Do you have sleep problems? Insomnia, restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea, snoring? Or maybe you just
wake up to pee in the middle of the night and then you can't fall back to sleep? An estimated
30 percent of the population at any given time is struggling with their sleep, so you're not alone.
And naturally, we go looking for sleeping hacks, and tricks, and nutritional supplements that can
help us to sleep better. If you fall under that category, this video is for you. Hey,
my name is Lucas. I am a yoga teacher, I'm a breathing coach, and as a breathing coach a huge
part of my work focuses on nocturnal breathing patterns - how you sleep and breathe. And you
can't look at sleep or breathing patterns without looking at what goes in your mouth and your mind
right before bed. Whether that's blue light from your laptop, whether that's alcohol or food,
or whether that's any of the myriad nutritional supplements and pills that people take before
they sleep. I'm also someone who has struggled with sleep most of my adult life, off and on, up
and down. So, both personally and professionally, sleep, and the study and the struggle with sleep,
is something I'm very familiar with. Hopefully what I've learned can be of help to you. A quick
disclaimer here: I'm not a medical doctor. Sleep problems can be very serious. Please use this for
educational purposes only. Before we jump in and talk about CBD, melatonin, and magnesium, let's
just look at the landscape of sleep to give you some ideas. The first thing is that sleep quality
is very poor, as we mentioned, restless sleep, getting up, shaking, light sleep, insignificant
sleep. But an even bigger problem is just lack of sleep, right, not sleeping enough. A 2010
workers study revealed that about 30 percent of the respondents in the study were self-reporting
sleeping less than six hours per night. When you sleep less than six hours per night all kinds of
negative consequences arrive - mental, emotional, psychological challenges go through the roof,
driving is very dangerous, an estimated 20 percent of all car accidents drowsiness is contributing to
those car accidents. When sleep deprivation, less than six hours per night, is chronic, suddenly you
have this imbalance that can contribute to, or even cause, things like cardiac arrest,
type 2 diabetes, metabolic dysfunction, weight gain, neurodegenerative decline,
pretty much all the negative scary stuff in health can be directly correlated with a lack of sleep,
especially long term. Now, the jobs where people reported the least sleep were things
like healthcare, believe it or not, service jobs, mining, utilities, people working shift work,
flight staff, things like this. But the reality is, this lack of sleep and poor quality of sleep,
it affects almost all of us. Not sure about you, but for over a decade I was convinced that I was
a different breed, that I had special genetics that allowed me to sleep just five and a half
hours and I was really, really wrong. Sleeping less than six hours is pretty much across the
board dangerous. Here's what Matthew Walker has to say about sleeping less than six hours per night.
"The number of people who can survive on six hours of sleep or less, without showing any impairment,
rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population is zero." So,
we can all agree that under sleeping is bad for you, we can all agree that poor quality of sleep
is bad for you, but then what do you do? You get into bed and you toss and you turn, you wake up
and you're not sleeping. So, that's when we take a look at our alternatives. Today we'll look at
three supplements. We'll start off by looking at CBD, cannabidiol is the actual chemical name, and
CBD has really exploded in popularity in the past 10 years as the legalization and decriminalization
of cannabis has really swept across the world. It shows no sign of slowing, so probably products
like these will become more and more abundant. Now, the research on CBD and sleep specifically
is still pretty light and it's interesting, but not that exciting. I personally have used CBD
in various forms for over a decade and I'll share with you both my personal experience and also the
experiences that I've pulled from the research from WHOOP. WHOOP is a fitness tracker company
and because they have so many people wearing devices and self-reporting pre-bed CBD use,
they have a really, really large data set that's even difficult to replicate in clinical trials. In
any case, what you will find with CBD is that it usually does initially reduce sleep latency. That
means you fall asleep faster. Initially, like in the first couple of days, it can also increase the
quality of your sleep, specifically your REM sleep can boost up a little bit. There's a couple of big
problems with CBD. The biggest problem that nobody talks about is that your tolerance goes up very,
very fast. Marijuana users are familiar with the fact that tolerance to marijuana goes up very,
very quickly. The exact same is true with CBD. Within a couple of days, a week at the most,
you might need double or triple the dose to do the same thing and eventually it just stops
being effective at all. You just fall right off a cliff and what used to help you fall
asleep and give you amazing REM sleep suddenly is totally ineffective. To add to the insult,
this stuff is expensive. There's a lot of cheap CBD out there, but most of those have very,
very low potency. For a high potency CBD extract that comes from cannabis, not from hemp, cannabis
is the plant that has a lot more cannabinoids, whereas hemp is more of an industrial grade plant,
these are going to cost you a lot of money. This is a $100 bottle of CBD, for example. So, you can
imagine we're taking a drop or two per night, OK that's no big deal, but then you're at 10 drops,
and 20 drops, and when you couple that with the fact that these usually have carrier oils,
suddenly you're taking a whole bunch of an oil. It can make your stomach upset, you wake up groggy,
you have diarrhea, you're not really sleeping very well, those are some of the big drawbacks with
CBD. So, what is my conclusion on CBD? You've got to find a really good manufacturer, which is hard,
there's a lot of charlatan companies selling weird tinctures and a lot of them are very, very weak in
terms of potency. So you've got to find a really good brand. You probably have to invest a bunch
of money and then what you're really looking at is either spot therapy, for example I probably
use this a dozen times throughout the year at the most, or really, really irregular use,
only when you need to, otherwise it can be very expensive and very ineffective. That's CBD.
The next supplement which is way more popular and never more popular than right now, is melatonin.
Melatonin can be bought in almost every pharmacy. It's very, very inexpensive and it's a really,
really problematic supplement that people don't think about. Here's the way that it works.
Melatonin is like a circadian rhythm regulator. In the morning we have a cortisol spike, the hormone
cortisol. In the evening we have a melatonin spike. Now, that's in an ideal world. Cortisol
and melatonin are kind of the yang and the yin, they're the day and the night hormones,
but they get kind of screwed up. Stress can make our cortisol spike at 9pm and exposure to light,
like from your laptop, can make your melatonin go down at 11pm, for example. And so we think oh
why don't we just take some melatonin? Well, the big challenge with melatonin is it's actually a
hormone, it's secreted endogenously in your pineal gland, and so naturally you would get a melatonin
spike towards the evening. If you start to take exogenous melatonin, meaning taking a pill form,
it can potentially stifle, or even turn off your pineal gland's production of melatonin. Not a
good thing when we're talking about hormones. Hormones are very complex and they work in
an orchestra. When one hormone goes up, some hormones follow it. When one hormone goes up,
some hormones go down. So, taking something like melatonin on a regular basis can, not necessarily,
but can potentially mess up your sex hormones, testosterone and estrogen, and mess up your
cortisol levels, dysregulate that morning cycle, it can mess up your your growth hormone, and it
can mess up your thyroid hormones as well. Now, is this going to happen if you take it a few times a
year? Almost certainly not. If you take melatonin here and there when you have jet lag, is that
going to turn off your pineal gland? Definitely not, but long-term use is a real problem and the
bigger problem with these is it's very difficult to know what you're taking. Just like with CBD,
and just like with all nutritional supplements, it's unregulated, and for whatever reason,
melatonin production is a mess. When they start to look at and analyze different supplements they
find that some supplements have way more than what's on the label, some supplements have way
less, and when you're messing around with hormones you really want a specific amount, you want to
know what you're taking. Here's what Dr Shaw at Mount Sinai has to say about melatonin. "Most
of the evidence shows that it ranges anywhere from having none to about 400 percent of what is listed
on the label." So, we've got essentially a hormone in a bottle, we're not so sure on the dosage,
and to complicate things oddly we mentioned that CBD is often underdosed, it's very weak, melatonin
is often overdosed. I'm not sure why, but there's often much more than is on the label, or the label
itself is already giving you way too much, it's giving you 10 milligrams when an active dose for
most people would be 0.5 to 3 milligrams. Again, we're talking about hormones here, not vitamin C.
You don't want to just take more, and more, and more. What can the side effects be? Well, you
could wake up with kind of a sleep hangover, with grogginess, it can mess with your mood, but again,
more concerning is the symphony of hormones when you start taking these things long term. The best
way to think about melatonin is as a circadian rhythm reset. Maybe you have an international
flight and you're changing three time zones, that would be an appropriate time to take a very small
one or two night dose of melatonin. This would be three, four times a year at the most, and by small
dose I mean maybe 0.5 to 3 milligrams and you're doing that to reset your body's circadian rhythm.
Taking this every night is a really, really bad idea. Choosing any random brand you find on the
shelves of your pharmacy is also a pretty risky venture. OK, lastly we have, you probably guessed
it, my favorite, which is magnesium. Magnesium to call it a nutritional supplement is exaggerated,
it's actually just a mineral. In the same way you'd find salt, or you'd buy chalk,
magnesium is really in this category. It's a mineral, it's extremely abundant in the world,
it's extremely abundant in your body, it's the third most abundant mineral in your body. Most of
you don't have a true magnesium deficiency, but a magnesium imbalance is very, very common. Why? We
get magnesium in dark leafy green vegetables, we get it in nuts and seeds, we get it from
dark chocolate, some kind of beans. Many people eat these foods, but maybe maybe not as much as
they should. Magnesium is really important for heart health, blood pressure, nervous system,
relaxing your muscles, and a whole host of other metabolic processes. When you take magnesium,
or when you eat more magnesium, it can help with your sleep, and unlike these other supplements,
which over time can start to have impacts in other parts of your health, magnesium's benefits they're
really pro-health in all other aspects as well. When you take magnesium, you can certainly take
it in a capsule form like I have here, 200 to 400 milligrams a night, or you could simply up
your intake of magnesium-rich foods. Either option is totally viable. In the short term,
however, most of you are going to get better results from taking a supplement. It's very,
very safe, very common. The biggest thing you need to watch out for is digestibility. If you take too
much magnesium, or you take the wrong form, or a form that doesn't suit you, you can end up with
a really uncomfortable belly, gas and bloating, which really negates any sleeping benefits that
you might have had. There's a number of different forms of magnesium and there's no shortage of
supplement manufacturers with marketing that tells you you need this special combo, or this hundred
dollar bottle. None of that is true. There's just a handful of common formats. Magnesium citrate
is probably the most common that you'll find. This upsets a lot of people's belly. Magnesium
glycinate and the glycinate groups tend to be the best digested. A lot of people also like magnesium
threonate. These are all very inexpensive. The manufacturer, unlike these, doesn't really
matter. Again, this is very similar to buying salt or chalk, buy whatever is economical,
but do focus on how your belly feels. Start off with less, 200 milligrams. Start off with
food to ease with your digestion. Pay attention to your belly and pay attention to your sleep. Now,
I'll warn you, you're not going to feel this fuzzy hammer bunk over the head like you might
feel with some of these stronger supplements initially, but over time it can actually be very,
very helpful for sleep. Keep in mind too, for those of you with restless leg syndrome,
muscle cramps, body aches and pains, very, very likely that magnesium can help with that as well.
In terms of brands and companies, I don't do any kind of endorsement here, so I'd encourage you to
seek out the best ones you can with the exception of magnesium, I would simply buy whatever is most
affordable for you in the magnesium glycinate group. Hope you found this helpful. If you'd like
more information about sleep, I'd encourage you to check out the work of Matthew Walker and his book,
which I'll put a link to down below. If you'd like more science-based yoga videos, stress videos,
breathing videos, hit subscribe down below. If you have experience with any or all of these, I'd love
to hear from you down in the comments below. And my teaching calendar is at yogabody.com.