Dr. Shane Creado, a prominent sleep doctor, covers a range of sleep-related topics in a YouTube video podcast. The discussion includes insights into napping, meditation, the significance of quality sleep, optimal sleep duration, achieving deep sleep, the natural process of falling asleep, the impact of coffee on sleep, biohacking for improved sleep, and tips to avoid jet lag. The podcast aims to provide comprehensive information to help viewers understand and enhance their sleep patterns for improved well-being.   

Join us in this illuminating conversation as we unravel the secrets to a rejuvenating night's sleep. Don't miss out on the opportunity to transform your life through the power of quality rest – because a good night's sleep is the foundation for a healthier, happier you!  

Let's enjoy the transcript

Ryan: What's the whole thing about

Shane Creado: purpose of sleeping is still poorly understood. There's direct effect on every aspect of our health in terms of deep sleep and dream sleep. Deep sleep is necessary to flush out toxins that build up in the brain. Toxins build up and directly correlate with Alzheimer's and other kinds of dementia.

Background: Popular demand is Dr. Shane Criotto, a double board certified sleep medicine doctor and psychiatrist, is a sleep. Performance expert specializes in sleep with athletes and brain health. Psychiatrist for the U. S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. He's also the author of the best selling book, Peak Sleep Performance for Athletes.

Introducing Dr. Shane Criado, who will fix your sleep first time ever in HealthShot Podcast. So

Ryan: welcome to health shots with Ryan Fernando, where we raise a glass to your wellbeing and begin. A new journey towards a healthier, more vibrant you. All right, let's get cracking with my architect. A gentleman, a fellow Goan, a doctor with a double board certified in psychiatry and sleep medicine.

Dr. Shane Criado. He's written, in my opinion, One of the best books I've ever read on sleep. It's called Peak Sleep Performance for Athletes. I'm on the cutting edge of making athletes win and sleep is the new diet. So Dr. Shade has studied, he's got a bachelor's in physical therapy and then he went on to do an MD, I don't think that was enough, and he graduated at the top of his class.

Whenever I recruit people into the co op nutrition clinics, I'm always looking how good they were in school, not in the subject matter, but where did they graduate? And so he's got the gold medal in every possible standard. And he completed his psychiatry residency training at the university of Wisconsin.

That was not what caught my eye. What caught my eye is he's on the board of directors of the international society for sports psychiatry and sports players really In today's world, I have so much of pressure that just giving them a diet is not good enough. And if you take the pressures of sport and you bring that into your daily life, I think everyone has some sort of mental pressure, biochemistry pressure, physical pressure.

So I think Dr. Shane would be the right person to get into a heated topic where the mind will not overheat, but we'll get certain snippets and shots from him on how we can get to the next level. Now he's been associated with the AIMEN clinics. Dr. Daniel Amen is a guru that I follow from the brain perspective, and I get to follow him on the internet, but Dr.

Shane gets to practice with this gentleman at the Amen clinics. He's also part of the NBA Players Association, the Australian Football League, the U. S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, the Miami Heats, the Chicago Blackhawks, and get this, the Rafa Nadal Academy, and so much more. Now, why do I want him talking to us about health shots today?

It's basically hay. Dr. Shane is, in my opinion, the sleep guru of the world. So without further ado, Dr. Shane, are you there? And hi, good evening or good afternoon. Where

Shane Creado: are you speaking to me from? Ryan, thank you for that warm welcome. I'm so happy to be here. I'm talking to you from Chicago. So it's a good morning to me and a good evening to you, sir.

Wonderful. So let's get

Ryan:cracking. I've got this whole list of questions that have been asked by my fans here in this part of the world. So the first one, why did you become a sleep doctor? You did psychiatry, but sleep doctor, did you get enough sleep studying so much in college?

Shane Creado: I got hardly any sleep in my medical practice because one reason why I was fascinated with sleep, but no, really, when we do psychiatry training on medical training, there's little to no focus on sleep.

And There's a massive overlap between. As we'll talk about between sleep and mental health issues and general health as well. And I was staring my hair out saying, why are we not learning more about sleep? Not just, oh, let's print out something from Google. Everyone gets eight hours. But the impact of things like sleep apnea, insomnia, shift work on your overall health, your lifestyle, your quality of life, concentration, mental health as well as.

Athletic performance. And so I decided to do a sleep medicine fellowship and additional training after psychiatry and then working with athletes and sports psychiatry I realized even the elite athletes the sports teams and national teams going to the Olympics We're not focusing on sleep in a personalized precision driven way the way you do with Nutrition and your elite athletes the way that people focus on mental conditioning, coaching, or physical training, they were forgetting about a personalized approach to sleep.

And so I said, I'm just going to write a book on this stuff, put it all together, and create that awareness in different teams and leagues and organizations around the world. So that's my mission, to show people that everyone can utilize these basic sleep strategies, understand your natural rhythms, retrain your brain, and it's going to have a downstream effect of reducing disease burden across the board.

Especially considering that it's such a prevalent issue in India.

Ryan: Awesome. So let's get cracking and let's see what are the main questions that me and my listeners have asked him. Now, the first one, why is sleep important for us? And why eight hours? You said this like one third, eight hours, you sleep one third, you work in one third, you faff around.

What's the whole thing about sleep?

Shane Creado: Yeah. So it's a little more nuanced. The purpose of sleeping is still poorly understood. However, there are multiple theories and we know that there's direct effects on every aspect of our health, our nervous system, our cardiovascular system, our immune system, our GI system, our brain health.

So sleep is. important for us only because it's essential for survival. Even when they look at AI models now, the AI models need their sleep. In terms of deep sleep and dream sleep, broadly speaking, deep sleep is necessary to flush out toxins that build up in the brain through the drainage channels called the glymphatic system that was only discovered in 2004, 2005.

So pretty recently. And if you don't get enough deep sleep or non REM sleep, toxins build up and directly correlate with Alzheimer's and other kinds of dementias. Where is this

Ryan: deep, this deep sleep is it also

Shane Creado: known as the SWS sleep? Slow wave sleep or non REM sleep. That's absolutely right. Yes.

Ryan: Okay.

So if an athlete is measuring this and their devices are looking at deep sleep. We're talking about the Deep Sleep or the SWS Sleep.

Shane Creado: Yes, and most of the devices on the market is REM sleep or dream sleep. And dream sleep is necessary for memory consolidation, new learnings, working memory. And so if you're not getting sufficient dream sleep, you're not consolidating the learning from the previous day.

Ryan: How would that help an athlete? An athlete just has to repeat stuff and go out and kick a ball or throw a ball. So what learning is there? You also work with athletes. So yeah, maybe I get for what comes first. I'm behaving like an athlete. Does a dream sleep come first? The REM sleep come first?

Can I give up one of these guys? Because I want to watch Netflix or I've got to catch a flight to go for a competition tomorrow and I don't want to go a day prior. So what's it like?

Shane Creado: Yeah, the first half of the night is more deep sleep for you, flushing out toxins, cleansing your brain. In the later half the night, you have more dream sleep.

So why is it important? Because the same areas that control dream sleep, are also necessary for emotional stability. Think about mental resilience, mental conditioning, coaching. Think about the plays you learned from the previous day. If your opponent or your opposing team has certain plays usually use your coach, your team will sit down and say This is some strategy you want to figure out, especially tennis one on one players.

So if you don't get enough deep and dream sleep, you're not going to be able to function effectively the next day. And how effective is this? There's studies that show this as well. So Matthew Walker did this study with depriving people of sleep versus people who got eight hours of sleep in a given night.

The next day, their ability to retain new information dropped 40%. So what's the difference?

Ryan: So let's summarize that. If I don't sleep well, My ability to learn the next day drops by 40%. That's right. So a lot of people who deprive, so does this apply only to athletes? So this applies to even corporate workers and even you and me,

Shane Creado: every single person.

So what I do,

Ryan: I read in your book. And I highlighted this point and everyone should get your book if they're an athlete. You wrote that for every 1. 5 hours of sleep reduction, daytime alertness drops by 32 percent. Yes. So should I sleep six hours? Should I sleep eight hours? Should I sleep 10 hours?

Shane Creado: I go by sleep cycles of 90 minutes each, not by hours anymore.

Please enlighten me on this. Yes, absolutely. So one sleep cycle, which includes deep dream light sleep is around 90 minutes for the average person. So seven and a half hours of sleep is five sleep cycles of 90 minutes each. Most adults need around seven and a half hours of sleep. If you're younger, if you're a teenager, you need closer to nine or ten hours of sleep.

One second. So are you saying the younger you are, the more sleep you need?

Ryan:Yes. Look at baby. My son is going to school. He's going for tuitions. He has to get up in the morning. He just gets seven hours of sleep.

Shane Creado: Yeah, I used to do the same thing and I look back and say, what was I doing? I was in Stanislaus and Bandra and running around with tuitions and classes.

It will not only reduce your ability to learn new things, when we see the brain scans in the Yemen clinics. The areas of the frontal lobe, the temporal lobe, the back of the brain are affected with chronic sleep loss the same way our head injury patients are affected brain wise.

Ryan: Whoa, so are you saying that, the kids that come to me who are between the ages of say five and 15 for sports nutrition, they should be sleeping more because if they don't sleep more, their brain scans, if he did one, would show the same as traumatic head injury.

Yes. And why is that? Therefore, we should not compromise on sleep, but compromise on tuitions and playtime and sleep more.

Shane Creado: Yes. So 40 percent reduction in your memory consolidation. It's like you're being sleep deprived. Your brain is a sponge that's already soaked. It's not dry enough to take up new information.

Now, the old knowledge was that after you learn something, you need to sleep to consolidate the memory. Yes, 100 percent true, but now we know for a fact that if your brain isn't adequately sleep fed, you're not going to be able to learn anything new or even retain what you already learned. Dr. Shane, I love that term,

Ryan: sleep fed, that we've learnt it wrong.

I bet he did it wrong and I did it wrong by studying late night into exams and we didn't have more memory. It's just stupidity without brain scans and modern doctors like Dr. Shane. Dr. Shane says. Let's sleep feed our brain and smaller children, teenagers need more sleep than adults and everything is in the learning and there's a 40 percent reduction.

Okay, I'm sorry I'm affecting your flow state, but I had a question on flow, which was one of my clients message. He says, how will sleeping better affect my flow state? And how is the state? Beneficial for maximum efficiency. Now, I don't understand whether they mean flow state as an athlete or flow state as sleep.

What do you feel is the question here?

Shane Creado: Okay. So flow state has been popularized by Steven Kotler. As we know, he's written really good books, including the rise of Superman. And flow state is considered a state in which Malcolm Gladwell speaks about this. Brenny Brown speaks about this, where you have more mental clarity, creativity and very fast decision making.

More intuition takes over your conscious thinking. So when you look at elite athletes, when you look at Sachin and his matches, Sachin Tendulkar, when you look at Alcaraz or Federer or Djokovic, they just click into something else. You see it, you notice it from the outside, but internally they're just driving on intuition.

That's flow state, where you have a wealth of experience, and now you're going to the quantum level rather than the binary level is what I think about. I think about the conscious brain as a binary computer, the subconscious brain as a quantum computer. So that's what flow state is. Now in terms of brain waves, three primary brain waves come into play when it comes to flow state.

Theta, Alpha and Gamma. And there's different frequencies of how fast your brain is cycling to get into those states. So Theta is when you're deeply relaxed. Alpha is when you're alert, yet calm. And Gamma is when you're in deep concentration. So some combination of those three results in intuition taking over conscious.

thinking and it might manifest as reaction times, mental reaction times, physical reaction times. We know that sleep, the right amounts of quality sleep, not just quantity, can actually have you work sharper, be more efficient. Your reaction times can drop by 300 percent with little to no sleep a given night.

So think about the athletes when it comes to traveling, time zones, jet lag, travel fatigue, but what about you in your daily life? What about driving to work? What about your reaction times and risk of car accidents? A small study showed that in daylight savings time here in the U S when you lose an hour of sleep in March, the next day, there's a 21 percent increased risk of heart attacks and.

In the fall, in the autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, when the times shift, there's around a 20 to 24 percent drop in the heart attacks the next day. Car accidents, much worse the day after you've lost an hour of sleep because of the reaction times. Think about that. In the

Ryan: pandemic, everyone worked from home and everyone binged on Netflix and because they didn't have to travel to work, they slept a little shorter and watched TV longer, got less asleep and we had more cardiovascular incidences post pandemic.

There we are. Now you know why. Very interesting. Okay, I'm going to go to the next question, which is about you being a specialist in this field as a sleep doctor, a sports psychiatrist. In your field of practice, have you found out that something that nobody else has found the link?

For example, could the gut microbiome Influence your brain and thinking capability and sleep, or is there something very unique that you have found that you want to share with us?

Shane Creado: Oh, speaking of the gut microbiome, 100%. The gut produces 75 percent for neurotransmitters, things serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, adrenaline, and it also is 80 percent of your immune system.

Ryan: I'm going to keep interrupting you over here. So if my gut's producing 75 percent of my neurotransmitters, the signals that my brain gets, the chemicals that my brain gets, it's been produced in my gut. So my gut is connected to my brain. That's what you're saying? Yes. Hang on. So if I'm mentally depressed, it's not in my brain.

It's coming from my gut? Mostly from your gut. So in your book, you've written about junk food. And so junk food is my department. People eat protein, carbs, fats, blah. And you've written about this. So I want you to explain to me about the micromyme, the gut neurotransmitter, and about this study in Uppsala University in Sweden about the two different types of food, which is basically normal food and a little bit of a junk food.

And could you throw a little bit light on how that's affected people?

Shane Creado: Yeah. So the gut microbiome has a bunch of bacteria and other things that need to be in healthy amounts. So the healthy bacteria, the top four healthy bacteria in our gut, produce a B vitamin, B for boy. They also need vitamin D for dog, in order to survive.

They can't make their own vitamin D, as we all know. So I'm preaching to the choir over here, so please stop me, interrupt me, correct me at any time. When those bacteria produce B vitamins, those B vitamins are responsible for red blood cell production and nervous system health. That's why pregnant women are asked to take more beta vitamins and more folate for their neural development.

the nervous system of the fetus. So if you're not getting enough vitamin D or not having healthy amounts of healthy bacteria, what's going to take over the unhealthy bacteria or dysbiosis in the nutrition world? And then that's going to result in a complete catastrophe. cascade, as I like to call it, where inflammation worsens, leaky gut happens, neurotransmitters go out of whack, and then your body doesn't have the raw materials and ingredients it needs to make healthy amounts of neurotransmitters and hormones.

Ryan: So that's amazing. So now I'm suddenly thinking people who are depressed, people who have anxiety, people who just are constantly stressed out. One is sleep is the new diet and diet is also slapping your gut. which is slapping your brain, does it also affect your sleep? So I'm like, okay, I don't get enough of sleep, but then I also eat bad.

So is eating bad also affecting the sleep?

Shane Creado: A hundred percent. So the gut microbiome also influences your sleep in a major way. They've done studies on fetal transplants in rats, where they take some feces, put it in another rat, and they can actually induce diseases. Like insomnia and narcolepsy where people just sleep too much just with changing the microbiome.

So when you say it's a gut feeling, it's more like feeling

Ryan: his gut. It's amazing that you talk about this because, I've been practicing for two decades now. And at the Quah Nutrition Clinics, we do something which is bio individual and Nutrigenomics since 2010, microbiome testing about five years ago when it first started.

That's way ahead of the game. Wow. So the idea was bio individuality. So I always believed Dr. Shane, that each person was a scientific study in their own right. So like in the Uppsala University study, I remember reading that. And thank you for sharing that article with me. And my conclusion from that was everyone binge eats on the weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

So it's high fat, high sugar diets, obviously alcohol and everything in that period. And then the study said that the deep wave sleep, the sine wave sleep was much more erratic and lesser. Now, I remember when athletes were doing hypertrophic training and they had to do faster recovery because we had just a short period of time, let's say between the IPL and then going on to the World Cup.

The mandate was the more my cricketer gets deep sleep, sine wave sleep. So the sine wave sleep, correct me if I'm wrong, releases more stem cells. Yes, which is the rejuvenation of the human body, which is a rejuvenation. So when people eat the junk food, the sine wave sleep gets short circuited. And so I was just thinking, Hey, so I'm getting, so it says that there was no difference in that number of hours of sleep, but there was some issue on the side.

And I was like, Okay, so that really is your beauty sleep. That really is what's affecting you. And this is the reason why I think everyone turns up on Monday morning feeling de motivated to work, no matter their profession. And it's not that they hate their job. It's just that they did not understand that they short circuited their diet short circuited their sleep short circuited their will for going to work the next day.

Daytime alertness dropped by, what you said, 32 percent. Memory and learning dropped by 40 percent. So I'm a zombie on Monday morning.

Shane Creado: Yeah, you're essentially functioning as if you're jet lagged. A jet lagged zombie. And because

Ryan: Sorry, and so you're jet lagged. When you're speaking of jet lag, and when people come to you for brain scans I'm sure you get a lot of people who take the exotic stuff.

The alcohols, and the weeds, and the cannabis, and all of this stuff. And I do have athletes asking me what's your opinion, and I'm like, listen, I'm on the Olympic doping committee. You're not supposed to take this stuff. Do you know you can get it even in the fumes? So you shouldn't be around people with the fumes.

What's your scientific take for us to convince people that alcohol, in my opinion, should have surgeon's warning, Dr. Shane Criado's warning, alcohol consumption is injurious to health. What's your take on this? Am I wrong?

Shane Creado: You're 100 percent right. You can talk about alcohol affecting the gut, that's your expertise.

You can talk about alcohol damaging the brain, the same patterns we see in head injuries and chronic sleep problems. We see in spectrum issues with alcohol use, it looks like a head injured, like a brain injury. Now, alcohol also, while it may be sedating, so it may help you fall asleep, it's going to fragment that deep sleep that you spoke about earlier.

Sleep fragmentation means bad quality sleep. Which means your brain is not going to flush toxins out. But people say they drink alcohol and they sleep better. They fall asleep, okay, but they're going to wake up in the middle of the night. Or they might not even be aware of the fact that their brain is woken up.

Because if your brain wakes up for maybe three seconds or less and goes back to sleep, you won't be consciously aware that it woke up. But it may do that throughout the night. And you may wake up not remembering. And as a sleep

Ryan: scientist, you're able to see

Shane Creado: this in a sleep lab. Exactly. And you may wake up not remembering, but you may feel terrible the next day.

What's a hangover? What is feeling like crap the next day after you've had nine hours of sleep, but five drinks the previous night? It's poor quality sleep.

Ryan: So we know that, I work with a lot of celebrities. You work with a lot of celebrities. We can't take names, right? So I can't take names of who's got a six pack and what protein powder I've given them.

And you can't tell me who's like a alcoholic. But in the field of celebrity and the pressure to go and party and stuff like that. Have you actually done and seen where in people have these scans done and then they decide to follow your diet, which is the sleep diet, your diet, which is reduction in alcohol or abstinence from alcohol.

And do you have a before and after scan? And is there any information that you can share with our viewers will understand that there's no hocus pocus of these two guys talking about it. There's action. proper diagnostics to say that there is a massive improvement in a person's condition.

Shane Creado: Yes, there is.

And so we can look at improvements in terms of cognitive testing, emotional testing, subjective symptoms that they've reported. Sleep testing, biomarkers like blood tests, like testosterone levels get boosted. Inflammation markers come down, cholesterol and blood sugar level markers come down. And imaging verification on SPECT images before and after they've implemented a brain healthy protocol, which includes the kind of nutrition work you do and the kind of sleep work I do.

We've seen brains look healthier and younger. over time with changing our diet and our sleep because those things are modifiable, which is what's so beautiful about it.

Ryan: Doc, I've not even gone through half the questions that I have to do. So we are going to do part two shortly, but before we let you go and we come back again for part two, I want to ask you a few questions, staying with nutrition.

Does hydration play an important role in the quality and duration of sleep? And should we stop all fluids before bedtime? And what is the last time? to eat before you go to sleep. So once hydration, is it important? Should we stop fluid before going to bed? And when's the last meal? Should we eat before going to bed?

Shane Creado: Hydration is extremely important. Make sure that your urine is clear, looking like water, then you know you're adequately hydrated. Why is it important? It's because if your brain is partially, even partially, if your body is partially dehydrated, your body's going to release more stress hormone cortisol.

So dehydration Less blood volume, cortisol tightens up the blood vessels, so you can maintain your healthy blood pressure. But stress hormones like cortisol disrupt your sleep. Chronic stress hormone release, chronic dehydration, results in shrinking of the gray matter in the brain, which is necessary for memory, executive functioning.

Wow. So that's how important hydration is, and also hydration with the right electrolytes, right? Sodium, potassium being the primary ones. Now, when should we stop fluids before bedtime was another question you just asked me. It depends. If you've been well hydrating throughout the day, great. Maybe an hour before bedtime.

You stop your fluid intake. You don't want to wake up thirsty and then drink water. Another reason why people shouldn't be drinking a lot of alcohol or smoking weed because it makes you thirsty. You're going to wake up, it's going to disrupt your sleep. Now, if you look at sleep hygiene guidelines printed out on the internet, they might say no meal three hours before bedtime.

No fluid three hours before bedtime. Not necessarily. One size does not fit all, right? It's a personalized approach. So what kind of food are you consuming before bed? I would say the reason they say three hours before bedtime no food is because sometimes there's reflux and the food can come up and then you might feel nauseous and wake up.

However, if you're eating healthy foods before night time, so what's healthy? You know this better than anybody else. High protein, complex, slow carbs. They maintain your energy, blood sugar levels in a steady state throughout the night. If you have fast carbs, sugars, all that junk food that we mentioned earlier, it's going to burn out of your system very quickly.

You might have a dip in your blood sugar levels in the middle of the night. Middle of the night you have more dream sleep. You burn as many calories as when you're awake. So what's it gonna do? It's gonna say, wait a minute, low blood sugar. Let me get some more. Wake up. gonna get it from? Wake up. I'm gonna get it from my cortisol.

Because it pulls the muscle glycogen to convert it to glucose. And then it's going to wake you up because cortisol is a stress hormone. It's, you're actually going to fuel the cortisol peak earlier and higher in the middle of the night than it would otherwise. The normal cortisol peak is between four and six in the morning.

It slowly rises here as your melatonin drops. You'll be sabotaging your sleep. Wow.

Ryan: Speaking of

Shane Creado: stress,

Ryan: I'm stressed out because we need to get you back into the next session. Doc, a quick rapid fire before I let you go. Name one thing you do to get better sleep. Fixed wake up time

Shane Creado: every single day.

Ryan: Fixed wake up time.

That's right. Awesome. You heard it first. I'm setting my alarm clock to get up every day at 6 or 5 a. m. All right. See you back on the other side very soon. Thanks Dr. Shane for joining me here today and thank you for these valuable tips. For everyone watching in right now, sweet dreams if you're going to sleep and if you're getting up, I just hope you had enough of deep sleep.

Thank you, Ryan. If you've liked this episode, then please gift me a a share, or a subscribe, or better still, if you comment, I'll come back to you. And don't forget, let's stay tuned for a new learning coming in, but till then, your body is the most expensive real estate. Take care of it.

Dr Shane A. Creado M.D. 

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