February 13, 2024 • 11 mins
Please enjoy this Q&A session I did at the EPIC Community event all about sleep, fasting and naps.
Let me know if you have any questions via @drgregwells on social.
Also you can ask me questions via the Dr. Greg Wells GPT that is trained on my books: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-AetMyeiiv-dr-greg-s-wellness-gpt
Have a great week everyone!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast.
It's great to be with you. Thanks for joining me for
another episode. And last week's session went so
well. We're just going to keep rolling
with that. I actually found some more
questions that people had on sleep, so I will include those
because obviously that was a massive topic of massive
interest for all of you last week.
There were also questions about intermittent fasting and how to
(00:22):
take a nap that doesn't make youfeel terrible.
So in this session today, we're doing.
More Q&A. From the Epic community, we're
talking about sleep, fasting, naps and a couple other little
tidbits in there too, just to keep you interested and and
listening to see if you can capture what those are.
So without any further delay, please enjoy this continuation
(00:43):
of my Epic community Q&A on sleep, fasting and naps.
If you have questions, please make sure that you ping me on
social at Doctor Greg Wells or through my website
doctorgregwells.com. Send those in.
We can create newsletters, we can create videos, we can create
podcasts. This year is all about you.
So whatever your concerns are, what are whatever your interests
(01:05):
are with regards to health, well-being and high performance,
make sure that you get that information over to me and then
my team is will go through. That we are.
Deeply in the midst of planning out our content for for the
year, but we're trying to make everything related back to what
all of you are looking for and the questions.
That all of. You have, so thanks for being
(01:25):
here. Thanks for listening.
Please enjoy this conversation that I have with the community
at Epic All about sleep, fastingand naps.
Exercise before sleep. Yeah, totally.
So quickly to expand that answera little bit, what's the best
time of day to exercise? Morning increases BDNF, brain,
Dr. neurotrophic factor, which stimulates the growth of new
(01:46):
neurons inside the brain and improves cognitive performance
all day long. So if you have a cognitively
demanding job, morning workouts awesome.
Plus it raises your metabolism, which is great.
The lunchtime workout is fantastic as it increases your
body temperature, which preventsthe tiny melatonin pulse that
happens in the middle of the afternoon, which prevents the
afternoon crash. So if you consistently find
(02:08):
yourself struggling at 2:00 in the afternoon, reading the same
line on the screen five times, not understanding what it means
in English, that's a good indication that maybe the
lunchtime workout will help you to prevent that from happening.
The evening workout is fantasticfor dissipating stress hormones,
So it breaks down cortisol, breaks down adrenaline, it
breaks down all of the hormones that get created when we're
stressed throughout the course today.
(02:28):
So that is absolutely fantastic.The problem is, is that you
increase your body temperature and in order to fall asleep your
body temperature must drop. So if you do an evening workout
you have to finish with a cool to cold shower until you stop
sweating. Then you can fall asleep and
stay asleep. So that's the one.
Hack around the evening workout to make it work.
Music and sound so white noise has been shown to improve sleep
(02:51):
quality and so we have air purifiers in all of our
bedrooms. Stories like podcasts or
audiobooks are good as long as they are fictional because
fiction replicates a dream state, just like REM sleep.
If you're listening to a podcastabout murders, maybe not, right?
(03:14):
Sort of like, I had a Supreme Court Justice once from Canada,
and he was like, I can't sleep. I'm like, what are you doing
before you go to sleep? It's like, I watched CNN.
Oh, got it right. Like so we want to just like
anything that deactivates your Physiology.
Could be fiction, could be lightmusic, Metallica.
Probably not classical maybe right.
(03:37):
So we just want to find that stuff that deactivates your
psychology and your Physiology. Humans are designed to fall
asleep and follow the light, dark cycles of the sun.
So if we are falling asleep before midnight and waking up as
the sun comes up first thing in the morning leveraging, then the
three WS get outside for wake up, drink some water and go for
a walk. You then have a bunch of people
(03:59):
wrote that one down. Apparently that works.
Make a note of that one as well.But when you get outside and the
sunlight hits your eyes first thing in the morning, that
actually makes it easier for your pineal gland to release
melatonin late at night. So as much as possible we are
aligning ourselves with the light, dark cycles of the sun.
The second thing that predicts lifespan when it comes to sleep
is the consistency of bedtime. So whatever that.
(04:22):
So it's like how much sleep do you get?
78 hours. Predictor of longevity.
Second predictor of longevity isdo you go to bed at the same
time every night? Not what time you wake up.
So I want to try to level that one out too.
Thank you for reminding me of that.
I totally forgot. That's awesome.
Just why I'm talking on that note to make the light easier.
This is also really cool study on sleep, which shows that if
(04:42):
you increase your sleep from 5 to 7 hours a night, which is 1
sleep cycle, you cut your risk of heart attack or stroke by 50
percent, 45% half research by professor Cappuccino.
But you know, anyway, yeah, tookyou guys a while to get that so
I had to lead you there, but I'mglad we all got there in the
end. Time wise, let's just assume
(05:05):
it's 8 hours that you're trying to sleep.
Overall, because the math is easy.
You want about about 25% deep sleep, 2 hours, 25% R.E.M., two
hours and about 50% light. It will vary wildly so over the
course of a month, Broadly speaking, that's about what
we're shooting for. I have discovered that if I get
(05:26):
more than one hour of deep sleep, I'm fine during the
course day. Any less than an hour of deep
sleep, I really struggle. Any less than 30 minutes, I
might as well not have slept at all.
So everything that I'm doing is trying to increase the amount of
deep sleep that I got for all the women in the room.
One thing that seems to improve slow wave deep sleep for women
is strength training. So this is another hack for the
(05:47):
ladies in the in the room. So research on sleep medications
which are different than melatonin which is a hormone.
So sleep medications work, they enable you to fall asleep.
They do not necessarily ensure that you get into deep sleep.
Stage 3-4, deep sleep you do getlots of R.E.M., stage one and
stage two. Prolonged use of sleep aids does
clearly increase all 'cause mortality and shorten lifespan.
(06:10):
So we recommend using sleep medsand sleep aids as a bridge to
better overall sleep patterns byadding in consistency at
bedtime, blackout blinds, 20° exercise during the day, eating,
finishing, eating early. And when you build all of those
practices in, eventually we're able to get people off the sleep
meds. But we do.
(06:30):
If you want to use them as a bridge, something going on at
work, something going on at home, it's super stressful.
You're not feeling very well. You're going through
chemotherapy like whatever the reason happens to be.
It's totally cool. But we are using them as a
bridge to build the lifestyle habits that enable you to fall
asleep so you can get off of them as quickly as possible.
Nightcap alcohol late at night, alcohol wipes out.
Slow wave, deep sleep, so you pass out, but you don't actually
(06:53):
clear out the brain. So stage 3-4 deep sleep does not
happen, which is why if you haveeven two or three drinks, you
wake up during the day and you just don't feel that awesome.
So I'm a strong proponent of if you are going to drink, which
many of my colleagues are stopping, that we do it on the
weekends. We try not to do that during the
course of the day or sorry during the course of the week.
Got distracted. Caffeine.
(07:17):
So ADD there we go. Typical entrepreneur alcohol not
good for sleep. Also there is no safe
consumption for alcohol when it comes to cancer and heart
disease. So I have cancer in my family.
Therefore I'm trying to eliminate and lowered as much as
I can. Caffeine.
Powerful performance enhancing substance.
Peak benefits 30 to 60 minutes after you take it.
Withdrawal effects 3 hours later, so be careful with your
(07:38):
timing. Make sure it lines up to the
most important thing that you need to do during the course of
the day. Effects last for up to 8 hours,
so I recommend stopping caffeineand take it around 2:00 PM to
make sure that 8:00 to 9:00 PM it's out of your system and you
can fall asleep quickly and deeply.
And sorry, there was one other thing.
Oh, food. High protein, high fat meals.
If you are still digesting the food, therefore within two to
(08:00):
three hours of falling asleep typically make it difficult for
you to fall asleep and to stay asleep.
Carbohydrates stimulate the release of serotonin, which
relaxes you, which makes it easier for you to fall asleep.
So a light carbohydrate snack late at night can help you if
you're struggling. However, it's not awesome for
body composition, so just be careful if you're trying to lose
percent body fat that you're notreally doing that.
(08:21):
I also recommend stopping eatingabout 3:00-ish hours before you
want to fall asleep. So all I say there's is once
you're done dinner, don't snack in general because that kind of
it's a hack for getting at intermittent fasting without
really intermittent fasting. So let's say you set your 20
minute power nap timer You fall asleep at and you only get 3
minutes. Still awesome.
All good. Plus, you've taken 17 minutes
just to close your eyes and relax.
(08:41):
You're probably kind of meditating, which also works as
well. Many times if I don't have time
or I'm not in a location where it's possible for me to sleep,
meditation does the exact same thing.
So I'll put on a sleep podcast or something like that and just
like meditate for 10 minutes. And it does.
It does the exact same thing if you have inconsistent sleep
times, artists who are performers, ambulance, first
(09:04):
responders, military like load, and all sorts of people on any
sort of shift work. We say 8 hours per 24 hour cycle
doesn't have to be all at once, and you leverage naps as much as
you can while it's disrupted. But then when things are not
disrupted, you are very structured about what you're
trying to do to get back on yourpattern as quickly as you can
after you get back from being ontour or four days of being on
(09:25):
shift. People that have like disruptive
patterns and they get back on it.
The beautiful thing about sleep is the effects are almost
instantaneous. So if you haven't been sleeping
well for a while but you get onegreat night's sleep, I'm sure
you've all felt that you're like, oh, the angels are
singing. You're like back to life.
Three or four days of good sleepin a row, like when you go on
vacation, all of a sudden you feel absolutely incredible.
One bad night's sleep is not going to make that big of a
(09:47):
difference. We constantly tell our athletes
you're not you're not sleeping the night before your race at
the Olympics. It's not happening.
So don't worry about it. 5-3, you know, 3-4 nights in a row of
bad sleep. That's when people start to make
errors and mistakes. As you know from the research in
medicine, if you are working andyou can grab anywhere from 10 to
20 minutes per four hours, that's polyphasic sleep.
(10:10):
You can actually keep going for a long period of time because
that 20 minutes will clear out the adenosine and give you back
the next cycle, and you can do that up for a few days at a
time. All right everyone.
Thanks for tuning. In I really.
Hope that was helpful. Obviously it's a little bit of a
different format, but super psyched to be able to share that
information with you. I hope that it was helpful.
(10:30):
If it was, please share this with your community.
Please let someone else know about the show.
Let someone else know about the episode, forward it to them.
And that helps us tremendously. If you could also leave a review
on your podcast platform of choice, whether that's iTunes or
Spotify, that also makes a massive difference for us and
really helps us out. And of course, if you can follow
(10:51):
me on social at Doctor Greg Wells or on LinkedIn forward
slash Doctor Greg Wells, that would be tremendously wonderful
as well. Ping me with questions.
Make sure that this is all aboutyou and we will continue to
build content for you this year that helps you to be healthy, to
perform better, and to get to a place where your well-being is
exactly where you want it to be.All right everyone, Thanks
(11:11):
again. We'll see you in the next
episode. Really.
Really soon.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast.
It's great to be with you. Thanks for joining me for
another episode. And last week's session went so
well. We're just going to keep rolling
with that. I actually found some more
questions that people had on sleep, so I will include those
because obviously that was a massive topic of massive
interest for all of you last week.
There were also questions about intermittent fasting and how to
(00:22):
take a nap that doesn't make youfeel terrible.
So in this session today, we're doing.
More Q&A. From the Epic community, we're
talking about sleep, fasting, naps and a couple other little
tidbits in there too, just to keep you interested and and
listening to see if you can capture what those are.
So without any further delay, please enjoy this continuation
(00:43):
of my Epic community Q&A on sleep, fasting and naps.
If you have questions, please make sure that you ping me on
social at Doctor Greg Wells or through my website
doctorgregwells.com. Send those in.
We can create newsletters, we can create videos, we can create
podcasts. This year is all about you.
So whatever your concerns are, what are whatever your interests
(01:05):
are with regards to health, well-being and high performance,
make sure that you get that information over to me and then
my team is will go through. That we are.
Deeply in the midst of planning out our content for for the
year, but we're trying to make everything related back to what
all of you are looking for and the questions.
That all of. You have, so thanks for being
(01:25):
here. Thanks for listening.
Please enjoy this conversation that I have with the community
at Epic All about sleep, fastingand naps.
Exercise before sleep. Yeah, totally.
So quickly to expand that answera little bit, what's the best
time of day to exercise? Morning increases BDNF, brain,
Dr. neurotrophic factor, which stimulates the growth of new
(01:46):
neurons inside the brain and improves cognitive performance
all day long. So if you have a cognitively
demanding job, morning workouts awesome.
Plus it raises your metabolism, which is great.
The lunchtime workout is fantastic as it increases your
body temperature, which preventsthe tiny melatonin pulse that
happens in the middle of the afternoon, which prevents the
afternoon crash. So if you consistently find
(02:08):
yourself struggling at 2:00 in the afternoon, reading the same
line on the screen five times, not understanding what it means
in English, that's a good indication that maybe the
lunchtime workout will help you to prevent that from happening.
The evening workout is fantasticfor dissipating stress hormones,
So it breaks down cortisol, breaks down adrenaline, it
breaks down all of the hormones that get created when we're
stressed throughout the course today.
(02:28):
So that is absolutely fantastic.The problem is, is that you
increase your body temperature and in order to fall asleep your
body temperature must drop. So if you do an evening workout
you have to finish with a cool to cold shower until you stop
sweating. Then you can fall asleep and
stay asleep. So that's the one.
Hack around the evening workout to make it work.
Music and sound so white noise has been shown to improve sleep
(02:51):
quality and so we have air purifiers in all of our
bedrooms. Stories like podcasts or
audiobooks are good as long as they are fictional because
fiction replicates a dream state, just like REM sleep.
If you're listening to a podcastabout murders, maybe not, right?
(03:14):
Sort of like, I had a Supreme Court Justice once from Canada,
and he was like, I can't sleep. I'm like, what are you doing
before you go to sleep? It's like, I watched CNN.
Oh, got it right. Like so we want to just like
anything that deactivates your Physiology.
Could be fiction, could be lightmusic, Metallica.
Probably not classical maybe right.
(03:37):
So we just want to find that stuff that deactivates your
psychology and your Physiology. Humans are designed to fall
asleep and follow the light, dark cycles of the sun.
So if we are falling asleep before midnight and waking up as
the sun comes up first thing in the morning leveraging, then the
three WS get outside for wake up, drink some water and go for
a walk. You then have a bunch of people
(03:59):
wrote that one down. Apparently that works.
Make a note of that one as well.But when you get outside and the
sunlight hits your eyes first thing in the morning, that
actually makes it easier for your pineal gland to release
melatonin late at night. So as much as possible we are
aligning ourselves with the light, dark cycles of the sun.
The second thing that predicts lifespan when it comes to sleep
is the consistency of bedtime. So whatever that.
(04:22):
So it's like how much sleep do you get?
78 hours. Predictor of longevity.
Second predictor of longevity isdo you go to bed at the same
time every night? Not what time you wake up.
So I want to try to level that one out too.
Thank you for reminding me of that.
I totally forgot. That's awesome.
Just why I'm talking on that note to make the light easier.
This is also really cool study on sleep, which shows that if
(04:42):
you increase your sleep from 5 to 7 hours a night, which is 1
sleep cycle, you cut your risk of heart attack or stroke by 50
percent, 45% half research by professor Cappuccino.
But you know, anyway, yeah, tookyou guys a while to get that so
I had to lead you there, but I'mglad we all got there in the
end. Time wise, let's just assume
(05:05):
it's 8 hours that you're trying to sleep.
Overall, because the math is easy.
You want about about 25% deep sleep, 2 hours, 25% R.E.M., two
hours and about 50% light. It will vary wildly so over the
course of a month, Broadly speaking, that's about what
we're shooting for. I have discovered that if I get
(05:26):
more than one hour of deep sleep, I'm fine during the
course day. Any less than an hour of deep
sleep, I really struggle. Any less than 30 minutes, I
might as well not have slept at all.
So everything that I'm doing is trying to increase the amount of
deep sleep that I got for all the women in the room.
One thing that seems to improve slow wave deep sleep for women
is strength training. So this is another hack for the
(05:47):
ladies in the in the room. So research on sleep medications
which are different than melatonin which is a hormone.
So sleep medications work, they enable you to fall asleep.
They do not necessarily ensure that you get into deep sleep.
Stage 3-4, deep sleep you do getlots of R.E.M., stage one and
stage two. Prolonged use of sleep aids does
clearly increase all 'cause mortality and shorten lifespan.
(06:10):
So we recommend using sleep medsand sleep aids as a bridge to
better overall sleep patterns byadding in consistency at
bedtime, blackout blinds, 20° exercise during the day, eating,
finishing, eating early. And when you build all of those
practices in, eventually we're able to get people off the sleep
meds. But we do.
(06:30):
If you want to use them as a bridge, something going on at
work, something going on at home, it's super stressful.
You're not feeling very well. You're going through
chemotherapy like whatever the reason happens to be.
It's totally cool. But we are using them as a
bridge to build the lifestyle habits that enable you to fall
asleep so you can get off of them as quickly as possible.
Nightcap alcohol late at night, alcohol wipes out.
Slow wave, deep sleep, so you pass out, but you don't actually
(06:53):
clear out the brain. So stage 3-4 deep sleep does not
happen, which is why if you haveeven two or three drinks, you
wake up during the day and you just don't feel that awesome.
So I'm a strong proponent of if you are going to drink, which
many of my colleagues are stopping, that we do it on the
weekends. We try not to do that during the
course of the day or sorry during the course of the week.
Got distracted. Caffeine.
(07:17):
So ADD there we go. Typical entrepreneur alcohol not
good for sleep. Also there is no safe
consumption for alcohol when it comes to cancer and heart
disease. So I have cancer in my family.
Therefore I'm trying to eliminate and lowered as much as
I can. Caffeine.
Powerful performance enhancing substance.
Peak benefits 30 to 60 minutes after you take it.
Withdrawal effects 3 hours later, so be careful with your
(07:38):
timing. Make sure it lines up to the
most important thing that you need to do during the course of
the day. Effects last for up to 8 hours,
so I recommend stopping caffeineand take it around 2:00 PM to
make sure that 8:00 to 9:00 PM it's out of your system and you
can fall asleep quickly and deeply.
And sorry, there was one other thing.
Oh, food. High protein, high fat meals.
If you are still digesting the food, therefore within two to
(08:00):
three hours of falling asleep typically make it difficult for
you to fall asleep and to stay asleep.
Carbohydrates stimulate the release of serotonin, which
relaxes you, which makes it easier for you to fall asleep.
So a light carbohydrate snack late at night can help you if
you're struggling. However, it's not awesome for
body composition, so just be careful if you're trying to lose
percent body fat that you're notreally doing that.
(08:21):
I also recommend stopping eatingabout 3:00-ish hours before you
want to fall asleep. So all I say there's is once
you're done dinner, don't snack in general because that kind of
it's a hack for getting at intermittent fasting without
really intermittent fasting. So let's say you set your 20
minute power nap timer You fall asleep at and you only get 3
minutes. Still awesome.
All good. Plus, you've taken 17 minutes
just to close your eyes and relax.
(08:41):
You're probably kind of meditating, which also works as
well. Many times if I don't have time
or I'm not in a location where it's possible for me to sleep,
meditation does the exact same thing.
So I'll put on a sleep podcast or something like that and just
like meditate for 10 minutes. And it does.
It does the exact same thing if you have inconsistent sleep
times, artists who are performers, ambulance, first
(09:04):
responders, military like load, and all sorts of people on any
sort of shift work. We say 8 hours per 24 hour cycle
doesn't have to be all at once, and you leverage naps as much as
you can while it's disrupted. But then when things are not
disrupted, you are very structured about what you're
trying to do to get back on yourpattern as quickly as you can
after you get back from being ontour or four days of being on
(09:25):
shift. People that have like disruptive
patterns and they get back on it.
The beautiful thing about sleep is the effects are almost
instantaneous. So if you haven't been sleeping
well for a while but you get onegreat night's sleep, I'm sure
you've all felt that you're like, oh, the angels are
singing. You're like back to life.
Three or four days of good sleepin a row, like when you go on
vacation, all of a sudden you feel absolutely incredible.
One bad night's sleep is not going to make that big of a
(09:47):
difference. We constantly tell our athletes
you're not you're not sleeping the night before your race at
the Olympics. It's not happening.
So don't worry about it. 5-3, you know, 3-4 nights in a row of
bad sleep. That's when people start to make
errors and mistakes. As you know from the research in
medicine, if you are working andyou can grab anywhere from 10 to
20 minutes per four hours, that's polyphasic sleep.
(10:10):
You can actually keep going for a long period of time because
that 20 minutes will clear out the adenosine and give you back
the next cycle, and you can do that up for a few days at a
time. All right everyone.
Thanks for tuning. In I really.
Hope that was helpful. Obviously it's a little bit of a
different format, but super psyched to be able to share that
information with you. I hope that it was helpful.
(10:30):
If it was, please share this with your community.
Please let someone else know about the show.
Let someone else know about the episode, forward it to them.
And that helps us tremendously. If you could also leave a review
on your podcast platform of choice, whether that's iTunes or
Spotify, that also makes a massive difference for us and
really helps us out. And of course, if you can follow
(10:51):
me on social at Doctor Greg Wells or on LinkedIn forward
slash Doctor Greg Wells, that would be tremendously wonderful
as well. Ping me with questions.
Make sure that this is all aboutyou and we will continue to
build content for you this year that helps you to be healthy, to
perform better, and to get to a place where your well-being is
exactly where you want it to be.All right everyone, Thanks
(11:11):
again. We'll see you in the next
episode. Really.
Really soon.
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