302 Shawn Stevenson: The Top 10 Ways to Sleep Smarter

"You are what you eat, drink, breathe, and think." - Shawn Stevenson If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, video and more at http://lewishowes.com/302 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 302 with Shawn Stevenson.

• 0:07Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 0:33Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to this podcast number 302. Thank you so much for being here. Our guest is a good buddy of mine. His name is Shawn Stevenson and he is a bestselling author and creator of The Model Health Show, which is one of the top nutrition and fitness podcasts on iTunes. With a background in biology and kinesiology, Shawn went on to be the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, which is a successful company that provides wellness services for both individuals and organizations worldwide. He's also a dynamic keynote speaker who's spoken with TEDx, universities, and numerous organizations with outstanding reviews.

• 1:13Lewis Howes?

  And he is the king of sleep. He's the king of mastering your sleep to optimize your health, your performance, your mind, your body for the best experience in your life. That's right. This is all about sleep. And in this episode, we cover what actually happens to our body and our mind when we sleep? Why kids have so much energy compared to adults? The big issue with looking at your phone right before bed, and I know so many of you do this. So many of you are guilty of this. So you're going to learn what the big issue is right now. What drinking caffeine before bed does to your brain?

• 1:51Lewis Howes?

  Even if you can still sleep after drinking a cup of coffee late at night, I know some of you guys like to do a late night cappuccino after dinner. It's a no-no and we're going to explain why. How to set your workouts up to get the right kind of sleep and so much more. I hope you enjoy this one and love it. So let's go ahead and dive into this episode number 302 with the one and only Shawn Stevenson.

• 2:20Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. Very excited about my guest today. His name is Shawn Stevenson. What's up, brother?

• 2:26Shawn Stevenson?

  What's up, man?

• 2:27Lewis Howes?

  Good to see you, man.

• 2:27Shawn Stevenson?

  Good to see you too, man.

• 2:28Lewis Howes?

  Glad you're here in studio in Los Angeles.

• 2:30Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 2:31Lewis Howes?

  Both, well, you're from St. Louis, but I lived there for about six or seven years. Still have 314 on my area code.

• 2:36Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 2:37Lewis Howes?

  For my phone number. So it's good to have you here. I know you're doing some, some work and doing some interviews, but you've got a new book out. It's called Sleep Smarter. You guys want to make sure you check this out. 21 Essential Strategies to Sleep Your Way to a Better Body, Better Health, and Better Success. And you had a smaller version of this come out a couple of years ago that did extremely well.

• 2:57Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 2:57Lewis Howes?

  With very little effort of promotion. It just kind of blew up. And you had all these publishers reaching out saying, we want to republish this. And it's two or three times as long, it looks like, right?

• 3:07Shawn Stevenson?

  That's right.

• 3:08Lewis Howes?

  A lot more research. And it's really powerful. I wish I was a sleep expert so I could write this book because I know it's going to do extremely well.

• 3:16Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Lewis Howes?

  Now, why did you decide to talk about sleep in the first place?

• 3:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Wow.

• 3:21Lewis Howes?

  Because you talk a lot about health too. You've got the Model Health Show.

• 3:24Shawn Stevenson?

  Right.

• 3:24Lewis Howes?

  But why sleep? Why is that your expertise?

• 3:27Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 3:29Lewis Howes?

  Why?

• 3:31Shawn Stevenson?

  Well, man, it was really, I'm a very analytical person by nature, you know? And so, working in my clinical practice, seeing incredible results with people over the years. For example, working with people with type 2 diabetes and seeing help, helping people to get off things like the metformins and potentially being on insulin, things like that. And we had over 80% success rate.

• 3:52Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 3:53Shawn Stevenson?

  It was pretty shocking. But there was always this category of people who weren't getting the results. It was like a thorn in my side, you know, maybe, you know, 20, 30% of my patients. And so, after doing a deeper dive and a deeper introspection myself, I start to see, hey, there's a problem going on with stress or sleep with these people. And after we get their sleep dialed in, then all of these results will come flushing in. And so, that was number one. Number two, having my show, you know, the Model Health Show, we were about 50 episodes in. We were still a baby at the time. And I did three episodes on sleep. And I looked at the downloads and they were in the top 10 of those. So it was like, people want to know about this.

• 4:31Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 4:31Shawn Stevenson?

  And that's when I put the initial book together. And like you said, it did amazing. It just kind of took off on its own. But you know, even hearing the name Sleep Smarter, a lot of people are like, yeah, I need that. You know, so kind of best form of marketing is a great product, you know?

• 4:45Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely. So why, I mean, were you a sleep expert before? Or did you just start saying, okay, my audience wants this information. I did a pod, a couple of podcasts on this, so, you know, let me just put out a book. Or did you say, okay, now I'm actually going to dive and do the research? Are there other sleep doctors or experts who add to this information that you learn from? What makes you credible in this space?

• 5:08Shawn Stevenson?

  So for, the first thing is personal experience, always. You know, I tell people, you don't truly know anything until you've done it yourself.

• 5:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 5:16Shawn Stevenson?

  And little did I know that, you know, my story really was coupled with a change in the way that I was sleeping helped to transform my body and my health. So when I was 20 years old, I was diagnosed with something called degenerative bone disease and degenerative disc disease. So the disc in between the vertebrae in my spine were breaking down. And my first physician told me I had the spine of an 80 year old.

• 5:36Lewis Howes?

  Oh, wow.

• 5:37Shawn Stevenson?

  20, right? And even take a step back before that, you know, you being from St. Louis, playing high school sports there. Uh, I went to Lafayette, which is the number one school in the state currently.

• 5:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Shawn Stevenson?

  For a couple of things and.

• 5:49Lewis Howes?

  No big deal.

• 5:50Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, you know, you know, but at the time, so when I was 15 years old, I ran a four, five, 40, right before the football season. So football went through, yeah, when I was 15. And so, but I was really in the track, like that was my thing. And so at track practice, I was doing a 200 meter time trial. And as I was coming off the curve into the straightaway, my hip broke.

• 6:08Lewis Howes?

  Broke?

• 6:09Shawn Stevenson?

  Just, I broke my hip.

• 6:10Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 6:11Shawn Stevenson?

  No trauma.

• 6:11Lewis Howes?

  Some Bo Jackson stuff right there, you know?

• 6:13Shawn Stevenson?

  So random, right? But, you know, I just thought I pulled a muscle, you know, being a hard headed guy, I just kept coming to practice for a couple of days. Till my coach made me go. And I got a scan done and there was my iliac crest, like the tip of my hip bone had just broken off. And so standard of treatment, ultrasound, um, NSAIDs, yes. Stim, ice, crutches for a couple of weeks, got to get out of class early.

• 6:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 6:36Shawn Stevenson?

  So I thought it was cool, but nobody stopped to ask, how did this 15 year old kid's hip break?

• 6:41Lewis Howes?

  Just running.

• 6:42Shawn Stevenson?

  And this is something usually reserved for people when they're older, you know, and um, generally people think that people fall and break their hip. But in reality, they break their hip, then fall. And that's kind of what was happening with me. So I was so malnourished with just kind of cut to the chase that my bones were just breaking down rapidly.

• 6:58Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 6:58Shawn Stevenson?

  It wasn't until five years later when I got that diagnosis. And, you know, being an aspiring athlete, it just kind of made my whole world come crashing down, very scared, you know, especially getting the diagnosis that there's nothing that I can do about it. And this was an incurable condition, according to my physician. I was smart enough to get multiple opinions, but it was the same story. So two and a half years went by until things changed. And I definitely dip into a state of depression for sure. You know, kind of mingled around in that and gained about 50 pounds of unsexiness. And I was fluffy version of myself, man, just was definitely off track in my life. But ultimately, things changed when, man, I just really decided to get well.

• 7:41Shawn Stevenson?

  I got the last note from the last physician I saw, and he said the same thing the other ones did. And I was just like, if I don't change my life now, I'm never going to change. So and most people never make the decision to get well. That's the issue, you know, it's like, I'm going to try, like you, I'm going to try to hit the New York Times bestseller list.

• 7:58Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 7:58Shawn Stevenson?

  No, this is done, you know? So when you make a real decision about something, you know, it's from the Latin day, meaning from and kadir, which means to cut. So you cut away the possibility of anything else. And so I made a decision to get well. And that really drove me into when I initially went to school. It's so funny, taking a pre-med track, you don't have to take nutrition, but I just happened to take nutrition the first semester. And I remember it so clearly, it was a big auditorium style classroom, and the teacher walked in, but his belly came in first.

• 8:27Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 8:28Shawn Stevenson?

  And I was like, oh, he's going to teach me.

• 8:29Lewis Howes?

  The nutritionist.

• 8:30Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes.

• 8:31Lewis Howes?

  It's funny when you see a big doctor, you know, it's like just overweight and trying to prescribe you something about your health, and you're like, how is this?

• 8:38Shawn Stevenson?

  It's kind of ironic in a way, but you know, the thing is, these are generally really great people, and they're doing what they're teaching.

• 8:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, what they were taught to.

• 8:46Shawn Stevenson?

  And a lot of people don't know this, but a lot of nutrition programs in colleges are funded by General Mills. You know, so there's a vested interest to get people to eat, you know, the bottom of the pyramid, right? Which is the number one kind of glycemic loading food, you know, the highest spiking food, which is a tragedy, you know? So people are just chronically elevating their blood sugar, which is keeping insulin turned on, which is keeping them storing fat, you know, really simple thing.

• 9:10Lewis Howes?

  I think I heard recently that the The government just put out an updated version of

• 9:15Shawn Stevenson?

  My plate.

• 9:16Lewis Howes?

  Right? They just put out an updated version of saying, well, actually, you're not supposed to have this much grains or whatever it is, like they used to say as a staple. You're not supposed to have this much milk or something. I'm not sure.

• 9:25Shawn Stevenson?

  It's slightly, slightly different, but still, there's a lot of work to be done. But with the podcast world, with what's going on online, millions of people are getting connected to this information every year and changing the way that they're eating. And so for me, man, it was

• 9:39Lewis Howes?

  Were you just eating a lot of sugar yourself before?

• 9:42Shawn Stevenson?

  Man, I was on the college diet. So I'm like, there's something called the Papa John's special. So it's five bucks.

• 9:47Lewis Howes?

  I love Papa John's.

• 9:48Shawn Stevenson?

  So large pizza. Yeah, I would crush a large pizza by myself on a regular basis. Uh, McDonald's breakfast if I got up in time, you know? And that's how I was living, man. I had no idea that food mattered.

• 9:58Lewis Howes?

  No vegetables, no fruits. That was essentially my life.

• 10:01Shawn Stevenson?

  Rarely would a veggie pass my lips, man.

• 10:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 10:04Shawn Stevenson?

  And, you know, it's because really you don't know what you don't know. And at that time, I didn't know that there was a difference with food. I just thought if you can eat it, it's healthy.

• 10:12Lewis Howes?

  Of course.

• 10:13Shawn Stevenson?

  And that's what a lot of people kind of fall into that, that reality, you know? And so, once I understood, and by the way, I asked my first doctor, I don't know to this day if it was like my spirit animal or like my future self jumped into my body. But I asked him, does this have anything to do with what I'm eating? You know, this disease that I have? And he looked at me, he just cocked his head and like shook his head. He's like, this has nothing to do with what you're eating.

• 10:33Lewis Howes?

  Really? He's like, you were born with this?

• 10:35Shawn Stevenson?

  This is something you just have to deal with. I'm sorry. Yeah. And so, yeah, but that was, it never sat right with me because he told me this has nothing to do with what I'm putting in my mouth. But then he wrote me a prescription to put some drugs in my mouth. Right? So that's the level of, you know, but I didn't know what to do. I just knew what he told me to do.

• 10:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, these are the experts.

• 10:54Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. And it's effectively like, we just mentioned Dr. Lisa Rankin, who I just talked to. It's a nocebo effect, which is giving somebody a negative injunction, saying, there's nothing you can do about this, or you know, you've got one month to live. And seeing people who walk into the hospital are wheelchair bound within a day after getting a, you know, uh, terminal illness diagnosis.

• 11:13Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 11:14Shawn Stevenson?

  And so the power of minds is very powerful, man. But for me, so to kind of wrap up the story and see the light at the end of the tunnel. I'm a very analytical person by nature, like I mentioned. So it wasn't like I made this decision and unicorns came out and the clouds parted. I really dug in and decided, I remember going to school and learning this stuff. But I was taught a lot about disease, you know, and problems. I'm gonna learn everything that I can about health and the human body. So there was basically three things I did. Number one, I changed the way I was eating, you know, funny enough. Number two, I started to move again. And it's shocking how many people are diagnosed with something and the doctor tells them to be careful. Don't do anything, bed rest. Your body requires movement in order to heal itself. So I started to exercise again. And the third thing was.

• 11:59Lewis Howes?

  So not actually resting and requires movement.

• 12:02Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes.

• 12:02Lewis Howes?

  That's true?

• 12:02Shawn Stevenson?

  There's this crazy study and I'm actually mentioning in the book. It was done on horses. And you know, a racehorse can be potentially, you know, millions of dollars, the value.

• 12:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, of course.

• 12:11Shawn Stevenson?

  And if they break a bone, that's grounds for the animal to, you know, get put down, quote, put down.

• 12:16Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 12:17Shawn Stevenson?

  And so there's a really vested interest in keeping that bone, that horse's bones healthy. And so with the study, they had the horses start taking calcium and other supplements to increase the bone density. And there was some change, but there was even more change, more radical change if they walked the horses and gave them the supplements. So there was a study with, you know, so one group of horses just got the supplements, improved walking and supplements. Radical transformation. And this is because.

• 12:44Lewis Howes?

  Go ahead, sir.

• 12:45Shawn Stevenson?

  This is because your body really assimilates nutrients through movement.

• 12:50Lewis Howes?

  Not through sitting there and resting.

• 12:52Shawn Stevenson?

  Right. I mean, you can do some stuff, but when you really move your body, it's actually turning on, activating biochemical pathways for your body actually assimilate stuff.

• 13:01Lewis Howes?

  Now, if you have a broken leg.

• 13:03Shawn Stevenson?

  Of course.

• 13:03Lewis Howes?

  You're not supposed to be walking on it.

• 13:05Shawn Stevenson?

  And especially, you know, if you have an acute situation where, you know, you just got hurt. Take a couple of days off, but then from there you need to do what you can.

• 13:13Lewis Howes?

  A little bit of movement at a time.

• 13:14Shawn Stevenson?

  Right. Do what you can.

• 13:16Lewis Howes?

  Not like. To extreme pain.

• 13:18Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, that's just silly.

• 13:19Lewis Howes?

  Just a little bit of movement. Okay, I just want to make sure we're clear like, oh, I broke my back. You're telling me to run?

• 13:23Shawn Stevenson?

  Not today.

• 13:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Shawn Stevenson?

  Not today. Yeah, you want to, you want to take your time, but you want to do what you can.

• 13:28Lewis Howes?

  Some movement.

• 13:29Shawn Stevenson?

  And it's also, especially, you know, being an athlete, you start to fall into a victim status very quickly. You know, that something's wrong, things are just going bad now, and we start to self pity instead of just being proactive. It's easier said than done, but a big cause of you getting well is, you know, usually hear about cause of problems, a big cause of you getting well is you being active, for sure.

• 13:49Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, okay. So, what was the third thing?

• 13:53Shawn Stevenson?

  So, the third thing, and really quickly, so with the nutrition piece, and that's really my domain, that's where I've been operating for a decade and a half now clinically, and man, it was really simple, man. I did the low hanging fruit. So, instead of eating like a McDonald's burger, fries, I'd go to, you know, I was shopping at Whole Foods, which just opened in St. Louis, which Midwest is kind of late to getting a lot of stuff.

• 14:15Lewis Howes?

  Really? It just opened there?

• 14:15Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 14:16Lewis Howes?

  I thought it's been there for a while.

• 14:17Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, this was, let's see, so this is about, yeah, this is about 16 years ago.

• 14:21Lewis Howes?

  Gosh, I was like.

• 14:22Shawn Stevenson?

  No, no. It's been there, it's packed there too now, man. But when I was first start shopping there, it was like me, some random old guy, and then like a lady with a tie dye shirt on, right? And so, but I thought it was so cool, it was like all of this stuff. And of course, I would meet a lot of major athletes there as well, like Isaac Bruce, I would bump into regularly there. So, it was really interesting and kind of changed my paradigm. So, I started to eat grass fed beef instead of whatever conventionally farmed, factory farmed beef from McDonald's, a sprouted grain bun, instead of fries, I'd get a bunch of broccoli. You know, I just did small changes that I could. And I was drinking water like I was getting paid for it, you know? And so, here's the thing, this is, this is so cool, guys.

• 15:06Shawn Stevenson?

  This is, this is really what transformed my body. So, I started to ask the right question, you know, questions are so powerful. So, I asked, what is my spine actually made of? And then dug into the research, and I was shocked, because when you think of your bones, what's the first mineral or nutrient you think of?

• 15:21Lewis Howes?

  I think of calcium, I don't know.

• 15:22Shawn Stevenson?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 15:23Lewis Howes?

  I'm ignorant though, so.

• 15:24Shawn Stevenson?

  No, this is where everybody lives. The. Majority of us, there's other, there's like 200 other factors that are equally as important. That's just the big marketing one.

• 15:33Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 15:33Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? And so there's things like magnesium, silica. Uh, I needed vitamin C to help to regenerate tissues. I didn't know that. Uh, sulfur bearing amino acids, all these interesting things I'd never heard of. And no way was I getting that via Papa John's and Sunny Delight, you know? So I changed the way that I was eating and I was.

• 15:49Lewis Howes?

  Egg McMuffin wasn't bringing the nutrients, man?

• 15:51Shawn Stevenson?

  No, I was missing it, man. I was missing the mark. And so I started to look for the foods that had those things in there. And then there was a radical transformation in my health. So, um, the last piece was sleep, rest and recovery, man. When I started to do all this good stuff for my body and training again. And, and again, I just started where I could. I started off on a elliptical, then a stationary bike, walked, picked up the weights again. And I naturally fell into a normal sleep pattern. And six weeks later, man, after making that decision, I lost 28 pounds. The pain I'd been experiencing every day for two and a half years was gone. Uh, ultimately about nine months later, I got a scan done and I had two herniated discs that retracted on their own.

• 16:31Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 16:32Shawn Stevenson?

  I, I lost three fourths of an inch in height and I re, I grew half an inch back.

• 16:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 16:37Shawn Stevenson?

  Which was crazy, right? And the degeneration was starting to essentially be reversed. And the last physician I worked with, he was just standing there looking at the picture, you know, the MRI is just like, wow, son, whatever you're doing, keep doing it. I haven't seen this before.

• 16:51Lewis Howes?

  You had no clue.

• 16:52Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. And so that's when I fired my doctor.

• 16:54Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 16:54Shawn Stevenson?

  But with love, with love, but, um, yeah, I, I kind of got what I needed from that experience. And even when I went to get a scan done, I already knew I was well. It was just kind of an affirmation. So, and that was the birth thing of my career, man.

• 17:07Lewis Howes?

  Amazing.

• 17:08Shawn Stevenson?

  People at my university saw the physical transformation that took place. I didn't look like a guy who lost weight. I looked like a guy who was healthy. And I remember walking out of class and my professor stopped me, who had seen me, you know, prior, the semester prior, and he was like, What happened to you? You look so healthy. And I was like, is that wrong? Is that a problem? He's like, no, what did you do? And so I started to work with him. I started to work with my fellow students. And working at a university, I had such a great bank of people from different cultures and different countries to work with. And it really taught me a lot. And so since then, you know, I've worked with thousands of people clinically, but you know, hundreds of thousands through, you know, the podcast and through speaking and all that good stuff through books. And it's just been an amazing ride, man.

• 17:51Lewis Howes?

  Amazing, man. Okay, so you, when did you really dive into sleep as like, I'm gonna understand every, you know, you're an analytical guy, you go all in with something, you do it to like the max, like I mean, know what's in that water, how it was processed, but you have everything, you like, don't touch, water doesn't touch your body unless it's filtered a specific way. I know that about you. You don't take a shower unless it's filtered away. So everything is like to the extreme in the way you do it. So when did you say, okay, I'm gonna know everything about sleep? Like more than anyone else in the world, I'm gonna learn from all the experts. When would that happen?

• 18:25Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, so that was, that was about five years ago and seeing this transformation in my, in my clinic and seeing it with people, you know, firsthand.

• 18:33Lewis Howes?

  What type of clinic do you have?

• 18:35Shawn Stevenson?

  So this was a nutrition consulting practice. So I'd work with a lot of physicians would bring their patients over to me, chiropractors, things like that. And so I would help their patients.

• 18:44Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 18:44Shawn Stevenson?

  And you know, it was a great team, great network of people.

• 18:47Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 18:47Shawn Stevenson?

  And just seeing some really remarkable results, but across the board, man. And by the way, you mentioned about, you know, physicians not necessarily being healthy. It's because it's the way the system is set up.

• 18:57Shawn Stevenson?

  Some of the most important people and the smartest people in our culture, you know, our physicians are brilliant.

• 19:02Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 19:03Shawn Stevenson?

  But the system really beats them down, you know, and puts them through a lot just to be able to serve people.

• 19:09Lewis Howes?

  A lot of stress.

• 19:09Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes, of course, of course. And so all of us teaming up and it really kind of opened the door for me to do this, to do this research.

• 19:19Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 19:20Shawn Stevenson?

  And right off the bat, man, I started to understand why I got well. And so I dug into that first, like what's going on during sleep that makes you recover faster? And so here's what's so cool. If you and I right now, we go to the gym after this interview, and we're standing there looking at the gym where it's like we're gonna have the best workout of our lives. We're gonna crush it. We're in better shape then than after the workout. All right, after the workout, if we go get some blood work done, I get you a hormone panel done. It might look like there's something wrong with you. Sure. You know, your cortisol is gonna be elevated, blood sugar is gonna be wacky. Um, your inflammatory biomarkers are gonna be up. But the only thing you did was just, it's called a hormetic stressor. You just did a workout and your body will recover from that when you sleep. Hmm.

• 20:03Shawn Stevenson?

  All right, sleep is really where your body comes back better from that workout. Sleep is where your body helps to convert food into you, a big portion of that. And most importantly is to eliminate the metabolic waste products and get stuff out of the way. So you can have more room for growth. And actually, same thing with your brain. And this was some, some of the new research that went into the book. Dude, this is so crazy because your brain creates your body. But when you're sleeping, so there's something called the lymphatic system, right? Your lymphatic system is basically your extracellular fluid. You have four, four times more lymph than you have blood. All right, so this is kind of the body's channel for eliminating waste. If that lymphatic system gets clogged, nasty stuff is gonna start happening. You know, just kind of like you're in, you're plumbing in your house.

• 20:47Shawn Stevenson?

  Like if it gets backed up, stuff's gonna get kind of gross. Right, right. And so, but your brain has something called the blood brain barrier. And so stuff can't just readily get there. Matter of fact, your lymphatic system basically stops at your neck. So your brain has its own lymphatic system. It's called the glymphatic system, which a little shout out to the glial cells in your brain that control it. And you're, it's for the purpose of eliminating, and your brain is doing like millions of processes every second, eliminating all the byproducts from all this change it's constantly doing. And it turns on, the glymphatic system is 10 times more active when you're asleep than when you're awake. All right, and your brain cells actually shrink about 60% while you're asleep to make more room to eliminate waste. Hmm. It's really important.

• 21:27Shawn Stevenson?

  So what they're finding is that conditions like Alzheimer's is probably an inability of your brain to eliminate waste. Wow. It's compiling all of this stuff, right? So. Started learning all of that, you know, but I didn't, I didn't talk about all of that stuff publicly. But because it's just, it was too much, man. There's so much information out there that people didn't know about unless you start to ask the right questions.

• 21:49Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 21:49Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, so.

• 21:50Lewis Howes?

  Crazy. Okay.

• 21:53Lewis Howes?

  What actually happens when we sleep? What is the process? Like, what is our body doing specifically, just so I'm aware, in terms of? How does it take in the nutrients or burn the fat or whatever it does? What happens? How's it recovering?

• 22:07Shawn Stevenson?

  Sleep is so weird, though, you know, it's, and this is part of the reason our culture looks down on it in a way, in a weird way. Like, if you've got 10 things to do, sleep is one of them.

• 22:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, neglect to sleep.

• 22:17Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 22:17Lewis Howes?

  Sleep when you're dead.

• 22:18Shawn Stevenson?

  Exactly.

• 22:19Lewis Howes?

  Sleep is for those who are broke.

• 22:21Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, you know, and the only thing that's accelerating.

• 22:23Lewis Howes?

  It's like a badge of honor, like, who slept less? You know what I mean?

• 22:26Shawn Stevenson?

  It's just accelerating the day to when you are sleeping when you're dead, you know, because your body's really transforming itself while, while you're asleep. So sleep is sort of weird because.

• 22:36Lewis Howes?

  I think they did it before you go into that. I think some documentary I saw, I think it was on happiness, talked about like the happiest people in the world or the oldest people in the world. They, one of the things they say is like, we slept a lot. And the people, like, people over 100 years old, like, the key to living a long life is sleeping a lot, taking naps, or whatever it may be. It also, it's getting like eight hours of sleep every night.

• 22:56Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. And so that's one of the things, too, is that, you know, at no point in the book do I say you need to get blank hours. It's more about the sleep quality.

• 23:04Lewis Howes?

  Quality.

• 23:05Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, making sure that your body's getting in natural, normal stages of REM and non-REM sleep, because that's really what's, what's changing you. So, uh, we can start, we'll start with the brain first. So this interesting process happens. It's actually, it's called memory processing with your brain. So you've got these synaptic connections that happen, just from people right now listening. This data is changing what's going on with their brain and becoming physical structure, you know, so this is why, number one, you want to mind what you're listening to, by the way.

• 23:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Shawn Stevenson?

  But then there's this myelination process that basically makes these connections like a superhighway. And a lot of that is going on while you're sleeping. Alright, so this memory processing, especially during REM sleep, is converting your experiences into short-term memories. Alright, and then eventually long-term memories. But if you're not sleeping. You know, you're gonna miss a lot. You're gonna miss a lot of that process. Yeah. So this is why it's really important for the brain. As far as physically, man, there's so much going on here. Let's just talk about the whole weight loss thing, you know, because we we know how our society is doing right now. It's not the best, but a lot is changing for the good. And there was a study done, it was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Two groups of exercisers, and they put them on the same diet.

• 24:18Shawn Stevenson?

  Group A got to sleep eight plus hours a night. Group B, they sleep deprived them. So they're getting like around five hours of sleep per night. Group A lost far more weight and body fat than group B. Only difference was the amount of sleep they were getting. So again, just kind of piggybacking on the point that your body is changing physically while you're asleep. One of the big reasons for that is something called human growth hormone, which people already probably knew about thanks to, you know, Barry Bonds and, you know. Mark McQuire. Jason, yeah, Big Mac, Jason Giambi, Marion Jones. Exactly. If you're listening to the show, hey, shout out to you guys. But it's just understanding that this is an endogenous hormone that your body produces. And so human growth hormone is also known as, quote, the youth hormone, right? So kids have a lot of it, and that's why they have so much energy, right?

• 25:03Shawn Stevenson?

  And a lot of parents are just kind of sitting there watching their kids, you know, run around at the park like they're crazy, you know? And it's just, they have so much of this human growth hormone going through the system. And according to the research, when we get around the age of 18, we have a pretty sharp decline in human growth hormone. But my argument is that that's not necessarily the case. When we were around 18, we go to college. And we stopped doing the things that helped encourage human growth hormone production because like, you know, mom, you can't tell me what to do anymore. You know, I'm gonna stay up and, you know, do whatever we're doing because it's college, you know? And you you're getting the biggest secretion of human growth hormone when you go to sleep. Hmm. All right, so this is helping with lean muscle growth. This is helping with

• 25:45Shawn Stevenson?

  a lot of anti-aging factors. And speaking of that, another one is melatonin. So. Melatonin is like the quote sleep hormone, but it's not really that. It really is a get good sleep hormone. It helps you to go through the normal stages of sleep properly. And here's another thing, though, is that melatonin is quite possibly our body's most important endogenous anti-cancer hormone. Okay, so this is why, there's a study that I cited in the book, done on nurses who work overnight. And there was like over 50% increased incidence of them having breast cancer.

• 26:20Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 26:21Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. And then, so that's what I do, man. It's like,

• 26:24Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 26:24Shawn Stevenson?

  Here's the research and why it's a problem, but here's why it actually is happening. It's because of melatonin, you know, and just if you're throwing off your sleep cycle like that, you're missing a lot of these benefits. And I can go on and on. There's so many different hormone compounds, physical changes, issues with blood sugar. You know, there's a lot there, but the main focus, though, of the book is strategies to make everything good and make sleep yummy again.

• 26:46Lewis Howes?

  And you got 21 strategies, and what I want to do is, well, maybe we cover 10 strategies.

• 26:52Shawn Stevenson?

  Let's do it.

• 26:53Lewis Howes?

  So maybe, I'm gonna look through the, the chapter outline, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna go through 10.

• 27:00Lewis Howes?

  Let's do, one of them here is get more sunlight during the day. Get more sunlight during the day. So tell me about, why is it important to have sunlight?

• 27:09Shawn Stevenson?

  Awesome. Yeah, so, uh, first thing to understand is that serotonin, right? Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, and it's supposed to be like a feel-good kind of compound. This is why so many antidepressant medications, they're serotonin reuptake inhibitors to help keep serotonin active in your system longer. Here's what's so cool is that serotonin gets converted into melatonin. And we already talked about how important this is.

• 27:35Lewis Howes?

  It's the anti-cancer.

• 27:36Shawn Stevenson?

  It's a precursor to that.

• 27:37Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 27:38Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? And so exposure to sunlight boosts your serotonin immediately. But also, uh, exposure to sunlight helps to set your cortisol rhythm. So cortisol is, it's been getting a pretty bad name in the media lately as it's like glorified stress hormone. We've got like 50 hormones, and cortisol is the only bad guy now. But cortisol is incredibly important and valuable. It's just when it's out of balance, it can, it can become a problem.

• 28:05Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 28:05Shawn Stevenson?

  And so sunlight is clinically proven. I cited one of the studies in the book. To help to normalize your cortisol rhythm. All right, so it helps to keep your cortisol lower in the evening if you get sunlight during the day, which will elevate your cortisol. Okay, and cortisol and melatonin have basically an inverse relationship. So when cortisol is high, melatonin is low. Right. When melatonin is high, cortisol is low. So it helps to get that on track again. And it's it's not like rocket science, you know, like we know that sunlight is valuable to human health, but we've been dissuaded in the media because of, you know, photo aging of the skin and skincare and things like that. And I actually talk about in the book and kind of demystify some of that. Because then we get into conversation about UVA and UVB and all this stuff.

• 28:49Shawn Stevenson?

  But bottom line, make sure you're getting some exposure to sunlight every day is going to help you sleep better at night. And this can also be through your photoreceptors, so through your eyes as well. And just getting light in the room, natural sunlight, you know, every day, and that's going to help to kind of set your circadian. What if in Chicago in the winter and there's no sunlight for St. Louis and there's no sunlight for three months? Check this out, so, and I do recommend, I share some hacks, right? There are light boxes that are used clinically to help to address things like seasonal affective disorder. Okay. Right? There are earbuds that shoot light through your ear canal, right? There's visors you can wear and they're clinically proven to be effective. Do you do sunbathing in a tanning salon or not?

• 29:32Shawn Stevenson?

  That actually does work if it's the right kind. The right light. So you need more UVB actually. And really depending on where you are in the world, pretty much the United States period is not getting UVB at certain times of the year. All right, so we want to be proactive with this, but understand it's not just the exposure on your skin is what I'm talking about. Your skin has photoreceptors that pick up light, but just the exposure in your in your room, all right? So making sure you have a have an office with windows, access to windows. There was another study done, this is crazy, because some people work in like a cubicle dungeon. Dungeon, yeah. You know? And what they found was that office workers who are not exposed to windows actually got 173% less exposure to natural light.

• 30:15Shawn Stevenson?

  And they ended up sleeping 46 minutes less every night. As a result of that, and they saw this correlation, which was so interesting. And they reported more physical ailments, less energy, and also a higher propensity towards diseases. Right? So this is super important, and even getting some exposure to sunlight on an overcast day is like fifty times more valuable than any fancy light you can get exposed to. But those things are great hacks, for sure. There's so many things there.

• 30:43Lewis Howes?

  Of course. Okay, that was the first one. The second one, avoid screens before bedtime. And I think this is probably something that a lot of us are at a fault with.

• 30:52Shawn Stevenson?

  I know you kissing that phone goodnight.

• 30:55Lewis Howes?

  You know, I always tell myself like, okay, shutting it off by a certain time and like, not having it in the room and all these other things, but it's a challenge, man. It's definitely a challenge.

• 31:04Shawn Stevenson?

  Here's why, dude. Like, this is, with this book, I was able to dissect that because I knew that that would be the toughest one of the 21 strategies. This one is the toughest because we're addicted. We are in fact addicted. Here's why. Here's what's happening. So there's this interesting compound called dopamine, right? And it was once thought that dopamine was related to pleasure, but it's not. It's, dopamine is all about seeking. It's driving you to seek, right? And so the internet is perfect for this because there's infinite seeking. Instagram is perfect for this because you're continuously going and just there's more to see. But every time you find, you get a little hit from your opioid system. So it's like a slow drip of drugs.

• 31:48Shawn Stevenson?

  I seek, I find, I seek, I find, and you get looped in, and it's very difficult to break that pattern. And everybody's had this happen where you're like, I'm gonna check my Instagram for a minute. I'll check Twitter for a minute, and then it's thirty minutes later, an hour later, and you're still scrolling. This is what's going on. Like, our brain is hardwired to get addicted to stuff like this. And these awesome social media apps know how to manipulate our mind and to take advantage of that. So this is a call to take your brain back. I'm not saying, I love this stuff. I absolutely love it, but it has a place. And it's being more aware. Now that you're aware, you can catch yourself and break the pattern. So here's why it's an issue at night in particular. So there was a study done at Rinsel or Polytechnic

• 32:29Shawn Stevenson?

  that found that just two hours of your device usage before bed was enough to suppress melatonin secretion. All right, so again, you can pass out, just being on it two hours before, you know, like that span. And so you can go to sleep or pass out, but that doesn't mean you're getting that rejuvenative sleep. So this is why a lot of people are sleeping eight hours, but they're still tired when they wake up in the morning.

• 32:50Lewis Howes?

  Tharic.

• 32:50Shawn Stevenson?

  Because melatonin is suppressed because they're on their device right before bed. And it's this blue spectrum of light that's shooting out, kind of pouring into your optical sensors.

• 32:58Lewis Howes?

  What if you can stop that, that spectrum? Is there shades?

• 33:03Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes.

• 33:03Lewis Howes?

  Is there screen protectors? Is there glasses?

• 33:06Shawn Stevenson?

  There's all of those things. So.

• 33:08Lewis Howes?

  Now, is that okay then if you have the band-aid on it?

• 33:11Shawn Stevenson?

  It's a hack.

• 33:12Lewis Howes?

  It's not the optimal, but it's the better than.

• 33:14Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes. So absolutely, everybody today can get Flux, F dot L U X, which basically cools off your screen.

• 33:21Lewis Howes?

  Ah.

• 33:22Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, pulls off that troublesome.

• 33:24Lewis Howes?

  Do you have that?

• 33:24Shawn Stevenson?

  Of course. So I've got all my different.

• 33:26Lewis Howes?

  Do you want to see what it looks like? Or is it just like a film that's like goes over the top of it?

• 33:29Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. So it's a cool app. It does this automatically.

• 33:31Lewis Howes?

  It's an app?

• 33:32Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Lewis Howes?

  So you just download it on your phone?

• 33:33Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes.

• 33:34Lewis Howes?

  Oh, I gotta get this. Okay.

• 33:35Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. And it does this automatically based on your time zone.

• 33:37Lewis Howes?

  Oh, wow.

• 33:38Shawn Stevenson?

  And the time of year, all that stuff.

• 33:39Lewis Howes?

  Amazing.

• 33:39Shawn Stevenson?

  So it pulls out that most troublesome spectrum of light. And so Harvard researchers found that it's not just light exposure, it's the color and it's the luminance, it's the, the, the strength of the light.

• 33:50Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 33:50Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, so green light was like three times less impactful to your sleep than blue light in their studies.

• 33:56Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 33:57Shawn Stevenson?

  So cool stuff like that. So Flux, you can get the blue blocking glasses. Basically they're like sunglasses.

• 34:03Lewis Howes?

  You use those too?

• 34:04Shawn Stevenson?

  With the orange tint. Yeah, I do. Yeah.

• 34:05Lewis Howes?

  Want to watch TV or something?

• 34:06Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. You know, like if you're gonna stay up late and watch a movie a little bit later.

• 34:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:10Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, but the whole thing is to not make that a habit because these are.

• 34:14Lewis Howes?

  Of course.

• 34:14Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, these are hacks, but the best thing is, and this is so important, especially for, for, for our audiences, you know, who are really about taking their life to the next level.

• 34:23Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:24Shawn Stevenson?

  And they're missing out on this key component, which is you have to find something that's of greater or equal value to the device. So people, you know, actually connecting with real people.

• 34:34Lewis Howes?

  A book.

• 34:35Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes.

• 34:35Lewis Howes?

  You know, something like that. Yeah.

• 34:36Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, playing games with your, with your kids, talking to your family, have sex. You know, there's other things that you could do.

• 34:42Lewis Howes?

  That'll help you sleep well.

• 34:43Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, that, I talk about that in the book too, but you have to find something that fills you up.

• 34:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 34:48Shawn Stevenson?

  Because that addiction is so strong and that's really the best tool, which is to avoid the screens in the first place.

• 34:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Okay. That's, uh, number two. Number three. Uh, I have a caffeine curfew. So what time, I mean, here's the thing, I feel like I don't have that much caffeine and I, I almost never drink coffee, except for about a month ago, I started doing some intermittent fasting testing until I'll have bulletproof in the morning.

• 35:08Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 35:09Lewis Howes?

  Uh, it's like, what time is it? It's almost two o'clock. I still haven't eaten today. And, um, but before, you know, if I'd have like a, a cappuccino after dinner or something, it would never affect me. Like I never felt like, oh, I'm wired now. Like I could always fall asleep, but I'm assuming that it still does something to my brain or my body, even in my system.

• 35:29Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 35:29Lewis Howes?

  Not allow me to fully rest. So what is the optimal time to, how many hours before you sleep? Should we not have any caffeine?

• 35:36Shawn Stevenson?

  Got it. And by the way, the hours before with the screen time, 60 to 90 minutes. That's all I recommend. So with the caffeine thing, you just said it perfectly. You can definitely go to sleep, but your nervous system can still be active because caffeine has something called.

• 35:50Lewis Howes?

  A drug in you. Yeah.

• 35:50Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. It has a half life of about eight hours. So if you have 200 milligrams of caffeine, eight hours later, a hundred is still active in your system.

• 35:57Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 35:57Shawn Stevenson?

  And so this can keep you out of normal stages of REM sleep and deep sleep. All right. So you can be physiologically laying down and think that you're getting eight hours of sleep. And so this study that was done, uh, they gave people caffeine right before bed, three hours before bed and six hours before bed. And they found that even six hours out was enough to have noticeable and they use like monitoring systems, you know, measuring their brainwaves to find out that whoa, their sleep is actually getting interrupted because of the caffeine. And then there was the subjective, so there's objective and subjective parts of this test. And people thought like, hey, I got enough sleep. Like I feel great. But in actuality, their body was lacking that rejuvenative sleep. And what that does is you have this false sense of being well rested

• 36:40Shawn Stevenson?

  and you automatically unknowingly start using more caffeine at some point during the day, because you're going to have more daytime sleepiness. All right. So, and that creates that whole. Vicious circle with caffeine to keep you going.

• 36:54Lewis Howes?

  Sure. Okay. So how many hours before?

• 36:56Shawn Stevenson?

  I recommend, and I'm a fan of caffeine, right?

• 37:00Shawn Stevenson?

  Just do it in the morning, do it in the early part of the day. It depends on how sensitive you are.

• 37:04Lewis Howes?

  Before noon.

• 37:04Shawn Stevenson?

  By the way, too. Yeah, before noon would be, would be ideal, you know, but some people are hypersensitive to caffeine.

• 37:09Lewis Howes?

  Yes, of course.

• 37:10Shawn Stevenson?

  Everybody's metabolism is different. Some people might need to lay off of it completely, but that's a whole nother, whole nother book of how to, how to make that happen.

• 37:16Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure. Okay, so no caffeine afternoon.

• 37:21Lewis Howes?

  This is my fourth one that I see here that I like. This is one of my favorites that I was doing, that I needed before. I learned about this power and importance of sleep and that's be cool.

• 37:31Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 37:31Lewis Howes?

  I remember growing up in Ohio, my dad, we did not have air conditioning in our house. And my dad was just like, well, I don't want to spend the money on this and it's only two months in the summer where you gotta deal with it, but. St. Louis is the same as Ohio.

• 37:44Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes.

• 37:45Lewis Howes?

  And man, it was miserable.

• 37:46Shawn Stevenson?

  You're sneaking my language, man.

• 37:47Lewis Howes?

  I couldn't wear sheets or anything. I'd just be laying there sweating with the fan on and my dad would make me turn the fan down because he didn't want me to get whatever. I don't know. And, um.

• 37:56Shawn Stevenson?

  Right.

• 37:57Lewis Howes?

  So it was just misery and I couldn't sleep. I'm up all night and I wish my dad would have read this book then. So he'd understand the importance of being cool. But what does it, what does it mean to be cool? What's the optimal coolness that you should be in or does it matter?

• 38:09Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, absolutely, man. And my story is very similar with yours. Uh, my bedroom was upstairs at our house.

• 38:14Lewis Howes?

  Top of the frickin' house, man.

• 38:16Shawn Stevenson?

  Heat rises, coolness drops, you know, so that's why basements tend to be cooler.

• 38:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Upstairs, I would literally see those heat waves.

• 38:23Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 38:23Shawn Stevenson?

  Walking up there, a hundred degree St. Louis weather. And so I would spray myself with a water bottle and then lay there.

• 38:30Lewis Howes?

  It's misery.

• 38:30Shawn Stevenson?

  And hope my brother doesn't come in the room, you know, when I'm trying to sleep. But yeah, man, it's not good sleep.

• 38:35Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 38:35Shawn Stevenson?

  And so this is really simple. You know, your body goes through a process, it's something called thermal regulation. And it does this every night and we'll just say around nine PM average. It does this process to lower your core body temperature to create the ideal environment for deep sleep.

• 38:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:50Shawn Stevenson?

  All right. Your body cools you off to sleep better.

• 38:54Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 38:54Shawn Stevenson?

  So you want to support it and not work against it. So some simple tips and it's gonna sound a little frosty to some people, but ideally. Your room temperature is gonna be, and this is according to the research, what experts say, sixty-two degrees to sixty-eight degrees.

• 39:07Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 39:07Shawn Stevenson?

  For sleeping, alright? And some people are like, no, no way. Like, my wife is actually, she's from Kenya, so hot climate, no, she's not having that. So I find a happy medium, you know?

• 39:17Lewis Howes?

  So you're at the top, you're at sixty-eight, sixty-nine, right?

• 39:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Like sixty-nine, you know? But, and also, you know, our friend Kelly Starrett, Dr. Kelly Starrett, he had a pretty big struggle with this, with being too hot. And he got it cold in the room, but it still wasn't enough, and he didn't want his wife to suffer. So he got something called a chili pad, which basically sits on your side of the bed. And he's like, he swears by it.

• 39:38Lewis Howes?

  Underneath the mattress, or underneath the sheet?

• 39:40Shawn Stevenson?

  Right on top of the mattress, yeah, right.

• 39:41Lewis Howes?

  Underneath the sheet.

• 39:42Shawn Stevenson?

  Exactly.

• 39:42Lewis Howes?

  But it just keeps you cool underneath you. Wow, interesting.

• 39:45Shawn Stevenson?

  It's been a game changer for him, you know? So just cooling your body temperature.

• 39:48Lewis Howes?

  It's a good idea.

• 39:49Shawn Stevenson?

  Even just one degree difference.

• 39:51Lewis Howes?

  It's huge.

• 39:52Shawn Stevenson?

  It's huge.

• 39:52Lewis Howes?

  It's huge. Okay, cool, so be cool at night. Doesn't mean you can still, you know, you can still wrap yourself in a blanket, but just keep the room cool.

• 40:00Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 40:01Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha, I like that. Okay, so that was number four. Number five, let's do is, uh, get to bed at the right time. So why is it important to be at the right time?

• 40:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Lewis Howes?

  Should we be at the right same time every night? And what is that optimal time?

• 40:17Shawn Stevenson?

  Good, good question, man. So timing your sleep is like timing an investment. If you invest a lot at the wrong time, you're gonna get pain. But if you invest even a little bit at the right time, you get some big rewards. And so according to the research, our quote money time sleep is between ten PM and two AM. And why that is, is that this is when you're gonna get your greatest increase of melatonin, which is gonna help you to go through your normal sleep cycle, and the greatest secretion of things like human growth hormone as well. So more recovery, more anabolic growth and development.

• 40:49Lewis Howes?

  Between ten and two AM.

• 40:51Shawn Stevenson?

  That's right, yeah.

• 40:52Lewis Howes?

  Is when you should be going to sleep, or that's when you get your optimal sleep?

• 40:55Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, if you can get some sleep in that window, and some, some experts say that it's like twice as much value per hour.

• 41:01Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 41:01Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, so.

• 41:02Lewis Howes?

  So if you go to bed at nine thirty, nine forty-five, and you're, you know, asleep in that window, that whole time, that's the optimal time, essentially.

• 41:10Shawn Stevenson?

  And people will notice this. They tend to get to bed a little bit earlier. They're just like, wow, I slept really great.

• 41:14Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 41:14Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, I see your face. I'm like, yeah, well, that happens, but it rarely happens. You know, and so that's the kind of money time window, but it's not again, it's not about being perfect. If this doesn't fit your lifestyle, stack the other conditions, do the other things.

• 41:27Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 41:27Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, because the timing does matter because your body's wired up to work with nature.

• 41:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, and only recently can we basically manufacture a second daytime. You know, and our, our systems, our, our genes are expecting a night cycle for us to get cozy, to get sleep. But we can throw on the, you know, do the laptop lap dance all night long today, you know, watch YouTube videos and Netflix.

• 41:50Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 41:51Shawn Stevenson?

  Be on our social media, but our genes are not different from our ancestors, even, you know, a hundred years ago, let alone thousands.

• 41:58Lewis Howes?

  I hear that, man.

• 41:59Shawn Stevenson?

  So we can evolve through this stuff, you know, like some X-Men stuff, but it's going to take a little bit of time.

• 42:04Lewis Howes?

  I hear that, man. Um, here is a good one. I mean, there's so many good strategies here, but I'm only going to pick 10.

• 42:12Lewis Howes?

  Get it blacked out.

• 42:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 42:14Lewis Howes?

  I think this is number five. Is this number five that I'm saying now?

• 42:17Shawn Stevenson?

  I don't know, man.

• 42:18Lewis Howes?

  Number five.

• 42:19Shawn Stevenson?

  We'll say it's five.

• 42:19Lewis Howes?

  Get it blacked out. Now, why is it, I, no, I did this after I talked to you a while ago and I got, you'll see in my room, it's got like blackout, pretty much blackout. There's a little light that comes through in the morning, but it's pretty dark.

• 42:32Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 42:33Lewis Howes?

  Why is this important to have a room, you know, pitch blacks, you can't even see your hand?

• 42:37Shawn Stevenson?

  Awesome. Yeah. So, uh, again, so that normal sleep cycle is helping to support that. And your skin has photoreceptors that pick up light and.

• 42:46Lewis Howes?

  Even the littlest amount, amount of light.

• 42:47Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. There was a study I put in the book that they, the, the room was otherwise pitch black, but they put just a tiny light behind somebody's knee.

• 42:55Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 42:56Shawn Stevenson?

  And it was enough. Yes.

• 42:57Lewis Howes?

  Shut up.

• 42:57Shawn Stevenson?

  It was enough to take them out of their normal stage of sleep. I, it's crazy, right? It's crazy.

• 43:03Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 43:03Shawn Stevenson?

  And so, because again, we evolved in darkness and it's not all light, it's unnatural light, like moonlight.

• 43:10Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 43:10Shawn Stevenson?

  If you look at the lux and I put a lux chart in the book, it's not even a problem, but that unnatural light. And so your skin has photoreceptors that pick up information and basically send it to your brain to secrete more daytime hormones, namely cortisol. All right. So your neighbors. Uh porch light, you know, streetlights outside, that kind of stuff. This unnatural light, it's been dubbed light pollution now. So getting your room pitch black can keep that stuff out of your room. But also the internal light too. So if you've got an ugly alarm clock staring at you, you know, that kind of stuff. You might want to consider, you know, getting a dimmer shut off or, you know, throwing a blanket over it or something like that.

• 43:46Lewis Howes?

  I like that. Okay, that was actually number six.

• 43:48Shawn Stevenson?

  Got it.

• 43:49Lewis Howes?

  Uh, so this is number seven. Let's see. Uh, train hard but smart, number seven. What does that mean?

• 43:58Shawn Stevenson?

  Awesome. Well, I think a lot of people know that a good workout can help you sleep. However, is the difference between going to sleep and passing out, you know, as we've mentioned. So a lot of people, you know, I just, I talk with Rich Roll and if he doesn't do one of his, you know, he's like running for days, you know?

• 44:16Lewis Howes?

  He's crazy.

• 44:17Shawn Stevenson?

  If he doesn't do one of his workouts, like he says, his sleep isn't, isn't the same. And he's, it's because of his cortisol rhythm, which he's changed, but that's a whole nother story. Bottom line is, there's a difference, number one, between going to sleep and passing out. And here's how to do this the right way. So this study done with Appalachian State University, they brought exercise up into three groups. Group A, exercise at 7:00 AM in the morning. Group B, 1:00 PM. Group C, 7:00 PM at night. Group A spent up to 75% more time in deep anabolic sleep.

• 44:47Lewis Howes?

  Earlier in the morning.

• 44:48Shawn Stevenson?

  So early in the morning, if you can get a workout in, it doesn't mean it has to be the time you hit the gym. You can work out in the afternoon, but that initial morning activity is important because going back to our evolutionary biology, it encourages that normal cortisol spike.

• 45:01Lewis Howes?

  So getting up and taking a walk.

• 45:03Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, you could do a power walk, you can do a four-minute Tabata session, do some body weight stuff, or you can do your full workout.

• 45:08Lewis Howes?

  Air squats.

• 45:09Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes.

• 45:09Lewis Howes?

  Some stretch, yoga, stretching, whatever it may be.

• 45:11Shawn Stevenson?

  You're helping encourage that normal cortisol rhythm.

• 45:13Lewis Howes?

  First thing in the morning.

• 45:14Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 45:15Lewis Howes?

  First hour or something.

• 45:16Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:17Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. And then what about the full workout? What about if you're like, okay, I'm gonna do my hour workout today, when should that optimal time be?

• 45:23Shawn Stevenson?

  If you want to do it in the morning, perfect. If it is, and there wasn't much benefit to the afternoon as far as sleep is concerned, but in the evening, there was some benefit. But it has to be the early evening, alright?

• 45:33Lewis Howes?

  So if I do work out in the evening, it's Okay.

• 45:36Shawn Stevenson?

  If it's the early evening, so.

• 45:37Lewis Howes?

  Six, seven?

• 45:38Shawn Stevenson?

  You need about four hours. So if your planned bedtime is 11, you need about four hours for your cortisol to get normalized and your core body temperature to come back down, which we talked about how important that is.

• 45:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, cuz I'll, I'll work out and then I'll take a cold shower, but I'm still sweating an hour later.

• 45:52Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, a cold shower is a great, great help, though, to help to lower your body, your core body temperature.

• 45:56Lewis Howes?

  But still, the, you know, the burn is just like, you know, a big guy, just still sweating. So that makes sense. Okay, so four hours after the workout, you should take before you go to sleep.

• 46:07Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, right. And some people are like hitting, you know, their, their jujitsu class at like 8:00 PM and then trying to get to sleep at 10.

• 46:14Lewis Howes?

  That's not optimal.

• 46:15Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, it's not.

• 46:15Lewis Howes?

  But it is good. You still get benefit if you go up till 7 o'clock or four hours before. It's okay.

• 46:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Just try and time it different, you know, a lot of times that we get in issues with this is because we tell ourselves there's not another option. You know, we're infinite beings that have plenty of different ways that we can change things.

• 46:32Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. Okay. Um, I believe that was seven. Okay, so number eight. Use smart supplementation. What does that mean?

• 46:41Shawn Stevenson?

  Oh, man, this is a, this is a great chapter, man. Um.

• 46:47Shawn Stevenson?

  This whole, working in a, in a clinic, people would sometimes see me like allopathic treatment, like what can I take? You know, so I'm having problems with losing weight. What can I take for that? What can I take for my sleep? And that sent me down a path of research and some stuff and some of the stuff I found wasn't, it didn't feel good. One of the first things in the biggest supplement for sleep is melatonin. We talked about melatonin a lot already. Just because you could buy it at a natural food store doesn't mean that it's okay.

• 47:18Lewis Howes?

  Not all melatonin is made equally, is that what you're saying?

• 47:21Shawn Stevenson?

  No, not that. This is a hormone, man. This is a hormone, like you're taking a hormone. And so I cited a study in the book that, right now, and there's a lot more being done on this, but right now, what's, what's seen clinically is that taking melatonin supplementation decreases the function of your melatonin receptor sites. So they start to down-regulate. Basically, your body stops being able to use it. No, you can produce it, but your body won't be able to use it.

• 47:46Lewis Howes?

  Oh.

• 47:47Shawn Stevenson?

  Alright, so the receptor sites.

• 47:48Lewis Howes?

  Taking creatine where you're like? Take so much creatine back in the day and then it stops using it because it's

• 47:54Shawn Stevenson?

  Something like that.

• 47:54Lewis Howes?

  overloaded creatine or something. Okay.

• 47:56Shawn Stevenson?

  But yeah, man, so.

• 47:58Lewis Howes?

  So you shouldn't be taking melatonin.

• 48:00Shawn Stevenson?

  Ideally, not consistently, you know, and this is coming out, Dr. Michael Bruce is somebody I mentioned in the book, a board certified sleep specialist and really smart guy and he's recommended people to back off the the melatonin, but I say everything has a place, everything has value. If you're changing time zones, if you're wanting to just kind of for short term to help to set your normal sleep cycle, it can be okay, but getting that dependency on it and using too much, the the amount that's in a normal, just everyday supplement is way too high.

• 48:31Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 48:31Shawn Stevenson?

  And your body will start to down regulate. And so what do people do? They'll take more. So melatonin is not the way to go. The ideal way is to start with things that are natural first, things that have a storied, long lineage of use through the to the human body. You can start as simple as chamomile tea can be really helpful. Clinically proven to be effective. Uh, kava kava is another one. That's the national drink of Fiji. Uh, which Tony Robbins always come to mind when I think of Fiji, but it's been shown to be a mild sedative as well as valerian. So these are three options. Then we can get into the chemical isolates, which I would do that later. But 5-HTP is effective, uh, L-tryptophan. 5-HTP is a precursor to melatonin. So gives your body the chance to do a step still and produce it versus you taking the end product

• 49:17Shawn Stevenson?

  and lowering your ability for your body to actually use it.

• 49:19Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. Wow. That's powerful. Okay. Uh, so that was number eight. Number nine, go easy on the bottle.

• 49:29Shawn Stevenson?

  So this was a, this is one of the funnest chapters of the book and wow, just some of the.

• 49:35Lewis Howes?

  I'm talking, I'm assuming you're talking about alcohol.

• 49:37Shawn Stevenson?

  This is alcohol. Yeah, yeah.

• 49:38Lewis Howes?

  What about my late night glass of wine or going out to the bars and drinking until I'm passed out? That's not gonna help me sleep better?

• 49:45Shawn Stevenson?

  So here's what's so interesting is that the research shows that drinking alcohol before bed does in fact help you to fall asleep faster. Hands down, no doubt about it.

• 49:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, passes you out, right?

• 49:54Shawn Stevenson?

  What also has been found is that you're not getting into normal REM sleep in particular. Your sleep stages are broken. This is why you wake up with what's known as a hangover. All right. Because it's interrupting your sleep cycles. So you're passed out, you're, you're, you're physiologically sleeping, but your brain isn't doing the right processes.

• 50:11Lewis Howes?

  Why not?

• 50:13Shawn Stevenson?

  The alcohol interrupts those. So one of the things that I mentioned earlier, and I didn't want to get into it, but adenosine, which we talked about in the book in regards to the caffeine. All right, so adenosine is this end product from your body. It's producing this compound to basically nudge you to go to sleep. And caffeine sits in the receptor sites for adenosine. So you don't really know you're tired, even though you are. All right, alcohol does something similar to that. So it makes you feel tired, even though physiologically you might not be ready to go to sleep for some people. So this has a lot to do with it, with the impact with the adenosine as far as alcohol is concerned. And so it does work again to put you to sleep, but getting good sleep, not so much.

• 50:54Shawn Stevenson?

  One of the other things that was fascinating about writing this chapter was looking at how similar sleep deprivation is to being drunk. And actually seeing right there statistical correlation between. And when you see this, man, the National Highway Patrol and all of the deaths that occur every year due to people falling asleep or driving while drowsy is shocking because there isn't an easy test for that.

• 51:21Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 51:21Shawn Stevenson?

  As there is with testing with blood alcohol. And there was a great Mythbusters episode that I talk about in the book that actually showed, wow, like you can actually be even worse off if you're sleep deprived.

• 51:31Lewis Howes?

  Of course, you can't open your eyes.

• 51:32Shawn Stevenson?

  Exactly.

• 51:33Lewis Howes?

  I mean, you know, I'll wake up sometimes and I'll feel like drowsy and sleep deprived. I've never been drunk in my life, so I don't know what the feeling is.

• 51:41Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 51:41Lewis Howes?

  But I think a few nights ago I woke up, you know, I was coming back from my international trip for two weeks. So I was just waking up at 3 a.m. and it was just all off.

• 51:49Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 51:49Lewis Howes?

  And I woke up and I remember just like walking around the room, like hitting the wall. And I'm like, man, I feel so drunk right now.

• 51:54Shawn Stevenson?

  Louis, that's what drunk is. That's what it feels like, man.

• 51:56Lewis Howes?

  I don't know what it is. You know what I mean? So I can like, I can only imagine, you know, when you don't have a stable footing and you're just like, where am I?

• 52:05Lewis Howes?

  That's interesting, so.

• 52:06Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, but there are benefits to drinking, especially like you mentioned, drinking wine, you know, red wine, the resveratrol, there's a lot of great benefits. It's just, how about we go for a happy hour? Or how about you give yourself the opportunity? I talk about how to do this.

• 52:18Lewis Howes?

  Almost like four hours before you sleep, kind of like that.

• 52:20Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, a couple, even two, even two. And drink plenty of water to help your body to essentially flush it out. You know, when you're drinking alcohol, well, you don't know this, but you tend to go pee a lot. Your body's trying to eliminate the poison, you know?

• 52:32Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 52:32Shawn Stevenson?

  And so just encourage that, you know, just by drinking, getting really hydrated and just giving yourself a couple hours before you go to bed. It's really that simple.

• 52:40Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha, okay, cool. So that was number nine. Uh, number 10. Let's do early to rise. Be early to rise. Why?

• 52:52Shawn Stevenson?

  How about let's do the get grounded? Since this is a correlation.

• 52:55Lewis Howes?

  Let's do it. Get grounded.

• 52:56Shawn Stevenson?

  This was the way your book kicked off, right?

• 52:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 52:59Shawn Stevenson?

  And this is the way that mine wraps up.

• 53:00Lewis Howes?

  I like it.

• 53:01Shawn Stevenson?

  And it means psychologically, but also physiologically. And wow, this was some of the most fascinating research that I got to dig into. And I got to talk to Dr. Jeff Spencer, who's, he's been on your show, right?

• 53:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yes.

• 53:15Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, so, and he was, he's, he's directly connected to like 40 national championships, Olympic gold medals, Tour de France victories combined, you know, all together with the, with his coaching and his, uh, being a team physician for the Tour de France, for example. One of his leverage points and his kind of secret, uh, sauce was through utilizing grounding and earthing, uh, equipment. And so what is it? So getting grounded basically means getting your body connected with the earth's surface. And again, me being very analytical, I'm not, you know, I, I don't like to get too unicorn, you know, but I respect to that. There is some of that relevant in the world, but, uh, I want to see the science. Like, I want to know how it works. And so.

• 54:01Shawn Stevenson?

  The earth itself is brimming with free electrons. Okay, and so your body is really operating off of this, this interesting combination of protons and electrons for events to happen. So positive event in your body is an inflammatory event, basically. And you need inflammation to get better, you know, to grow, all right, to develop. Inflammation is actually good, but we don't want to go too far. Bringing an electron molecule into an inflammatory process, because what happens today is people are having too many inflammatory overreactions, right? So this is like autoimmune condition where your body's doing too much. Yes. And bringing an electron in basically neutralizes that inflammatory event.

• 54:45Shawn Stevenson?

  So one of the things that's seen is when you get grounded, and there's so much cool research on this, inflammation goes down, your parasympathetic nervous system kicks on, right? And so there was a study done, and this was a journal of environmental and public health. And I cited this one in the book that found that as soon as you get grounded, instantly your parasympathetic nervous system is turning on and your sympathetic nervous system is turning off. So what are those? Parasympathetic is basically your rest and digest system. Sympathetic is fight or flight. And most of us are chronically in this. It's a binary system. It's either off or on. You're not a little bit sympathetic. So getting grounded immediately does that. And why does that work?

• 55:27Shawn Stevenson?

  Human bodies conductive, you know, like it's not some magic. Right now, you know, if somebody might be listening to podcasts, now matter of fact, let's, I'm gonna use a different example. Scary movies, right? One of the worst ways to go out is like you're taking a bath and here comes Freddy Krueger and he throws an electric device in the bathtub. Yeah. Right? That would suck. It sucks, right? Because we're conductive, we can be electrocuted because we're conductive. We can electrocute each other just with static electricity. You know, it happens every day. You're very, very conductive. So that should help to kind of buffer that disconnection of like what's going on. You just can't see the electricity, the electrons coming from the ground, but they're there. So conductive surfaces are mainly like grass, dirt, you know, soil.

• 56:17Shawn Stevenson?

  Concrete is a little bit conductive. Asphalt is not. Bodies of water is why we feel grounded and ideas come in the shower.

• 56:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:25Shawn Stevenson?

  All right, because those pipes are grounded.

• 56:27Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 56:27Shawn Stevenson?

  All right. Um, sand, things like that. So getting your body in touch with those things. And that's why people feel so good when they go to the beach. They feel relaxed, they get better sleep. Some people fall asleep at the beach.

• 56:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 56:38Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, because your body's actually getting, it's setting the circadian timing is getting back on track. So that's one thing. And also getting grounded. And this was so cool that I saw this clinically proven. And so I, let me preface this. So what Dr. Jeff was using was grounding equipment. So this is equipment that basically connects to the grounding prong in your outlets. And it's basically like sheets that align with this particular material that sends that energy basically to the human body. And so there's grounding mats, like I think you have one. I got one for a buddy, John Lee Dumas, that he uses all the time. Uh, I have a mouse pad, there's grounding sheets, there's all this other cool stuff that basically connects you to the electrons that the earth is emanating.

• 57:23Shawn Stevenson?

  And so by, there was one study that I cited, getting grounded using this equipment. Number one, it lowered nighttime cortisol. So they monitored the person all night, the people all night long in the study. Lowered nighttime cortisol. All right. And also it helped to normalize cortisol during the daytime. So they're not hyper fight or flight just by getting yourself grounded.

• 57:46Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 57:47Shawn Stevenson?

  All right, so super powerful stuff. The inexpensive way to do it, which it helps if you're in California, you know, it's so great to be out shoveling snow the day before I came here. But it's easy to get grounded. What other places, you know, depending on the time of year can be a little bit more difficult. But I encourage you to explore, you know, if it's a little chilly outside and you've got a patch of grass in your backyard, still get out there, roll up your, roll up your, uh, your pants and do that. Or you can get yourself some of the earthing equipment that I talk about in the book.

• 58:15Lewis Howes?

  Awesome, okay. Um, make sure you guys go, that was just 10 of the 21 strategies. There's a lot more great stuff that we didn't even talk about. Um, that'll let you guys dive. And learn more about when you get the book. So make sure to go get the book. It's called Sleep Smarter. I'll have it linked up here in the show notes. Uh, also you can get it on Amazon or anywhere books are sold with that same publisher that I have for my book. And also when you get the book, you're going to get a uh 14 day sleep makeover. So you're gonna, he's gonna talk about how to essentially go through 14 days and do this process to see better results. And also he talks about sleep sanctuaries. We're gonna do a video if you guys are, are listening or watching right now, we'll have a link afterwards where you guys can go watch a video of Sean

• 59:01Lewis Howes?

  in my bedroom, helping me with my sleep sanctuary. Um, so make sure to get this book. I highly recommend it. I wish I was smart enough to write it myself. Um, three final questions for you. This was great. So thank you for sharing this with us all. One is, what are you most grateful for in your life recently?

• 59:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Wow, um.

• 59:22Shawn Stevenson?

  I'm grateful for my wife. You know, she is my hero, man. She's my best friend. And none of this would be possible without her. You know, she was definitely the catalyst for me to find ways to, to get better, you know, in every area of my life. And I'm just so grateful for her, man. I love her. I love her to pieces.

• 59:41Lewis Howes?

  Wow. How long has it been married?

• 59:42Shawn Stevenson?

  We've been married for almost nine years. We've been together for 11 years.

• 59:46Lewis Howes?

  Amazing, man. Congrats on that.

• 59:48Shawn Stevenson?

  Thanks, man.

• 59:49Lewis Howes?

  Um, next thing is three truths. I don't know if you've heard this question me asked before, but at the end, I ask everyone. Uh, at the end of the day, if all your books have been erased, all your podcast episodes deleted. And the only thing people had to remember you by was a piece of paper with three things that you get to write down. They say what you know to be true about your experience in this world and what you'd pass on to everyone else. Say this is Sean Stevenson's three truths about life. And how to live it.

• 1:00:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:19Lewis Howes?

  What would you write down and say?

• 1:00:22Shawn Stevenson?

  Three. Okay, so the first one would be to be yourself. Be yourself. People don't buy your books, they buy you. People don't listen to your podcast, they listen to you. You know, people connected to people. And the more that you can be you and full out, flesh out all those parts of yourself, the quirky stuff, the funny stuff, the sad stuff, the greatness that you have. Just being more of yourself is gonna help people to connect with you more. And this reality, this life is really about your relationships. So be yourself. Find a way to find your voice as quickly as possible because this world can force different voices onto you.

• 1:01:05Shawn Stevenson?

  Be yourself and you're gonna, you're gonna be successful. Okay, so that's number one. That's number one, okay. Two more. Number two, number two would be, this is piggybacking off of that one. The most influential factor on your health and your well-being and your success in life is the quality of your relationships. So make sure that you are mindful of that and seeking out great people to be around because you know, you've heard the whole quote, the compilation of the five closest people in your life. So make sure that you're investing in that and taking care to have great relationships because they are in fact, and there's a study done with Princeton

• 1:01:47Shawn Stevenson?

  that found that two people just talking and there's a little bit of rapport between us, our brains sync up, you know, our brainwaves actually sync up. We're so connected to each other and you wanna make sure that that connection is a good one with people who are uplifting and you're uplifting to them as well. So be that person, you know, be that person who you would want to be friends with and show up for other people in your life and create great relationships. Okay, that's two. All right. Okay, the last one would be. It's not you are what you eat. It's you are what you eat, drink, breathe and think. So all of those things literally create physical structure. You know, so just the thoughts that you're predominantly having, the information that you're taking in

• 1:02:32Shawn Stevenson?

  literally changes your brain and creates physical structure in your, in your brain. And the food that you eat, wow, food isn't just food, it's information. So you get to choose what kind of data you're providing your cells every single day. And basically to print out cooler copies of yourself, you know, or you can print out some, you know, some, some crappy copies, you know, it can happen, but you can change that in an instant. So it's you are what you eat, drink, breathe and think.

• 1:03:00Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, I love that. Thanks for that. Before I ask the final question, I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Sean, for your service and your commitment to healing the world. I love when people are so dedicated to their craft and doing the research and doing the things that are challenging and going above and beyond to learn all the information. You know, obviously you're running a business and you're want to sell books and things like that, but I know your heart is so committed to healing people and having them live a healthier, happier, richer, fuller, longer life. And this is, in my opinion, been one of the main components of the last few years that I've just taken on for myself and understood the, the power of sleep.

• 1:03:42Lewis Howes?

  So I want to acknowledge you for everything you consistently do to serve humanity to, to live better.

• 1:03:49Shawn Stevenson?

  Thank you, man.

• 1:03:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, of course, of course. Final question, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:03:55Shawn Stevenson?

  Lewis, man, you find a way to hit me, man. Oh, man, that, that was amazing, man. Thank you so much. Uh, my definition of greatness.

• 1:04:07Shawn Stevenson?

  Service, you know, find a way to serve. Find a way to serve every day. Every encounter that you have, there's a way that you can bring some value to somebody's life. And just being cognizant of that as you're going through your day. I just, I bought my wife some, some exercise tights, you know, from this really cool store that was by my hotel here in Cali. You know, there's stuff in Cali that you can't get anywhere else. And I got the wrong size, apparently. And so I went back to exchange it and I saw, you know, on the, the person at the cash register, his, his demeanor, like he was worried that there was a problem. And I just, I felt it and I was just like, man, it's okay. Everything is cool, man. Because he actually helped me yesterday.

• 1:04:50Shawn Stevenson?

  And so just letting him know that it was cool, like he's a person, you know, he's, he's doing the best that he can with his life. And let me make sure that he feels like he's of value in the world. So I know it's a little silly instance, but every day, you know, find a way to be of service. And there's like a, a cool saying that, you know, find a way to serve the many and ye shall be great. You know, so find a way to be, be of service.

• 1:05:13Lewis Howes?

  I love it. Shawn Stevenson. Thanks for coming on, man, man.

• 1:05:16Shawn Stevenson?

  Appreciate you so much, man.

• 1:05:17Lewis Howes?

  Appreciate it, bro.

• 1:05:18Shawn Stevenson?

  Thank you.

• 1:05:22Lewis Howes?

  Sleep, sleep, sleep. It's a powerful thing. We all need to do it to optimize our life. I hope you guys enjoyed this one and got a lot out of it. If you did, make sure to share this. LewisHowes.com/302. Post it on Twitter, on Facebook, on Snapchat, on Instagram. Tag me, at Lewis Howes. Let me know what you thought. I reply to almost every comment I get on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. You've just gotta tag me and let me know. I love connecting with you and hearing what you thought of the interviews and what you got out of the interviews. So please share this with your friends. LewisHowes.com/302. Also, if this is your first time here or you have yet to leave a review, please subscribe

• 1:06:06Lewis Howes?

  on iTunes, on SoundCloud, on Stitcher, and leave us a review over on iTunes. That helps us continue to get the message out there and we are constantly in the top one. ...of podcasts on all of iTunes and it's because you guys continue to spread the message of greatness and those reviews really help increase those rankings also. So thanks for all of your love. Thanks for all of your support. I hope you get a lot out of this and continue to listen because we're bringing on bigger and badder people every single week. Three episodes a week we do this and it's only going to continue to get better. So you guys know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.