Lessons - How to Sleep Better and Think More Clearly | Dr. Dan Cohen - Neurologist, Inventor & Serial Entrepreneur

0:00 In this lessons episode, discover how deep sleep influences recovery, stress regulation, and brain health. Understand how non-REM sleep supports the body's restorative processes, explore how relaxation can help lower stress, and uncover the potential role of deep sleep in cellular repair and cognitive decline. The cycles of sleep or stages of sleep, I guess, are light sleep, deep sleep, which is like you said, delta. And then what's REM? REM is dream sleep. So that's... Dream sleep. Okay. So if you look at sleep and you divide it up, you spend about 25% of your sleep time, not time in bed.

0:43 Okay. There's a difference because there's a lot of time in bed that you're awake. Let's say typically an hour. All right. So if you look at just the sleep time, your time in dream sleep, REM sleep, is about 25%. And the percentage of time that you're in what's called non-REM, which is light and deep, is 75%. And so about 50% of that is light and 25% is deep. If you're a normal 20-year-old, okay, healthy, normal 20-year-old. But then what happens over time, your deep sleep gets lighter and lighter, so it's no longer deep. And your lighter sleep also gets lighter and lighter, so your sleep becomes more fragmented and you have much more wake time.

1:24 And so it's not nearly as restorative. as it was. And we deepen all of that non-REM sleep to make you feel better the next day and to obviously have the health benefits. And just to tie that, so when you deepen the deep sleep, so that impacts... a lot of things, but how does this impact your stress levels and your nervous system and your cortisol? You mentioned it also, Bexar, your endocrine system. That's all your hormones, right? So maybe like showing percentages or numbers or some sort of quantifiable so that people understand how this deep sleep impacts your stress directly.

2:10 Well, remember that there's, we're talking about the same area of the nervous system. Yes. Okay. Number one. Number two, I'm sure you've heard of the term neuroplasticity. Of course, yeah. Okay. So your brain, as you learn and your brain forms new neural pathways. Exactly. Back when I was in neurology training, that concept didn't exist. It's really been the past 30 years or so that people have realized, hey, wait a minute, the brain is dynamic. Well, because we're supporting and influencing this primitive part of the brain that has connections throughout the entire brain, It's restoring all of these areas.

2:52 Like when we restore deep sleep, it doesn't happen the first night you use it. If you already have the circuits in place when you're 20, yeah, you're going to get an effect very quickly. Okay? But if you're 70 or 50, even by the time you're mid to late 40s, you've already lost 60 to 70% of your deep sleep. So you've got to grow back those circuits. So depending on how old you are and how damaged your brain is, It's going to take you, you know, a month, two months, three months, and then it continues. You know, it continues to improve in terms of your deep sleep. And so, number one, recognize that, but it happens through neuroplasticity.

3:32 Okay, now I've explained all that in relationship to sleep. But it's the same circuits related to stress. So now you've regrown all those. And we have, in our app, we have two sections. One's dedicated to sleep. The other's dedicated to relaxation or meditation, stress reduction. And so you can run that as well. And that will impact those areas of the nervous system. And what's nice about that is you're awake and aware, and you can feel what's happening to your body. And when you can feel those changes, humans are very good at recreating feeling states.

4:13 And so then you learn what it feels like to have reduced stress. Because most people don't know. If you ask somebody, do you know what it feels like to have zero stress? I always have some stress. You know, I know where I'm at. I'm just, you know, I'm kind of that way, you know. And so people don't know. But when they start to experience lower and lower stress levels and profound levels of relaxation, it's like, wait a minute. This is how I should be operating. And by the way, this is how you optimally operate. when you're in low stress states, because then you're receptive. That's when you can make really good decisions from a business standpoint.

4:53 That's when you can feel your guts saying, screaming at you, no, no, this is not the wrong path. This is the right path. Yeah. So then you, that's how the two are interrelated. You grow back the circuitry, you exploit that circuitry, you learn what it feels like, and you do it during the day too. I have some people- that they'd have a system under their bed and they don't feel like moving it, so they'd buy another one under their desk and they'd just turn that on during the day while they're doing their work. And they feel the effects. If you just had the system under your bed that's helping you with that deep sleep and that neuroplasticity and regrowing the things that deteriorate over time, then you're lowering your stress baseline, but then the second you wake up and you move away from that environment, then you elevate it again.

5:38 So you've got to find a way to... In sleep and when awake, you have to find a way, well, I guess awake, to sort of take advantage of that lowered stress baseline that your deep sleep is allowing you to have. And we're combining those functions in our app right now. We'll have an update in a couple weeks where there's now a choice. It's relax to sleep. So it runs a relaxation session, and then at the end of that, it automatically switches into a sleep session because there's a good chance he will have already fallen asleep. So then you get the benefit of the relaxation. You can feel it, you drift off, and then it goes into your typical sleep session. Because all the other things that people do to help with sleep.

6:19 So, you know, they say, uh, shut off your phone X amount of minutes before you go to bed or an hour before you go to bed. Don't eat too late. And obviously no caffeine. I mean, these, these all help, but they're not going to have the same impact. Oh, God, no. No. We recommend all those sleep hygiene tips are good. They're all good. They're all beneficial. But this is actually supporting the mechanisms that subserve sleep and stress. How does this device and deep sleep, how does that play into cellular repair, cellular regeneration, even I'm assuming... like cognitive diseases or cognitive decline as well, Alzheimer's, dementia.

7:04 So, I mean, obviously the benefits affect everything in your body. So we don't have to go through every single thing that can happen to people. But those two items in particular, those are interesting to me, mostly because Alzheimer's, dementia is in my family. But secondly, I think that I think that the cellular damage, you mentioned that before, is also a really interesting point as to how deep sleep impacts that. So maybe you can speak to both of those. Sure. Well, when you think about it and when you're growing, you're going through cell degeneration, cell repair, cell growth. Okay. And... One of the things that's very notable in your endocrine system with growth is growth hormone.

7:45 It subserves that function. And that happens during deep sleep. 70% to 80% of your growth hormone is secreted during deep sleep. And so, you know, since you lose deep sleep, you're obviously losing that functionality. So the question we have is, are we restoring growth hormone levels, you know, by increasing deep sleep? We know we must be doing something because we see an effect, okay? We haven't actually measured growth hormone levels, so I can't tell you definitively, but we know with deep sleep... People are being physically restored to a much greater extent. We also know that because if you're 70 years old, you might have good deep sleep one night with our system, and then the next night it's not so good.

8:32 And people call me up and they say, hey, now that I have deep sleep again, why don't I have it every night? And I said, well, are you active every day like a 20-year-old? And they go, no. I said, well, that's why. So your body's not telling your brain to put it out like that, okay? So again, it allows you to increase activity, but it's there for you now. So cell repair, cell regeneration, that's all part of the deep sleep process. Okay. And, you know, look, does medicine right now know everything about every kind of hormone and every kind of chemical in your body? Absolutely not. We're discovering things like that every day. So there are all of these mechanisms at play, and we know they're at play in deep sleep and in the different stages of sleep.

9:19 Okay, so we know we're having an effect by being able to restore deep sleep. We see the effects, you know, daytime in terms of people's level of restoration and health. So we know hormonally that's a big issue. On the other side is the immune system. The immune system is constantly surveilling every cell in your body. Is this one developing cancer? Is there an infection? Do you have enough white blood cells? Are your stem cells doing what they need to do to fight off issues? All of that is happening, and we know we bolster that because, again, that's a deep sleep restorative issue. And that's really key. So, you know, we see less infection.

10:01 You know, I can't speak to cancer because we don't have the data to speak to that. But it's going to be interesting to see. But I would expect over time, this will have some effect because the immune system is getting better and your body can naturally heal and detect these things. So I look at those things and say, yeah, there's going to be broad ramifications with this technology. You've got to remember, We're not developing a product here. We're starting an entire industry with ICT is an allergy. And then you mentioned dementia. There's debate about what are called towel proteins, you know, in the nervous system, in neurons that are associated with Alzheimer's disease.

10:46 And we know deep sleep allows for those proteins to be cleaned out of cells. And so if that's really true, you know, by promoting more deep sleep, then we should be removing those waste products. And so we'll have to see over time whether or not this decreases, you know, Alzheimer's disease. Can it reverse the effects? Can it plant it? Again, you know, we have decades of research ahead of us to understand all these phenomena. But this is the first thing that has to be solved for before we can start to study all the potential downline positive effects of having more deep sleep at a much later age.

11:30 Well, we're seeing, I mean, people are calling us up with, hey, this is getting better and that's getting better. Yeah. You know, I can't name these things at this point because that would be a medical claim. But, you know, we know it's happening because of what we're doing for non-REM sleep. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.