Дэйв Эспри – Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever (страница 18)
• On some days, limit your eating window to eight to ten hours a day based on what works best for your schedule. Good options are 12:00 P.M.–8:00 P.M., 9:00 A.M.–5:00 P.M., or 10:00 A.M.–7:00 P.M. Have breakfast sometimes, especially if you’re tired or stressed. Don’t eat after dark.
• Teach your metabolism to be flexible by having ketones present in your system every week. Practice a cyclical ketogenic diet by fasting, avoiding carbohydrates for a few days, or adding “energy fats” to your food (or coffee) that convert directly to ketones.
Sleeping feels good, but ever since I was a kid, there was always something more fascinating and productive I’d rather do than go to bed. I resented having to dedicate so many hours each day to something I saw as basically a waste of time. So for most of my life I skimped on sleep. Even the first two years after founding Bulletproof, I slept for about four hours a night, at most a self-imposed five hours. I used the extra three hours a day to be a father, start Bulletproof, and still pay the bills with my day job.
My sleep deficit almost certainly contributed to the diseases of aging I faced as a young man. It turns out that lack of quality sleep doesn’t just leave you tired and unable to perform in the moment; it also rapidly accelerates aging. The good news is that you can learn to be a Super Human sleeper and cram more high quality sleep into fewer hours and still get all the benefits. For the past five years, I have been getting progressively healthier, leaner, and younger on six hours and five minutes of sleep a night, but I use every technique in this chapter to sleep like a professional.
Perhaps you will choose to get more sleep than I do. Regardless of how many hours you sleep, the information in this chapter is intended to help you make the most of the sleep you do get. It doesn’t matter how old you are, how busy you are, or how much money you have. Sleep is the ultimate tool to sharpen every skill and add more quality years to your life. So get better at it.
HOW LACK OF SLEEP WILL KILL YOU
Like it or not, a lack of
In the previous chapter we discussed Satchin Panda’s research on longevity and circadian rhythms. As part of my research for this book I went to his lab and had a great time with his PhD students looking at how the combination of food, light, and too little sleep affected rats. They walked me through new research showing that eating late at night dramatically reduced the quality of the rats’ sleep and that poor sleep impacted the rats’ ability to control blood sugar by up to 50 percent. That’s huge! In fact, it’s more than what most medications can do.
In rats and humans, the pancreas is responsible for making insulin. Satchin has studied insulin-producing cells in the pancreas and found that they, too, have their own circadian rhythm. At night when melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate wake and sleep cycles, is released, insulin-producing cells shut down, too. So if you eat something sugary late at night, your body’s insulin response is not as effective as usual. So that late-night piece of cake leads to a blood sugar spike and then a crash that triggers the release of adrenaline … which keeps you awake at three A.M.
If you get less than six hours of sleep, the hormones that control how hungry and/or satiated you feel (ghrelin and leptin, respectively) start to work against you. Ghrelin increases, making you feel hungry, and leptin decreases, making it more difficult for you to feel satiated. This is one reason that sleep loss leads to obesity and all the many health problems that go along with it.6
Sleep is also incredibly important for warding off Alzheimer’s disease, the killer many of us fear most as aging begins its silent creep. When you are asleep, your brain undergoes a natural detoxification process. The glymphatic system, a waste clearance pathway comparable to the lymphatic system, which drains fluids from tissues in the body, sends cerebral spinal fluid through the brain’s tissue and flushes out cellular waste and neurotoxins.7
This is a big deal, as the glymphatic system clears out the amyloid proteins that are the hallmark of Alzheimer’s when they build up in the brain. While we don’t yet have hard evidence that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by a lack of sleep and thus not enough time for the glymphatic system to work its magic, I would wager that it’s a contributing factor. In fact there is some evidence of this. A small study on twenty human participants showed that losing just one night of sleep causes an increase in amyloid proteins in the brain.8 That may be a small sample, but it’s enough to convince me to make sure my glymphatic system has a chance to fully detox my brain each night. That doesn’t mean sleeping for eight hours; it means sleeping like a boss.
Since mitochondria play a role in the glymphatic system process and sleep in general, everything you do to strengthen your mitochondria can also help you sleep better and thus keep your brain clear of amyloid plaques. There are also simple things you can do to enhance your glymphatic system function. For example, studies on rats show that sleeping on one’s side improves glymphatic clearance compared to sleeping on the stomach or the back.9 While we don’t have studies proving that this transfers to humans, we know that side-sleeping humans have lower blood pressure and heart rate.10 Sadly, they also get more vertical wrinkles than back sleepers, but sleeping on your back increases your risk of sleep apnea, a condition in which the upper airway becomes blocked during sleep. Sleeping on your back will make you less wrinkled but more likely to die. Not a great trade-off. I’d opt to stay alive and hit those wrinkles with other hacks in this book.
Apnea in and of itself puts you at a much higher risk of dying from one of the Four Killers. Sleep apnea is often the result of dysfunctional mitochondria, and it can be deadly.11 If you snore, your risk of developing diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure is nearly double that of someone who does not. And if you snore
As you read earlier, bad quality sleep causes poor blood sugar regulation. It’s also true that dysfunctional mitochondria cause bad sleep, which then causes poor blood sugar regulation! No matter how you slice it, if you don’t get enough good quality sleep, you will age faster and die sooner. Which begs the question …
HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?
When I learned about how critical good quality sleep is to aging well, my perspective on sleep changed for good. Instead of seeing it as something to skimp on, I made it my goal to hack my sleep so I could get all of the benefits of a good night’s sleep without having to sacrifice eight hours of my life every night. Some of these efforts have been more successful than others.
In the year 2000, when Google was just eighteen months old, an early biohacker posted the Uberman Sleep Schedule in a dark corner of the Internet. This was the first writing to propose that you could get away with only three hours of sleep per day as long as you were willing to sleep in several carefully timed, precise naps at exactly the same times each day. This technique is now called polyphasic sleep.
Intrigued by the approximately eleven years of my life I’d reclaim from this schedule, I tried it. The amount of time and energy it takes to do this is absurd, not to mention the social and professional interruption from napping at the same time every day and feeling wrecked if you miss one nap. Polyphasic sleep is not compatible with having either a career or a social life. Some people have success with it, but personally I felt like an unproductive, antisocial zombie. The idea of getting by on a couple of hours of sleep at a time is a beautiful dream (get it?), but it just didn’t work. I was starting to feel resigned to having to sleep eight hours a night …
Then I came across a study from the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the American Cancer Society that looked at over 1 million adults ranging in age from thirty to a hundred and two and correlated how much they slept with their mortality rates.13 The results of this study changed the way I thought about sleep forever. The data was actually collected in the 1980s, but it was so complex, showing differences in outcomes with just a half-hour difference in sleep length, that they couldn’t crunch it all with 1980s computing, so the information sat there for years until researchers could use high-speed computing. The researchers found that the people who lived the longest slept six and a half hours a night, while people who slept eight hours a night consistently died more from any cause. Ha! Take