ScDavid Schmidt of LifeWave Discusses Getting Healthy Sleep

We’re hearing a lot these days about the importance of sleep and know that most of us aren’t getting enough of it.

David Schmidt of LifeWave recently sat down with us to discuss the importance of sleep and what science tells us about ways to get better sleep.

Why Sleep Is So Important

You’ve heard lots of explanations about why sleep is important. But at the end of the day, it comes down to the two primary states of your body, catabolism (breaking things down) and anabolism (building things up).

This is how the body repairs itself and why sleep is critical to health and wellness.

During catabolism, you break down nutrients from food into their components primarily through digestion. Then, in anabolism, you build healthy cells out of those components.

This anabolism happens almost exclusively while you’re asleep. So it’s critical to optimize sleep. That’s not too much or too little, but the right amount to maximize anabolic processes.

Most of us need 7–9 hours a day to accomplish this. But a lot of people struggle to achieve this.

Many turn to sleep medication, which isn’t solving the problem because it’s not addressing why you can’t sleep. The pineal gland and hypothalamus aren’t producing sleep-inducing hormones and regulating body functions as they should. So, yes, sleep is much more complex than just taking some melatonin.

How Sleep Supports Health

Sleep is preventative. Quality sleep can reduce your risk of developing numerous diseases and slow their progression. There are many reasons for this, but it certainly goes back to that anabolism that takes place while you sleep.

Your brain is doing the housekeeping, tidying up, and making sure everything is in working order. When you take this away, it affects how nerves function, communicate with each other and replenish.

As an example, sleep reduces the presence of beta-amyloid 2, a protein whose accumulation has been closely linked to Alzheimer’s. That’s housekeeping you don’t want to neglect.

Sleep also boosts your immune function. Melatonin, a hormone that healthy sleepers produce, strengthens your immune system and protects the brain and body.

The brain and nervous system regulate everything from managing stress to how sick you get when exposed to a virus. So if you’re not keeping the brain tidy, the rest of the body also suffers. That’s why Sleep deprivation and deficiency lead to numerous health problems.

The Impact of Sleep on the Individual

Let’s take an athlete as an example. When you’re not getting enough sleep to repair your body, you’re increasing the stress on the body. Your body produces more cortisol to compensate.

This may lead to trouble building muscle, increased injuries, poor mental focus, and a tendency to store body fat.

Now, let’s take this same athlete and make sure they’re getting enough sleep. They can now meet their fitness goals more efficiently while feeling less stressed doing it.

But what about the rest of us? Most of us aren’t pushing our bodies to the limit athletes do. A lot of us have desk jobs.

We need more mental focus, clarity, and performance to succeed. We’ve all seen those performance declines when we didn’t get a good night’s sleep.

We may compensate with excessive caffeine, but this raises cortisol and restricts melatonin. We can argue that caffeine in moderation is okay or even beneficial. But ideally, we should be running in our natural state.

Three Sleep Factors Define a Good Night’s Sleep

This isn’t just about getting more sleep. We need quality sleep. That comes down to three factors:

● Sleeping at the proper time

● Sleeping the optimal amount of time (not too long or too short)

● Sleeping deeply, going through all the sleep cycles effectively

We wake up refreshed with more balanced hormones, better body composition, and overall better health when we achieve these.

Ideal Sleep Conditions

To optimize sleep quality, we need an understanding of what type of environment promotes better sleep.

First, because catabolism and anabolism take place at separate times, avoid eating too close to bedtime. Ideally, your food should be well-digested (catabolism) before you go to sleep where anabolism takes place.

Second, your body should be free of stimulants like caffeine and cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone. But it’s also your body’s natural “wake up” hormone. So avoid doing anything to increase cortisol before bed, like intense exercise, caffeine, or fuming about your stressful day. Relax.

But the sleep process goes beyond these basics.

The Sleep Process

As we age, we often need to change our go-to sleep process to get better sleep. Watching TV, engaging with social media, listening to loud music — -these may have been okay for you at one time.

But as you age, these can increasingly impact your sleep. So we need to put the devices away 30 minutes to an hour before bedtime to sleep well.

We should also be aware that these devices send and receive data while they’re off. All data travels as energy (radiation), so sleeping next to an “active” device may disrupt your natural sleep.

Even something as seemingly harmless as room light can impact your circadian rhythm and therefore your sleep quality, according to the CDC. Humans have evolved to wind down as visible light diminishes, but internal lighting counteracts this natural brain cue.

David Schmidt and LifeWave members can attest to this fact. Very low levels of light can stimulate some interesting effects, including the inhibition of melatonin. But other types of light can actually stimulate melatonin production.

How to Get Better Sleep

In addition to the above, clinical research does show that small steps like wearing socks to bed can improve sleep. It has been shown to increase the length of sleep by 30 minutes.

Some other strategies include:

● Warm milk can work because tryptophan is converted into serotonin and melatonin in the brain.

● Magnesium relaxes the nervous system and helps us spend more time in a parasympathetic state where the body switches into relaxation and restore mode.

● Green tea has theanine, which also relaxes the nervous system.

● Taurine calms the brain down, discouraging racing thoughts and overthinking.

But ultimately, the sleep tricks that work for one may not work for another because they only work if they address the specific reasons you’re not getting good sleep. That varies from person to person, and may even change in your lifetime.

David Schmidt LifeWave Solution

LiveWave is a health technology company that offers solutions to promote health and wellness, of which better sleep is paramount.

This technology comes in the form of patches engineered based upon how science says we can get a better night’s sleep.

LifeWave patented phototherapy patches should not be seen as a standalone solution but rather an aid in getting more restful and restorative sleep.

And as we discussed, no one sleep solution will help everyone. It all goes back to the causes of sleep problems, which are individual. Some people may respond better to one or more sleep solutions and need to experiment.

Three of the LifeWave patented phototherapy patches that might support your sleep include Silent Nights, Alavida, and Aeon Patch. They tackle the problems surrounding sleep from different angles.

Silent Nights by LifeWave

A small pilot study on LifeWave Silent Nights patch showed two out of five people tested had a 202% increase in melatonin production and serotonin production increased across all participants.

Unlike melatonin supplements, LifeWave patches stimulate the skin with a specific wavelength of light, causing the body to balance out its own hormone production.

A subsequent double blind clinical study on a much larger population showed that those using the patches for two weeks improved sleep by over 2 hours compared with roughly a one hour improvement in the placebo group.

This, of course, represents a wide margin of statistical significance — the kind that tells scientists there on to something. The patch group had a 66% increase in sleep, without putting medication into their bodies.

AEON Patch by LifeWave

Similarly, the Aeon patch transmits its own unique wavelength through the skin. It has shown its ability to reduce nervous system stress and inflammation. Many people use this during the day, but may find it helps with sleep if their sleep problems are related to stress, inflammation, or chronic pain.

Alavida Patch by LifeWave

Alavida patches transmit wavelengths clinically shown to reduce oxidative stress on the body as well as activate the frontal lobe which houses reasoning and emotions, and may improve sleep in some individuals.

Uncontrolled oxidative stress speeds up aging and the development of several diseases by increasing cellular damage.

Getting Healthy Sleep

The importance of sleep for health and wellness can’t be denied. But the reasons you may not be getting your best sleep are unique and individual to you. Making lifestyle changes can improve both the quality and the duration of your sleep.

The various LifeWave patches David Schmidt discusses are available in more than 75 countries worldwide and may help you find your more restful and restorative sleep.