Podcast Transcription: Sleep Smarter, Perform Better: Here’s What the Sleep Experts Want You to Know  

Ted Ryce: What is up my friend and welcome back to the Legendary Life Podcast. I'm your host, Ted Ryce health expert and coach to entrepreneurs, executives, and other high-performing professionals. Today we're gonna be diving into a topic that most people just don't give enough attention to.  

In fact, it's kind of near and dear to me at this very moment because it wasn't so good for me last night. What am I talking about? I'm talking about sleep. And let me tell you, sleep can make or break your overall health, your fat loss results, your focus and your energy levels. And look, I got it. You have a lot going on.  

You're building your business, supporting your family, training hard, eating healthy, at least doing your best to. Do everything and you try to make it work on five hours of sleep or maybe six. But here's the thing, if you're not sleeping well, you're leaving results on the table.  

Poor sleep messes with your fat loss, as I said already. It wrecks your energy, slows down your workouts, and messes up your ability to make good decisions, especially around food. 

And the great thing about improving your sleep is it doesn't need to be that complicated, and you don't necessarily have to sleep more hours. If you feel right now, that's just not gonna happen.  

So, in this episode, I'm bringing you powerful insights from three incredible experts, Dr. Kirk Parsley. He's a former Navy Seal and former sports medicine doctor to Navy Seals.  

I've got Sean Stevenson, someone who wrote a book on sleep, and Dr. Greg Potter, someone who I just love talking to because of his deep understanding of sleep. And to help you understand why sleep matters and how to improve it again, even if you can't sleep for more hours.  

So, let's kick things off with Dr.Kirk Parsley. As I said, he's a former Navy Seal, a physician, and one of the top voices on sleep and human performance. In this clip, he explains why sleep isn't just about feeling rested. It's about keeping your body and brain functioning at its best. And more importantly, why trying to push through on too little sleep is actually sabotaging your fat loss, your health, and ultimately your results.  

Kirk Parsley: This body is a couple of hundred thousand years old, right? It evolves to be on this planet to be awake during the day and asleep during the night. In fact, it evolves to be awake for 16 hours and sleep for eight hours. 

You're born into that contract, just like you're born into the contract that you're gonna die one day. You don't, you don't get to negotiate that. You need eight hours of sleep for 16 hours of being awake. 

So I tell everybody it's 90, it's 90% lifestyle. And it's not that complex. It's actually very simple. 

Now, that doesn't make it easy, right? It's very hard to get your lifestyle in order. It's very difficult. It's very taxing. You have to do a lot of stuff you don't want to do. You have to track a lot of things that aren't really that interesting to you, but you really have to do this to get your lifestyle in order. 

It's a tough thing to do. It's simplistic and concept, but it's hard to, it's hard to implement, and so it takes a long time to get your lifestyle and order. But once you do, it's, like I said, it's exceedingly rare that people come to me and like I'm eating. Spot on. My nutrition's spot on. My exercise is very smart. 

Like I'm training with the trainer, I'm tracking my heart rate variability. I'm not, I'm not over training. I'm not training when I'm overtrained, I'm taking breaks. I'm doing this, I'm doing that. Oh, and I meditate every day. And I, you know, I, you know, whatever, I'm, I'm religious. I pray I have a strong sense of community, and my stress level is nil, but I can't sleep. That doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. 

And if it does happen, they probably have a sleep disease and they need to go see a sleep physician like, who specializes in that. And that's not, that's not the case. 

Every single thing that you do, everything that you wanna get better at, you get better at while you're asleep. 

You don't get stronger when you work out. You get weaker when you work out, right? You damage tissues when you work out. When you sleep, you repair those tissues and based on how you damage those tissues, your brain and body are smart enough to go, oh, the, these muscle fibers are being put through an an, an, an intense amount of tension and stress, and they're rupturing because they aren't strong enough.  

So we're gonna make them bigger and thicker and stronger so that they won't tear next time. And then you get stronger, or they're super enduring. We're gonna increase mitochondrial density and we're gonna figure out a way to get things in and out of the cell faster so that cell can last longer before being, becoming toxic and damaged from exercise. 

So you actually get better while you're repairing and you're repairing while you're asleep. When you learn stuff, it's loosely in your head. When you go to sleep, you rehearse it, you form new neural connections, you start being able to associate that with other information that you know, you really, really understand it, and then you wake up the next day able to use that information a lot more efficiently. 

But most importantly, your prefrontal cortex, which is what makes us the smartest animal on the planet, take out the prefrontal cortex and you're, you're dumber than a monkey. Uh, you know, you're like, you are just completely. You know, stimulus and response at that point. Like, you, you don't think about the future. 

You definitely can't plan you, like you, like none of that stuff happens. So what makes us the smartest animal on the planet is our prefrontal cortex. What's the area, you guess, of your brain that suffers the most from sleep deprivation? your prefrontal cortex, obviously it makes perfect sense that it would, what, what area of your brain is most inhibited by stress hormones, prefrontal cortex. 

And I just told you, you're born into this. You're born into this contract. You, you're awake and active for 16 hours. After that, you need eight hours to recover. 

If you don't recover a hundred percent the next day, you're, you're actually waking up the next day worse than the day before. Does that make sense? Right. Yeah. So I beat myself down for 16 hours. I'm diminished over what I woke up as, right? And now I don't get good sleep. The next day, I'm gonna be even worse. 

This is really what we call aging, right? This is really what aging is. If you could recover a hundred percent every night, fix everything that got broken, everything that got stressed, you wouldn't age, right? You would be the same person every day when you woke up. So you can't fix a hundred percent, like it doesn't work that fast. 

But this is sort of the minimum recovery we know, and specifically for the brain. So if I know the entire purpose of me sleeping tonight is to get my brain and body ready for tomorrow, and I know I need eight hours of sleep, but if I only get six hours of sleep, tomorrow still comes. 

So what do I do? How do I do tomorrow? I release stress hormones because stress hormones are catabolic. They're using all of my stored resources, like my stress hormones, use my, my stored resources to get me through an event. So the maximum stress fight or flight right tiger jumps outta the bushes. 

The only thing that matters is getting away from the tiger. No other physiologic function in your body matters. So your body and brain will sacrifice every function that doesn't entail you getting away from that tiger. One of the most important things that's going to sacrifice is your prefrontal cortex, because if you start planning how you're gonna get rid of that tiger, you're dead before you, before you finish thinking about the plan. So we inhibit this, right? Our brains don't work. You can ask somebody their phone number in a gunfight. They won't be able to tell you, I guarantee you, like your brain shuts off for this stuff. So if that's fight or flight, then your prefrontal cortex is useless. 

Well, what if you're 50% down there? Well, it's 50% as useless as it is up here. What if your stress hormone is like almost zero? Well, then you have the maximum prefrontal cortex function you could possibly have. So don't you want your stress hormones to be really low? Well, of course you do. Stress hormones are catabolic. 

Catabolic means we're taking complex things or breaking them down into small things primarily as fuel. So I use my muscles, I break them down. I get amino acids because my body needs amino acids to continue its functions. That's catabolic. Anabolic means I go to sleep, I'm well nourished. Uh, the damage my muscles and my body uses all the amino acids I eat and it builds new muscle fibers and more new, new muscle tissue. 

So I'm building up. So that's anabolic. So an sleep should be highly anabolic, and it is, it's the most anabolic time of your day. And in fact, deep sleep is the exact opposite of fight or flight. Every hormone that's high during fight or flight is non-existence during deep sleep and vice versa. So when you wake up the next morning, you should have fairly low stress hormones. 

You should be anabolic if you don't get enough sleep. The only way to have enough energy and resources that day is to secrete more stress hormones, which are catabolic. You're breaking yourself down. You're also interfering with your brain's function. Now you run a high level of stress hormones. You try to go to sleep. 

You can't go to sleep 'cause your stress hormones are too high. This is one of the rules. Stress hormones have to be at a certain level for you to even be able to fall asleep. And if you do manage to fall asleep, it won't be very high quality sleep. So now even if you get eight hours, your stress hormones were so high, you only got the benefit of six hours. 

Now you're gonna wake up tomorrow with even higher stress hormones every day wake up with higher stress hormones, it gets harder to go to sleep. So now you're not sleeping well because you have high stress hormones and you have high stress hormones 'cause you aren't sleeping well. And this is what that aging process is between like 45 and 55 when we're less metabolically resilient and we're still trying to live like we lived when we were 20. And you just watch people crash. 

Ted Ryce: That was Dr. Kirk Parsley, and I hope you really let that message sink in: sleep is not optional. I've worked with hundreds of high performers and let me tell you, the ones who see the biggest changes in their body composition, energy, and focus aren't the ones who are grinding 24/7, aren't the ones who are pushing it deep into fatigue and trying to cut back on their sleep as a way of being more productive. That backfires.  

The ones who do the best, they're the ones who treat sleep as a required part of the program. And again, it's not just about getting more hours. The real power of sleep is what it does to your hormones, your metabolism, and your brain. And you can improve your sleep without even sleeping more hours just by improving the quality. 

And that's where our next expert, Shawn Stevenson, comes in. He's the bestselling author of Sleep Smarter and one of the most passionate voices out there about how sleep affects everything, especially fat loss and performance. 

Shawn Stevenson: Sleep is so interesting because you get all of this benefit by doing nothing. You know, so for our modern minds to process that in as much distraction as we have, it's pretty difficult. You know, and so this is why it's going on and why it's become more popular is that people are realizing like, wow, I'm not getting the results that I could be getting because of this thing.  

And so why it matters now and why, why it matters so much, period, is really a simple principle is that sleep is known as the anabolic state, right? Being awake is catabolic, period. Even if you're just sitting there picking food outta your teeth, like it's catabolic, you're breaking down rapidly. Sleep is known as the anabolic state.  

This is when you're producing the vast majority of your anabolic hormones, namely HGH, you know, human growth hormone and testosterone, melatonin, all these things that help to rebuild you and rejuvenate you. And you need both. It's not that catabolic part is bad. You need something to recover from to come back better.  

But if you're missing out on this stage right here, you're missing all of this anabolic development. And it's really the secret sauce. You know, what is, what I refer to it as? You know, it's exponentially, basically, it's a force multiplier. Everything in your life gets exponentially better. When you get great sleep, your relationships are better, your attitude is better, your energy is better, your physical appearance is better.  

We know this stuff, even from one night of crappy sleep, you start looking like, you know, like your character from, um, Twilight. You know, like you start looking a little bit suspicious, you know, and then carry that out over a period of time, man, and it can get pretty messed up. And so, but on the other end, it's like, it's exponentially, it's a force multiplier in the opposite direction.  

So if you're not getting the optimal sleep, everything in your life is gonna suck a little bit more to a lot more from your appearance to your brain function, your memory, your energy levels, your ability to defend yourself against disease. You know, and I really dive into that deeply in the book as well.  

But that's really what it's about, man. It's such a powerful thing. And I built my practice over the years, clinical nutritionist, right? Sure. Helping people studying nutrigenomics and how your food even impacts your genes, like this deep, powerful level. I know the power of food, but nothing is more powerful than the sleep that we get.  

It's, it is the most powerful factor in our life, and it's so important natural to us. It's built into our DNA, it's built into our genes, but we've become so unnatural. You know, we've broken this, this intimate code, this intimate relationship with sleep because of all these little silly things that we do.  

 You are not healing if you're not sleeping.   

we all have a hormone rhythm. There's certain times of the day that your body is evolved. You know, if you look at evolutionary biology to do certain processes, you when in the morning you should have a bowel movement.  

You know, you should feel the urge, the peristalsis to go poop in the evening that essentially that part of your body shuts down as far as that vibration of those muscles. Human growth hormone, if you're asleep between the hours of 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM that is the greatest anabolic window right there.  

If you're asleep during that time period, according to research, man, you're gonna produce more human growth hormone. And this is what we call money time sleep. 

If you're sleeping during that time period, because through our evolution, this is when humans would normally be asleep. All right. And it's because after it gets dark, we've only been able to manipulate light into, you know, basically manufacture a second daytime for like a hundred years. 

That's it. And in the Book of Humanity, that's like one page in a a million page book. I. All right. So it's not that long that we've had access to do what we're doing. And so, and also humans are not nocturnal creatures, you know, so when it's dark outside, we have to take shelter we are, are genetically designed to be up and to be active during the day. And so just basically, we'll say a couple hours after it gets dark outside, you should be asleep.  

All right? So just sleeping in that anabolic window can help a lot with our results.  

Researchers found out that when you're sleep deprived, just even 24 hours sleep deprivation radically suppresses your leptin secretion. Okay? So leptin is your body's satiety hormone. Number two, ghrelin is up. Ghrelin is your hunger hormone. And number three, and this is where it's really gets really interesting, is when you're sleep deprived, just 24 hours, there's a 6% reduction in glucose reaching your brain. 

Right? But that's not even shared equally, 14% of that is from your prefrontal cortex.  

Basically, we become a dumber version of ourselves, right?  

So our decision making goes down. It sacrificed a lot. Our distinguishing between right and wrong, wrong, our social control to be able to stop ourselves from saying or doing the thing that we think that bridge starts to get inhibited. And the amygdala, your amygdala is lit up.  

And that's a part of your brain only concerned about survival.  

And your willpower is very, like, you can, like, you can read all the books on willpower and you know what I'm saying?  

 You could change your name, your first name to will, and your last name to power. And just like, but it's not gonna matter if you're sleep deprived. You understand? It's like it's gonna be short term because your biology is gonna compel you to eat those cookies. You know? And it's just like we're setting ourselves up for failure and we have no idea about it.  

So sleep deprivation, number one, it's gonna elevate your cortisol level. All right. Cortisol is gonna be much higher because it's a stressful condition for your body.  

Cortisol is not bad. It's supposed to be elevated in the morning and drop as the day goes on. It's important for our survival to get up and do stuff, to work out, to be assertive in the world. It's got in a really bad name, but it's not bad. It's just when it's outta balance. So when you're sleep deprived, cortisol is automatically elevated. 

Ted Ryce: So, if you didn't already take, so if you didn't already take sleep seriously, I'm guessing you do now. As Sean just laid out, sleep controls everything from your blood sugar and hunger levels to your testosterone and cognitive function. So if you're trying to lose fat, build muscle, improve your focus, or just not feel like garbage halfway through your day, sleep isn't optional. 

But I know some of you are trying to get more sleep and still struggling. You wanna sleep, but your brain won't shut off or you wake up at 3:00 AM with racing thoughts. That's what happened to me last night, and that's where our final expert, Dr. Greg Potter, brings the science down to the real world level. 

In this segment, he talks about what to do if you're struggling with insomnia or poor sleep, and shares actionable tips to help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. 

Greg Potter: For those people who seem to be doing everything right, but they're still having difficulty sleeping, that's really raising a red flag that they might have a sleep disorder. If you do have insomnia, then first of course, you need to be diagnosed with it. So that would be going to your. Sleep medicine specialists, there are questionnaires that you can answer online to that will help you identify whether you might have that. But the common symptoms of it are things like difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep, waking up too early, just not feeling refreshed after sleeping, generally, feeling fatigued, having difficulty concentrating.  

So maybe you are rereading the same line of text again and again, having mood and behavioral problems, all these different things diagnosed by. Some sort of clinical interview and people would answer certain questionnaires and fill in some sleep diaries about they've been sleeping recently and so on.  

But it is crippling and it is also very treatable.  

And there are common themes that underlie people who have difficulty sleeping or have insomnia, and they have all these negative sleep related thoughts, and they also tend to associate their beds with the bed being a place of wakefulness. So what they need to do is they need to. To relearn that the bed is the the place of sleep, and also to learn how to reframe their thoughts. 

They're more positively about sleep. That is associating the bed with sleep. It's really important that people save the bed for sleep and sex only, but what that means is that if somebody's having difficulty sleeping during the night, then they should leave the bedroom, go elsewhere, do something relaxing and dim lighting, and only return to the bedroom when they're sleepy.  

Again, same thing at nighttime before going to bed. Maybe you plan to go to bed at 10:00 PM but you're just not tired at 10:00 PM. Don't go to bed then at 10:00 PM So the analogy that sleep research is often used is that you wouldn't sit down at the dinner table and wait to get hungry. Well, sleep is much the same.  

So you need to retrain your brain to associate your bed with sleep, apply that 15 minute rule, and then start to address. These cognition. So that will help you overcome these sleep related threat cues. And sometimes people become very attuned to their internal bodily sensations, their heartbeat, their breathing.  

Sometimes they're very attuned to external ones, such as noises that come from outside the bedroom. And there are different strategies that people can use to overcome these, but one is just making sure that their thoughts are all offloaded at the end of the day. So they don't have things racing through their minds about what they need to get done in the days to come.  

And simply making a do list shortly before bedtime can be useful for that. And if you do that, then keep the list by your bedside such that if you wake up during the night and you need to get that idea outta your head so that you're not actively trying to hold onto it so you don't forget it in the morning, then the person can just jot down that on the notepad again.  

But then also if somebody's very attuned to their internal sensations, then visualization exercises can be very useful. And if people practice these during the daytime, so just going somewhere in their head where they feel relaxed and they try and tune in as much as possible to all the different senses.  

So how does it sound in this place? How does it feel? What can they smell? What can they see? Who are they with? What's the temperature like? Over time, they can go back to that happy, relaxed place more quickly. And then if they're lying in bed at night and they can feel their heart pounding, they can draw on that visualization, which will help them detach themselves from those internal sensations.  

So that's a useful strategy. And then one more that I'll mention is that if somebody has a very busy mind, then they can actually just try and block thoughts. And sometimes that can just be repeating one word over and over again, which sounds really boring and it is. One that's commonly used is just the word, the, so somebody would lie in bed and if they keep getting these thoughts, they would just repeat the, the the, and it's so boring that people do tend to fall asleep.  

Actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna mention one more too, which sure is an idea that was actually popularized by the guy who wrote Man Search for meaning Viktor Frankl. And that's the idea of paradoxical intent. If people who are struggling to sleep. Tell themselves in their mind, stay awake, and they actively try and stay awake, not by getting up and switching the lights on and doing jumping jacks or anything like that, but if they're in bed and it's dark and they open their eyes and they look at the ceiling and they say, stay awake, stay awake, stay awake.  

They actually tend to fall asleep faster, which is completely counterintuitive, but that's a very useful strategy for some people too. 

Ted Ryce: So there you go. Three experts. One clear message. If you want to perform at your best sleep needs to be part of your strategy. So I want to ask you, are you giving your body the time it needs to recover? Is your bedroom set up for rest and deep sleep or are you stuck in a cycle of scrolling at night wired but exhausted? 

Maybe waking up at 3:00 AM and not able to go back to bed and look, no supplement, workout or diet plan can make up for poor sleep. So when you sleep better, everything else becomes easier. Fat loss, energy to power through your day, mental clarity to make the best decisions to get ahead in life, you're, you'll start doing better on your workouts. 

Even your patience with the people around you improves. So instead of chasing more hacks or pushing harder through fatigue, start by getting serious about your sleep routine. Sleep is one of those rare things that just makes everything easier. I. When you start getting it right, so if you've been putting it off, waiting for things to calm down before you get serious about sleep. 

Don't wait. Start tonight. Shut down the screens a little earlier. Make your room darker, cooler, quieter. Invest in blackout blinds if you need them. Give your body permission to recharge. You'll be amazed at how much in control you feel over your body, over your energy, your mindset, your appetite. You'll start to see the impor, uh, that your, your performance in the gym start to go up all when you make sleep a priority. 

And that's what I wanna leave you with. So have an amazing week. Hope this episode hit home for you and speak to you next Monday.