If you’re not familiar with Sydney he talks about how our lifestyles are affecting our health as well as our genetic structure and expression in human physiology. He’s a medical anthropologist and has done mountains of research into the simple mundane practices we do each day that affect our health.

It is always really great speaking to somebody like Syd because he reminds us to step back, waaaay back from how we’re living out lives and really examine if the things we do each day are helping us or hurting us. For example in this interview we talked a lot about practical ideas for improving our sleep.

Did you know that by raising the head of your bed by 15 degrees (about 6 inches) can reduce eye pressure, oxygenate the brain, reduce inflammation, increase circulation and improve your health in a number of different ways?

Simple right? But who knew?

It’s things we do (specifically with our anataomy) like sitting for long periods of time or even other things like wear constrictive clothing that over time can dramatically decrease our health.

Is sleeping on a flat bed one night or sleeping with no pillows going to kill us? Well no…

But…

Over a life time these practices can radically impact our health at a dramatic level. The really great news is that the unhealthy practices that we do each day without even knowing it, can be changed relatively easily and then they can have the exact same impact on our health, but on a beneficial level.

When we correct our lifestyle mistakes that are harming us, then we can make those same practices work for the benefit of our health and life without really doing much on a day to day basis.

How much extra work does it take to sleep on a bed with the head raised by 6 inches? Not much. But if you fix that and other lifestyle habits like that, we can (over time) GREATLY improve our health, prevent disease, increase energy and live longer.

It’s really quite amazing how simple and easy it is to correct these mistakes.

At the very end of the show we decided to have Syd back because there were so many other sleep issues that we needed to talk about but didn’t have time to cover. So we wanted to have him back on and ask him lots of other questions regarding how to improve our sleep.

Then we decided to try this experiment on ourselves. Kate and I are going to raise our bed by 6 inches at the head of our bed. We’re simply going to cut 2 wood blocks that are 6 inches thick and put them under the 2 corners at the head of our bed and then report back to see how this experiments affects our health.

We really enjoyed Syd Singer and we hope you did also.

After you listen, comment below and tell us what you think!