The Quality of your Sleep isn't just about personal well-being; it's the unsung hero of your relationships. Discover how your rest affects communication, empathy, and overall harmony with those you love. Explore the unique connection between sleep and the health of your Relationships for a more fulfilling bond these some Couples Therapy.
What Quality of My Sleep Impacts The Health of My Relationships
Nutrition expert Sean Stevenson here with my amazing co-host and producer Jay Darrell what's up Jay let's have shine how are you today I am stoked emphatic stoking fatty yes what is it emphatically stoked to be here today me too me too so good to see you as usual be always brighten up my day yes everybody Wow let me tell you guys got a fantastic show lined up for you today we're going to be talking about really taking a deep dive in on how the health of your sleep deeply impacts the relationships in your life all right this could be your professional relationships your intimate relationships the relationships with your kids and family and as I've mentioned many times on the show before truly believe and I've seen this clinically that the most influential factor on your health and the success in your life is deeply tied the number one factor in my opinion my professional opinion is the quality of your relationships alright and having sucky sleep we'll just call it sucky sleep the way someone says did you get up on the wrong Okay it's a real thing origin and so this there's a lot of really interesting science behind what are we talking about today and what the research shows and how we're showing up in our relationships and in our lives when we're sleep-deprived is just absolutely shocking and of course, we're going to provide some great strategies so we're going to talk about sleep quality in regards to relationships with a sign that says we're going to cover what's happening with the brain when you're sleep deprived and valuable tips for improving your sleep specifically when you're sleeping in the bed with another human body because as you know when you get into a relationship and you begin sleeping in the bed with another person it is grounds for really interesting phenomena as you meet somebody's sleep alter ego you know it's so it's like I get to meet the real you so we're going to talk about some really specific strategies for addressing that all things ranging from breathing issues too snoring too restless legs you know but first before we get into the content for today I want to talk about something really really important guys and that is Sleep Smarter my new book Sleep Smarter is coming out March 15 nationwide to bookstores everywhere and also of course you can get it online and I am beyond excited the upgraded extended edition of the book and it is just loaded with so much valuable content we're diving in and talking about nutrition as related to sleep in a really deep and profound way we're talking about how movement and body work is related to sleep we're talking about some really interesting components that are often left out of the conversation when related to sleep health and how it affects every single part of our life from our work to our relationships like we're talking about today to our our body and our parents and so I'm beyond excited about this and I want to make sure that you do not miss out at all on getting this book for yourself and for the people that you care about so our bonuses that we're giving away this book it there absurd let me just be clear it's absurd and look at you I wanted to take all aspects of any type of excuses off the table just by pre-ordering one copy of the book you're gonna get a $25 gift card to thrive market that's basically like free food all right let's give me giving you twenty-five dollars to go and spend at your favorite natural food store you know and this can be used for personal care items household cleaning products and of course for food you know non-GMO organic all that good stuff so right there covers the cost of the book alright so that's just for pre-ordering one copy if you preorder more than one copy of different book bundles you're going to start to get some upgrades some serious upgrades things like we're giving away free bottles of the ease magnesium that I'm such a huge fan of and we did a whole show really dedicated to that and that's 30 bucks right there and we're giving away tangible real things you can hold not some flimsy here are 17 PDFs that don't matter you know like you might see out there with a lot of book launches and have nothing to do with the book itself you know but actually talk about this particular magnesium in the book and it's also part of one of the big upgrades in the book is there's a 14-day sleep makeover program about making sure that you have this for that so and then there's greater packages and we're giving away something from our sponsor on it which we got to give a special shout out to them their product new mood which just so happened and this is before I even knew what was in that product many of the compounds that I talk about in relationship to sleep health nutrition specifically all right so key nutrients that can help to build hormone pathways are in New mood and just so happen and I talked with those guys like hey we got the book launch coming up because you guys do for my audience and so we're giving away some bottles of that as well and there's even one package is like ultimate package whereby getting this specific book bundle and this is just for the top players out there you're going to be able to attend a mastermind lunch with myself and people like dr. Sara Gottfried the author New York Times bestselling author of The Hormone Cure she actually wrote the foreword for the new version of Sleep Smarter which is just a huge honor Mike Dolce MMA trainer of the year I think he's just won his third award for that stuff Gaudreau is stupid easy paleo Jim Quick all right accelerated learning expert it's going to be amazing all right and there's some other people that are in the mix now we're trying to pin everybody down exactly is going to be there but I'm telling you it is just I'm incredibly
excited but regardless even if you're not a part of that just by you get into but one book exactly even if it is if the book isn't enough I want to take all excuses out of the way and make sure that you get yourself a copy and especially just even upgrading and get some copies for the people you care about right other people that you got to deal with it you need to sleep hey take this and we'll talk later and so head over to sleep smarter book calm and I promise you it's gonna blow you away which you actually see there and grab your copies pre-order your books today get going today you don't want to miss this I appreciate you so much so we're going to go ahead and get started but first really quickly I want to get into the iTunes review of the week alright this is love from dr. ish Eva's Wow informational and inspirational five stars I stumbled upon this podcast about two months ago and have been hooked I've
I'm talking about rich shout to people who know so there's also a decrease in activity in the frontal and insular cortex and these are the more quote higher order parts of your brain that responsible for distinguishing between right and wrong for problem solving and most importantly for accurately assessing conditions to create appropriate responses so this is like the bridge between your emotional reaction your primitive survival reaction and actually what's coming out of your mouth yeah i think the reflex when you're sleep deprived that barrier starts to break down and you think it you say it right or do it and this excess activity in the amygdala and reduce activity in the higher order areas of the brain is the foundational science behind why sleep loss leads to increase negative mood and decrease abilities to regulate those moods that's key now since the amygdala is taking over its primary concern is survival yeah alright this is very very important to understand this very primitive part of your brain is only concerned about survival of self and this means it's going to automatically have a greater lean towards selfishness and personal concern rather than quote putting yourself in someone else's shoes which is key to any relationship having having real fruitful results or having any kind of coherence or rapport you have to be
Able to see from the other person's point of view but you're depriving yourself you're handicapping yourself to be able to even do that when you're sleep deprived now as I was looking deeper into the research and what I discovered is so interesting and it's actually really very sobering so Matthew Walker who's a neuroscientist at the University of California Berkeley and his colleagues had 26 healthy volunteers to get normal sleep or get sleep deprived making them stay awake for roughly 35 hours the following day the researchers scanned their brain activity in the volunteers using an fMRI and that's functional magnetic resonance imaging while the volunteers were viewing 100 different images they started off with emotionally neutral images things like spoons or a basket and over time they begin to have increasingly negative tone for instance like pictures of attacking sharks or people being hurt alright or vipers you know like really intense photos like that while they're getting their brain scanned and what Walker found out was that while they predicted this is what he said while we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact to sleep deprivation we didn't predict they overreact as much as they did oh wow they became more than sixty percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli that's a whopping increasing the emotional parts of the brain just seemed to run a monk see okay my question would have been well how much of a big deal because you know we deal with fluctuations late but then for it to be that great of a number exactly is kind of frightening yeah exactly so we're automatically going to be overreacting okay everything is going to be overly emotional automatically when you're when you're tired and sometimes because you're in it you don't realize that you're doing it it's very difficult to see that and to break the pattern that's another thing that they found out is that the negative emotions tend to stay around longer alright that cooling off of those parts of the brain took longer time so what this goes back to is that when you're sleep-deprived we tend to overreact experience more negative emotions like anger depression fear okay in relationship to the pictures of the the stabbing right right I wonder if
Anybody just like leaped up out of their their God Oh so a picture of a shark attacking you know you could put in perspective when you're when you're not sleep depriving your your normal self but seeing that it automatically because the amygdala is concerned with in its very primitive part of your brain pictures are real like you see it and it's just like that is a threat and it categorizes that as a threat however your higher order function of your brain can say hey this is just a picture chill out right go easy it's not a big deal the toilet roll was over we don't have to have this conversation right somebody hung the hangers up left-handed they hung it up inside a set outside so these negative emotions like anger depression fear and because of the lack of activity in the frontal cortex and insular cortex we basically suck at problem solving and making things better and this is really a recipe for disaster and for me so just to kind of pre just give a little preview of what our lives can look like when someone is well rested they are likely to be better able to clarify whether or not they're being criticized and not Rover yeah yeah all right but when you're tired when you're sleep deprived any type of criticism can immediately put you on alert like why would you say that what do you mean you know instead of like oh that's interesting can you know tell me more
Like your your response to actually find out well they didn't mean that they were just saying you know I don't know your pants you they might have said hey those pants look great what do you mean they look great my pants yesterday didn't look great you know what do you mean just because I wear tights all the time doesn't mean that my pants won't look great when I put some jeans on you know instead of just saying oh wow thank you glad you notice you know whatever the case may be but these are some funny examples but you know real world examples that you've had where when you're tired just being emotionally thrown into stuff and over-reactive when people might say things that might not sit well with you you're going to be much more likely to react another big issue when people are well rested their likely better able to keep things like traffic and dirty dishes in perspective all right and I've seen for example i'm probably going to be sharing things about my relationship with my wife today but i've seen like when she's tired and then there's dishes it's not a good look she is just like you know life is over you know but it really is just those are just some dishes is gonna be okay but when you're tired yeah and also traffic obviously that's a big big culprit you know just instead of enjoying the podcast and just understanding like traffic's going to happen or like you know this is just giving the opportunity to think about things that you know I want to improve in my life or whatever the case may be you see evidence more you can have the positive angle more easily to grasp versus when you're sleep-deprived it's just like everything is on high alert and everybody's just stupid and everything's okay so also another thing when you're well-rested you're likely better able to have patience with kids and adults who act like kids well they're okay I have a confession yeah this is my confession yesterday yes you know and again all of us especially you know if your parent grandparent or even anybody's watch kids you've had that experience of definitely when you're tired it is a little bit more difficult or if not a lot more difficult to have patience and then patients with tire children because they are people that experience it too absolutely even though they know I'm in
Little that's legendary they actually not hesitate all right you know when their sleep deprived oh yeah they gonna let you know but then they're against the nap right you know problem I try to tell these little kids like listen you're gonna be sad about these naps later you'll be like I don't know why I treated you so wrongly map when I was four return you know all right so it's important to keep in mind that sleep deprivation also dampens your ability to experience positive emotions okay so this is the other thing and so there's one study I looked at that show people who were more sleep deprived did not report increase positive effect after an achievement all right achieving something that they were working towards whereas people who had an adequate amount of sleep did feel happier after their achievement now we've seen that time time again especially with events people are planning they spend so much time getting ready or they're up all night getting ready for it then they have it and there's no joy you're exhausted weddings are big one weddings are huge vacations you've heard the term I need a vacation from my vacation you know yeah baby big presentations we've had to deal with that personally until we discovered oh yeah exactly you just said it yeah I'm so glad you brought that up because this is something that so many people are unknowingly you were robbing ourselves of happiness you know we don't even know it because we're tired and not structuring our life so we're getting optimal sleep so we can enjoy the good things in our life that we're working towards you know funny example stay up all night to get tickets be the one to get the first edition of whatever this is the latest model of whatever so you camp out and if you have no real way to fully indulge it in it right yeah right it's so many concert I
Slept in the tent you know I was like sleeping on a tape we're not in the forest I'm gonna tent on Fifth Avenue Fifth Avenue by the pizza hut to get these tickets and now i don't i'm not even pumped about it alright so psychologist amy gordon PhD says that someone who was sleep deprived is more likely to be a ticking time bomb possibly reacting automatically without the capacity to stop and think it through air traffic control and again this goes back to the research that affirms all of this one study tracked relationships and behavior over the course of two weeks and this is this is one that was really sobering for me what they found out was that the worst people slept the night before the more likely they reported fighting with their partner that day just one night so if they if they didn't sleep well the night before that day they're far more likely to have an argument with their partner okay right there so here's some facts and relationships that you know again I've seen firsthand when you're tired you'll argue over absolutely ridiculous things the kind of stuff you won't even remember what you were upset about days later not I mean even probably the next day like was it over the the dishes for example you know is it that's that's easier but was it over I dropped a quarter you know like it's just a quarter you know like really strange weird things you'll get upset about and I told you I didn't like those green pajamas yeah and you gave me green pajamas anyway hey you you likely won't make much sense to anybody with your problem except to yourself and you'll fight for the sake of fighting and that's the real issue that tends to happen when you're sleep deprived why again the primitive part of your brain is taking over never make a long-term decision on a temporary emotion you have to really guard against this never make a long-term decision on a temporary emotion you might say things and do things that you really don't mean simply because you're tired and we have to catch ourselves and be aware because they're they're going to be interested in your life where you do end up sleep-deprived but we want to make that in the minority not the majority we don't want to make that the exception not the rule can't be your xistence so when you are in fact when you know like hey I only got you know five hours sleep and there was not good sleep you know I again I slept on in a tent on fifth Street next to the pizza hut and now you're like you know what I'm just super I mean having this argument with my loved one my boyfriend girlfriend husband wife my parents my child neighbor and can realize was barking yeah and you can catch yourself like whoa I see what's going on here let me take a step back you know let me take a step back and reassess so if you mentioned five hours and I'm always trying to pin you to a number you won't ever get your number yeah what would and can you clarify what deprived means and how it varies let me let me echo and we're getting into that sea jeopardy this is the thing about you know were you good so in tracking this in the research these are the these are the different aspects that I looked at okay
So because there is no cookie cutter amount of sleep there any one person needs it's really about the sleep quality and getting proper sleep cycles you know being able to cycle through your non-rem sleep and your REM sleep properly to make sure your your body and your brain is fully recovered and your memory processing is getting done and that's what sleep smarter is really all about is the static condition in your favor so they took quality of your sleep is radically better you might get eight hours of sleep eight hours of time on that mattress but wake up feeling like a wreck right versus somebody you might get six hours of sleep and feel incredible and have energy all day so that's where you know that you've dipped into deprivation when you're missing those yeah these are some of the components so these are the different facets Oh quantity that does matter you know because chances are two hours sleep Isn't going to cut it you know but that's not the biggest factor it's just something to take into account so that's how long you sleep quality is how well you sleep alright and this is things like sleep latency and this is how long it takes you to fall asleep making sure your sleep isn't interrupted you know so not waking up after your sleep has right has has started disruption so how many times you wake up during the night is another
Factor to look at daytime dysfunction in by the way some of these things the disruptions you might not be consciously aware of things can pull you out of your normal sleep cycle but not wake you up consciously not fully bring you out of that sleep and so this can be things like sleep apnea you know if you're breathing pathway is cut off for just a half a second you might not wake up but your body's going to get pulled out of that state another issue is alcohol can start to mess up those sleep patterns and pull you out of the normal stages you should be in and that should dispel the idea that i need a nightcap in order to get it yeah and another thing is or I talked about I really willing to talk about alcohol is related to sleep because I'm not anti drinking right it's just how you do it like there's certain little things that you could do to totally change the game for yourself so you can enjoy a little sippy sip without being totally messed up with your sleep quality another thing to look at is daytime dysfunction and this is basically how tired you are the next day if you're falling asleep during the day chances are you didn't get high quality sleep at night because you're an adult well you know you're not a baby and your body's not going to be necessarily going into that downtime like you would normally do for a child you know our sleep patterns do evolve and change as we get older but you know a lot of people like that nap is so important for them during the day and chances are a lot of times they're sleep deprived they're not getting enough sleep in the first place but sometimes a good nap is a good nap and you know it is what it is create and get your Garfield on you know but what we're doing when we r go to sleep during the days we're forcing a melatonin secretion all right so that's yeah so again you're possibly throwing off your whole natural normal sleep cycle that's a whole nother subject so daytime dysfunction if you're tired during the day chances are your sleep wasn't that good and then we add all these things together to get a more clear picture of what sleep quality really looks like alright so in this again this is just some of the things or other factors to take into account all right it's here yeah alright so back to what we were talking about never make a long-term decision with the temporary emotion so we've got to guard ourselves against doing things saying things that we don't really mean and end up hurting ourselves and other people because we're sleep deprived you don't want to be ending up like Britney Spears when she got married to that guy in vegas for one day you know do you remember that guy I do what's his name I don't exactly nobody knows hey I looked it up actually it's Jason alexander so shout out if you're a fan tomorrow he'll show shout out to you man yeah I know you were sleep deprived yourself that's all good okay so this is what we gotta guard ourselves against and make sure they were getting high quality sleep so that were not being that person alright so people who reported sleeping ineffectively the earlier night experience less certain feelings and more gloomy feelings and were less ready to take their accomplices point of view
During conversations and this is goes back to the study we mentioned earlier both of which are harmful to the well-being and longevity of the relationship okay it's pretty clear and you certainly won't sleep well with that stress on your mind so true saha yes hey so we also looked at something that was really this is shocking right here this just and I got to actually see this firsthand recently so I also looked at whether people were affected by their
Partners sleep okay yeah it turns out and this is right ask me this is right in the research it turns out that whether or not you sleep well if your partner doesn't sleep well you also experience fewer positive emotions and more negative emotions and are less able to perspective take okay so when it comes to dealing with conflict if either partner doesn't get a good night's sleep then both partners in the relationship are going to be affected this is like it should put up a huge red flag for you to take and pay attention to even in pro wrestling they have classifications of every it might weights in different skills you know you're not if you're both not rested you're coming in at different classifications you go bringing it away wrestling into it you can say boxing or MMA rest because immediately my brain went to the WWF and I was like oh yeah rather great and I had no idea we're going to go with that but makes sense absolutely big says and I could tell you there were times when sleep-deprived with nuke new children yeah and then husband's not sleeping well I had some thoughts there were things I wanted to do to help him go to sleep and it's because of what kind I'll talk about I'll talk about this just in it just a second my personal story recently but participants in the study were found to most likely report resolving the conflict when both Partners were well rested and if either partnered slept poorly the previous night the fight was likely to not be resolved okay so once again this really just drills down and looks at the fact that when it comes to conflict resolution it takes to not just one poorly rested partner okay or one well rested partner it takes two people being them their their full self to be present all right or it's going to be like you're you might feel good but your Partner doesn't and some of the things that you can experience so just recently my wife actually stayed up because she was getting something together for a really really important program and it wasn't much I mean you know just couple hours later than normal but she's really been on a certain rhythm and just been rocking it out and so the next day uh what do we was it about see this is the thing like you don't even remember what the conflict is about but you know she
I remember what it was she wanted to do the dishes and it was my son's job you know my my 15-year-old son Jordan and and I was just like he's gonna do when he gets home she's like no I can't have it just sit here till the guitar I'm just like just relaxed we got it you know I said well your first mistake was telling a woman to relax oh of course that's a steak don't say the R word relax no don't say the R word but you know luckily she did she did remember that hey you know I'm just a little bit stress I'm a little bit under slept in today and she let us handle it you know so I put the dishes away he cleaned the dishes and everything was okay but later on in the day it was another small thing and you know we were talking about one thing but then she jumped right over to something from like weeks ago and you probably had this happen before guys where you start bringing up old stuff right uh-uh and stuff that's totally irrelevant from the situation at hand you know and this had to do with our daughter and so you see how it's funny how kids a huge be you know but again if you're showing up and you're irritated and tired it's going to be much more difficult to resolve really simple issues in relationships that everybody's going to have look what this creates though and what we can see how this can really change the landscape of families of relationships of marriages of the stats that we're seeing that have created such a disruptive state all over the place folks can't come to resolve and it may be because of deprivation hmm you just said it and it's this is something that is literally in it's like you don't know what you don't know it's one of those situations no one do some of the things that you do from that poor state of union we want to show up as their best self and we have to make sure that we're getting a great sleep that we all really need and helping our partners to do the same thing you know and she's been sleeping so well because I've been so adamant about her putting herself first event you know it's because she's one of them no it's been a graceful process because when we got together and I've said this on past episode you know she's the type of person she'd stay up till two o'clock in the morning you know even when we first began living together I'm sleeping and then I get up and you know and you know I'm like with the kids this when I was like ten years ago so my kids were smaller and they'd be like is she gonna wake up you know and so because this is were my two kids prior to us getting together and so we're all like hanging out we having breakfast and you know my wife is in the other room come on and it's thank you see you know but now today she's like our sleep health is just so on point that when she gets off
Of it like you really do notice so now like I was saying we have to make sure that our partners are getting great sleep too so I want to do things and stacked conditions in all of our favor not just mine to make sure that she gets great sleep at night because she deserves it and I also love how she shows up you know she's definitely easier to get along with as am i because let's be for real you know dealing with Shawn you know we're constantly pressing constantly grow let's go let's move it can't be easy some people like I would love that oh it's real joy we really a majority of the time you are you are you know share some of our no no it's an absolute joy so it's all of this thing comes much more pleasurable for everybody and you can again perspective take it's so important when I can see things from your perspective if we have some type of dissonance which is very rare because i love you i love you but if there's anything where we we just need to see things from the other person perspective it's very difficult you sleep deprived you know what else i see is that being able to help my partner now maybe chris had my husband hasn't listened to not a single podcast which i'm not gonna put him out there like that but if he were not aware of sleep smart or your partner isn't aware of that even affecting their life by stacking those conditions one for me and then for them i can also show up to be a better help and partner absolutely you just said it but this is why sleep smarter is so important why we get to books this is exactly what exact bundles this is why it's such an important book for our world today not only it is is it a huge catalyst for change in people's physiques your health your energy to optimize your sleep but it's really talking about in depth it's a catalyst for healing relationships for world peace we're improving our connection yeah right and for having more happiness in our lives because we actually slept better at night and when you just said that for world peace I just saw I think it was on Jimmy Fallon right a is super super funny guy but you know so sometimes I watch these little like tonight show clips on YouTube ok are you to see God yeah and he was interviewing hillary clinton i believe it was it was one of those talk shows was interviewing her she was talking about how sleep deprived she was when she was Secretary of State right and she was like everybody has just trashed and she's like trying to keep herself awake in there this big ambassador meeting whatever it's just like and she's like she's had to pinch herself and keep sticking her I'm just like and you're making decisions that right you know it's like that stuff is scary that's it is real and it's just happening all the time we can go from politics to you know public safety you know and I talked about this in depth in the book and how we've really displaced and haven't really cared for our firefighters are police officers are health experts air traffic controller our physicians are now nurses okay right so making sure like some of the people who are most important for the safety and health of our society they're not cared for as far as their sleep is concerned and a documented research showing that across the board you know it's radical incidents much higher incidents in the population of nurses who work overnight than the popular than the normal population itself all right and it's just it's them directly you shared some incredible testimonies there the lives that were changed by that adjustment but how difficult and challenging it was by living in that existence of that night shift that swing sure yeah we have to do better we have to put this into the consciousness of the public that we've got to change it we got to change the system it's not saying you know because of course we need people working overnight in different fields but to have a certain cycle that they can work on that versus like oh you've got to put in you don't have seniority so you got to put in 10 years working overnight where and I give some examples of strategy that would be more advantageous to the health of everybody but so tons of stuff in there but the bottom line is this is really about sleep smart as a catalyst for optimizing our sleep so that it can heal our relationships our bodies our connection and again having more happiness so he'll our planet now let's talk about some of the components of improving your sleep quality as it relates particularly to intimate relationships in your life now according to the NSF the quote walking tired are more likely to sit and seat in traffic jams and quarrel with other people sleep deprived people polled by the NSF and this is the National Sleep Foundation by the way we're task force we're also less likely than those who slept well to exercise okay again let me say this again sleep deprived people polled by the NSF were also less likely than those who slept well to exercise to eat healthfully to have sex and to engage in leisure activities because of their sleepiness so the sleep and sex connection is a big one it probably should jump out at you and we've actually talked about this quite a bit on the last episode and which will put in the show notes but just to touch on us again here no pun intended yeah part of a healthy intimate relationship is a good sex life and sleep has a huge connection to this first of all other absolutely first of all something that we've talked about a little bit on the past show was and something that definitely needs more attention is that one of the overlooked benefits of sex and orgasm is it has this incredible impact on your sleep quality and when you have an orgasm you're actually releasing a cocktail of clinically proven chemicals that helped enhance your sleep I'm actually right now I'm holding an advanced copy of sleep smarter this is the touching it the hardcover is what you guys are going to get when you pre-order the book but this is my advance copy I'm actually going to read right from the book and share this with you guys I was hoping you'd give us a sneak peek so I'm actually gonna read right from the book what's that chapter called now this is chapter 9 have a big oh alright and one of the compound so I dove in and talked about specific hormones and studies showing their efficacy for enhancing
