I’Ve been bagged on a lot online for having some circles under my eyes. Okay, part of it is the fact that, yes, i have a toddler and a newborn at the house. Part of it is genetics, but a big part of it is yeah. When i do keto, i don’t sleep as well now, there’s things that i implement to improve my sleep and i’m going to share them with you, but i think it’s kind of common knowledge now that, if you’re doing keto, sometimes you end up sleeping a little bit.
Lighter so these five tips are going to help you out in getting into the non-rem portion of sleep a little bit more, which we’ll talk about more as we get into the science i’m gon na try to keep this fairly high level, so you just have practical, Tangible things to utilize, please do hit the red subscribe button if you’re looking for intermittent fasting, keto knowledge and everything that you need to be the best version of yourself and also hit the little bell icon to turn on notifications, i am not a doctor. I am just some guy on the internet. Okay, i just happen to like biochemistry and i’ve lost a few pounds all right. So first thing i want you to implement is glycine or collagen.
Glycine is probably a cheaper way to go, but collagen has glycine, because glycine is a primary constituent of collagen and sometimes people like to make a little shake before bed or something. So you could do that. Here’S. The reasoning why first of all glycine is a precursor to serotonin serotonin turns into melatonin melatonin, as you probably know, helps you fall asleep, but there’s bigger pieces than just that.
Okay glycine has an interesting effect on vasodilation. It helps blood vessels open up so that you have less body heat in your core and it dissipates through to your lower body. As your body cools down, it sends a signal to your brain to trigger melatonin, and you therefore fall asleep a little bit easier.
You want to be cool and you don’t want to be hot. It also acts upon. What’S called the nmda receptor. The nmda receptor is like a little guard, shack at the edge of your cell and that nmda receptor sometimes lets things like calcium and excitatory things invade the cell and wake you up and keep you energized well that nmda receptor needs to be activated to block that.
So it turns out that glycine has a little help in terms of activating that nmda receptor. A little bit of magnesium goes a long way with that too magnesium, plus some glycine or something known as magnesium glycinate can be very, very powerful. With that there’s a study. That’S published in neuropsychopharmacology that found that just taking a little bit of glycine had a pretty powerful effect at getting someone into non-rem sleep and also shortening the amount of latency before you got into non-rem sleep, so rem, sleep, rapid eye movement, people think is the deep Sleep but rem, sleep is actually not that deep of sleep rem.
Sleep is important because it’s like the defragmentation of your brain if you’ve ever run a defrag on your computer. You know that your computer’s working hard when you’re defragging it’s reallocating things. Okay, non-rem sleep is actually the deep restorative sleep they’re, both important but non-rep. Sleep is the deep sleep that we’re after in this case, so it improves that and improves the time to that you get there faster.
Okay. The next thing i want to talk about is very similar, taking a warm or hot shower. I don’t need to say a lot about this.
It’S all about cooling, the body again, sending that signal to the brain. There was a study that was published at the university of pittsburgh school of medicine. It took a look at what is called cerebral thermal transfer.
Basically, what it is. It’S a complicated like electric ice pack, they put on the prefrontal cortex the front of someone’s head and they did this to people that were suffering from insomnia and they found that when they did this, they ended up improving their sleep. So much that they were sleeping on par with about 89 of their peers, that didn’t have insomnia, so it restored their sleep patterns quite well. So anyway, it just helps you get into that phase, a little bit more lots of science still emerging in that category, but it’s a pretty quick and easy hack that, regardless of your dietary pattern, will probably work this next one’s something that you can consume: okay, roibos Tea: okay, roibos tea is really cool because it interferes with cortisol.
So it’s not some. Naturally, sleep inducing thing it’s indirect and we find a lot of times. People that are doing a ketogenic diet end up with higher levels of cortisol, not because that’s bad, okay, cortisol levels aren’t bad unless they’re, really in conjunction with carbohydrates, which we can talk about later.
But the point is: is that when you can reduce cortisol, you reduce this impact on your body that might be keeping you awake now. This will also work really well when we talk about the next piece in just a minute with carbohydrates, because roibose might help counteract some of the potential negative aspect of adding carbohydrates strategically again more on that to come. Another thing that combines with roibose tea or you can do it separately would be ashwagandha.
Okay, ashwagandha is an adaptogenic compound, which means it helps your body find homeostasis. But in this case i like it because it has what’s called triethylene glycol triethylene glycol directly, induces that non-rem sleep so again helping you get into that direct, deeper sleep and then, of course, we have theanine. I’Ve put these into the categories, because you could quite literally make a little compound for yourself.
So athenian induces your brain to go into the gamma-aminobutyric acid scale. A little bit more produces more gaba, which helps your brain relax a little bit more kind of.
The next piece that kind of coincides with this a little bit is adding carbohydrates or allocating your carbohydrates to the end Of the day, but not the very end, okay, so later in the day, but not too late, so what you’d want to do is you’d want to preserve most of your carbs for one particular meal later in the day.
Okay, what this does is. It helps the insulin levels go up strategically, so tryptophan can get into your brain. Let me explain how this works really interesting. Okay, when you are doing keto, you don’t have a high levels of insulin.
It’S a good thing. Okay, but what that means is you have a large neutral amino acids floating through your bloodstream? These large neutral amino acids pool up in your bloodstream and they compete with tryptophan to go into the brain. So normally tryptophan can just go into the brain totally fine, because there’s no competition but once you’re doing keto it has a lot more competitions. They all compete for the same receptor in your brain.
So suddenly tryptophan went from being just a big fish in a small pond to suddenly being a small fish in a big pond, and the brain can’t take them up as much because well, there’s just more amino acids that it can choose from. But if you spike your insulin by having 20 grams of carbohydrates or so those amino acids that are competing with the tryptophan get soaked up into the muscles. But tryptophan does not, therefore leaving more tryptophan circulating the bloodstream and having an opportunity to get into the brain.
Then guess what tryptophan triggers serotonin serotonin triggers melatonin and there you go voila. The reason that i mentioned that roibose might be a good tea to combine with your carbohydrate meal is because roibose cuts cortisol effects. Now we don’t want to have a cortisol spike in conjunction with the carbohydrates.
That’S why i mentioned that. It’S not the end of the world, just an added little bonus, and the last thing that i would recommend people embark on is playing around with some red light therapy. There’S some cool science that shows photobiomodulation, where you manipulate yourself with red light, can actually have a big effect on how quickly you get into sleep.
The journal of athletic training published something that showed just 30 minutes of red light therapy for daily. For a couple of weeks helped restore sleep patterns and got people into a non-rem state of sleep, much much faster, even if they suffer from insomnia. Okay, if you don’t want to spend the money on red light therapy, you can simply get some blue blocking glasses glasses.
That block blue light so that way you’re at least reducing the impact of the blue light. That has a negative effect. But if you just get one of those bulbs that turns the room red or you get some like juve red lights, or something like that, it plays a pretty big role in helping you sort of reestablish a new rhythm, highly recommend you check it out. So you can use all five of these things or you can implement little bits and pieces together, as always, keep it locked, and here my channel i’ll, see you tomorrow.
