Episode 188—Sydney Ross Singer—12-9-2013

Broadcasting live, four days a week worldwide, from the sunny beaches of Southern California. This is ExtremeHealthRadio.com.

Ty: Hey, you’re listening to Ty Bollinger of CancerTruth.net and you’re also listening to Justin and Kate with Extreme Health Radio. These guys are great. Enjoy listening to them. I always do.

Justin: We’ve got a cold snap here in Southern California, don’t we?

Kate: Chilly-willy this morning.

Justin: I know.

Kate: We’ve got our heat on, but the Santa Ana winds are actually blowing here and it’s very windy, but it’s freezing.

Justin: A lot colder than we normally are used to, isn’t it?

Kate: Usually the Santa Ana winds are warm, but it’s pretty chilly today.

Justin: I know, right?

Kate: Yeah.

Justin: Well, hopefully you guys are not cold, wherever you are in the world today. You could be anywhere. You could be in the southern hemisphere where it’s summertime. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

Kate: Lucky.

Justin: So hopefully you’re having a good day, wherever you are. My name is Justin and my co-host is named…

Kate: Kate. Hello, everyone.

Justin: And we’re so glad to be with you today and this is ExtremeHealthRadio.com, Episode 188, so you can find the show notes and anything that Sydney Singer mentions on that show page, ExtremeHealthRadio.com/188. And if you like to follow our shows and follow what we’re doing on Facebook and keep up to date with everything we have going on, with past show archives and everything, upcoming shows, you can go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Facebook and you’ll be able to click the “like” button on there and join our community that way. We’d love to have you onboard. And for reference, today is my birthday.

Kate: It is.

Justin: In case you needed to know that. But it’s December 9, 2013 and this is going to be a fun show with Sydney Singer.

Kate: Yep.

Justin: This is going to be Part 2 of our sleep episode.

Kate: I can’t wait to talk about this and break it down a little bit more.

Justin: Learning how to sleep better, and that’s what it’s all about. So that will be a fun show. We’ll introduce him in just a moment. If you’d like to support our work, you can purchase products on Amazon and go through our link, if you’re interested in doing that. We’ll make a small commission and that will help keep the light on here, keep the bills paid, and all that. You can go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Amazon and that will redirect you. You can bookmark that page and purchase anything you’d like—health-related or not—and we’ll get a small commission for that. So thank you for doing that, everyone. A lot of people have been doing that lately. We are so grateful. It’s a great way to support our work and make sure the shows stay free for everybody. Today we have Sydney Ross Singer and he is a medical anthropologist and he heads up The Institute for the Study of Culturogenic Disease, and he has been on our show a couple times now, Episode 119, as well as 162. His website, if you’re interested, is KillerCulture.com, as well as SelfStudyCenter.org. He is the author of a handful of books that we think you will find very interesting and very provocative titles, right Kate?

Kate: Oh yeah.

Justin: Dressed To Kill, Get It Up!, Get It Off!, Get It Out!, and The Doctor Is Out!.

Kate: That’s beautiful.

Justin: And so we’re going to be talking about his book, Get It Up, which is not about sex, but it’s about sleep and it’s really fascinating. So thank you, Sydney, for being on the show today. I really appreciate this.

Sydney: Oh, it’s my pleasure to be with you again, Justin and Kate.

Kate: Thank you.

Justin: And did you have a good sleep last night, I hope?

Sydney: No, actually I didn’t, but that’s another story. You know, sleep… There are a lot of things that affect your sleep and I guess all we can handle here are the physical things that we do to ourselves that can make it easier to sleep and have a better restful night. But some other things were happening last night, but I’m okay and happy to be here this morning. It’s very early here in Hawaii, where I’m talking to you. It’s 7:00 in the morning and I can be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed without caffeine because I sleep right.

Justin: Wow. And what time did you go to bed last night and what time do you normally wake up?

Sydney: Well, we live in the jungle here on the big island and we live very close with nature and we have open-air living in a lot of our buildings, so we basically feel like we’re in an observation platform. More than that—I mean it’s a house, but it’s open. So you really feel the woods that you’re around and surrounded with and when it gets dark in the wintertime, you stay awake for a little bit, but then you go to sleep. So we go to sleep pretty early. This is one of the things we should talk about today is like when should you sleep? What are the right times to sleep? And if you don’t have a clock telling you when to get up… We have clocks, but we don’t have schedules that we have to keep like that. I don’t have to get up and go to a job in the morning. So we have a more natural pattern that isn’t interfered with by cultural requirements and that’s a big problem with sleep. People have to get up at a certain time so they know “If I’m going to get a good night’s sleep, I’d better go to sleep by this time” and so forth and so on. But we do our sleep based on if it’s dark out and there’s nothing much happening and the Coqui frogs come out and they start singing and it just gives you this real peaceful nighttime feeling, it just puts you into a sleepy feeling. And so we’re asleep by 8:00; some nights 7:30 we go to sleep.

Justin: Now I’ve heard, Sydney, that it’s more beneficial to go to bed early, like the hours that you get before midnight are really important. Have you found that to be true?

Sydney: Well, I get my deepest sleep at that time. Then I start waking up by about 3:00. Now in Hawaii it gets dark—right now in the wintertime—it gets dark by 5:30, so if you’re going to sleep by 7:30 or 8:00, you’ve already been two and a half hours in the dark. So then by 3:00 I have already had eight hours of sleep, so I can get up before the sun. The sun comes up now here at about 6:30, so I’m really fresh when I wake up. I do my best writing at like 4:00 in the morning. So by the time the sun comes up, I feel like I’m just in the middle of the day. So it’s a whole other thing. And then when the summer comes, I stay up later and I get up later because I go to sleep a little later. So I might go to sleep at 10:00 and then I’ll wake up at like 4:00. Pretty much, it’s more natural. And then when the moon is out, I mean that’s another issue with sleep. We’re really aware of the moon and when you live indoors, you’re not aware of the moon. And if you’re in a city, all the streetlamps are like simulated moonlight all over the place and it dampens the moon. You don’t even know that there is a full moon because all these streetlights feel like a full moon.

So the whole lunar cycles have been lost in modern civilization now, but if you’re living more rurally, you’re very much aware of the moon. When the moon is bright, it shines in my face through the windows and it just wakes me up and I don’t sleep as well in a full moon, and a lot of people don’t. In many cultures they’ll do work in the full moon, you know? You can see. You can get around. When your eyes get used to it, being in the moonlight is really easy to see what’s going on. And all the animals are still grazing. We have sheep and horses and they’re all out in the moonlight. They’re out like it’s in the middle of the day. They’re all doing their thing, grazing. It’s not like they’re asleep under a tree somewhere or something. So moonlight is real activity time, but we in our culture can’t afford that if you have to get up at 6:00 or 5:30 to get on the freeway and drive to work. So you’ve got to get to work at a certain time. You have to go to sleep at a certain time, whether you like it or not. So then they resort to sleeping pills or whatever else they need to artificially induce somnolence, which is not the same if you’re taking drugs, so you don’t get the same brainwaves and the same restfulness and so forth.

Justin: Do you think it’s good, Sydney, to be going to sleep and get a pattern going and going to sleep at the same time every night? Do you think that’s something that’s good for the body?

Sydney: Yeah, but I think you also have to be sensitive to times when if you’re really tired, just go to sleep, you know? You have to listen to your body and there are times you might want to stay awake. But there are so many things that interfere with that. Like caffeine is so powerful. I do not do any caffeine in my diet at all. In fact, my whole family, except… Well, Soma likes a little bit of caffeine because it feels good for her to have a little. But when I get any caffeine whatsoever… I mean decaf is like espresso for me. I still feel it in decaf because it’s not uncaffeinated; it’s decaffeinated to about 5 or 10% of what it originally was. Even if it’s 1%, there’s still caffeine there, and if you’re sensitive to it, which I am now, boy do I feel it. So I’m not happy with caffeine and that’ll keep people awake easily, if you’re sensitive to it.

And people don’t realize it could actually take you… This is really an important thing to understand about the half-life of chemicals in your system. Our bodies, when we take in caffeine or drugs or everything has to metabolize away these chemicals and it does it with enzymes that are usually in the liver. And the amount of time it takes… Every chemical, there are different enzymes that deal with different types of chemicals, and these enzymatic processes that break down these chemicals take a certain period of time and it’s different for different people and for the same person it could be different at different stages of your life and at different stages of health. So these enzymes, they’re like little machines that break down these chemicals and you have a certain number of these machines and you make more of them. They are protein. They are made by our DNA and some people have a lot of these machines, some have fewer and sometimes they’re busy breaking down something else, so they get saturated and new stuff comes in that they normally could work on, but it backs up. The load backs up because the factory gets overworked, because that’s what an enzyme is; it’s like a machine that clips things and makes things happen.

So what happens is that the amount of time it takes for a substance to be broken down is called it’s half-life and they studied this in many systems to try to come up with an average half-life for an average person, but that changes for people and something like caffeine, some people can get rid of in two hours as the half-life. That means the amount of caffeine in your system will be cut in half in two hours and then in another two hours, that amount would be cut in half, so by four hours you’d have a quarter of the amount you originally took, and then in another two hours, you’d have an eighth of the amount and in another two, a sixteenth, and so on. Well, that’s if it’s a two-hour half-life. In some people, the half-life for caffeine could be two days.

Justin: Wow.

Sydney: Yes. It can be up to two days, and that means if you had a cup of coffee today, you’re feeling it for two days, until half of that is in your system still. So what happens is you could go like… Imagine. You do the math. Depending on your sensitivity, you could be like three weeks from that cup of coffee and finally start getting it out of your system enough that you don’t feel it anymore.

Justin: So why do you think some people can drink a cup of coffee and within a couple hours they can go to sleep? Do they just have a lot of enzymes to be able to deal with that, do you think?

Sydney: Yeah, they must be dealing with the caffeine well and it just doesn’t affect them. There are a lot of chemicals that are involved and all sorts of processes that the caffeine affects, and some people just have tolerance for things—for alcohol too. Some people can tolerate that and they have to take a tremendous amount of alcohol to feel its effects, which is not good because that creates worse alcoholics. People who feel the effects of things usually do less dosage and stay away from them because it doesn’t feel good. So tolerance actually creates more of an abuse of things because you don’t feel it and until you get to the point where your body is… Feeling is actually a good thing. Sensitivity is there so that when bad things are happening, you feel it and you can stop. If you’re not sensitive, you overdo it and if you’re hypersensitive, you underdo it and you avoid so many things and you’re likely to freak out and you have to be in a padded room all your life.

So you have a balance of sensitivity. But sometimes we get chemical exposures—toxins in our world—that our bodies are working to get rid of, and some of these things are hard to get rid of and it saturates our enzyme systems so our factories are focusing on getting rid of one pollutant and then you dump all this other stuff in there and it gets overloaded and backed up. And some things… Take a drug like Valium, which they prescribe for a whole bunch of things… I was thinking about the ‘70s and popping pills and the Valium—the Rolling Stones song—“Mother’s little helper.” I mean that’s all about Valium. You know what the half-life of Valium is?

Justin: I don’t even want to know.

Sydney: It’s a week.

Kate: What?

Justin: Wow.

Sydney: Valium and its metabolite are biologically active with a half-life up to a week in people.

Kate: Oh, my gosh.

Sydney: So you give someone some Valium and man, they’ll be feeling it for months. They won’t even know who they are anymore by the time they get off of that stuff. So you imagine popping that every time you’re upset? I mean that’s why we created so many addictions and problems. So you need to know about the half-life of things when you take drugs and consider the fact that just because it says that half-life doesn’t mean your body is going to have it. So I learned the hard way, from just experience with caffeine and chocolate—I can’t even have chocolate anymore—it wires me, it immediately gives me cramps; it’s like the caffeine effect of vasoconstriction is like “Wow!” in me, on a little bit of caffeine.

Justin: And like you said before, it’s a good thing to have these sensitivities because Kate and I talk all the time about how now that we have changed our diet and we’re on a much cleaner eating path, we feel things like we never used to. And we always joke about we used to be able to go out and eat hamburgers and hotdogs and…

Kate: Sundaes.

Justin: Sundaes and feel like we could just burn right through everything, but if we do that today…

Kate: Right. We’d be dead.

Justin: We’d be on the floor for the rest of the night. So…

Kate: It’s a gift.

Justin: You’re saying it’s a healthy thing to be able to feel these things and we can’t commit the same kind of crime against our body, right?

Sydney: Yeah. Yes, totally. And the interesting thing is because we are so adaptable as creatures… I mean the human body is really adaptable, and we end up overcoming that negative feeling as our enzyme systems pick up. You see, the genetic code for all of these enzymes in your body is manipulatable by environmental factors, as you know—the epigenetic issues—and these factors have a role by stimulating the production of more enzymes when you need it. And there is a lag time, so something will come into your cells, your cells will activate the part of the DNA needed for this particular enzyme to deal with that, and over a few days you’ll start making what you need to make and then you’ll deal with it. So if you’re used to clean air and you move to the city or for some reason you’re there, you might really feel it for the first few days, but after you’re there for a while, if it doesn’t kill you, you end up getting used to it. And before you know it, you’re like “It doesn’t bother me anymore.” And that’s because if it’s an air issue, your body might be making a little more mucous, you build up the enzyme system to deal with the particular poisons you’ve been exposed to now, and you cope with it. And then once you get out of that environment, it takes you a while to clean out, and you actually sometimes get sick once you stop with the stressor.

It’s the same thing psychologically. Have you ever noticed that when you have a problem in your life—you’re dealing with something, not a problem, like traveling—and you can’t get sick… you just can’t afford to get sick, so you don’t get sick, and then as soon as you get home and you can lower your stress level and your defenses, then it hits you and it’s like “Wow!” and you get sick. And that’s because your body wants to get that out. It stores it while you have to, like you’re in enemy territory and to get through it you’ve got to be tough and all the bad stuff you put aside and you just trudge through it and you just ignore the bad stuff as long as you can. And then once you can finally deal with it, you just do a dump and you feel it when you dump it. And then after that, your body is healthier, but it’s gone through this cleansing, and then you get back to that other environment and you feel it again, but your body now may have sensitivities because these things are like allergens, right?

Anything can be an irritant. Anything is an allergen that’s not your own body; it’s foreign. And your body is going to want to react to that if it’s noxious. And if you’ve been exposed to something that was a noxious chemical that really bothered you, every time you get exposed to it after the big exposure—once you’ve cleaned it out of your system and then you’re exposed to it again—that’s when allergies happen. It’s not the first exposure. It’s the subsequent ones because your body is like “I don’t want to deal with this again,” right? You know that about allergy, right? I mean the first time you’re exposed to poison ivy or poison oak you don’t get any reaction. It’s the subsequent times. Your body has to first experience it to then say, “Okay, we’ve got to deal with this thing the next time we get it,” which is also what vaccination is supposed to be doing, theoretically. I mean it’s supposed to stimulate reaction to something that if you see it, you’re ready for it. So I didn’t mean to throw in the vaccine because now it’s a big, controversial issue, but that’s how vaccines are supposed to work too. It’s the same philosophy.

Justin: Interesting. So Sydney, how much sleep…? Actually, we have to take a break here.

Sydney: Back to sleep.

Justin: Actually, yeah. We have to take a break here in about a minute, but I want to ask you some questions after the break. Actually, we’ll just take a break now so that we can get it out of the way. We have lots of questions and last time we talked on the show—Episode 162—we talked a lot about the mechanics of sleep and sleep positioning and things like that, and in today’s show I’ve got lots of other questions, topics like how much sleep do we need, how difficult it is to get to sleep, and all these kinds of things. So we’ll talk with Sydney Ross Singer about all these questions that I have for him on sleep, after the break. Don’t forget to check out his website. It is KillerCulture.com. We’ll be right back with Sydney after this break.

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Justin: Kate and I have had our sauna for about a year now, I’d say, when we first got it from Phil Wilson. It’s an incredible machine. We use ours about every single day. Kate sits in about 20 minutes and I sit in there for about a half hour, usually watch a documentary, and it’s extremely relaxing. It’s a really, really incredible machine. And if you go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Sauna, you can learn all about it. We did an entire hour interview with Phil Wilson. You can check that out. You can look at the pictures of us with it. Then you can watch videos on that page. It helps you to sleep really, really well. You can lose a lot of weight with it. You can burn, I think, around 600 calories in about 20 minutes or so. It improves your skin, increases circulation all over the body and circulation is critical for your health. You can prevent and reverse diseases with it. If you have a cold or a flu, it’s incredible; it heats you down to the core. It heats four to six inches inside your body, so it’s really incredible. A lot of people use it for cancer as well, so if you have any kind of “incurable” disease, you can use it for that. And Dr. Shade is the foremost authority on detoxification and listen to what he says about it.

Shade: How do I detoxify from plastics? I mean you guys are using a sauna and what does a sauna do for us? A sauna is great. It’s moving a number of different toxins. Remember we talked about the mice that if you put PCBs in there, then that made the mercury all that much worse? And sweating moves out a lot of plastics, volatiles, fat-based toxins. It’s really good at moving those out, sweating those out. So that’s how you’re getting those out and those are contributing to this synergistic soup inside the body, and so that’s why they’re good is they’re taking out a bunch of the different things in the soup.

Justin: And Daniel Vitalis, one of our favorite guests, what do you have to say about the sauna?

Daniel: When you go into the sauna, like a far-infrared sauna like you discuss, your body goes into a deep relaxation mode and your sympathetic nervous system shuts down and your parasympathetic nervous system turns on. And when that’s active, that’s the nervous system—part of your nervous system—that’s active when you meditate. That becomes active and your detoxification pathways open up wide. Why is this important? It’s important because when you go running and you sweat, you’re not necessarily eliminating very much toxicity from your body. But when you sweat in the sauna, you eliminate a lot of toxicity from your body. So sweating in a relaxed state is how we eliminate. The other thing is that what’s wonderful about the sauna is that it puts you in a parasympathetic nervous system response as if you were meditating. So it’s almost a hack. It’s like a trick to get yourself into a meditative, relaxed state, to decompress stress, to reverse the effects of stress, and to get your body eliminating deep, deep toxicity that’s stored in your body fat because it can come out in the oils of your skin. So I think sauna is one of the most crucial detoxification… really health practices that we can take on, especially in this era of heavy toxicity, particularly fat-soluble toxins.

Justin: This sauna is really, really great. They offer payment plans because if you buy it through PayPal, it’s 100% secure; you don’t even need a PayPal account. I think you can do a payment plan through PayPal. It’s got low EMF electromagnetic fields coming off it. It’s portable, so that means you don’t have to knock down a wall in your house. You can just move it from room to room. It sets up in about two to five minutes. It’s super easy to clean. All you’ve got to do is wipe it down when you’re done and wipe the neck down. It produces energy and heat inside, very, very evenly throughout the whole machine. All you have to do is sit in there for about 15 minutes a day. And the great thing I like about it too is it requires zero preheating. So you turn it on and you’re starting to get warm and you’re starting to detoxify with that far-infrared light almost immediately. So it’s really great. It comes with a one-year warranty. It’s about $990 plus $25 shipping and that’s really, really a good deal because if you look at most of the regular saunas out there, they are in the $2,000-4,000 range, so this is really, really a good deal so check it out at ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Sauna.

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Justin: All right. We’re having a great time here, with Sydney Ross Singer from KillerCulture.com, talking about sleep. And if you’re interested in Part 1 of this series that we’re doing, you can check out ExtremeHealthRadio.com/162, and our initial episode with him was Episode 119, so you can check those out if you’re interested in our other shows with Sydney Ross Singer. As the lady said, don’t forget to follow us on Facebook. We’d love to have you join our community and lots going on there and you can stay up to date with our shows. If you have any questions also about that sauna, please let me know. You can always email me and ask me anything. We use ours every single day. Kate, you used it this morning, didn’t you?

Kate: I got up at 6:00 am and I’m not usually that much of a morning person, but it’s such a good way to start your day.

Justin: You did your little coffee enema and then you did your…

Kate: I did. I’ve had quite the morning, haven’t I?

Justin: I know.

Kate: I know.

Justin: So that’s great. Yeah, if you have any questions about the sauna, let me know and I would love to help you out.

Kate: Or me as well.

Justin: Yeah, in any way we possibly can. Right now we’re talking with Sydney Ross Singer from KillerCulture.com about sleep. So Sydney, I have a ton of questions here for you, so let’s try to get through as many of these as we possibly can, if possible. I know that each one of them we could spend a lot of time on, but…

Sydney: Okay, I’ll be quick.

Justin: How much sleep do you think we actually need? A lot of people say eight hours; a lot of people say eight to ten; some people claim they can run their lives on four, you know? So there is a lot of debate about how much sleep we actually need. What have you found in your studies?

Sydney: I think it’s all very individualized and it depends on what you’re doing and how tired you are and how sedentary you are, so it’s really a very individualized thing. Probably around six hours—six to eight hours—is probably on the average, but people have to figure out what their optimal is.

Justin: Interesting.

Kate: So again, it’s very personal.

Justin: Yeah, I guess it depends, like you said, what you’re doing, what kind of life you’re…

Kate: And what you’re going through at the time, I’m sure—just the season—can be a different season than others.

Justin: That’s true.

Sydney: And what phase of the moon it is, what’s happening in your life, the thoughts going through your head all the time. I mean I think the big… We were talking about toxins and sensitivities and difficulty sleeping and all of those factor in. So sometimes you need more sleep than in other times, so I think you just have to listen to your body.

Justin: Yeah, I find that I need about eight hours of sleep, at least. I can’t really sleep longer than that and I tend to wake up eight hours, no matter what time I go to sleep, so if I go to sleep at 10:00, I’ll wake up at 6:00 naturally, or if I go to bed at midnight, I’ll wake up at 8:00, or if I go to bed at 9:00, I’ll wake up at 5:00. Do you find that is the case with you?

Sydney: I tend to wake up at the same time, no matter when I go to sleep, so I’ll just get up at the same time. My body just wakes up. But we have roosters and so there are a lot of other environmental factors at play in what I hear.

Justin: And what do you think about people talking about the sleep in terms of total overall duration at one time? We had a guest on our show—you may be familiar with him—Dr. Bob Marshall from Healthline.cc, and he’s a really prolific doctor out of Texas, and he says that a lot of people call on his radio show and ask him about sleep and he says that at the bare minimum you want to get five hours all together, at one time because a lot of people are waking up at sporadic times during the night. They may sleep for eight hours, but they don’t get five hours all together, at one time. Do you know anything about how much we need in blocks like that?

Kate: Consecutive?

Justin: Yeah.

Sydney: Again, I would think it’s all individualized. I mean I just don’t think we’d want to tell a person and make people feel anxious that they’re not getting that five hours, you know? I mean get as much as you can, but I think the reason… Why are people waking up every couple of hours? Why aren’t people having a restful sleep? I think that’s the thing. Instead of adding another stress that “Geez. Now I have to worry about not sleeping enough,” it’s all these worries that are keeping people from sleeping and all this artificial imposition in our lives. So if you’re waking up every couple of hours, it could be because you have too much stimulant in your system. We were talking about caffeine or other stimulants. It could be you’re just too anxious about life and ideas come right into your head when you get up in the middle of the night or whatever. You could have to get up because you have to urinate frequently in the middle of the night. You might have—if you eat late at night, before going to sleep—that can affect your sleeping if you have indigestion, and indigestion can create anxiety feelings in your sleep and you wake up anxious and bloated and gassy and uncomfortable and that kind of thing. Other pains in your body that you have are going to keep you from sleeping well—pain—chronic pains.

So all of these are making people sleep poorly. Needing five hours continuous, that may be great if people can get it, but I think we have to ask, “Why are people not getting a good solid night’s sleep?” And then on top of it—this is in addition to what we were talking about—like your head of the bed should be elevated slightly to improve brain circulation and reduce brain pressure, so you don’t get problems like sleep apnea and glaucoma and migraines and a whole bunch of other problems associated with too much head pressure. That helps people sleep better too because a lot of times they’re just uncomfortable in their beds. They’re just leaning on their body the wrong way, cutting off circulation. Like you shouldn’t sleep on your sides. We talked about that last time… Did we talk about side-sleeping?

Justin: We did.

Kate: Yeah.

Sydney: So you should stay pretty much on your back as much as you can. I mean it’s not like you can’t roll to the side for a minute to give your back a break and all that kind of thing, but you don’t want to be a belly-sleeper or a side-sleeper because you’re compressing parts of your body and that will make you uncomfortable. A lot of people say, “Oh, I’m in all sorts of positions. I roll around all night,” and that’s just a sign of being uncomfortable. If you’re really comfortable, you’re just asleep like a baby. They have no problems. They’re happy. They sleep like a baby. And I think the farther away we get from that is the problem.

Justin: And what do you think about people having a hard time falling asleep, actually getting to sleep? I have found in my life, as I’ve gotten older I tend to fall asleep a lot quicker, and Kate, how about you? Do you fall asleep…?

Kate: Yeah, me as well.

Justin: You fall asleep pretty quickly?

Kate: Mm-hmm.

Justin: Yeah, a lot of people will lay in bed for hours, won’t they, before they can go to sleep?

Sydney: Well, that could be they’re going to sleep too early, they’re still stimulated, they just watched an exciting movie or they watch the news before they go to sleep. I mean all these things are anxiety-inducing. And if you look at screens, like on iPhone screens or computer screens, the light in your eyes affects your melatonin and you need melatonin to sleep, so we’re blowing our melatonin with all of this light and putting our brains into the wrong rhythm with too much nighttime light. Think about traditionally, when it gets dark, if there’s no moonlight, I mean the moon and the stars are your nighttime light. You could have fire. But before modern-day, with electricity and our ability to make artificial lighting, apart from fire we were pretty much limited in light at night. The more we create a daytime environment at night, the more we throw off our sleeping cycles. And people who work at night are the worst for all these things. I mean their whole circadian rhythm is completely messed up. Their daily rhythm is called your circadian rhythm and that’s your day-night cycles, the sleep—it has to do with melatonin and probably there are other hormones too, and you go through a rhythm and the rhythm is affected by light. I mean you do that with animals too. If you give them light, you can make chickens lay eggs more and fool them into thinking it’s summer when it’s winter. Our physiology is affected by light.

Justin: So really quickly, off the top of your head, just some really quick things for people, like building a little strategy of what people can do at night before bed and leading up to sleep. What are some things you can think of just off the top of your head that will help people to have a better sleep?

Sydney: Well, it’s probably a good time to meditate, to stretch, be calm—to try to calm your mind. You might want to turn off all your lights, use candles—much less stimulating on your eyes and you can see. Just try to wind down and wind down from your busy life. Try to make sure you’re elevated properly in the bed to make it comfortable for your head and elevate the feet. By the way, I want to ask you the results of your sleep study because that might—before we finish today. Can you share with me what happened to you and Kate?

Justin: Yes. It’s incredible. We raised our bed about… What is it, about five or six inches?

Kate: Mm-hmm.

Justin: And we started off doing, I think, two inches, and then we kind of worked our way up. I find that I sleep a lot better, a lot deeper, and I fall asleep quicker. I’m trying to think of…

Kate: I do fall asleep way quicker, which is interesting to me, but I also have way less congestion in my nasal passages, which actually keeps me asleep longer because when I used to have such a flat bed, in the morning I’d wake up and feel this sort of like “Oh,” head rush. Kind of everything goes right to your nose. Now it’s just not so much of a difference between getting out of the bed and standing up as it used to be. That’s been my one really big change, personally.

Justin: Yeah, it’s kind of awkward to raise your bed that high, but…

Kate: It feels a little funny at first.

Justin: Yeah, it feels a little funny and it took us a while to get used to it, but…

Sydney: What do you do for the foot of your bed? Do you just make it a full incline so your feet are down?

Justin: It’s raised… We have these little wooden blocks that we put under the head of the bed and the bed just is slightly slanted, yeah.

Sydney: So what do you do for your feet? Do you put pillows under them or are they down?

Justin: Oh, they’re down. Yeah, we don’t do anything for that.

Sydney: Okay. Now I’ve been doing this for years, so that’s how we’ve been sleeping, but over time that could possibly congest your feet for the same reasons as your head being too low congests the head. My wife and I just bought adjustable beds for ourselves. Over these years we’ve been trying to do it without having to spend a lot of money because we wanted to come up with a solution that everybody can do. Adjustable beds—they can be expensive. For example, for a king sized bed we had to get two singles, extra long, and here in Hawaii with our prices and at this store, it cost us like $3,400 for that. It’s foam mattresses, which had to off-gas a little bit, but after about a week you couldn’t really smell them anymore, but the foam can be noxious—the gas coming off on foam mattresses—so people should be aware of that. The adjustable bed is phenomenal. I should have done this years ago. I really think if you have the money, you spend a third of your life on this thing, and we spend so little on it compared to a car, which we are in less amount of time than your bed. You should really put your money in a good, adjustable bed.

What we do is we raise our legs so that our feet are up, and then we raise the head to about 25-30%, but it’s so comfortable with the legs raised, it’s like you’re in this… It’s like a recliner, like a Lazy Boy type of recliner, with your feet up and your head back and you’re so comfortable and it’s just… And in the middle of the night, you can change it. So sometimes I feel like “Okay, my legs have had enough being up.” By bending your legs, it helps your lower back because it bends so that your knee is bent, the way the bed bends up. So your leg—the bottom part of your leg—you’re bending at the knee and then the feet go more horizontal. So your buttocks is obviously really the lowest point—very much the lowest point. In the middle of the night you might want to stretch out more, so you can just press the button and lower your legs a little bit. And you might want a little more head pressure, so you lower that. You might want a little less and you raise it. It’s really nice to adjust it and it’s nice that your spouse can adjust theirs because they have their own particular needs too, so you don’t have to both be at the same elevation all the time.

It’s phenomenal. It really… I had a bad back the night I went to sleep in that and in the middle of the night, I moved, I felt a crack because it wasn’t as stressed out. Lying flat really stresses your lower back—your lumbar area—because that’s curved up, and when you’re lying flat because the way your buttocks is curved and there is an arch in your lower back, and that gets a lot of stress just lying flat, and that’s why people are so uncomfortable. Putting the bed in your knee really helps your lower back. It flattens it out and it allows it from being curved and it makes it much more comfortable on the bed, so bending the knee—putting a pillow under your knee and a pillow under your foot…

If you don’t get an adjustable bed, try that on your bed the way you have it now. So your head is still elevated, but your feet will get more elevated and you’ll bend at the knee and that’ll really help your lower back and see if you feel a difference. But your feet… Otherwise, over time, some people have foot circulation issues and they get edema in the ankles and so forth, and for those type of people, I didn’t want them to try these one slant beds because their feet don’t get a chance to decongest. They need to have them up as much as possible if you have bad leg circulation, and people with diabetes have these problems too, you know? That’s why they get ulcers in their ankles and that area. So if you have swollen ankles at the end of the day, you need—because people are standing, they’re wearing tight shoes… So it’s the same thing with the bra—congestion in lymphatic with the socks and the shoes—so the skin gets very congested with edema and at the end of the day, you need to raise your legs to let them drain, so you don’t really want to always have them dependent. You’re young so you don’t feel it, but as you get older, they may want to definitely have the feet up. If you’re over 50, buy an adjustable bed.

Kate: That’s really good to know because somebody like me—even though I’m not old—I am on my feet all day long as a hairdresser; I’m standing. And when I get home, man, is my body just needing that. So that’s a great suggestion about the pillows. I wouldn’t have thought of that, actually.

Sydney: Yeah, and when you’re adjusting, when you’re on your back, I assume you guys are sleeping on your backs in this position to make it comfortable, right?

Justin: Yes, yes.

Sydney: It’s good to open your legs a little bit, like your knees, bend them and they’re open, so your feet are almost touching and your knees are out, and that’s really good for your pelvis and the prostate. People get prostate problems by side-sleeping because your prostate is right there between your legs and as you squish your legs together, closing your crotch, you’re compressing all of those organs. So it’s really good to leave them open. And you also don’t want to sleep on your belly because that bends the penis and that’s something… A lot of men, their penises are bent to one side or the other. That’s because they’re leaning on them in bed for hours.

Justin: Isn’t that interesting? So many different things that you need to worry about… well, not worry about, but be concerned about.

Kate: Be aware of.

Justin: Yeah. So we’re with Sydney Ross Singer and his website is KillerCulture.com and if you’re interested in his books, I highly suggest you check out his books.

Kate: I don’t know how you can not be interested.

Justin: Yeah, this is really fascinating information. So we’ll be right back. We’ll get into some more sleep issues after the break, with Sydney Ross Singer, and we’ll be right back.

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Justin: A few years ago, when I was working for this company—it was a really small company—and I had been wanting a Vitamix blender for years and years and years, but they’re so expensive and I just hadn’t saved the money at that time to get one. And so as a Christmas bonus, they knew that I loved the Vitamix, so they got me a Vitamix, the 5000 blender. That thing is so incredible. It was right at the beginning of my raw food journey and I was using it about three times a day, really. Today I still use it about twice a day to make blended smoothies and things like that, but the Vitamix blender is really, really great. If you go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Vitamix, that will redirect you over to there and then you will be able to purchase that, and we’ll get a commission for your order, and you will also get free shipping too, so that will be great for you if you’re interested saving about $25 on the shipping.

And with the Vitamix, you can make sauces and dips and bread. You can make ice cream with it. I’ve done a lot of ice cream. You can just make the most incredible things, and it’s my favorite because it’s got a tamper on it and you can put ice and frozen berries and avocado and some honey and things like that—and with no water at all—and you have that tamper and you can make the most amazing ice creams with it. So the Vitamix is my favorite blender of choice and if you’re in the market to buy one, I would greatly encourage you to do so if you have the money for it. And if you do it through us—through ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Vitamix—I’ll get a little commission for it and you’ll get free shipping, so it works out for you and for us too. So if you’re in the market, please do it through us. That would be really cool. You’re going to love this thing when you get it. You’re going to fall in love with it. You’ll never go back to a regular blender again. So check that out at ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Vitamix, and I hope you enjoy it.

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Justin: And if you’d like to get the Vitamix blender through our link, you’ll get free shipping, so it’s something to consider for the Christmas and the holiday season if you’re interested, and that would help to support our work as well. So if you’re interested in the Vitamix or if you have any questions, just let me know. I’d love to answer any questions about that machine. It’s so worth it. It is just so worth it. That machine is incredible, isn’t it?

Kate: It is amazing.

Justin: We make everything in that. So yeah, if you’re interested in buying it through us, you’ll get free shipping. And as the lady said, don’t forget to sign up to our newsletter list. We’d love to have you join and we’ve got thousands of subscribers on there and you get an incredible free e-book that sells for $20 on Amazon, called Lessons From The Miracle Doctors, that we’re giving away for free, and you can get access to that immediately if you sign up and you’ll stay up to date with our shows as well. So we’d love to have you join the community on our newsletter list. So Sydney Ross Singer from KillerCulture.com. I had a couple questions, Syd, about the adjustable bed because you mentioned one thing that I thought about, which was the off-gassing and then I’m not sure if it has metal coils because I’ve also heard that any time you have metal near or around your bed, that’s going to attract electromagnetic field frequencies to it, and so a lot of people these days are sleeping on things that don’t have any metal or they’re not conductors of frequencies like that. How does the sleep adjustable bed…? It’s obviously working for you because you love it, right? Oops, did we lose Sydney?

Kate: Is he here?

Sydney: The bed that I have, I do like because of the positioning and the foam mattress has no… I don’t believe it has any metal coils in it. I believe it’s just foam.

Justin: Oh, wow.

Sydney: Yeah, because it has to bend and I think a foam mattress is easier on an adjustable bed with the bending that the bed does. The legs of the bed are metal. The bottom frame part is metal. And there is a little bit of a little motor that just pushes the different parts of the bed up or down. But otherwise, I’m not worried. I don’t think I have to worry about electromagnetics on that one. If you’re on a coil bed, that might be a different story.

Justin: I see.

Sydney: Yeah, but off-gassing is probably a thing that people need to think about, and in addition to the off-gassing of any foam product, you also have to think about the smells of all of the things on your sheets and on your pillowcase and on any clothes. Hopefully you’re sleeping naked too. I mean that’s another issue—how should you sleep? But you’re inside the sheet and the blanket and all of this. They have smells in them that are from fabric softeners and detergents and you’re breathing that all night. Bleach—there might be bleach residues you’re going to be breathing all night. And should the sheets be cotton or polyester or whatever, those will have a different feel on your skin, depending on what kind of sheets you have. You don’t want to have sheets that create static when you move. Cotton is usually a good bet on sheets, but think about if you’re uncomfortable in your bed, it could be because of the fabric and think about what you’re breathing all night that could be creating irritation in the morning from eight hours of sniffing in fabric softener smell. So those are other considerations.

Justin: How dangerous do you think it is…? You mentioned it a little bit earlier about people that have these times where they work at night and then they sleep during the day. Is that as dangerous as I think it is?

Sydney: Oh yeah. I think so. I think it’s really bad for your health. These people suffer from a lot of problems. The same thing with flying—if you’re a pilot or you do frequent flying, it totally messes up your internal clock and it’s hard to even get it back. I mean some people never get it back. They just are on such artificial time. Like a pilot that’s flying around the world, they have to go to sleep whenever it’s convenient, by the clock. And I think people lose the ability to feel a normal rhythm in their lives because of all this changing time zones quickly and artificial lighting in our environment and working when you normally might be sleeping, you know? But people can work at night. I mean obviously we do. And when there is moonlight, like I mentioned before, many cultures are not inactive at night.

I mean the whole idea of needing eight hours of uninterrupted sleep inside your bedroom with the door closed and no noise and no light and all this is a very modern thing. It requires a tremendous amount of security to feel like you could be unconscious for that long. If you were living in much more in the elements or in a more primitive way, which people have done for a long time before modern times, you have to be alert and even in the middle of the night there could be things happening. There could be intruders. There could be animals that could threaten you. You have to be aware of all sorts of things. The idea of being unconscious for eight hours, it’s just because we have this clock dependent society where everybody is living that way and we have to force ourselves to be able to conform to that, and that creates a lot of disease. That creates a lot of stress in your system because you’re not living by natural rhythm.

Justin: It’s funny because I watch my dog and our little… We have a little ten-pound wiener dog and she is so funny because she’ll… I’m sure she sleeps all night, but I’m sure she’s up at different times in the night. But she’ll sleep in little pockets during the day, you know? Like right now she’s on the couch and she’ll be sleeping for 20 minutes and then she’ll get up and want to play. I wonder if that’s something that we should be… Have you ever heard of the polyphasic sleep, where people sleep in little segments like that?

Sydney: Yeah, and I think traditionally that’s what siestas are sort of a form of, and I think that’s a good thing. If you were living without the stresses of modern life, it would be completely different, you know? You would be doing things according to your own schedule and your own needs and sometimes you might not be able to sleep for quite a while if you have an emergency, a natural disaster and things like this—wars, threats. I mean there are a lot of things that keep you awake. So you sleep when you can. You get the best you can. And you do the best that you can. Nothing is totally optimal for people, and especially in modern society. So I don’t know if people should be looking for… You’re going to have to change your life drastically to get that peaceful, great night’s sleep. I don’t think drugs are the answer because I don’t think they give the right kind of sleep. They’ll knock you out. And I think changing your lifestyle might be the answer. I mean if people are real insomniacs and are not happy, a lot of it could very well be a psychological issue. I mean sleep is a very… Ironically, the more stressed your life is, the more sleep you really need, and the less sleep you can get. So…

Justin: Yeah, it’s interesting because with the polyphasic sleep, I think you sleep for about 20 minutes at a time and you kind of do this around the clock, so you’re kind of… But then if people are doing that, it seems like they’re not really getting that deep REM that people talk about. Do you think that’s important?

Sydney: It may be more important for people who don’t sleep like that, you know? Maybe… That doesn’t sound too natural to me, to be constantly sleeping like that. I don’t know. I mean are they at home all the time, pretty sedentary? Do they ever go out and exercise for a few hours, you know?

Kate: Right.

Sydney: I don’t know that lifestyle. Maybe I really don’t know polyphasic sleeping because I don’t know why a person would adopt that particular lifestyle. It seems like if you’re working… I mean you’ve got to go out and get your food somehow, some way, whether you’re in a primitive situation… Like we have—in our situation here—we basically can forage for our food. We grow our own food and we have milk goats and sheep and all this stuff, so we can support ourselves and basically, if you’re hungry you go out and if you want to have something, you can go out and get it. Of course we cheat and go to the store and buy stuff. I’ll tell you, when you want to make something here… Like okay, I’ll need some coconut milk. Okay, so I’ve got to get a coconut and cut it open and get the pulp out, put it through a juicer to get coconut milk, which we then use in the recipe and then the shredded coconut is also useful for recipes and for whatever—feeding animals or whatever. So just that act of getting the coconut, opening it up, doing this and that… The food preparation for every little thing, I mean the milk—you’ve got to go and milk the animal. And the eggs—you’ve got to find the eggs. And if you want to go to the garden and pick what you need, I mean it’s all work to get what you need. And when you think about all the things that they go through the day of just taking care of survival, it’s a lot of stuff. And then you’re tired at the end of the day and you sleep. I mean it’s really that simple. If you work a lot during the day and you’re physically tired, you’ll sleep really well.

People don’t exercise enough also and that makes it difficult for them to sleep. And if their bodies aren’t really tired and their minds are just stressed out, then they’ll be lying in bed unable to fall asleep and then they look at the clock and think, “Oh, my God. If I don’t get to sleep, I’m going to be tired all day tomorrow,” which adds to their stress. I mean it’s just a sick culture. That’s why my website is KillerCulture.com. We talk about all the ways the culture is killing people. Sleep problems are a symptom of many, many things. It’s not just a simple “Take a warm toddy before you go to sleep” or “Have a warm bath,” but those might help. You’ve got to try… Raise your bed, de-stress your life, examine your life because the thoughts that are going on in your head in the middle of the night aren’t going to go away unless you change your life, and those might be keeping you awake. I mean people have to live with their conscience too and a lot of people are not happy with themselves and with what they’re doing with their lives or what their children are doing or what their parents are doing, and it keeps them awake and those are sleep issues. They really are. So in a way, sleep represents… To sleep a good night’s sleep is a sign that you’re healthy and happy.

Justin: I love it.

Sydney: And if you’re not having a good night’s sleep, you’d better look at your life and take it a step at a time to try to eliminate the things that are messing you up. And you know if it’s psychological because if you’re honest with yourself you’ll know it. And if it’s physiological, like you’re feeling stressed out and you can’t sleep, it could be the drugs you’re taking, it could be a side effect of prescription medications, it could be the caffeine, it could be the chocolate, the soft drinks that you didn’t know had caffeine in it, it could be all sorts of… Look at your diet and try to eliminate those things. Try to meditate. Calm your mind down and all of that. And then raise your bed and that’ll help your brain not get too pressurized and will help you be fresher in the morning. So that’s just part of the puzzle. But the other part for sleep—good sleep—I mean that’s like saying, “How do you be healthy?” I mean there’s a lot that goes into it.

Justin: Yeah, it’s really about building an entire life around the very things that are important to us.

Sydney: Yes.

Justin: I know we’re kind of rounding out this show and we’re kind of coming to an end here, but one last question I have for you—do you find that you have dreams? Do you dream a lot?

Sydney: Oh yeah. Sometimes more than others. Yeah. Why do you ask?

Justin: Well, I was just curious if that’s a sign of being in a deep, restful night’s sleep, if there is something to that.

Sydney: Well, sometimes I think you dream more. Some people dream more in the morning, when you could be getting up already, and if you stay in bed you start having lucid dreams where you’re half awake and you can do all sorts of stuff. I mean I don’t know. I think if you’re dreaming, I mean that has psychological dimensions too. I mean dreams—you’re opening up another can of worms here on dreams.

Justin: Right, right. I know. It’s hard to do at the last bit of the show, but I was just curious if there was something to it.

Sydney: As long as they’re not bad dreams. I mean if they’re bad dreams, then you’d better look at yourself because your mind is trying to talk to you. I think dreams have significance, but how to interpret them and all of that, that’s a whole other story and I’m not by any means an expert on that. But dreaming is a normal thing, but the kind of dreams you have could be important to tell you aspects of your life that you need to look at.

Justin: Wow. Interesting. It’s good. It’s so interesting because I like your approach where you were talking about changing people’s lives based around something that we spend a third of our lives around, and it’s not so simple as to take a pill or to just stop eating a certain food. I mean it really goes into a deeper thing. I love the work that you’re doing. Are you working on any new projects here, coming up in the future?

Sydney: Well, one of the things we’re working on now is with the thyroid and vibration, using your voice—that vibrates the thyroid—and that’s something that medicine doesn’t recognize, even though I found out that it was recognized by ancient Ayurvedic medicine, and they knew that for the thyroid you should chant and a specific time for chanting to stimulate the thyroid and that’s because it’s on your voice box and as you talk, you’re basically giving yourself a thyroid massage. And if you under stimulate the thyroid by not talking enough, you can get hypothyroid and if you over stimulate it by yelling too much, you could get transient hyperthyroidism and damage your thyroid all over. So you’ve got to… So we’re looking at the use of voice and how our culture affects all of that because you look at deaf mutes who have never… They don’t talk very much and by the time these kids—who are deaf mutes—by the time they reach puberty, they’re all on medication for low thyroid. And people who overuse their thyroids, like people who scream a lot, they’ll end up getting thyroid disease—hyperactive thyroid—because they’re just blowing their… There are actually occupational injuries by too loud of noise. People who work in factories where there is big banging, that actually can cause thyroid damage because your thyroid has like a gel substance in it that holds thyroxin and it has a resident frequency with vibrations and it vibrates with it, so that’s why nature put it on your voice box.

But medical science only thinks about the hormones involved with the brain and the feedback loop with the brain, so we’re looking at this mechanical issue and trying to get people with high and low thyroid to contact us and try self-studies of changing the way they vocalize and either speak more or less, sing, chant, give your voice a break. Even massaging your thyroid you can release thyroxin, so we’re looking into that kind of thing, as well as our other ongoing self-studies on… I’m really still very big with the bras and breast cancer and that’s actually getting around more and more. It’s like snowballing constantly and this year it’s gotten even bigger and it’s just a grassroots big thing that’s happening that women are finally liberating themselves from the constriction of the bra and their breast disease is going away and they feel so much better. It’s just so wonderful reading this women writing about it. You should check out the Facebook page I’m working with some women on. It’s called Free The Boobies.

Justin: Oh yeah. You know, I think we linked up to that on our last show. We’ll do that again, yeah.

Sydney: Yeah, it’s a good one, and so those are the things we’re working on. And the head elevation, which is in our book Get It Up! and which this show is about, and there are a lot of other ones. You should go to the website, KillerCulture.com and it gives you all these different self-studies that you can do to try different lifestyle changes and see what it does to you. Your body is your guide, so it’s just a matter of just tuning in and trying different things and seeing if these changes make you feel better, and then you know you’re improving your health. So it’s just lifestyle changes.

Justin: Oh, I love it. I love it. We love the work that you do, so thank you so much for all that you do and your books and your work and your comprehensive and exhaustive approach to these seemingly “smaller problems” in our lives. It’s really great and an honor to have you on.

Sydney: Well, thanks. It’s a pleasure being with you guys and I’m glad you’re spreading the word because ultimately, we’ve got to put the medical industry… They should be a small part of our culture’s financial burden. It shouldn’t be that we spend so much money on treating and detecting disease. We have to prevent it by changing the way we live. And unfortunately, the culture is invested in the way we live that’s causing disease, so that’s the problem, you know? We’re dealing with telling people to do things that the culture is opposing because it frees you and liberates you from the cycle of disease that medicine profits from and that industries that create the products and services that are making us sick want us to keep doing. So it’s all up to us as individuals and to be empowered to do the right things, and that’s why we have KillerCulture.com. It’s all free and we’re a nonprofit and the goal is to try to just make this a better world.

Justin: I love it.

Kate: Amen, Syd Singer.

Justin: Couldn’t have said it better myself. Thank you, Syd, for being on the show and enjoy the rest of your day out in Hawaii today.

Sydney: Hey, you too. Thank you.

Justin: Okay, thanks Syd.

Kate: Bye-bye.

Sydney: Bye-bye.

Justin: Wow. So Mr. Syd Singer. That was a pretty interesting show, wasn’t it?

Kate: Gosh, sleep has so much to it. That’s how I feel every time I’m done with a Daniel Vitalis interview. It’s like you never knew there could be so much information on just one subject, and I feel like we just, again, scratched the surface. I want to have him on again.

Justin: I know. He’s pretty interesting. KillerCulture.com is his website. I feel like he does such a great job in bringing such simple concepts and A, making them interesting, but really fleshing them out and opening them up to really see how much there is to talk about. Like you said with sleep, I mean you think, “Oh, this is no big deal,” but I really liked his comprehensive approach and it wasn’t like taking a pill, like a sleep pill, but he talked about diet and lifestyle and structure in your life so there’s no stress, and how it’s beneficial for us to turn the lights down.

Kate: Well, properly preparing your body for something that you take a third of your life to do seems to make sense. Yeah, dimming the lights… I mean not only getting ready and preparing to go to sleep by calming down, by doing all these things, but also then preparing your actual body in the bed, in a position that makes sense to get not only the most benefit out of your sleep position and the way that you’re going to get the most benefit from the sleep, but also to not crush certain organs and things like he was talking about and not to cause deformities of our bodies. It’s like a twofold very strange concept to me.

Justin: I know. And once again, we’re not taught anything about sleep at school and it’s a third of our entire life, but we don’t learn anything about sleep. I mean it’s so funny, you know?

Kate: You’re right.

Justin: It’s such an important part of our life. We can’t not sleep, yet we probably go through twelve years of schooling and don’t even learn one thing about how to get a good sleep. I mean it’s just so strange. But I really like… I think of what he was talking about and even our whole life, as… You know those EKG waves of your heart that go up and down and they peak and then they go down? I feel like that’s the way our days should go. Like where we have our biggest meal at the peak of the day, which is right in the center of the day, like 12:00 or 1:00, and we might want to consider doing our most strenuous exercise. And as the day continues to progress, we slowly wind down and slowly wind down, and do less and less things.

Kate: I agree with that because I think that the times that I get the worst sleep are when I go, go, go and I get to the high point and then all of a sudden you try to go to sleep. I used to have no winding down period. I really feel like personally, the thing that has helped us the most—besides the more recent elevation of our bed, which is helping my sinuses and things like that, like I mentioned… I mean I really am getting a better sleep, but I feel like the candlelight is hands down the thing that has calmed me down the most.

Justin: That’s huge, isn’t it?

Kate: Yeah. I mean we have all those LED candles that go on and they’re on a timer, so they go on when the sun goes down and they stay on and by the time we go to bed they just kind of turn themselves off, but I mean room to room… There are some in our bathroom, there are some in our bedroom, there are some in the living room and our studio is basically candlelit.

Justin: Yeah, we have a salt lamp in here and then we have another candle that we put on.

Kate: So I feel like it’s very abrasive to go into a lighted room. Like if I didn’t set something out right in the bedroom and I need to turn the light on, it’s like “Oh…” It takes away from everything I just tried to do in order to lead myself to the better sleep.

Justin: Yeah, for me too. The same thing is going on with… I wear the blue light glasses and I’ll wear those and along with the Flux thing.

Kate: The Flux Capacitor?

Justin: 1.21 gigawatts of power? No, but I wear those at night and it really does help. It blocks out the blue light and I just think it’s really important. I wish we had talked a little bit more about dreams.

Kate: Yeah. That’s a fascinating subject.

Justin: Yeah, if you get a good sleep you’re going to dream, but I don’t remember my dreams at all. I wish I did.

Kate: Sometimes you do. We’ve talked about a few of them.

Justin: Yeah. You know what? The other day—last night—I had a dream and I told you. We were in line buying ice cream. I don’t know why that…

Kate: Why that stuck with you? I know why. It’s because we’ve been obsessed with that new ice cream—the coconut bliss.

Justin: That’s true.

Kate: I feel like what’s really helped me though too is doing the sauna at night.

Justin: Because that’s a very relaxed…

Kate: It really winds me down.

Justin: Yeah. It’s very relaxing to do that. And I try to do my rebounding during the day now.

Kate: Yeah, and that wakes me up. I’ve been trying to do that first thing in the morning on an empty stomach.

Justin: You jump up and down and that really helps to wake up and…

Kate: Well, and then the BioMat just lays us all out. Like we’re out… Within 15 minutes usually of being on that, if I don’t get up at that moment, I am toast.

Justin: You’re done.

Kate: You’ve woken up like two hours later on that thing.

Justin: And I’ll do it and I’ll think, “Oh, it’s 10:00. I’m going to go to bed. I’ll lay on the BioMat for 20 minutes” and I’ll wake up an hour and a half later; it’s almost midnight.

Kate: That’s wild. Then it’s a bummer though because you have to restart your sleeping process. You have to get up and then you have to brush your teeth and then get into bed and then you’re awake. But I don’t know. It seems to change. Even if you have to fall asleep like that and then wake up and… You’re usually pretty tired and then you can go right back.

Justin: Yeah. That’s funny though because I asked him about the polyphasic sleep and that’s an interesting concept. A lot of people are doing that and I first learned about that…

Kate: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’d never heard of that before.

Justin: …from a guy named Steve Pavlina, and you may want to look into him—StevePavlina.com—and he’s got a whole series of polyphasic sleeping cycles and it’s really…

Kate: Is that kind of a new concept?

Justin: No, it’s been around for a long time. People have been doing it. You can read. I think he did it for 30 days. He does these 30-day experiments on his website and he’ll try something, like he’ll do raw food for 30 days or he’ll do some speed-reading thing for 30 days and see what kind of results he has, and then he’ll do a… I’m not sure if he does a daily blog post or a weekly blog post, documenting his journey with whatever thing he’s trying out. And so he did this whole thing on polyphasic sleep. I don’t know why people do it. I think they do it because it allows them to be more productive. I don’t know. It’s just a really interesting thing. It doesn’t sound very appealing to me. I wouldn’t want to sleep catnaps throughout the day. I love sleeping.

Kate: That would take some intense training to try to get your body to become okay with that because right now that’s not even a possibility. I can’t even take a nap in the middle of the day. I just can’t turn my mind off, which maybe that’s because I’m not as far along in my journey as other people who have their control over their mind. So far the thoughts that stick out to me are a few things, but I feel like I really like the fact that he said—just like a reminder—of “Don’t pressure yourself to think you need a certain amount of hours.”

Justin: I like that.

Kate: That stresses me out. I mean that alone makes me not sleep. You know how we got ready to go on that trip last week, and just knowing…? Any time that I know I have to wake up at a certain hour and I have to get to bed at a certain hour, that just ruins it, and then I’m just ruined for like two days.

Justin: And that’s just a story we’ve told ourselves, isn’t it?

Kate: Right.

Justin: And we can let go if we want.

Kate: And all we have is now. Let go.

Justin: We don’t have to believe it.

Kate: Right. Plus… Yeah, you’re right. And the other thing I actually stopped doing just recently—probably in the last month—is that if and when I get up to go to the restroom once during the night, I come back and I refuse to look at my clock. I have it blocked out by a book.

Justin: Oh, that is so stressful.

Kate: Because the minute you look, you’re like… It’s dark and you think, “Okay, it’s probably only like 1:00. I’ll have like five more hours” and you just go right back to bed, but the minute you look and it’s like 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning…

Justin: And then you start calculating.

Kate: You’re screwed.

Justin: Right? You’re like “Oh, I’ve got three hours left or two hours. What’s the point?” and think, “Oh, if I get up now, I can get so much done” and then…

Kate: And rarely can I really go back to sleep.

Justin: Do you ever do this, where you get a sleep and then you wake up and you feel good and you feel like “Okay, the story I’ve told myself is I need eight hours,” and then you say, “Okay, I feel pretty good,” but there’s something inside you that says, “I don’t know if I got a full eight hours sleep or not.” And you feel really good and you feel like you got nine hours, you know? You feel really good. And then you think back and you calculate, “Okay, what time did I go to bed? Okay, and what time did I wake up?” and then you realize…

Kate: It was only six hours, five hours.

Justin: It’s only six hours. And then you think, “Darn. I’ve sabotaged myself.”

Kate: It just ruined everything.

Justin: Then all of a sudden you feel tired, just because you had that thought. Isn’t that weird?

Kate: Yeah. No, that happens to me too.

Justin: And then sometimes I’ll snap back into it and say, “Oh, I feel great.” Like this happens to me a lot. Whenever I don’t get a good sleep or a lot of sleep, I’m tired, and this is the weirdest thing. I’ll be tired most of the day if I sleep five or six hours or something, but then it’s on a day… Let’s say it’s on a day I go to the gym, right? And typically, if I don’t get a good sleep, I can’t lift heavy weight. I don’t have that extra little juice in me to push hard weight or push a lot of weight. I can go to the gym and kind of go through the motions, but to really have that extra energy to kind of go for it, I don’t have that. And so if I get to the gym, I kind of forget about my sleep. I feel like “Okay, I feel pretty good,” you know? And I don’t really think about it. And then I’ll be three quarters of the way through my workout and realize, “Okay, I did bench-press, I did squats, I did something else, and I really lifted heavy.” And I’ll be three quarters of the way through my workout and think, “Crap. I didn’t sleep well last night. I’m not supposed to have this much energy. I’m not supposed to be doing this.”

Kate: And you tell yourself a story.

Justin: And then all of a sudden I get tired and I’m thinking, “Oh, I’ll just cut out in the last couple exercises and I’ll just go home.” But it’s almost like as soon as I remember I didn’t get to sleep, I become tired. Isn’t that weird? That’s so strange.

Kate: Mm-hmm. That’s pretty wild.

Justin: Who knows, right?

Kate: Yeah. I do have to say—this might be poking fun at you…

Justin: Uh-oh.

Kate: When I first met you, up until probably even three years ago, in my head I would laugh at you and your family…

Justin: My family?

Kate: Yeah, I’m bringing them into it. Because…

Justin: What did we do?

Kate: You guys seemed to be so obsessed with talking about how you slept. Every conversation I would hear, “Hey, how did you sleep?” and then on the other line it would be silence and then “Oh yeah. How did you sleep?” “Oh, not so good. How about you?” and then you’d talk about your sleep for like the first five minutes. And then your dad would get on the phone—“How did you sleep?” and then “How did you sleep?” and then you guys would just talk about how much you sleep and how bad you slept or how good you slept or… Everything revolved around sleep and I’m like “I’ve never heard people talk about their sleep so much.” Like “What is your deal?”

Justin: Wow.

Kate: So you’ve always valued sleep. I don’t know if you knew that, but I used to actually kind of make fun of you behind your back to my friends like “This family is so obsessed with talking about their sleep.”

Justin: Really?

Kate: Yep. You can ask my friends.

Justin: Cat’s out of the bag now.

Kate: I know. Sorry.

Justin: I won’t tell you what I told my friends about you.

Kate: Oh, whoa. Thanks.

Justin: No problem. Any time. No, that’s weird. Yeah, maybe it is some sort of an obsession we have.

Kate: Yeah, so Syd Singer is your best friend right now.

Justin: Yeah, right?

Kate: You found somebody who loves talking about sleep just as much as you guys.

Justin: Yeah. No, it’s good stuff. I love it.

Kate: I love it. And you know I’m… I’m serious, but I also think it’s really endearing that you have always loved talking about sleep.

Justin: It’s pretty funny, huh?

Kate: Yeah.

Justin: Good thing neither of us snore though. I’ll tell you that.

Kate: Oh gosh. I was on the plane… You heard him.

Justin: Oh, I heard Mr. Snorey-Guy.

Kate: Mr. Snorester. He would not stop.

Justin: No.

Kate: He was out from the minute we sat down, ten minutes before we took off, and snored probably for the first two hours.

Justin: I don’t think I ever saw him… I think I just saw him there and when we got up to leave he was still snoring. I don’t think I ever saw him doing anything other than snoring.

Kate: I thought at one point he’d actually wake up when I said out loud to you “I think he needs Breathe Right strips.” But he didn’t hear me.

Justin: No, he was…

Kate: He was out.

Justin: He was out.

Kate: That was pretty funny. But yeah, thank God we don’t have snoring problems. That’s a whole other… You know, we need to talk to somebody about snoring.

Justin: I know, right?

Kate: Because we need to talk about sleep apnea and snoring and things that…

Justin: Well, Syd Singer talks about sleep apnea and glaucoma and things and about raising the bed to combat that, but yeah

Kate: Yeah. I really do want to talk about the snoring thing.

Justin: And I think it’s interesting too—we didn’t get a chance to talk about this—breathing through your nose rather than your mouth.

Kate: Oh, right.

Justin: And I have kind of put together this concept—this idea—that breathing through your nose while you sleep can cause cancer.

Kate: What?

Justin: Yeah.

Kate: Really?

Justin: That’s just my own thought. I have no idea if it’s true.

Kate: You made that up?

Justin: I made it up, and here’s why. If you breathe through your nose, you’re not allowing your saliva, which carries your immune system and white blood cells…

Kate: Oh, I remember this now.

Justin: …to get to your teeth, right? So if you have any plaque or any food particles left on your teeth at night, you’re drying out your mouth because you’re breathing through your mouth, and so you’re not allowing all of the natural immune cells from your saliva to coat your teeth and to combat any bacteria. So you end up getting a cavity, which is not a big deal, but if you let that cavity go, it becomes a root canal, and root canals are associated with cancer and heart disease.

Kate: You know, I actually do remember you saying that and at first I wondered where you were going with that, but I think there’s a little leg to stand on there.

Justin: I’m sticking to it. That’s my theory. No idea if it’s true, but there you go.

Kate: Well, I think it kind of makes sense, so…

Justin: So sleeping with your mouth open causes cancer. That’s a bit of a jump, but we’ll go with it.

Kate: Just in your opinion. We’re not claiming anything.

Justin: So Syd Singer’s website is KillerCulture.com and you can check out his book and we have links to that, and his shows that he has done on our website are Episode 188, which is this show. If you have any questions or comments about anything we talked about, you can go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/188 and you can make comments and read eventually the transcript and check out his books and website, show notes—all that stuff—on Episode 188. And he’s also been on Episode 162 and 119, so those were the three episodes we’ve done with Syd, if you’re interested in more information from him.

Kate: And who doesn’t love that guy? He’s just really easy to talk to.

Justin: He’s great.

Kate: Not only do I love who he is as a person, but also I love that I can hear his birds chirping in the background. It sounds like he’s just in paradise over in Hawaii.

Justin: I know. He’s like Ace Ventura over there, isn’t he? In the jungle or something.

Kate: It sounds so peaceful.

Justin: I picture him like Ace Ventura, with all the animals around him.

Kate: Just flocking.

Justin: You can hear all that stuff.

Kate: Birds on his shoulders. Yeah, I mean I love those interviews we have with people that live in the islands because it just sounds… I mean it sounds peaceful over there.

Justin: It’s funny because when we come back from a commercial, we’ll come back on and usually I have the guest muted during the commercial so that none of their sounds come through, and

Kate: But we’re hearing it.

Justin: Yeah, we hear it and so when I come back and we’ll put it back on, the first thing I hear is those frogs in the background. It just sounds so peaceful, doesn’t it?

Kate: I know. Yeah, check out Syd Singer. He’s amazing.

Justin: He’s doing good work. KillerCulture.com and all of his books are linked up on our website, Episode 188, and I think that’s about it. Time to go make a smoothie here.

Kate: And check out the Free The Boobies Facebook page. That’s always a good one. We’re going to put a link to it, but since we had him on last time that was something I was interested in. It’s worth checking out.

Justin: So thanks, everybody, for joining us on this episode. If there’s ever anything we can do for you, please let us know. Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook at ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Facebook. Click the “like” button. And also don’t forget to sign up to our newsletter list. You can get show updates and a really amazing, great e-book called Lessons From The Miracle Doctors, 177 pages. It sells in physical form on Amazon for $20, but we’ll send it to you for free and you can read that on your Kindle, you can read it on your iPad—anything like that—tons of great information about cleansing, detoxification and specific protocols for cleaning your body and getting healthy and gaining more energy. Good, good stuff. So we’ll give that to you for free if you sign up at ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Subscribe. And if you guys can, if you could forward this show to anyone who you think might benefit from this show…

Kate: Anyone who sleeps, perhaps?

Justin: Anybody who sleeps. Think of people in your life that sleep. There might be one or two of them. But we would be so grateful if you would do that. You can share it if you have Facebook or there are links on this show page at the very top of all of our posts. There are social media links—Twitter and Facebook—and you can share it that way.

Kate: I really like that. If you or anyone you know who sleeps…

Justin: Spends time sleeping…

Kate: I love that

Justin: Yeah, so they might be interested. If you could forward this link on to them any way possible, we would be so grateful because all of our shows are free. We don’t charge anything. We just take donations and sell products in our store and so that’s kind of how we support everything here. So if you could do that, we would be so grateful and that’s all we ask of you, if you could do it.

Kate: Have a great sleep tonight.

Justin: Yeah, have a great sleep tonight.

Kate: I know I am

Justin: We plan on it every night.

Kate: And then we can talk about it all day long with your family.

Justin: We can talk about it with my family tomorrow. Oh, man. All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

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No material on this blog is intended to suggest that you should not seek professional medical care. Always work with qualified medical professionals, even as you educate yourself in the field of life through nutrition and alternative medicine. I’m not a doctor, nor am I offering readers or listeners medical advice of any kind. None of the information offered here should be interpreted as a diagnosis of any disease, nor an attempt to treat or prevent any disease or condition. While information in this blog and during this podcast is discussed in the context of numerous conditions, it can be dangerous to take action based on any of the information on this podcast or in this blog or to start any health program without first consulting a health professional. The content found here is for informational purposes only and is in no way intended as medical advice, as a substitute for medical counseling or as a treatment or cure for any disease or health condition and nor should it be construed as such. Always work with a qualified health practitioner or professional before making any changes to your diet, prescription drug use, lifestyle or exercise activities. The information is provided as-is and the reader or listener assumes all risks from the use, non-use or misuse of this information.