2025 December 16 Sleep is good

You can view the original Facebook video here.

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today. If you like what you hear, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, send me a message. Tonight we're going to be talking about sleep and health.

This week I'm going to take kind of a quiet little topic like sleep because, depending upon your relationship with that very useful state of being, you'd either think there isn't much to talk about, or perhaps that you can never seem to get enough sleep, or perhaps can't sleep well enough, or that sleep's just an interruption to getting things done, or that it's the most miraculous and healing activity we can do each day.

All those aspects actually relate to sleep, depending upon where you are in your life at that particular moment in the day. But tonight I'm just going to do kind of a high level introduction because we could really do a whole course on sleep and the benefits of sleep. And actually that would probably be worthwhile. As you're going to find out, sleep really is pretty important.

Sleep has, for many years, been somewhat underappreciated and often felt that it's kind of okay to cheat your body out of an adequate amount of sleep. And to be clear, I often find myself in this position. I just returned from an excellent conference by James Wedmore, one of my mentors. I mention him frequently, and not only is his content fantastic, but this particular event is always attended by many, many extraordinary people, all of whom you want to meet and talk with. But the conference only lasts for three days, and this year there were over a thousand people at the event.

So what do you do? You start early, you stay late, and you try and see everyone. But while I can often do that for the short term, in this particular case, I'd started out the trip already tired. Plus I was off by two hours in time zones. So I was waking up at a nice, frisky, perky 3:00 AM every morning and let myself get run down from lack of sleep.

Remember I said there were over a thousand people in a single room? Well, I'm sure a number of them were ill, so I picked up the latest disease or two. What's that got to do with sleep? Turns out, everything.

Sleep is, amongst other things, the mind and body's magic repair system. We've hinted at some of these benefits before, but quickly: when you sleep, both your body and your mind can switch from primarily being active for survival activities—though the survival mechanism is still on, that's a hereditary thing—but it switches over primarily to repair and rebuilding activities.

Your mind totally changes into multiple different states. I think there are five officially defined states. There's a hypnagogic state, which is that kind of twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness, known as the creative state. Plus different regions of the brain can be in different states at the same time.

Meanwhile, your brain uses cerebral spinal fluid—we talked about this a couple weeks ago—CSF, during sleep, especially deep non-REM sleep, to cleanse itself thoroughly through the glymphatic system, flushing out metabolic waste like beta amyloids and tau proteins that build up during the day. And that process is vital for preventing neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease. Not bad for being asleep, huh?

There's also a ton of rewiring being done in the brain. The brain's synaptic homeostasis is largely finalized during sleep. That's a crucial process where the net strengthening of synapses from waking time learning is scaled down, kind of toned back, and that prevents saturation in the brain and also saves energy. However, it's also making room for new learning by weakening less important connections while preserving and consolidating key memories. This whole housekeeping involves widespread synaptic weakening and renormalization—a fundamental restorative function of optimal brain function and plasticity.

We've already impacted our brain health, our long-term brain health, learning, neuroplasticity—which is how you learn new things, set new patterns—memory organization and more, just by getting a good night's sleep. And some of these are really super important. A lot of people, as we get older, tend to get more concerned about things like Alzheimer's and a lot of neurodegenerative diseases that seem to creep up at older age. But when you sleep, a lot of the things that cause them get flushed away naturally, which means when you don't sleep, that doesn't happen. Something to keep in mind.

What about my newly acquired diseases? Well, not to be outdone, all the bodily systems are just as busy during sleep as well. During sleep, your immune system becomes more active, producing infection-fighting proteins like T cells, strengthening adaptive immunity and immune memory to learn about new, similar and dissimilar future pathogens, and also shifting antiviral responses away from inflammation. This whole restorative process allows your body to create immune defenses, but sleep deprivation reverses this, increasing inflammation, lowering protective cytokine production, and reducing the effectiveness of vaccines and infection responses. And so again, sleep is super important to the immune system.

A lot of recommendations say seven to nine hours. But I've seen some of these life hackers talking about, "Well, I can get by on five hours of sleep," and "I can even do three hours of sleep, and that's adequate and I get so much done." And I would tend to disagree under all but the most urgent circumstances.

We often talk about, "Well I worked real hard all week, so I'll catch up on the weekend," and unfortunately it doesn't work quite like that. You'll catch up a little bit and you'll certainly, in the case of your brain, maybe do a little more cleaning than you did. But a lot of things like plaques and stuff tend to get stuck if they're not cleaned away. Think about your kitchen floor. It's not like you can not wash it for three months and then say, "But I'll scrub it 20 times as hard this weekend." Sometimes the dirt just gets ground in. You can scrub until your scrub pad falls apart, but the dirt is still ground into the floor.

Same thing with a lot of the systems in your body. If your system was trying to repair a joint or repair a muscle, or repair a micro crack in your bone, and you don't give it time to do that, then that crack is going to propagate. It's going to get bigger. And now later on, maybe you sleep all weekend. But that crack, instead of being a couple millimeters long, is now maybe three-eighths of an inch long. And yeah, you'll heal some of it, but you won't heal all of it because now it's a bigger problem. So we want to be careful, like these life hackers. And that's why I say I disagree. They say, "Well, if I get really tired I'll catch up," but you don't really catch up. You do some of the repair, but you want to be careful because you can't keep borrowing from tomorrow forever. And actually that threshold is fairly short. After a few days, you'll probably do damage that doesn't truly get completely undone, not for a long time. Something to keep in mind.

So back to what's going on here. Same story for your musculoskeletal system. It shifts from activity to repair and growth, with most muscles relaxing and losing tone so that they can heal themselves. Also, the body releases hormones like growth hormone to rebuild tissue, replenish energy storage through glycogen, to perform critical maintenance, making sleep central for muscle strength and recovery.

Similar story for the cardiovascular system. Like I said, this could easily be a short course on the very real benefits of sleep. Even the skeletal system gets in on the act as well. Your skeletal system actively undergoes vital processes like bone remodeling, which is where old bone is removed and new bone is rebuilt by the cells. And then also bone repair of micro damage. Like I said, little cracks form. That's just part of it. There's a whole thing of why walking, for example, strengthens your bones, and weight lifting strengthens your bones—not necessarily heavy weight lifting. Your bones respond to use, your body responds to use, but your bones do as well.

And so when you do something, lift small weights or somehow stress your body carefully under doctor's advice, obviously—but if you never pick anything up and instead say, "Instead of getting a quart of milk, I'm going to get a half gallon of milk," and you start stressing things a little more, your body will respond to that. It'll make your muscles stronger. It'll make your tendons stronger and your ligaments and it'll make your bones stronger. And so all those little bits, all those little tiny teeny repairs, they help you to maintain strength. And also regulates minerals like calcium—a process we know is very important. And growth hormone is related to the mineral usage and mineral release. All those things are happening while you sleep. And even your skin. Your skin is also repairing itself during sleep.

Literally, every system in your body is in repair, improvement, preparation, rebuilding, growth, organization, and other beneficial modes and activities during your sleeping time.

So what about my disease? Clearly, getting around four hours of sleep each night didn't leave enough time for my immune system to deal with a room full of new invaders from being around so many new people each day. Plus my mind was definitely working in kind of low definition mode because I wasn't giving it time to properly clean and sort the previous day's information.

Let me put this in perspective. A typical day lasted anywhere from about 10 to 14 hours. It was just nonstop information. There was information on screens, there was information from coursework. There was information from talking to people, and they were telling you things. You're learning about them, but there's also information of how they do things. So there's just a ton of information and it's all mashed in your short-term memory and in your brain. And your brain wants to kind of sort that out. I wasn't giving it time to do that.

And I probably would not have gotten ill if I'd been able to sleep until 6:00 AM instead of 3:00 AM. But that brings us to the whole other sleep-related phenomenon: the body's circadian cycle.

This alone could also be another short course. We talked about it a couple weeks ago. And also I mentioned I used to be the owner of a circadian lighting company. But as a species, we're pretty focused on being more active during the day. Since, until very recent times developmentally, we didn't have artificial light. So it's really hard to go out and build that castle when the only lights you have are a few oil torches. Even then, one of the interesting things is the color of the light from those oil torches was red enough that it didn't trick your body into thinking it was the middle of the day.

Fast forward a few hundred years and fires, torches, candles, and even incandescent bulbs have been replaced with high efficiency lighting. We replaced that red-hued lighting from things like candles, things like even incandescent bulbs, with bright blue-hued lighting from LEDs. The peak frequency of that blue is very close to the highest sensitivity of the non-visual cortex of the eye. Remember we talked about this a couple weeks ago. Specifically, they're called the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. Big name just says non-visual cortex of the eye, one piece of it. And those cells—the IPRGCs, as they're called colloquially—talk directly to the hypothalamus in your brain. And they set your body's master clock.

Wait, don't our phones, tablets, and computers use LED lights? Yes. Matter of fact, they sure do. Just as most of your body is starting to get ready to go to sleep, we look at our electronic device and we look at our phone. Maybe we read a nice calming novel on our iPad, or even if we're using a book, it's illuminated by this little teeny, very cute battery-powered, high efficiency, bright blue LED light.

That core component of our clock system just starts to yell and scream, "It's dawn! Get up! Wake up! I see blue light everywhere. We've missed—we gotta get up and get going. It's the start of the day." What it does is cause the body to start decreasing melatonin, boosting cortisol to get us alert. It generally tells you at bedtime, now is the time to get up and get going, and it will shift your actual circadian cycle by hours. So now you may not be alert at dawn or you might be tired at night, and yet many of us do this to ourselves every single night right at bedtime.

Which totally impacts not just the amount, but the quality of those precious sleep benefits we described above. Because a lot of those are the result of a longer process where the body's slowly starting to shut down. Different hormones are changing levels, different activities are starting to change in our body and our brain. Suddenly we get the alarm that it's dawn. Those start to reverse. All those things—the hormone levels change and everything else. So even if we do fall asleep, our body's not in the right state, so we don't go into those healing deep sleeps for more time after that. It's really very damaging.

Studies have shown that blue light blocking glasses do minimize these effects. So that's one approach. But what else is a brain and body to do? Well, the first thing is probably the easiest: set your phone, TV, or device to night mode.

Yes, the colors look weird. Do it over dinner when you hopefully aren't watching TV. Come back in and your brain will adjust in a few minutes. Honestly, my phone is almost always in black and white. Always has been for over a decade and it will never go back. When I look at color screens, the visual assault is almost painful. I cannot stand it. I also run a different color balance—colored lookup tables—to reduce the blue even further at night.

But what about your lights? All the lights all around us. In my studio for the podcast, I do take one for the team and I have studio lights out there and they use daylight, high blue bulbs for better image color rendition for the camera. Like I say, I just do that because I gotta do it, so otherwise I look unusual. However, every other bulb in my house, besides those four specific light bulbs, every other bulb is either low blue, warm white LED bulbs or incandescent bulbs.

In my bedroom, I have a single incandescent bulb on a dimmer, so the color temperature is extremely low with a distinctive red hue, and I usually have no trouble sleeping because my body, my eyes, my brain, and circadian cycle are in harmony.

So I hope you see some of the benefits of a good night's rest, how so many important things are happening when we're sleeping, and more are being discovered every single day.

However, big takeaway besides don't let yourself get tired is that yes, there are many times you may have to cheat on your body and work late or get up early for a flight or the baby won't sleep. And we all have many reasons. But it's really important to keep in mind that cheating on sleep isn't free. Like I mentioned, it's cumulative and like the book title on a different but related topic, the body keeps the score. If you keep putting off brain, body, skeletal, muscle, immune, lymph, and all the other system maintenance, eventually you'll have a bigger and more serious breakdown.

Can't put on muscle at the gym? Did you sleep after that workout? Can't pay attention to the seminar? Were you up to 3:00 AM scrolling social media? Feel like you're getting arthritis? Did you take a break from eating before bed so your digestive system can rest with all the other systems?

Like many things in life, it really is in our control. We just have to decide we're important enough to ourselves to make the decision to take care of ourselves. Most of it isn't magic. And do not get shamed by millionaires flying to climate conferences in Davos in their private jets saying, "If you don't run the brightest, most efficient bulbs, you're personally responsible for climate change." Baloney. Absolutely not. Your number one job is to keep yourself healthy. If part of that means using low blue light bulbs that are a half percent less efficient, that's a fine trade off. Until all the stars and celebs start taking commercial airlines to Davos, you have to get a grip on this. There are a lot of things that we're doing these days in the name of efficiency that are really harming our health. And one of the biggest ones that we see all around us are bright white, high blue bulbs. They're not good for us at all.

If you think you can't stand the different color from night mode, then switch to monochrome perhaps. Like me, I grew up with black and white TV and movies. The color was always better in those, on a black and white show, because we could use our imagination, be creative, but most of all have fun. Realize sleeping isn't a waste of time. It may actually be the most important thing you can do for your health the entire day.

So that's it for the evening. Thanks so much. Your homework is to think about your evening and bedtime schedule. Focus on what devices you're using, what lights you have on, and how you're preparing for bed. Extra points: you then think about ways to eliminate any sources of blue light. Most common things, like I said, are phones, tablets, TVs, other devices with LED screens, fluorescent lights, LED light bulbs, and especially bright white or daylight bulbs.

If I were to turn and look over here, there's a low blue light over there and a daylight bulb over there. The daylight bulbs are particularly—if you've been in a place like I was just in a hotel and they use a lot of those bright white ones and they look very bright white. But you get used to it and then you see something that looks like a regular old incandescent bulb, like, holy cow, there is such a difference in shade between those two.

Try getting a couple, putting them in and you'll see that suddenly the light isn't harsh anymore, that your eyes can relax and it makes a difference. Try switching to night mode on your devices. Replace the bulbs—like I said, replace all the bulbs in your house with low blue bulbs. They're available from many sources. Then see if you can start having an easier time falling asleep.

I'm a walking example of why you shouldn't cheat your body out of sleep. It's actually kind of interesting because this was probably one of the worst times to not be able to get enough sleep because like I said, I came in tired and then I was in an area where there are a lot of new diseases just because people come from literally all over the world. One person I know came from Australia. I think she traveled, I want to say, almost 40 hours each way. We had people there from dozens of countries and tons of people from all over the United States, Canada, Mexico.

So when you do that, you want your body and your immune system in tip-top shape. And here I was getting four or five hours of sleep at night tops, with a natural result. Take this example, here live in front of you, and say, "Am I doing this to my body every night by not getting enough sleep?" And I would encourage you, please sleep. It's a lot more important than we ever give it credit for.

As always, remember one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. See UKR7.com for links on how to help people in Ukraine, WCK.org—World Central Kitchen—they work internationally, going into disaster areas. There's also local charities during the holiday season. They can all use time, money, and effort. But even if those aren't on your plate right now, even something simple like a simple smile could change someone else's day for the better in ways you can't even imagine.

So as always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along. Please subscribe, hit that like button, and if not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com.