What Happens If You ONLY SLEEP 4 Hours A Night for 30 Days?

Hello Health Champions today I'm going to talk  about what would happen if you only slept four  

hours per night for 30 nights well if you're  like me then you've probably lost some sleep  

from time to time but the good news is if it  only happens once in a while then we will have  

full recovery there's no permanent damage from  that but what I want to teach today what I want  

you to understand is that the chronicity is the  problem that if we have chronic lack of sleep  

now we get chronic damage and in some cases that  could be long lasting it might be able to reverse  

it but it would be difficult but in some ways we  also get some permanent or irreversible damage  

so we'll talk about all of that and the next  question again of course is how many hours of  

sleep do I need and it's not such an easy answer  it's just to give a simple number because if you  

stay with with me throughout the video you'll see  what these variables are and what number might be  

right for you but generally they recommend that  adults get about seven to eight hours of sleep  

per night and by that measure about one-third  of us are sleep deprived for adolescents or  

teens that number is about eight to ten hours  and two-thirds of them are sleep deprived but  

why is it that we have to sleep at all in order  to understand that we need to know what happens  

in the different stages so there's four stages  and in stage one and two the body is basically  

relaxing it's getting into light sleep getting us  ready for the next stage and stage three is called  

deep sleep or Delta Sleep Delta is the slowest  brainwave frequencies between zero and four Hertz  

and something very interesting happens here this  is where we we get our periodic bursts of growth  

hormone and growth hormone as the name says it's  to grow things it's to repair things and one  

thing it repairs is our DNA down at the cellular  level we're repairing this really important stuff  

and we're also making immune cells to clean out  debris and pathogens and even cancer cells stage  

four is probably what most people have heard  of the REM sleep rapid eye movement and this  

is because We're Dreaming so we're not as relaxed  the brain is actually increasing inactivity our  

heart rate and breath rate increases because  we're processing information and we are also a  

little bit paralyzed because When We're Dreaming  we're often trying to act out these things that  

happen these events and if we didn't paralyze the  muscles then we'd be flailing around all night  

long and the reason we're doing this dreaming  and we're going through this process is here is  

where we're converting our events the events from  the past day we turn them into long-term memories  

where process and integrating them so that we can  make sense of it and store it long term and if we  

get seven to eight hours of quality sleep then we  will cycle through these different stages several  

times so stage one and two is basically just  relaxing our brains our hearts our breath our  

muscles relax and slow down stage three is where  we have our physical healing at the cellular level  

we're repairing and fixing stuff and stage four  is for the mental aspect and this is where our  

mental capacity changes which we'll talk about  if we go long enough without sleep we basically  

go crazy and the hardest thing about poor sleep  is that it kind of becomes a catch-22 so if we  

have dis ease or stress or imbalance in the body  then that causes poor sleep so we can't sleep as  

well but then when we don't get enough sleep based  on what we just talked about now we also don't get  

the rest we don't process the information we can't  heal the cells so it becomes a vicious cycle and  

one of the reasons I talk so much about stress and  stress responses is that it's tied to everything  

and it fits right in here as well because once you  have a stress a stress response you make different  

hormones and one of them one of the stress  hormones is called cortisol and cortisol will  

effectively shut down melatonin and melatonin is  the hormone that helps you sleep that regulates  

your sleep cycles but anytime that you have stress  you increase cortisol and you decrease melatonin  

so here is part of that vicious cycle and why we  have to control stress to get to the bottom of  

this so when we don't sleep after about 18 to 24  hours of staying awake obviously you will notice  

some fatigue but you also will see a decrease  in alertness you see a decrease in concentration  

you'll see a worsening in reaction times in your  quality of life will start to go down as well  

you won't appreciate things you won't have the  same sense of humor you can't appreciate funny  

things or the joy in life and if you wake up in  the morning after less than six hours of sleep  

then you will experience a lot of these same  things now some of you may have noticed that a  

lot of these things are similar to what happens  when you're drunk from alcohol intoxication so  

if we compare those symptoms the decrease in  performance from sleep deprivation to those of  

intoxication and we look at the alertness and  the reaction time then after only 18 hours of  

staying awake you have about the same performance  as someone who has a blood alcohol level of 0.05  

percent and if you're in Europe or a lot of  other places they don't measure percent they  

measure per ml which is Thousands so that would  be 0.5 per mil and this is already legally drunk  

in most countries if you stay awake for 24 hours  now you double that level to 0.1 percent or 1.0  

per ML and now you're legally drunk in every  country in the world and it is criminal and  

punishable by imprisonment in many places now in  many places like Sweden where I'm from it's even  

stricter than that so at 0.02 percent you will get  fined at 0.03 you can lose your license or will  

lose your license and at 0.1 it is a criminal  offense and you can get put in prison whether  

there was an accident or not and the reason  I bring this up is that Sweden who has really  

gone after this has the lowest rate of traffic  accidents and traffic deaths that are related  

to alcohol and if we understand that mental  performance can be affected not just by alcohol  

but also but Sleep Quality then maybe we should  take it a little bit more seriously maybe it is  

more to it than just feeling a little bit off or  at the very least maybe we should stop treating it  

as a virtue to lose sleep so many times I've  heard people almost brag about how busy they are  

and how successful they are because they don't  sleep well a lot of people on my channel and a  

lot of people coming to my clinic are people have  been financially successful they created something  

but then they wake up 20 years later with 12  medications and type 2 diabetes and realize that  

maybe their priorities were just a little bit off  if we're sleep deprived for even longer like 24 to  

72 hours now all these things start to get worse  we get into a bad mood we lose our impulse control  

we have a tendency to be aggressive we experience  increasing levels of anxiety and depression and  

if it goes even further now we can get full-blown  paranoia and delusions we can get hallucinations  

and see things that aren't there here so the  detrimental impact on the suffering associated  

with this is strong enough that the United Nation  designates intentional sleep deprivation as a  

form of torture but fortunately even if we let  it go to the point of paranoia and delusions  

it is still fully reversible all we need is a few  good night's sleep and we're back to normal but if  

you're watching this and you're really interested  in Optimum Health like I know a lot of you are  

then the long-term effects is what you really  want to understand and if we don't spend enough  

time in the different stages of quality sleep  like stage 3 where we make the delta waves then  

we also don't get the growth hormone and we also  don't get the DNA repair one more thing we're not  

getting is we're not getting the cleanup of junk  proteins like beta amyloid that's associated with  

dementia and all Alzheimer's so less time in Delta  Sleep means that we clean out less and these beta  

amyloid plaques build up and this is unfortunately  one example where the changes can become permanent  

and also your immune system suffers tremendously  after a single night of four hours of sleep you  

have just shut down your production of T cells  your killer T cell activity by about 70 percent  

and these are the cells that go around cleaning  up mutated proteins mutated cells that can turn  

into cancer and that Association is strong enough  that the World Health Organization has actually  

classified sleep deprivation as well as nighttime  shift work as a probable carcinogen they've also  

found that sleep deprivation is a strong predictor  of different types of cancer like colon cancer  

prostate State cancer and breast cancer now I  know this is pretty heavy stuff I don't want  

you to freak out but I want you to be aware of  this because sleep is One requirement that the  

body has and sleep deprivation is one form of  stress in addition to many of the other forms  

of stresses so we need to understand it and know  how to improve it but I'll come back a little bit  

later to what you really need to look for as  far as what you're getting enough or not sleep  

deprivation also causes some metabolic changes so  after a single night of four to six hours of sleep  

we see a decrease in testosterone to the point  where a 40 year old male would have about the  

same levels as a 50 year old male so in a sense  you get 10 years older in that regard and what's  

also very well documented is that if you lose  some sleep there will be a significant income  

increase in cortisol during the following day and  cortisol the main purpose it's a stress hormone  

it raises blood sugar because blood sugar is your  emergency Fuel and when you raise blood sugar on  

a chronic basis now you will also raise insulin  to respond to that blood sugar and you promote  

insulin resistance so for some people this might  drive them toward insulin resistance but for most  

it will probably just make it more difficult  to reverse insulin resistance and that is the  

single strongest contributor to obesity type 2  diabetes cardiovascular disease stroke and all  

of the other metabolic diseases and statistically  they found that if you get less than six hours of  

sleep on average then your risk of death from  cardiovascular disease is up 200 percent and  

your risk of a stroke is up 450 percent one  of the interesting things I came across was  

the daylight savings experiment so twice a year  1.6 billion people either lose an hour or gain  

an hour and in the spring when we lose an hour  the following day we see a 24 increase in heart  

attacks and I find that very interesting but we  need to understand cause and effect to put that in  

perspective and here's how you need to think about  that so we ended up with a bunch of heart attacks  

but did the daylight savings caused the heart  attacks not really the daylight savings was the  

trigger right but a healthy person doesn't have  a heart attack because they lose an hour of sleep  

but statistically if you have a lot of people with  some disease with some imbalance in their body and  

then you add the trigger now statistically you're  going to get an increase another thing I saw  

I want to comment real quick was that decreased  sleep is linked to cardiovascular disease but then  

they also said that increased or excess sleep was  also linked to cardiovascular disease and here's  

how we want to think about that that we have  decreased sleep leading to disease and then like  

we said before we also have the reverse that this  disease also results in less sleep so here's like  

this vicious cycle again and here we can argue  that there is a causative relationship because  

we can measure certain things that happen or that  are missing when people don't get their sleep but  

when it comes to excess sleep I think we have to  be careful with the idea of causation when we see  

something linked to or associated with we have to  ask ourselves is it the disease causing the excess  

sleep or the excess sleep causing the disease  and I believe that it is the disease causing the  

excess sleep that if there's something wrong with  people then they can't generate enough energy or  

enough interest to to be awake and productive and  you know this if you've been sick if you have an  

infection like the worse you feel the more you  sleep and all animals do the same when they're  

sick they just lay down and sleep until it goes  over so if you have something wrong with you then  

you probably will sleep more and the body does  that to compensate but the sleep is not causing  

any diseases so should you worry about sleep  absolutely not because worry is counterproductive  

it shuts down all the healing and all the  resources in the body but what you should  

do is you should understand it and then you should  do something about it as it relates to you and the  

first thing you need to understand is that sleep  is just another stress or rather sleep deprivation  

is just another stress just like pesticides and  high blood sugar and emotional stress and so  

force and we have all those other stresses we  talk about on this channel and how to do something  

about it and here is one more piece in the puzzle  next thing is that we need to relate it to you and  

we need to understand that seven to eight hours  of recommended sleep is average it's like this  

famous bell curve that's where most people do okay  but you need much more or much less and we'll look  

at the Criterion just a little bit but when they  do a study and this goes true for basically any  

study is that if we were to put sleep on this axis  and performance on this axis then we would expect  

that the more people sleep the better they perform  to a point or in the reverse that the less people  

sleep the less they perform and then we measure  we do this study on different people and we find  

one person there and one person there and then  we see them spread out in in different patterns  

and then that fits our Theory the best fitting  line but if you notice that this person has a much  

better performance than this person even though  they're getting less sleep so whenever they study  

something there's going to be a distribution  there's going to be variation between different  

people and that's why we can't just look at one  aspect and say this is the best food this is the  

best amount of sleep for everybody because it  doesn't work like that and I'm sure there's a  

lot of more criteria you could look at but I just  want to quickly mention five things that you can  

use to evaluate if you're sleeping well enough if  the amount of sleep is good for you so first do  

you fall asleep relatively quickly it shouldn't  take hours to fall asleep you don't have to be  

asleep the moment your head hits the pillow but  it shouldn't take that many minutes so if you can  

fall asleep you get a check mark next question  is do you stay asleep or do you toss and turn  

throughout the night or if you wake up and go to  the bathroom that's not a disaster but you should  

be able to fall back asleep relatively quickly  not toss and turn the rest of the night then next  

do you wake up rested how do you feel when you  wake up are you totally grogging does it take you  

forever to get into the day or are you ready to  hit the day next do you make enough energy do you  

feel energized do you feel like you can do stuff  throughout the day and finally how is your focus  

and concentration and like I said there's probably  a lot more things that you can look at but it all  

comes down to how do you feel in the end if you  can check off most or all of these then you're  

probably okay whether you sleep being four or five  or six or seven or eight or nine or ten hours and  

if you can't check all the boxes then obviously  you want to do something about it but how do you  

fix it unfortunately there is no quick and easy  fix because these patterns these sleep patterns  

the habits are ingrained in you and they can be  changed but we have to be patient and we have to  

understand that the body works as a whole there's  a lot of different things we need to address first  

of all it involves rewiring the brain because  everything that you're doing everything that's a  

habit is a pattern in your nervous system that we  need to change over time it's like a super tanker  

has a certain momentum we can't just turn it on a  dime the next thing that you need to do obviously  

is good sleeping habits first of all you have  to set off enough time to sleep if we can't do  

that obviously we really can't do much good and  next thing we need to understand what stress is  

and we need to control stress stress is a learned  response it's a habit pattern just like a lot of  

different things in the body and stress does many  things it's responsible for these thoughts that  

just keep going in our mind the brain that won't  shut off and it is also responsible for raising  

stress hormones like cortisol cortisol turns off  the sleep hormone melatonin and it makes a lot of  

sense to do that the body is smart it's stress  hormones are supposed to alert us to danger and  

then we don't want to be sleepy at the same time  so anytime we need to be alert we need to shut off  

melatonin the problem of course happens when  we have chronic stress when that cortisol and  

those stress hormones are chronically elevated  we need to learn what good food is because part  

of reducing stress is stabilizing blood sugar  when we have a lot of blood sugar swings from  

sugar and processed foods now we will also have  cortisol swings and excess cortisol so one of  

the best ways to reduce cortisol and stabilize  mood and blood sugar is to eat real food with  

lots of fiber and fat and protein and very little  sugar and starch another huge piece is exercise  

exercise makes everything work better in your body  but specifically in this case exercise is one of  

the best ways to control stress because when you  exercise you drive information to your brain and  

the frontal lobe and that frontal lobe lights up  it increases the activity and it can inhibit and  

turn off those stress responses if you enjoyed  this video you're going to love that one and if  

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