what if I told each and every one of you that you have access to something that could improve your
heart health, make you happier, and less depressed improve your performance, and maybe even help you
lose weight. Would you want to learn about that? Well, I'm Dr. Rena Malik, urologist and pelvic
surgeon, and I'm going to tell you exactly what that superpower is and how you can access it.
it's sleep in previous videos i've talked about how to boost your testosterone naturally sleep is
critically important well today i'm going to convince you guys that sleep is super important
for so many different aspects of your quality of life and trying to prioritize your sleep and get
rid of bad habits can really go a long way the american academy of sleep medicine and the sleep
research society recommend getting seven or more hours of sleep for optimal health how many of you
sleep more than seven hours at night pause the video and comment below i'm gonna guess that a
third of you are not getting enough sleep before we get into why sleep is important let me talk a
little bit about sleep so how do our bodies know when it's time to sleep well all of us have an
internal clock it's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus and it's in the brain and this responds
to the amount of daylight around us to tell us when it's awake time and when it's time to go
to sleep this is called the circadian rhythm but interestingly everyone's circadian rhythm is not
the same so you all know somebody who is a really good early morning person wakes up bright and
excited to take on the day and there's other people who would sleep till noon if they could and
that's because we have variations in chronotype so this was actually a survival advantage you
can think back to when we didn't have modern day society and we lived in maybe tribes and didn't
have security systems so at that point people had to take turns staying awake throughout the night
so they could oversee and make sure that the tribe was safe and so it made sense that some people
would be better at sleeping later in the morning and some people would be better sleeping
earlier at night and this also tends to change over a lifetime so if you all have ever been
a teenager or have any teenage children you'll realize that they never want to get out of bed
before noon that's because their chronotype is optimized to be waking up in the late
morning in addition to our exposure to light in our chronotype there's another chemical
that builds up in our brains called adenosine and when you wake up in the morning you've got
a clean slate no adenosine and throughout the day adenosine builds up and builds up and as it
continues to build up you get more and more sleepy interestingly caffeine blocks adenosine so that
we don't get that fatigue feeling however once the caffeine wears off all the adenosine rushes back
which causes the caffeine crash so how do you get good quality sleep sure it's the number of hours
you sleep but it's also how deeply you sleep meaning how often are you aroused at night and
that's something that usually you're not aware of but certain things can affect the quality of sleep
so if you have sleep disorders like sleep apnea where you wake up and you find yourself struggling
to breathe and fall back asleep or your partner might tell you that or you're having restless leg
syndrome or your legs are moving quite a bit or if you've had a lot of caffeine or alcohol late
in the day that can affect the quality of your sleep and interestingly we are the only species
that actively tries to limit our sleep every other species goes to sleep at around the same time
every day and wakes up around the same time every day so i mentioned that caffeine may disrupt your
sleep and it's not that you may have difficulty falling asleep i have plenty of times drinking
caffeine late in the day particularly when i was in training and i would fall asleep quite easily
but it does affect the number of awakenings you have and makes your quality of sleep more
poor similarly alcohol will disrupt certain stages of your sleep and make you wake up more frequently
throughout the night producing lower quality sleep so you can see the effects of sleep deprivation if
of course you don't sleep for a night or most of the night but it can also build up if you've had
multiple nights where you've slept maybe six or less hours and it can cause cumulative effects
which can be more difficult to recognize the first way that sleep can affect your quality of life is
that it can affect your what we call cognitive function so it's your ability to perform tasks
or respond to tasks appropriately so when tasks are really easy and repetitive it can just take
longer for people to respond but when they become more complex it can really affect your ability to
perform optimally in fact in certain small studies they found that even three days of sleeping less
than six hours can affect your ability to perform optimally another thing which i'm sure many of
you are familiar with is that not getting enough sleep can actually affect your mood right so many
of us have been sleep deprived and we're more irritable more maybe depressed or anxious and
if you've got chronic sleep deprivation you're not allowing yourself to sleep enough at night
that can become a chronic state of being but if you tend to restore that sleep and get good
quality of sleep you will find yourself to be more happier less irritable and increase your energy
the other really scary part about not sleeping enough is what we call micro sleeps so if you've
ever been in a situation where you've been sleep deprived and driving you may actually remember
having micro sleeps in your car where you stop at a red light and you fall asleep for a couple
seconds and wake up these are essentially not under your control you can open a window you
can blast the music you can do all those things but they're not going to stop that drive of your
body needing to sleep and if you're driving when that micro sleep happens it can really cause a
serious car accident which can lead to paralysis death and so many other horrible consequences
and in fact excessive sleepiness is the cause of half of all truck crashes in the united
states half sleep can also affect your heart so in 2016 the american heart association released
a statement that essentially said having sleep deprivation is a cardiovascular risk factor and
the reason for this is that when you are in lack of sleep your body revvs up your sympathetic
nervous system and your sympathetic nervous system is kind of your fight or flight system it's what
your body does when it's in a state of stress it needs to run away from like a lion that's chasing
you and during this time your heart rate and your blood pressure go up they did a huge study
in the uk of 500 000 people who had no history of cardiovascular disease and they looked at people
who slept for less than six hours just chronically slept for less than six hours they followed them
over seven years and they found that people who slept less had a 20 percent higher risk of a
heart attack or a myocardial infarction 20 just from not sleeping enough interestingly sleeping
over nine hours was also a risk factor for having a poor cardiovascular outcome in another study
looked at 4 000 people who didn't have any heart disease or sleep apnea and they looked at those
who had less than six hours of sleep a night and they used ultrasound to look at a couple major
arteries in the body to see if there was plaque buildup or which is what we see in patients who
have heart disease and in fact those who did sleep less than six hours had a higher burden of what we
called atherosclerotic plaque in their arteries also there's some concern that sleep deprivation
can put you at higher risk of obesity diabetes or what we call metabolic syndrome and i'm sure
a lot of you can relate me personally when i'm sleep deprived i'm way more likely to eat snacks
and eat high carbohydrate processed foods rather than eating whole natural foods and they've
actually looked at this in some small studies and they found that people who are sleep deprived have
higher levels of ghrelin which is a hormone that stimulates appetite and lower levels of leptin
which reduces appetite which causes people to have more cravings they've also done some small studies
where they've sleep deprived people and given them free access to food and they found that people who
were more sleep deprived tended to eat more high carbohydrate foods about 300 600 calories more
than the groups that slept well and lastly sleep can actually affect your immune system so they've
actually done a few studies where they've looked at the response to getting the influenza virus or
the rhinovirus which are both meant to help prevent you from things like the flu or the
common cold and what they found is that people who are sleep deprived have either a less robust
response to the vaccination or they're more likely to get the cold when they're exposed
to it if they're sleep deprived bottom line sleep is super important in my next video i'm going to
give you guys some actionable tips to help you sleep at night so make sure you subscribe and
hit that notification bell as always we're going to take care of yourself because you're worth it