How Not Sleeping Is Killing You: SLOWLY

Dr. Berg’s Healthy Keto and Intermittent Fasting Podcast

Dr. Eric Berg

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you’re consistently getting less than 6 hours of sleep, you increase your risk of premature death, cancer, diabetes, dementia, and more!

Sleep is the best way to clean the brain of damaged proteins, but this only occurs when you get real sleep. Sleep medication can sedate you but will not enhance your sleep quality. Alcohol significantly decreases sleep quality, causing snoring, sleep apnea, and tossing and turning.

Sleep is essential for repairing and restoring the entire body, especially the immune system. Without sleep, the immune system shuts down, leaving you vulnerable to infection.

REM sleep supports parts of the brain involved in creativity, memory, and problem-solving. It improves social interaction, emotional stability, empathy, and your mood throughout the day.

Most repair occurs during non-REM sleep, also known as deep or delta-wave sleep. As you age, non-REM delta wave sleep decreases significantly. Delta wave sleep is vital for fat burning, cell repair, and cell regeneration. It’s also when your body fights infections most effectively.

To improve your sleep quality, try the following restful sleep tips:

•Avoid alcohol

•Drink kombucha tea

•Exercise regularly

•Avoid eating too late

•Avoid eating too much protein

•Sleep in a cool, dark room

•Avoid too much caffeine

•Avoid excessive blue light

•Turn lights off a few hours before bed

•Get plenty of sun during the day

•Go to bed when you’re tired

•Avoid stimulating shows/movies before bed

Magnesium, vitamin D, and zinc are the most important nutrients for sleep. L. reuteri is a microbe that can help boost oxytocin and serotonin and improve sleep. Sodium is also vital for restful sleep.

Transcript

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0:00.0	how not sleeping is actually killing you slowly.
0:03.9	Out of all the things you can do to create health,
0:06.4	sleep is near the top of the list.
0:09.7	Let's say you're not getting at least six hours of sleep consistently.
0:13.3	Your risk of premature death increases by 30%.
0:16.8	Cancer risk increases by 40%.
0:19.7	Increased risk of diabetes by 50%. Increasing your risk of dementia problems like Alzheimer's. There's a huge percentage of Alzheimer's patients that just don't sleep. And also just getting one hour or four hours of sleep will literally shut down your immune system by 70%. Why do we really need sleep? One of the reasons is that
0:39.7	sleep is the best way to clean your brain. There's a certain effect that sleep does to your brain.
0:46.7	It acts like a dishwasher. It's cleaning the brain of damaged proteins. In sleep, you're actually
0:52.5	cleaning those proteins out of the brain, but only if
0:55.6	you're actually getting real sleep. When you take a sleep medication, it might create some type of
1:00.4	sedation, but you're not getting the quality of sleep. The other thing that's really important
1:04.4	to know is what alcohol does to your sleep. This is why when people drink alcohol just a little
1:10.0	bit, they snore more,
1:11.7	they have more sleep apnea, they're tossing and turning more. One of the main purposes of
1:16.0	sleeping is cleaning out the brain. The second one is repairing and restoration of the entire
1:21.1	body, including your immune system. And this is why when we don't get enough sleep,
1:25.3	our immune system just shuts down and then things start
1:28.7	happening in a negative way. Our brain becomes more vulnerable to infections. Let's first start
1:33.9	with the REM sleep. REM sleep happens in several stages more in the second half of sleep. The brain
1:41.2	activity is very similar to when you're awake, kind of like you have muscle
1:44.7	paralysis, but you can have very vivid dreams that you remember. This part of the sleep has a
	...

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