Sleep is a Nootropic 🌙 Stacking sleep supplements and “sleep tech” for serious slumber by @jeroseland on 3Speak
▶️ Watch on 3Speak --- As Biohackers, we are perpetually on the hunt for the "thrust"--that elusive, boundless well of energy and motivation required to kick ass through the day. We obsess over sti...
Tags: #sleep #supplements #health
Sleep is a mutropic. Hey, I'm Jonovan with Limitless Mindset, and as you can see here, I'm coming to you from my bed. So this is going to be a riveting lifestyle vlog. Just kidding, it might not be all that riveting, but I am going to impart some very cool sleep hacks to you. So recently, I have been getting some seriously solid sleep by stacking some sleep supplements, some anxiolyytic sleep, REM sleep promoting supplements with some biohacking tech. We could even call it... Sleep, biohacking tech, or at least that's the application that I have been, that I have figured out that I'm going to share with you here. So, like I said, sleep is a neotropic. As biohackers, a lot of times, we are looking for all these different ways to stimulate ourselves. We are ever on the hunt for cool molecules that are going to have that energizing effect that are going to give us that thrust that we desire during our waking hours so that we have just a deep, boundless well of energy and motivation that we can draw on to kick ass through the day and sometimes through the night. But this should be balanced, you know, as biohackers, we are seeking that balance. And I did a book review not all that long ago of the book Why We Sleep. And I am going to link to that, and this big, long book, you might not want to read all of it, but the... information, the science that is summarized and parted in it really underlies something that's kind of common sense, but something that we lose track of, which is that the higher quality of sleep you get, the higher quality of mind and motivation and cognitive horsepower that you have to bring to bear on having an awesome And so while you're looking at the smart drugs and the neutropics, while you're looking at things like the racetams or modafinil, or that seventh cup of coffee to keep you going throughout the day to make sure that you're really kicking ass and getting things done and keep those problem solving capacities of yours really on. point, it's important to also be looking at our sleep. And of course, all those great stimulants that we love, those can hurt our sleep. So sometimes the low-hanging fruit that we want to grab a hold of is better sleep. And that's why I have been using things like this. just relax and deep sleep, along with actually using P-E-M-F to optimize the brain waves. So I am a big fan of these kind of stacks. These are anxiolytic stacks. and shortly I'm going to break down the ingredients in them and the synergies that they have. And these two do a little bit different things. This one is kind of a wind down type stack. So this is something that you take several hours before bed, or you could even... take it at the end of your working day, and the ingredients in it are going to just kind of take the edge off for you. They're going to have this relaxing, tranquilizing kind of effect. So, if you're like me, the last couple hours of the day, you'd like to devote them to something like reading, or maybe you're just hanging out with your family, winding down. And this is going to be conducive to that. And it is not going to knock you right out. You're still going to have the concentration that you need. I am right now reading... Ben Greenfield's 1100 page book, Boundless, which is very dense, and I'm also enjoying Shogun, which is a 1,300 pages, isn't it 1 ,300 pages, which is... Close to it. Okay, which is this... masterpiece on feudal Japan, and I have got the brain power on this to enjoy those books in the evening. And then when the hour of slumber arrives, then I'll go, I'll switch to this one, which is Deep Slee. And this has more of those ingredients that are going to actually... knock you out. I'm sure you've had this unpleasant experience, we all have, and some of us have it chronically, which is that when it finally comes time to get to bed, to lie your head down, on the pillow, you just have thoughts racing. That is the moment that your contemplative problem -solving capacity of your brain strikes. Maybe it takes you 20 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe it takes you longer to get to sleep and stacking this kind of biohacking tech that I am not contemplating things in an elongated fashion at bedtime. I'm laying my head down and what do you think, babe? Is it maybe three? five minutes, maybe seven minutes max, and I'm off to Dreamland, right? Yes. Yes, yes. And that is really great. That is something that for a lot of my life, as this ambitious, workaholic kind of guy, that is, that's kind of something new for me. I am loving that, and I'm waking up with more of an edge to take on the day. And I would really like to, my next biohacking tech acquisition is going to be the aura ring so that I can quantify my sleep and then I can, you know, publish my sleep scores, put them out there on the internet to a not so humbly brag about the sleep quality that I am achieving. But the way for now that I know that I'm getting solid sleep, is that I don't find myself early in the morning when I'm doing my work on the computer making little mistakes. So you can think about... Things like when you're misplacing browser tabs, you're putting the wrong metadata in the little fields where it needs to go, remembering the correct article ID of whatever I'm working with, all of those kind of little airs. If I find myself making those early in the morning, typically I'm up working by about 745-ish, 8-ish. If I find myself making those kind of airs, then I know that I have not quite gotten the optimal kind of sleep. That's the way that I kind of measure things, lacking a aura ring. And being cognitively on point at 745 is obviously great for my productivity. So a little bit more about the sleep tech. So this is the I.C. Hummer by infopathy. And what I will do, typically about 40 minutes before bed, often while I'm enjoying a documentary on my new Curiosity Stream membership, or just reading is I will attach this thing to the back of my head. And I'll try to show it to you here. Hopefully, it doesn't mess up my hair too much. I'll attach it like this so that the I-C. Hummer can administer... P-E-M-F can administer a little bit of pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, kind of to my corpus callosum region. And then I will just run a, what's called a IC. I will run a, I will run through it, a delta. wave and those of you familiar with sleep stuff know that delta wave is the sleep state and this induces what's called brain entrainment not entertainment Brain Entertainment is what's going on. That's what we're voraciously all about is brain entertainment, right? But brain intrainment is when you expose your brain to a particular type of wave, either via electromagnetism or via sound that you can... do auditory brain entrainment, and so I will run for about 40 minutes a delta wave, and it's kind of cool. I can feel this real thuddle kind of thumping on the back of my head, and over the course of the 40 minutes, that thumping kind of slows... down, bringing my brain into this delta wave. And if I want to take this to the next level, What I'll do is I will simultaneously run that same I see, but I'll run it through my headphones. And so I'll have the auditory, it's like a .5 to 0.4 hertz binaural beat. It's kind of boring to listen to. It's not like one of these cool algorithmic musical binaural beats like Brain FM does, although I think that kind of has the same effect. And I'll listen to that while I am reading. And that will really get my brain into kind of this, that'll get me really into kind of a sedated state. And then when bedtime rolls around, I will undress. So... Just kidding, just kidding, I'm not gonna undress on camera. You people don't pay me enough for that. So I will get in bed, and then for about 10 to 15 minutes, babe, can you hand me the red light? For about 10 to 15 minutes, I will cuddle with her in bed while I shine this thing on the back of, and let's do the near-infrared first. I'll shine this thing on my back. And red light, as you can see, it's really bright, and it bathes the room in this beautiful red glow. You've certainly seen this in some of my other videos. I use it pretty often. This thing, the red light exposure has a biophotomodulation effect, particularly that near infrared. It's actually a low-level laser, and this has an additional effect. of releasing even more melatonin. And so that is the final coup de grace of my consciousness that really puts me to sleep. In fact, often I fall asleep while I'm right there cuddling and we're in the middle of a story, we're in the middle of chit-chatting and laughing about whatever happened in the day. And then additionally, What I do is I put on a sleep track. I have a speaker, and like I said, I don't like to have the Wi-Fi on in the evening. I like to have the phones, I'll turn it off, or in airplane mode. So I've downloaded some tracks, and then I have a soothing rain falling track. And I find that what that does... is that assuages my tinnitus. And this is kind of cool. I also did an experiment for, oh, it's been probably a year now. I've had a mild case of tinnitus, and if you have tinnitus or if you've known anyone with tinnitus, you know that nighttime can be hell for them. The quiet nighttime is when the tonight is really the toe is when our ears are just screaming at us. And actually, this can rob a lot of people of sleep. And so I did, I had gotten in the habit of using the sleep sounds to get to sleep. That worked, that worked fine, that were great. But as an experiment, I didn't do that one night. I just did all of these sleep hacks. and I managed to fall asleep in about 10 minutes with no problem. And so for someone with tinnitus, that's pretty awesome. That means that these things are really sedating me. Speaking of biohacking tech, I did do a meditation session on the just... relax, and it resulted in a really sublime meditation session. You know, when you do meditation, it kind of reveals to you, you become more mindful of your state, and yeah, the just relax put me into a very nice sublime state. So if you are going to try this, I do recommend, yeah, taking two or three capsules, and then maybe about 20, 30 minutes later, doing some... meditation so that you can really appreciate it. And I did do an HRV session with my heart math device, speaking of biohacking tech, and the scores were quite good. What did I end up getting? I ended up getting 448 achievement points, and that's pretty good for... a 20-minute session, and then I emerged from the meditation session feeling freaking fantastic. Now, let's look at the ingredients of these anxiolytic stacks and discuss their synergies. And we'll start with just relax. So, this one contains... Oshwaganda, notably, which is the anti-anxiety adaptogen used in Indian traditional medicine. There are 30 published scientific papers on the herbs effect on... Sleep. A 2021 meta-analysis published in Plus One notes that it improved both sleep quantity and sleep quality, along with mental alertness upon rising, anxiety level, and quality of life. It also contains elthenin, which is the tranquilizing ingredient that gives you a cool, creative head after drinking green tea. And it contains altriptophan. And I didn't know that much about eltriptophan, other than it's what makes you tired after eating a big turkey Thanksgiving dinner. However, Ben Greenfield writes about it in his giant book, Boundless, he writes, when triptophan accumulates in your blood, it crosses the blood, brain barrier, and is converted into five hydroxy. tryptamine, a precursor of serotonin. 5HT is also a precursor of melatonin in your panil gland that causes letherty and drowsiness, and it contains lemon balm. extract, and there are 17 scientific papers on this nutraceutical and sleep. A 2019 French-Polish clinical trial notes that in combination with melatonin and vitamin B6, which is another ingredient of this one, It may be a godsent to those struggling with mild to moderate insomnia. It also contains B vitamins, and B vitamins are not traditionally sedating, but B vitamins play very important roles in the regulation of healthy sleep cycles. and deficiencies of B vitamins will hurt your sleep quality, or they can even cause insomnia. And it includes vitamin B3 or niacin. And this is actually super important. Your PARP system needs niacin as an NED plus precursor so that your PARP system can... repair the damage that is done to your genes, which is not good, while you sleep that EMFs are doing, which is another good reason to turn off your Wi-Fi and those smartphones at bedtime. And deep sleep here, the complementary stack also contains those same B vitamins. I don't take both of these every day. Some days I'll take just one of them, because I find that, in combination with the biohacking sleep tech, that I discussed, I find that... Two or three capsules of either of these is plenty for me to get good sleep. But, you know, sometimes you have an extra stressful day, or maybe it's a Sunday, and you've got your Monday coming up, and you really want to have a kick-ass morning on your Monday. I might combine them so that I'm just getting a little bit more out of my sleep. And I also might mention watching movies and television in the evening. Obviously, I'm not a huge fan of this television and movies, especially movies that are intense, you know, like a... horror movies where there's terrifying monsters that are lurking in mirrors, you know, things like that. Really get your system on edge. You really don't want to be watching those kind of things before bed, but hey, you know, sometimes you're going to watch a film with family or whatever before bedtime. And so if that's what you're doing, then you want to have an extra degree of vigilance about your sleep house. using things like this. Maybe that would be a time to double up on your sleep supplements. So I mentioned the B vitamins already, and this one also contains magnesium glycinate, and magnesium is one of my all-time favorite sleep supplements. Magnesium promotes crucial... REM sleep, that you need to maintain mental health to consolidate your memories and to keep cognitive decline at bay. And for some reason, thinking about REM sleep, I'm thinking of that Star Trek, the Next Generation episode, where Captain Picard and crew, there's some strange alien frequency that's beamed into the Starship Enterprise, and none of the people on the ship can get proper REM sleep, and so they all start hallucinating and seeing terrifying things lurking around the corridors of the Starship. ship. Go away. Do any of you remember that? that episode who was kind of, it was kind of an unnerving episode of Star Trek and very educational about the... About REM sleep, you know, that should be a reminder to all of us that we don't need strange alien frequencies being beamed into our civilization. We have enough problem with EMFs as it is, and that's why you need things like magnesium to maintain your REM sleep, which does promote dreaming. So if you're never having dreams, then that's kind of a sign that... Maybe you need something like this, and it packs a punch with 450 milligrams of the good stuff, magnesium, glycinate. Oh, and here's a tip. Supplements that have a form, typically, you want to look at what the form is of a given ingredient in your stacks. If the form ends with eight, like glistenate. then that's a good sign that that's going to be one of the better absorbed forms of whatever the given supplement is. Next, it has melatonin, which is the household name supplement hormone at this point, and the melatonin underlies the circadian mechanisms that put us to sleep when the time is right. And this supplement has just... 3 milligrams, which might seem vanishingly small, but actually that's all the melatonin that you would really want to supplement unless you were trying to get through some sort of illness, or you were dealing with maybe something like jet lag. You'd only want about 2, 3, maybe 4, maybe 5 milligrams maximum of melatonin. I'm actually going to talk a little bit more about illness in just a minute. It also contains Valerian root extract. And this is an herbal sleep supplement, a sleep aid used since time immemorial in traditional Asian and European medicine. And there are over 14 published scientific papers on Nature's Valium, as some people call Valerian. Root. It wasn't Valerian, a Roman emperor? Let me know if I'm wrong about that. It also has passion flower extract, which I imagine just could also make you a very passionate person, right? That's what we want out of our biohacking. So, speaking of the passionate Germans, yes, Germans, well known for their passionate national character. They did a clinical trial on it, and they concluded that it is a gabaergic, nutraceutical, and that it's also basically a full spectrum, mental health, and well-being hack. In fact, 12 weeks of dosage mitigated... disturbed sleep and nervous restlessness while improving stress resistance and kind of just general quality of life. And that 12-week thing is kind of a good point, is that if you've got sleep problems, if you have some mental health things that you struggle with, these supplements are not necessarily going to be an instant. fix. Like I said, in my experience, they do a good job of knocking me right out. Sometimes they dramatically improve sleep right away, but sometimes good things take time. So you want to maybe have realistic expectations if you've been like a lifelong insomniac. And then I will mention zinc glycinate, and zinc is the brain's Dark Horse. According to a Swiss research paper, and there are over 10 clinical trials studying its effects as a natural regulator of sleep. A landmark 2011 clinical trial found that it shared synergies with the other ingredients, melatonin and magnesium. Together, they are a dream team, pun. intended for people that are, for insomniacs even, that are badly in need of some quality shut-eye. And I'll mention, coming to my conclusion here, that this before-bed stack of these two together helped us get through a brush with COVID. In January, my wife and I had a thankfully mild case of COVID. Of the Omicron variety, we believe, in addition to being a bit kind of oxygen starved during the day, the illness messed with my sleep. It was kind of odd. I found myself for several days. I would get to sleep, but then I wake up. in the middle of the night. And so I just kind of, the way I got through this was that I would just pull up my iPad and make sure I had the brightness on the iPad turned all the way down with the white text against black background with the blue light filter turned on, of course, of course. And then I would just read that book Shogun. for about 20 minutes and that would put me back to sleep. But the melatonin, those of you that have been following COVID treatment protocols, will know that melatonin is actually real helpful in getting through COVID. And quality sleep is, of course, really crucial to immune... function. And so that I found that taking three capsules of this preceded by this before bed, I found that, with the exception of a few challenging nights, that got me the sleep that I needed. And as soon as we knew that we were dealing with COVID, and we didn't get a PCR test or anything like that, we don't go in for all this fashionable testing in regards to this particular virus. As soon as we suspected we were dealing with COVID, we began an anti-aggressive immune regimen. We took quercetin, NAC, a whole lot of vitamin C, along with our liposomal vitamin D. And we managed to kick the thing. We were a bit uncomfortable feeling a bit weird for maybe about 7 to 10 days, but then we were through it. So I was, yeah, I was thankful to have these things on hand for that. And I also look forward to... hearing about what kind of sleep hacks that you might be up to. I think I've got things pretty well figured out…