8 Surprising Benefits of Sleep Your Doctor Didn't Tell You!

Hey, did you know that you have 41% greater risk of becoming obese if you get less than seven hours of sleep per night? Or your chances go up 13% higher of dying of heart disease. Well, did you also know that there's certain genes that are better for sleeping at night? Well, I'll be going over these questions and answers and a whole lot more when I discuss the eight amazing health benefits of sleep. Hello and welcome to Total Health with Dr. Nick, where my purpose is to inspire, empower, and motivate you to live longer, healthier, and more abundant lives. And I think you're gonna really like this video because guess what guys, you don't have to do a whole lot to benefit from sleep. In fact, you're pretty much sleeping it away. So you just go to sleep at night and your body goes to work. Well today, we're going to talk about the eight amazing health benefits of getting enough sleep. And that's the key. You want to make sure you're getting enough because too little is going to harm you, but too much can harm you too. So you want to get that little Goldilocks sweet spot of just the right amount of sleep, not too much, not too little. And guys, if you like what we're talking about today, make sure you like, share, comment, and subscribe. Make sure you click that little bell notification so you get notified anytime I do a video. And if you want to work with me personally, a lot of you have reached out to me from around the world that you want to work virtually with me. Then guys, there's a link down below. There's a short video for you to watch to see if we're a fit and if you'd like to work together. And also too, if you'd like to get in, take advantage of my keto course, which I now call the metabolic healing diet, because it does a whole lot more for healing heart disease and diabetes and insulin resistance and even cancer. That's why I think we should rename it to the metabolic healing diet. Anyway, there's a link down below for that too, but let's go ahead and get started with the eight amazing health benefits of sleep. Well guys, first of all, sleep is very, very important. In fact, you probably sleep about 30% of or 33% of your life away sleeping and that's okay. So I'm not faulting you for that because you really need to make sure that you're getting enough sleep because your body's normal processes work a whole lot better when you're getting adequate sleep. Sleep is the most impactful, yet often the most neglected performance enhancing area of wellness. If sleep is out of balance, no other area of the human system will function effectively. And I'll tell you, or efficiently for that matter, my wife can tell you firsthand, we've got five children, so she had a lot of sleep deprivation. Now, I helped out a lot. I was up at night a lot with the kids, waking up with them. But anyway, any lady will tell you, you get sleep deprived, it really starts to impact a lot of your body's systems. But the first thing I want to talk about is your genes. Like I said in the opening, there are certain genes that are better for sleep than others. The most effective way to optimize expression is by following your genetic blueprint and actually sleeping the way your body's designed to. So one of the things that we do with our patients in the office and people we could do virtually anywhere in the country is we can do genetic testing. And when we do genetic testing, we take a little swab on the inside of your cheek on both sides. You put it in a test tube. You send it back to the lab. You record your kid. It's got a little registration number on the side. We then get the test results back, and it lets us know everything from your sleep, your athletic performance, your hormones, your detox, your nutrition, your fat, your proteins, your carbs. So we can get a lot better, more customized approach to how your body performs best and works best when we feed it the right fuel and work it out the way we're supposed to. But one of the things, too, is sleep. And guys, if you're interested in that, there'll be a link down below if you want to work together with that. But anyway, there's different genes that are important for sleep, and that's a key thing because your genotype may be better for sleeping longer periods of time or less periods of time. Maybe you have a quicker or slower sleep onset, which means you fall asleep quicker than most people. Or maybe you have a sleep disturbance cycle or sleep disruption cycle that happens. That's all in your genes. It's actually pre-programmed. So for example, the PER2 gene, that has a lot to do with your circadian propensity, so your circadian rhythms. When does your body like to wake up? When does it like to go to sleep? Does it like to wake up and go to sleep with the sun up and then the sun down? That's how it works. That's based on your genotype. Your CLOCK gene, no pun intended, but CLOCK3 has to do with sleep onset. So for example, how long does it take for you to go to sleep at night? Some people, I hit the pillow, I'm out within 10 minutes. Some people might take 30 minutes or longer. That has a lot to do with your genes, believe it or not. Now, there is some factors like what we call sleep hygiene, and we're going to talk about that on the next video. This is actually going to be a two-part video where we're going to talk about sleep hacks and best ways to get to sleep and really way to adjust your sleep environment so you can get the best sleep. But the DEC2 gene, that has to do with sleep duration. How long do you stay asleep? Some people, it's normal for them to get about six hours of sleep. Some people do best on seven. Some people do best on eight. It's really genetically determined. It has, once again, you can alter that because of your lifestyle, but pretty much it's set in your genes. The COMT gene, that has to do with also with sleep duration. The BDNF gene, this has to do with sleep disruption. So that gene will determine how easily you can get woken up. So if you sleep very light or some people say, I'm a heavy sleeper, man, it could be an earthquake and I don't wake up for anything. Or my God, if my kid walks into the room and I hear a little, you know, foot on the floor, I wake up. That has a lot to do with the BDNF gene. So your genes will determine how long it takes for you to get to sleep or how quick your sleep duration. And also too, if you get disrupted. So a lot to do with your genes on that. Once again, there's a link down below if you want me to work with you on that. So the number one health benefit of adequate sleep is weight loss. Guys, there's been a lot of studies done on this and they are confirmatory. A 2020 analysis found that adults who slept fewer than seven hours per night had a whopping 41% increase of developing obesity. You heard it. That's what I was talking about in the opening. Studies have actually proven this. You can lose more weight and keep your weight down by making sure you're getting adequate sleep. Because if you're not, you are greatly, greatly, whoppingly increasing your risk of obesity. Sleep deprivation has been shown to increase levels of ghrelin and decrease levels of leptin. Ghrelin is a hormone that makes you feel hungry while leptin makes you feel full. This may also cause you to feel hungrier and overeat. Various studies have shown that sleep deprived individuals have bigger appetites and tend to eat more calories. In particular, foods high in sugar and in fat. And I've talked about that on many of my videos. You don't want to combine sugars and fats because when you combine sugars and fats, your body goes into storage mode. Anytime you take in sugars or carbohydrates, your body will secrete insulin. Insulin is a storage hormone. Think about it. Insulin insulates, okay? Insulin insulates. When you take in a fat with it, you are going to store that fat also. So you never want to combine carbohydrates and fats together. You typically want to have fats maybe with a protein, but not with carbs. So getting sleep deprived puts you into that mode that you do not want to be in. Number two is concentration and productivity. Cognition, concentration, productivity, and performance are all negatively affected by sleep deprivation. A study on overworked physicians found that doctors with moderate, high, and very high sleep-related impairment were 54%, 96%, and 97% more likely to report clinically significant medical errors. And guys, that's one of the big problems that we see with the medical profession, especially your interns when you're in school and you're going through your rounds and you're working excessively amounts of hours at one time. Now, I think they've gotten a lot better with this, but I remember times when somebody might work 24 hours straight or longer before they were off their shift. And that creates a lot of medical errors because you start to get too tired, of course. And when you're sleep deprived, you do not make good cognitive mental decisions. Good sleep has also been shown to improve problem solving skills and enhance memory performance in both children and adults. So like you said, the opposite is true. When you're sleep deprived, you do not make good cognitive decisions. But when you get adequate sleep, you're a whole lot more efficient at problem solving, whether you're a child or an adult. Number three is athletic performance. And we see this a lot. Guys, when they're training for things like the Olympics, they train, they eat, and they sleep. That's typically the three things they do because they know they start to heal and repair while they're actually sleeping. Numerous studies have shown that adequate sleep can enhance fine motor skills, reaction time, muscular power, and muscular endurance. Lack of sleep may increase your risk of injury and lower your motivation to exercise. And that makes a whole lot of sense. Guys, when people are doing drills where it involves a lot of hand-eye coordination, when they start to get sleep deprived, they start to get sloppy with the movements. A lot of that happens with the law enforcement. They want people training in such a way and in the military that even if they're sleep deprived, they can still go through certain motions very quickly where it's almost second nature. So that's what happens when they start to train them this way. They know that they can still make split-second decisions even though they are sleep deprived. But when it comes to athletic performance, you don't want to be doing a certain race or a pole vault or a certain jump or hurdles when you're sleep deprived. That's when you're going to get injured. And once again, when you're not getting enough sleep, you don't have any motivation to exercise either. Number four is heart health. In the beginning, I talked about the fact that you have a 13% greater chance of dying from heart problems. 19 studies found that sleeping fewer than seven hours per day resulted in a 13% increased risk of death from heart disease. Another analysis found that compared with seven hours of sleep, each one hour decrease in sleep was associated with a 6% increase of all-cause mortality and heart disease. So every hour that you take away of sleep actually causes all-cause mortality where it's not just heart disease. You start to look at all different kinds of death rates because of lack of sleep. One study found that people who slept fewer than five hours per night had a 61% higher risk of developing high blood pressure than those who slept seven hours. Now guys, that right there is groundbreaking. 61% increased risk just because you're not getting at least seven hours of sleep a night. So that seems to be the sweet spot. You want to get at least seven hours, but I would say no more than nine. You start to get above nine, it will actually have detrimental effects. But like I said, if you really want to get an accurate number as to what you specifically need, it's always best to check your genotype and see what your genes say. Number five is sugar metabolism and developing type 2 diabetes. Turns out that shorter sleep cycles actually increase your risk of developing type 2 diabetes. In fact, an analysis of 36 studies in over 1 million participants found that very short sleep of fewer than five hours and short sleep of fewer than six hours increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 48% and 18% respectively. Now that's a big difference between these two just from going from six to five hours. You can see it's an enormous 30 point difference here. Number six is reduces your risk of depression. Now guys, I see so many patients coming in on all kinds of different medications when really all they need to do is actually start to walk around a little bit. Walking actually helps produce endorphins and your body will respond to that. Your brain responds to it and you can actually get off of up to two of your different medications just by walking. But sleep also has a profound effect. One study of 2,672 participants found that those with anxiety and depression were more likely to report poor sleep scores than those without anxiety depression. In other studies, people with sleep disorders like insomnia or obstructive sleep apnea also report higher rates of depression than those without. So sleep still seems to have a profound effect on depression also. So once again, guys, you want to make sure you're getting at least seven hours of sleep upwards of nine. Number seven is that sleep tends to help strengthen and give you a healthier immune system. In one study, participants who slept fewer than five hours per night were four and a half times more likely to develop a cold compared to those who slept more than seven hours. Those who slept five to six hours were over four times more likely to develop a cold. So once again, every time we sleep deprive ourselves, we're weakening our body's immune system. Just creating that depression is going to weaken your immune system. Just not having enough athletic performance and movement is going to weaken your immune system. So it's a cascade effect of many different things when you're not getting adequate sleep and it's reducing greatly, if not down-regulating your body's immune system. With everything going on right now, with everything everybody's so worried about, you want to make sure you're getting adequate sleep to be able to fight anything that comes along. And number eight, sleep helps reduce inflammation. And I've talked about this many times. Inflammation is one of the major causes of all diseases today and you want to make sure you can get inflammation under control. Now, like I've said before on many of my videos, we're not talking about an injured shoulder or an injured elbow. We're talking about a chronic systemic inflammation that's all over your body. Well, it turns out that sleep helps regulate your central nervous system. In particular, it's involved in the disease response systems known as the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. Now, these are different parts of your brain. So the hypothalamus is right in the center of the brain, the pituitaries. And then, of course, the adrenals are right on top of your kidneys. Those are your adrenal glands. This axis has a lot to do with regulating your body functions. Sleep loss, especially from disturbed sleep, is known to activate inflammatory signaling pathways and lead to higher levels of undesirable markers of inflammation like interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein. Now, these are inflammation markers. In particular, C-reactive protein has a lot to do with showing degrees or levels or propensity of heart disease. So guys, I hope I got into your heads here. You get enough sleep. Make sure you're getting at least seven hours. Some people can get away with six. I can genetically. My body's designed for six. And once again, if you want to know more about your genes, click down the link below and we can get you set up with a panel to find out what your genes are saying about you. But if not, watch for the next video because in the next video, I'm going to be talking about sleep hygiene, how to sleep hack yourself, and how to get the best sleep. So like I said, guys, if you like this video, make sure you like the other ones. Make sure you like, share, comment, and subscribe. I love and appreciate you, and I will see you on the next video. Bye-bye.