Extend Lifespan by Fixing Your Sleep (LIVE LONGER) ~ Dr. Eric Berg

There's three main problems.

Either you can't get to sleep, you can't stay asleep, or you wake up too early.

Okay.

Now, if you get up at two, that's because your cortisol is too high.

I have a separate video for that, but this video in general should help you.

Everything is controlled by this extremely tiny little structure in your brain, okay? It's called the supracosmotic nucleus.

So that's something to say at a party to sound intelligent, but the supracosmotic nucleus is about one fourth the size of one millimeter squared.

But the size of this little nerve bundle is extremely small.

It's like a fourth of, one millimeter okay it's just like really really tiny you got two of them and they're like a pair and they control the clock in the body okay they control the circadian rhythms of the body and it's their main hormone that helps with this is called melatonin okay so melatonin triggers this whole process and the most powerful controlling factor over this this structure right here is light okay and dark cycles and so the real problem with our sleep is that we live in an abundance of artificial light okay so first of all our light is artificial fluorescent lights and also we have too much light mean light is 24 hours like if you live in the city or in your house you can keep the lights on and we pretty much have the lights on all day as we're by our computers right we go places there's the lights on in these rooms and then of course you might be watching tv with the lights on and all that light inhibits this melatonin okay so melatonin is triggered by darkness So that's one thing you need to know.

But there's another type of melatonin that is outside the little gland that makes melatonin, which is called the pineal.

And so there's another source of melatonin that's made by all your cells, okay? That's outside the pineal gland.

And that melatonin is triggered by... light but not any light very specifically infrared light okay it's a certain wavelength of light and so you have this whole spectrum of light starting over here with like ultraviolet light and it goes to the visible spectrum of light And then we have infrared on the other side.

And it just so happens that the sun has over 50% infrared.

So it's really important to expose yourself to sun to get more infrared to build up your melatonin.

And melatonin has a lot of other functions that go beyond just sleeping.

Melatonin is the most powerful antioxidant, so it helps with a lot of other things.

It gives you energy and it helps protect you against diseases and even cancer, but also it helps you sleep.

So to improve your sleep, let's just take a look at what you need to do.