The Anti-Aging Sleep Formula (Science-Backed)

You spend about 30% of your life asleep, which is a crazy number if you think about it. And if you spend any less time sleeping, your life would be shorter. Good quality sleep can either make you age faster or age slower and in the process help you also live longer. It comes down to leveraging all the different anti-aging pathways and mechanisms that get activated in your sleep. High melatonin levels, high growth hormone levels, autophagy activation, and high glutathione levels. The problem is that the modern world makes it so easy to disrupt these pathways over the course of years and decades. You will be aging faster because you're not getting the full recovery in your sleep. Even if you sleep 7 to 8 hours. So, in this video, I'm going to tell you how to build an anti-aging sleep routine. It's going to help you get better recovery, better hormones, better energy, better brain cleanup, and better long-term health while you sleep. Let's start with melatonin. Melatonin levels have been

seen to drop with age after puberty by up to 10fold. Your body releases the most melatonin in your sleep, but as you get older, the less it does so. During childhood, you produce a lot of melatonin and significantly less after puberty. Now, the reason this is significant is because melatonin not only is a sleep hormone, but also a powerful antioxidant. It lowers inflammation and oxidative stress. It in fact regulates many other anti-aging and repair processes in your sleep that we're going to talk about. Think of it as the master coordinator of all your sleep architecture and recovery. So, we definitely want to have high melatonin levels in our sleep as the cornerstone of an anti-aging sleep routine. You could do everything else right in this video, but if you miss the melatonin, you're wasting your time. So, how do you have high melatonin levels before you sleep? The biggest thing that suppresses melatonin before bed is artificial blue light. It has the most potent melatonin suppressing effects. What you could get exposed to in the evening is red light. The sunset has red light, but then you look at your blue light smartphone before bed, then it cancels out the melatonin production. So, here's the order of operations you have to have. 1 to two hours before bed, dim down the lights. Use filter apps on your smartphone to reduce the blue light. On Apple, it's f. lux, and on Android, it's twilight. Wear blue blocking glasses if needed. This way, your bathroom light or your computer screen isn't going to suppress melatonin when you're heading to bed. And sleep in pitch black darkness. Wear a sleep mask and use blackout curtains so there wouldn't be any sneaking light shining into your eyes while you sleep. Getting exposed to infrared light during the day also helps with melatonin production at night because the infrared light penetrates the skull and regulates the circadian rhythm. The morning daylight exposure initiates the circad rhythms that tells your body to produce melatonin in the evening. Taking melatonin supplements is also safe and effective. As you get older and your natural melatonin production declines, there's no amount of blocking blue light in the evening that's going to replace the melatonin that you were producing when you were young. Your body is just producing less melatonin because you're older now. Yes, it's part of natural aging, but natural aging is bad for you in terms of living longer and slowing down aging. That's where melatonin supplementation can fill the gap. There's plenty of evidence from clinical trials that melatonin supplementation at a dose of around 10 millig, which is a dose much higher typically used for sleep, lowers inflammation and improves cardium metabolic risk factors. That's because melatonin is a potent antioxidant. There's also studies on taking all the way up to 3,000 milligs of melatonin with no adverse reported side effects. Overall, these studies using gigados melatonin show better sleep regulation in dementia patients and anti-amaloid and neuroprotective effects which might be useful for neurodeenerative diseases. Melatonin combined with chemotherapy in cancer patients improved the tolerability of chemo and had possible anti-tumor effects. The patients had also less anorexia and fatigue. In heart disease patients, melatonin lowered blood pressure, improved cholesterol and inflammation markers. And in COVID 19 patients, melatonin had immunom modulatory and anti-inflammatory effects, which might support the immune system during sickness, but there isn't enough research on that yet. So, taking larger doses of melatonin can be strategic in some situations. Can you

slow down the aging of your melatonin production? Yes, there is some evidence for that. Of course, just a healthy lifestyle, being healthier, not being obese, that's going to also slow down this trend in declining melatonin production. But it's not enough. However, the part of the reason you see a decline in melatonin production is because of circadian clock dysfunction that happens with aging. This is a natural process again due to entropy and aging. Fortunately, it's been found that it's possible to reverse this chronic jetlack syndrome, as I like to call it, and damage to the circadian system. The key metabolite for this is NAD+ which is an enzyme with many longevity benefits. But one of its main effects is circadian regulation. Here are some things that increase energy production and recycling. Exercise, especially submaximal aerobic exercise. Going to failure with your exercise actually lowers NAD production. Calorie restriction, being slightly under a calorie deficit, aka getting a bit leaner. Intermittent fasting, being in a fast state helps with recycling of NAD. Circadian rhythm alignment, going to bed and waking up around the same time. and dietary polyphenols from olive oil, berries, vegetables, herbs, and spices. Let's move on with growth hormone.

Remember, when you were a kid, you could just recover from everything super fast. You didn't even have to sleep. You could party all night, wake up the next day, look and feel just fine. You were able to build muscle or sat with ease while eating anything. Well, part of the reason for that is that you had very high levels of growth hormone. Unfortunately, growth hormone levels decline with age similar to melatonin. Part of the reason is because melatonin regulates growth hormone release in your sleep. Growth hormone goes through several pulses during the day, but they're relatively small. The vast majority of growth hormone release happens at the first hours of sleep, especially in deep sleep. What facilitates this massive surge in growth hormone in your sleep is melatonin. So, everything you do for melatonin will help with growth hormone as well. As you can see, melatonin and growth hormone rise around the same time because melatonin is the master coordinator. However, both melatonin and growth hormone respond to nutrient intake as well. Basically, eating reduces growth hormone and not eating increases growth hormone as a way to reduce muscle loss. The gut has up to 400 times more melatonin than the pineal gland in the brain and 10 to 100 times more than in the blood. Melatonin mediates the interactions between your body and your microbiome by modulating the gut bacteria short- chain fatty acids. To take advantage of this, you want to go to bed on a slightly empty stomach, not with a full stomach. Not only is having large amounts of food in your stomach bad for your sleep quality, but it also lowers melatonin and growth hormone levels. And as a bonus, fasting also increases growth hormone. If you fast for 24 hours, growth hormone has been seen to rise by 210% on average and do so 70% more frequently compared to eating regularly. So by stopping your food earlier, you produce more growth hormone in your sleep. Eating would reduce this process slightly. So it's better to go to bed slightly hungrier rather than stuffed. So, how much time are we talking about? Do you need to stop eating at noon? I don't think you need to go that crazy with it. You don't need to stop eating like 10 hours before bed, and you don't need to skip your dinner entirely. In my opinion, a good limit is around 3 to 4 hours before bed, and maybe optimally up to 4 to 5 hours. Interestingly, I get the best sleep when I stop eating around 4 to 5 hours before bed, and my stomach is slightly emptier. I know that's not applying to every people because some people can't fall asleep when they feel the sensation of hunger, but I actually sleep very well when I feel this slight hunger in my stomach. If you can't fall asleep with an empty stomach, then have something that is lower glycemic and higher in protein, maybe like cottage cheese with some berries or kiwis. Those have been shown to also improve sleep and they're not large portion sizes that would disrupt your sleep. The last piece of

the puzzle is autophagy, which is the process of cellular cleanup. It helps to eliminate worn out cellular debris as well as junk material that accumulates during aging. That's why autophagy is central to longevity. It's actually a new hallmark of aging than controls many other hallmarks. It's no coincidence that melatonin also regulates autophagy. Yes, you can upregulate autophagy during the day with things like exercise, consuming polyphenols, fasting and calorion. But the vast majority of autophagy occurs in your sleep, especially deep sleep. The body is a very efficient system. It doesn't want to waste energy and for that purpose it coordinates all of these repair and anti-aging processes into your sleep specifically deep sleep since this is when physical repair occurs. And this is another reason you want to stop eating a few hours before bed because eating will lower auto process. You don't need to be completely fasted but you want to avoid high glycemic meals. And you don't want to have massive amounts of food or massive amounts of amino acids and protein in your system either because amino acids lower autophagy. You can do additional things to support autophagy in the evening. During the day you can exercise and consume coffee for example. These two increase advag. In the evening you can have herbal teas like chamomile or ginger tea. Two herbs that also have autophagy regulating effects. Melatonin supplementation possibly also supports autophagy because of the increase in melatonin levels. And there's also the amino acid glycine that's been shown to increase autophagy. What I like to do is drink chamomile tea with three g of glycine. That's the perfect evening tea. All right. Now that we've gone through the major components, let's put it all

together. In the morning and during the daytime, get exposed to some sunlight. Morning light exposure starts the circadian rhythm and tells your body to produce melatonin at night. It also starts to support NAD recycling. Infrared light during the day also helps with melatonin. So, it's also important to get some infrared light throughout the day. During the day, do some exercise. It increases sleep drive, the desire to fall asleep, but it also increases growth hormone and esophagy. Stop eating four to five hours before bed. At least three to four hours. This ensures you have higher growth hormone, melatonin, and autophagy before bed. Take melatonin 3 hours before bed. A recent meta analysis saw that this was superior to 30 minutes before bed for increasing total sleep time. A 4 milligram dose was also superior to 2 millig. Many people take melatonin 30 minutes before bed, but that means your melatonin will rise in your bloodstream only when you're already asleep. If you take it 3 hours before bed, then you already have elevated melatonin before you fall asleep. Take glycine 3 grams with either tea or just regularly. This promotes relaxation and helps with sleep. Glycine lowers body temperature and supports sleep, but it also increases autophagy. Block blue light one to two hours before bed to not undermine the melatonin production in your sleep. If you don't block blue light, then yes, your body will eventually start producing melatonin, but it will do so about 30 to 60 minutes after you've fallen asleep. But why would you not support it by simply avoiding artificial blue light? I know this video wasn't about specific sleep hacks or sleep tips because that's the purpose. This video was about leveraging the underlying mechanisms and pathways that actually make your sleep anti-aging and beneficial for your longevity. If you want to know how to really optimize your sleep with the basics and more thorough tips to sleep more and feel more recovered, then check out my video about how I increased my sleep scores from 77 to 100.