How To Sleep Your Way to Weight Loss #SANE

Jonathan: Hey, what’s up everybody? Jonathan Bailor and April Perry. We are back with another SANE Show. What is up, April? How are you doing today?

April: I’m actually doing really well because I got a really good night’s sleep last night. [laughs] Just what we’re talking about today so I’m excited.

Jonathan: Oh, I could tell by the resonance in your voice. You sound well rested and ready to go.

April: Well, my husband and I have been helping at a youth camp for our daughters and so we were there the last couple of nights and I didn’t sleep so well. So anyway, I’m doing much better now and feeling excited to talk about how sleep plays a part in going SANE, which is actually one of my favorites.

One quick side note -– at this camp, everyone has a camp name. Eric’s is “Agent P” for Perry and Alia is “Fun Facts” because she has all these facts she likes to tell people. They were trying to figure out what my name should be for my camp name and I’m thinking all these nice things that they would say about me and they decided “Naps-A-Lot” was the best name they could come up with for me because I really like naps.

Anyway, so there we go.

Jonathan: That’s so funny. Well, the quick side note/anecdote regarding sleep for me as well is, I had recently realized that my wife and I have been sleeping on the same pseudo mattress since I’ve been —

April: Pseudo mattress?

Jonathan: Yes, so I say pseudo mattress very intentionally because it was this –- back when I was in college, the whole memory foam stuff happened. I was in college so I had no –- zero –- money so I ended up getting this super knock-off, the three-inch Memory Foam mattress topper.

Over the years, we just kept buying new mattress toppers and stacking them on top of each other so we had like this four-foot chunk of Memory Foam that we slept on and then we realized they had a bunch of tears in them and our backs were hurting. We were like, “Hey, we should probably buy a mattress since it’s been fifteen years.”

April: [laughing] Congratulations. So you have a better mattress now?

Jonathan: [laughing] Yes, that’s the first mattress I’ve ever bought instead of sleeping on a giant pile of Memory Foam. So there you go –- a shredded fifteen-year-old Memory Foam.

April: You know what? I love that. Yes, we had a similar thing where I was like, “Uh, mattress? No big deal.” But then, Saren, my co-director of Power of Moms – she and her husband/family came to stay with us. We gave them our room and we were downstairs because the kids were little and they were getting up really early.

She came down the next morning and she’s like, “Thank you so much for letting me sleep in your room but you really need a new mattress.” I was like, “Really? I do?” She’s like, “Yeah, I think you’ll sleep better.” So we got one. Oh, it was amazing.

But yes, you usually don’t realize how making the investment and the time we spend sleeping because you’re there a third of your life really. That’s a big deal.

Jonathan: It’s a very big deal and that’s the perfect segue because that’s -– the macro point is that sleep is very important but one of the key things that you can actually do -– and neither April nor I are in the mattress sales business so —

April: No, we don’t have a sponsor for this episode.

Jonathan: We’re sponsored by whomever but having a good mattress makes a big, big difference and they don’t need to be like four thousand dollars. I know some of that stuff is a little bit nonsensical. There’s a lot of great options on the Web. There’s actually a lot of new business models around mattresses where they’ll ship mattresses to you and they’re less than a thousand dollars and they’re good. So yes, mattress matters. Let’s put it that way.

April: And sleep matters. We want to talk about this because –- I’ll just give a little pre-SANE story. I would go to bed late because my husband’s a night owl and I want to hang out with him and once we get the kids to bed, we needed some time. Then what would happen is I would end up getting up early because I had little kids and they would wake up between five and six and that’s why I’m called “Naps-A-Lot” because I would always try to take naps during the day to make up for the sleep I wasn’t getting at night.

What I would end up doing then is trying to get up a little bit earlier so I could go exercise first and feeling exhausted just trying to keep up. Plus, I wasn’t eating much so I was counting calories and it turned out I was super tired and really under-rested.

So let’s just talk about what sleep has to do with being SANE. We’ve actually been receiving some questions in our SANE Family’s group. The first question –- the way they phrased it was -– “What is the best explanation for how sleep affects our eating patterns?” I thought that was interesting. So what do you say about that?

Jonathan: One of the reasons we focus so much on hormones instead of just thinking about calories is, when you take on that hormonal mindset, it can be very helpful for many different areas of life. Sleep is a great example because when you do not get enough sleep -– if you follow the modern science of “You can do whatever you want with calories,” but if your hormones are out of whack, it’s not going to be sustainable because your hormones are going to win long term.

So you can try as hard as you want to starve yourself but if your hunger hormones -– like ghrelin and so on and so forth –- just turn the volume up, the more you starve yourself, eventually that’s not going to work. It’s a little bit like trying to just force yourself to not go to the bathroom. Eventually, biology will win over willpower.

April: Yes.

Jonathan: So the reason sleep is so important is -– one of the reasons sleep is so important is it helps to reset or re-regulate myriad hormones and many of those do have to do with appetite and metabolism and there’s actually been -– this is not observational studies; this is not anecdotes -– these are really easy-to-do, very controlled studies where you will take an individual and you will sleep-deprive them and then you will measure their hormones before they’re sleep-deprived; measure their hormone levels after they’re sleep-deprived; and you will see, for example, that hunger hormones are radically elevated; stress hormones are radically elevated after sleep deprivation. So if you want to not crave junk, one of the easiest things you can do is get more sleep because the hormones that, when out of whack, cause you to have inSANE cravings are compounded and thrown out of whack by a lack of sleep.

April: And so, this is moodiness too, right?

Jonathan: Absolutely. I mean, I know it sounds a little bit silly but we tend to not -– no one would sort of say, “Breathing air is negotiable.” Like, “I’m going to sort of negotiate and breathe less air.” Sleep is as essential. If you think about actually the things we need to live –- deprivation of air is the fastest thing that will kill you, just to be honest; then, deprivation of water; and then deprivation of sleep would actually kill you before deprivation of food would.

You have to sleep. Sleep is when your body recovers; it’s when it repairs. Trying to live without sleep is like driving to drive a car without gasoline. We think we can do it; we think we can power through it but what ends up happening is, we’re not actually living; we’re actually sleepwalking. We’re half living and that’s not worth doing.

April: Okay, this is actually opening my eyes but one of the things that I am wondering is, Why do we think it is negotiable? Why is it that when you look -– there’s always articles that are coming out saying, “The average person is sleeping five hours, six hours.” I mean, ridiculous -– especially people who are working in really high-stress jobs or people who are on-call around-the-clock.

I even went to a class -– actually at Harvard University. They had a special class just for parents of children. They were talking about technology and they said, “Parents, you need to make sure your children do not take their phones to bed with them because a lot of teenagers are keeping their phones on so they can hear if a text comes through or there’s a notification because they don’t want to be left out of any conversation going on.”

Children are literally waking up all night responding to messages and having conversations with their friends and this isn’t uncommon. This is actually becoming more of the norm for this growing population that can be on all the time. I kind of want your perspective on why, as a society, are we okay with this.

Jonathan: I think it’s the distinction -– this could be a little bit esoteric but I’m kind of in an esoteric mood so -– it’s the difference between living and being alive. You can be alive without sleeping; just like you can be alive by eating five, six, seven hundred calories per day. So we’re like, “Oh, look. I had three small children at home so I had to be sleep-deprived for three years and I was able to function.”

“Able to function”, a.k.a. “being alive” versus truly living one’s life are very different things. I think sometimes we can conflate in our minds like, “Hey, I’m able to walk around after only sleeping for four hours so that means sleeping for four hours is okay or doable.” But if, for example, your barometer for fully living life –-

Sometimes athletics are a good example because they’re easy. Put it this way -– an Olympic athlete doesn’t think sleep is negotiable because an Olympic athlete cannot do their job if they’re not well-rested. If you perceive your job as “I’m able to get my kids off to school and I’m able to not punch my spouse in the face”, then you might be able to do that without sleeping. But if you perceive your goal as “I’m able to be vibrant and healthy and energized,” then you actually can’t do that.

April: I think that’s brilliant.

Jonathan: Compromising on sleep – does that make sense?

April: That’s awesome. I think that that’s really smart and I love that that goal is, “What do I want for my life?” One of the things that I’ve said a lot because I actually have been teaching mothers how to get naps and how to sleep more because that was something I couldn’t function without getting enough sleep. So what I told them is, “It’s an investment in my marriage; it’s an investment in my whole family. If you want me to be civil to you, make sure I get enough sleep” because I’m a really nice person; but when I’m tired, I’m a lot less nice.

I’ll just say that that’s even hard for me because I really –- I kind of am a people-pleaser. That’s something I’m trying to get over a little bit but I feel like when, in the past, I’ve said, “It’s fine. I don’t need that much sleep. I’ll be okay. I can just keep going on fumes every single day.”; what I was actually doing was destroying my family and destroying my life. Now I don’t see that as an option. So I think, let’s talk a little bit about the specifics of sleep.

When it comes to being SANE, I know seven hours at a time minimum is what I’ve heard you say before. Does it matter when those seven hours happen? Do we have to go to bed at a certain time, like before midnight? Does it count for more or something like that if you go to bed earlier? And if you’re making it up with naps, is there anything we should be considering?

Jonathan: Real quick, April, before we get into the mechanics of getting more sleep. I wanted to piggyback on what you just said about how lack of sleep can permeate our lives in a way that we may not be able to detect until it’s too late. Let me just give one kind of silly analogy. This is funny. This may or may not fit. This may be a classic crazy Jonathan analogy.

April: Okay, go ahead.

Jonathan: You could probably live your life without showering, right? You could totally live your life without showering. Actually, let’s say you live by yourself and you don’t shower for a week. You probably actually wouldn’t smell anything because you’d become used to it. That’s just the way you smell. So you’re going through your life and you’re just like, “Oh, I don’t need to shower. It has no negative impact on anything. It doesn’t -–“ Little do you know that your lack of showering has this global impact on everyone else and on you because none of us are completely on our own; we always interact with other people.

So in some ways, not sleeping is a little bit like not showering. Like, you can not shower and still live your life but it may have some downstream effects that you’re not too happy about it. I don’t know if that metaphor fits but —

April: I think it’s great. No, I think that’s really smart and I think that, for everyone listening, taking a chance to assess right now — if you are not sleeping right now, is that negatively impacting your relationships?

If you really ask that question and answer it honestly, you may find that you’re quick to get offended; you’re snapping at your family; you’re not smiling. I mean, it’s a big deal. Sleep, I think, can solve a lot of problems. I hate that advice to not go to bed when you’re having an argument. I’m like, “Go to bed. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll like you more in the morning.”

Jonathan: And it’s free and it’s enjoyable. I mean, we have all these different techniques and things we want to buy and new strategies for this and magic supplement X and —

April: Yes.

Jonathan: Or you could just sleep more. Woohoo! I’ll do that. So speaking of sleep more, you mentioned seven hours, does it matter when we go to sleep?, so on and so forth. Naps are great but one thing we really need to keep in mind though is that, just like we talk about the difference in food quality, there is a big difference in sleep quality.

I think most people have a casual familiarity with there’s different sleep cycles, there’s REM sleep, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. There is no getting around the deep sleep that comes from continuous undisturbed sleep.

April: Okay.

Jonathan: It’s not the same. If you were to say, “I’m going to get seven hours of sleep in half-hour intervals throughout the day”, that is one hundred percent different in terms of its impact and lack of positive benefit to your body to “I’m going to get seven hours of undisturbed sleep.”

When you go to sleep, there is some science showing that -– I mean, we do have natural sleep cycles. Melatonin levels that help us sleep are tied to whether or not it’s sunny outside and that’s why looking at screens or blue light emitted from screens can cause you to not be able to sleep.

As a general rule of thumb, we’ve been here on this planet for quite a bit of time and there’s a lot of natural wisdom in that so, as a general rule, the further we’re deviating from waking up when nature is prompting us to wake up and going to sleep when nature is prompting us to go to sleep, we may not have as positive of results otherwise.

April: Okay, and I like that. I was remembering back in college, they have this health challenge, which actually most of it was kind of ridiculous because it had nothing to do with eating SANEly but they had, for sleep, you got a point if you got, I think it was eight hours of sleep, which as a college student, I don’t know if anybody got those points. But then, you also got a bonus point for each hour you went to bed before midnight.

I was really trying to get those points. I was kind of wired that way so I was really excited to earn these points and I remembered in my dorm room, all of my roommates and the dorm-mates were staying out till maybe two. It was ridiculous. Midnight was early so I had earplugs; I had a mask; and I was like the grandma going to bed way before midnight, or eleven, something like that.

I’ve thought about that ever since, thinking, “Why was it I got extra points for going to bed before midnight?” because no one’s giving me points now. But I like what you’re saying that, as we just think about how nature works -– and that’s actually what we talked about when we were going back to why we’re eating SANEly –- is we’re talking about getting as close to doing things in a natural state as possible.

I think that makes sense to most people but I just think that often times, once you’re done with your work for the day or your kids are in bed or everything’s quiet and now I can watch my favorite show or now I can finish up some of my emails or whatever it is. It’s hard. It kind of takes discipline to be able to do that.

Jonathan: I think one of the key distinctions that’s helped me as well as I used to be huge into just like brute force, power through, sixteen hours of work in a day is always better than eight hours of work in a day. “Look at me, world. Look how much I can work.” Then I was like, “Jonathan -–“ I mean, this was before the whole quality versus quantity SANE stuff.

Quality of time matters so much more than quantity of time. I mean, unless your job is literally like stacking blocks on top of each other that you just need to do it for a certain amount of time, the quality of your time -– I mean, if you ever have to solve problems in your life -– I mean, just like try to sit down and type. Imagine having the horrible flu, being hungry, like just being cut off in traffic and trying to solve a really tough problem. It’s just not going to happen.

I mean, our lives are way more complicated and nuanced than they used to be so having just a lot of time to brute force stuff is really not -– I mean, think about even hyper-effective people. We all have twenty-four hours in a day.

So there are these people that have the same amount of time as everyone else but somehow they just seem to crush it and get so much more done. It’s not necessarily that they’re brute forcing it; it’s that they’re able to solve problems faster and maybe they’re able to solve problems faster because the quality of their time is elevated. If you want to elevate the quality of your time, getting more sleep is the fastest -– absolutely the fastest way to do that.

April: All right, I think everyone’s probably on-board with you because that resonates. I think that makes a lot of sense. I have three kind of rapid fire questions for you to kind of finish the sleep discussion. Are you ready?

Jonathan: I’m ready -– rapid fire.

April: Okay, rapid fire. Should I ever prioritize exercise over sleep?

Jonathan: No.

April: Okay. I think I want to expand on that. Never prioritize over sleep. Make sure we get our sleep —

Jonathan: And here’s the quick reason why.

April: Okay.

Jonathan: Saying “I’m going to exercise while I’m sleep deprived” is a little bit like saying, “I’m going to redline my car without fuel in the gas tank.”

April: Okay. Yes, that makes sense. I like that analogy. All right, next question. What if I sleep too long? What about the people who are maybe sleeping like ten, twelve hours? What does that do to our SANEity?

Jonathan: You don’t want to sleep too long. I don’t know how much of a problem that is for most people but, I mean, if you’re –- I have not seen any peer-reviewed research that says twelve hours of sleep increases your risk of getting cancer, for example, so I don’t know if it’s actually detrimental. It might negatively impact other areas of your life. It certainly has diminishing marginal returns.

April: I think it’s probably related more to maybe depression or something like that but people who I know who are maybe struggling on that end of the spectrum maybe are just having other struggles.

Jonathan: Yes, I would say so but I -– if you’re depressed, don’t let the fact that you’re sleeping for eleven hours make you even more depressed because you think you’re going to get cancer because you’re sleeping too much. Like, not sleeping enough will harm your health. It is unclear to me whether or not sleeping too much will harm your health.

April: Okay. Now, what if you’re sleep’s getting interrupted by children or stress? A lot of times, that can interrupt your sleep. What do you suggest we do? My husband’s response would be duct tape the children to the wall. [laughs] Let’s say it’s just you’re getting interrupted. Your sleep’s interrupted and maybe you don’t have an ability to handle that right now. Like, if you have a nursing baby or something like that.

Jonathan: Just maximize your SANEity. I mean, if you travel all the time and you’re on airplanes or you have children –- I mean, there’s only so much we could do. Your best sleep schedule might not be Sally Smith’s best sleep schedule. Our goal is never to be like, “Hey, there’s this ideal perfection that I’m going to pursue.” It’s, “I’m going to do as best as I can based on proven science, given my circumstance now.”

And that circumstance will change. Life is constantly changing. So a year from now, it’ll be different. So as long as you’re pointed to that true north, which is “get the most and best sleep you can always and always be looking for a way to improve that”, just do the best you can.

April: All right. So here’s what I’m committed to doing. I’m committed to going to bed at a reasonable hour. I’m committed to doing everything I can to protect my sleep to make sure that I can get seven hours. I’m committed to not waking up earlier than I need to wake up in order to put exercise before sleep. Any time I get grumpy or mean in front of my family, I’m going to put myself down for a nap.

Jonathan: I think that sounds like great –- absolutely great steps. The one stretch goal or action item that I would encourage people to do is to say, if you look at the effort that you put into your wellness in general, just in terms of like even reading labels or drinking from certain types of water bottles versus not other types of water bottles and being like, “Well, should I eat food that’s coming from a can or not?” Think of all the time and energy that you spend thinking about your health and your family’s health and then think about how much of that is spent on getting more sleep.

April: Yes.

Jonathan: You’ll probably see that it’s less than one percent. If you just slightly increase the amount of attention you gave to the type of sleep you’re getting, knowing how capable you are and knowing how many tough problems you’ve already solved in your life, I bet you could figure out some really low-hanging fruit ways to improve the quality and quantity of your sleep pretty easily.

April: I think that’s a fantastic next action. Totally onboard. More sleep for everyone.

Jonathan: So on that note, April, I think we need to wrap this up because I need to go get a nap.

April: Sounds good. Me too.

Jonathan: All right. Well, hey, thank you, everybody, for joining us. Remember to, of course, get SANE sleep in addition to everything else. Remember in general, stay SANE. We’ll chat with you soon.