The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
234. How To Improve Your Sleep With These Sleep Hygiene Tips
08 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
the sleep choices you're making right now will determine your brain's health in your 70s and your 80s today we're talking about something that affects every single person listening sleep sleep is so fundamental to life that it's built into every creature with a nervous system so why is it that modern humans are the only species that are voluntarily cutting sleep short the obsession with productivity in our culture tells us that sleeping less means getting more done just disrupted sleep
reduces attention span capacity by 30%.
Chapter 2: What happens to your body when you're sleep-deprived?
That's nearly a third of your ability to focus gone after just one night. You're not going to have a perfect night's sleep every single night.
Chapter 3: How does sleep deprivation impact your brain health?
Life happens.
Chapter 4: What are the long-term dementia risks associated with poor sleep?
Even if you can't control exactly how much sleep you get every night, controlling when you sleep has massive benefits. This goes all the way down to what you're sleeping on.
Chapter 5: How does modern life affect our sleep quality?
When I realized that we spend a third of our life asleep on our mattress, I started to understand just how much it actually matters.
Chapter 6: Why is consistency in sleep schedule more important than duration?
And that's why I'm launching the Ultimate Snooze Mattress.
Chapter 7: What are the crucial steps to improve sleep quality?
It's completely free of harmful petroleum, foams, glues, and chemical fire barriers. 100% GOTS certified organic cotton and wool from New Zealand as a fire barrier.
Chapter 8: How can your sleep environment influence sleep quality?
This is a much safer, healthier, and more natural way to satisfy the federal regulations than using chemical fire retardants. Let's get to sleep. You spend an entire one third of your life asleep on a mattress, but one in three people around the world are not getting enough of it. And a lot of people treat sleep deprivation like a badge of honor.
Sleep is so fundamental to life that it's built into every creature with a nervous system. So why is it that modern humans are the only species that are voluntarily cutting sleep short? And what is it actually costing us? I'm a biohacker and human biologist, Gary Brekka, and you're listening to the Ultimate Human Podcast, where we dig into the real science behind longevity and disease prevention.
Today, we're talking about something that affects every single person listening, sleep. But this isn't going to be another episode telling you that sleep is important. You already know that. Instead, I'm going to show you what happens to your body when you don't get enough sleep, how fast those changes happen. Researchers at Harvard Medical School wanted to answer a simple question.
What happens to your body's ability to process sugar when you don't sleep eight hours? They brought in healthy young men into a clinical research center, and these were guys with no health problems, normal weight, no history of diabetes in any of their families.
The researchers restricted the participants' sleep to just five hours per night for one week, just seven nights of sleep deprivation for five hours. They controlled everything else, the same food, same activity levels, even the same environment. The only variable that changed was sleep. At the end of that week, they measured insulin sensitivity using two different tests.
After just one week of sleep restriction, insulin sensitivity dropped by 20%. Now remember, insulin sensitivity is a good thing that keeps the blood sugar level stable. When insulin sensitivity drops, more glucose stays in the bloodstream, raising your blood sugar levels. They also measured free fatty acids in the blood.
These are fats that circulate in your bloodstream and can directly cause insulin resistance. After sleep restriction, free fatty acid levels increased by up to 30%. When they looked at who developed these changes the fastest, they found that it didn't matter if you were fit, young, or had perfect health markers going in.
Sleep restriction created pre-diabetic metabolic conditions in everyone within just one week. Think about what this means. We're not talking about months or even years of bad sleep. We're talking about the kind of week that millions of people have regularly. Late nights working, early mornings at the gym, trying to maximize productivity and cutting into sleep.
And in that one week, your body starts displaying the metabolic markers of someone heading towards diabetes, even if you've been careful with what you eat. This is such solid proof of what we know that's already true. You can't supplement or exercise your way around poor sleep. Let's talk about the effects poor sleep has on your brain.
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