#247 – Why sleep is one of the key aspects of your metabolic health | Mike Haney & Ben Grynol

Your sleep routine is one of the most important aspects of your metabolic health — and it’s largely in your control. Levels’ Head of Growth Ben Grynol and Editorial Director Mike Haney sat down to analyze the findings of a recent sleep study on metabolic health outside of the type one and type two community.

02:36 – A study about sleep and metabolic health

The team at Levels analyzed a study on sleep and metabolic health outside of the type one and type two community.

So this study came out end of last year, end of 2021. It was done in combination with diabetes center in Sweden and the Harvard Chan public school health here. And actually most of the population that was studied was in the UK, and there was a little component that was in the US. About 10% of the component was in the US, but the controls and the whole setup was the same for all participants. And a couple of things were unique about this study that drove us to cover it. There’s a lot of research out there about sleep and metabolic health and the connections, and we’ve written a fair amount about it on the blog, but a couple things caught our eye here that made this study unique. The first and probably the biggest is that the population studied here, and it was about 1000 people were healthy subjects.

03:26 – The benefits of sleep for metabolic health

Mike emphasizes the importance of sleep on people’s metabolic health.

One of the things that we see in a lot of the metabolic health research, whether it’s sleep or anything else that we’re looking at, is the research has done for self-evident reasons, in people who have some sort of metabolic dysfunction, whether that’s diabetes, often diabetes. Sometimes it’s pre-diabetes, sometimes even obesity, because you’re trying to find ways to make people who already have some kind of impairment better. So a lot of the studies about nutritional interventions or sleep effects are in those populations. And that’s great, but it’s a little challenging for the kind of audience that we’re trying to talk to on the blog, which is a broader audience who might not have these problems yet. And our whole goal here is to try to help people not develop some of those problems like type two diabetes or obesity. And so we want to know what the effects of these various things are when you don’t already have a problem. When your metabolism and your system is otherwise sort of working quote unquote, “normally” or “okay.” But it’s just harder and harder to find a research, or I should say increasingly there’s more of that research being done, but traditionally, a lot of the research is only in these other populations. So that was the first thing that caught our eye was like, oh, here’s a sleep study. And they screened for people who didn’t have any of those conditions, so it’s people who were basically otherwise healthy.

05:24 – Sleeping at home

The study let people sleep in their own homes, which is unique for scientific studies.

The other thing that was kind of unique particular to sleep studies, a couple of things they did here. One is that the research was done in people’s homes. It was about a two week period in which they studied people. And a lot of times the sleep studies, again for kind of self-evident reasons, the research is often done in sleep labs because they want to really control the environment. And often the kind of measurement they’re doing and the monitoring they want do requires a lot of technology, a lot of machines and so people go sleep in sleep labs. But of course, most people sleep differently in a lab somewhere than they do at home. And so this one was actually conducting people’s homes and people wore a little monitor called ActiGraph that measured their sleep.

05:24 – Standardized meals

It’s a challenge to have people eat their normal diet and then compare it to other people’s diets, because many of us have different nutritional needs.

And the third thing they did that was unique here is that they use standardized meals. So this is always a big challenge in any kind of study that involves nutrition is, do you let people eat what they normally eat and that has certain advantages, or do you standardize the meals and say only eat these things. In this case, they gave people standardized meals to eat. And what that allows you to do is compare not only what they call within person, which is basically one person’s response to various meals or various inputs meals, and sleep and various aspects of sleep, but also gives you a better opportunity control to compare between people. So now we know that subject A and subject B at least eight, the same meal, they might have other physiological differences. They might have other sort of sleep inputs, but at least the meal is the same. So those three things together made this study one that we wanted to look at. And just briefly what they looked at, what the study did was had people where a continuous glucose monitor, so they could get real time measurement of glucose response, eat standardized meals, and sleep kind of according to how they wanted to sleep over the course of two weeks. And then what they looked at was basically how their bodies responded, particularly their glucose sensitivity to those different kind of sleep inputs.

07:20 – How glucose levels affect sleep quality and duration

The quality and duration of your sleep can change based on your inputs throughout the day. A large factor is your glucose levels.

One thing that is interesting to note is how much the quality and duration of sleep can change based on these inputs. So assume that a person has high cortisol, they’ve got a ton of stress, it’s like their sleep will be different and that everything is downstream, where you can have poor sleep. And that gives you poor glucose variability or we’ll call it higher oscillation the next day, poor food choices, what you ate throughout a day, those things matter. Alcohol makes a huge difference, lack of exercise, not getting enough duration, these all end up being confounding variables when starting to look at these things. So it sounds like the study controlled for as many of these factors as possible, so that it could look at what was the next day glucose data to see how much variability there would be and what the average levels were.

12:50 – What you eat matters

In the study, they found that your glucose levels change based on what you eat after a night of sleep.

The couple of findings they had that were a little bit more expected, but I think still interesting again, given some of these other controls of healthy population, sleeping in their beds. One was that what you eat actually really matters. Now, again, that seems sort of obvious, but to unpack that a little bit, the standardized meals that they had folks eat, there were a variety of them and they had different macronutrients compositions. So some were really high carbs, some were really high fat, some were high proteins. They had different makeups to them to see what to basically answer this question of like, well, okay, we can say that for instance, having variation from your normal sleep pattern impacts glucose control the next day. Well, is that true no matter what you eat? If I eat eggs and bacon, which a very high protein meal, high fat, but pretty low carb, is that going to have the same effect as if I eat a bowl of cereal the next day, and what they found is no, what you eat really matters.

14:37 – Sleep quality and glucose

Duration and variability aren’t the only sleep factors that can affect glucose levels. Sleep quality also matters.

The last thing I’ll mention, the last finding that again, was not unexpected, but was still good to see was that it wasn’t just duration and it wasn’t just how normal or how much variation from normally your sleep was, it was also that quality of sleep thing or what they call, sleep efficiency or disturbed sleep. That also had a real impact on glucose control the next morning. And it was basically, the better sleep you got, which meaning to say that the less disrupted, the more likely you were on average to have a lower glucose response to breakfast the next day. So again, sleep quality does matter.

18:06 – Sleep is the most important thing you control

There are a lot of things about your health that you can’t control, but sleep is something you can.

Sleep is one of those things that is within your control. So there’s a lot of things that about health in general, that aren’t in your control, your genetic makeup. And sometimes even things like for a lot of folks that kind of food they have access to, or what they’re able to afford, or prepare whatever sometimes can be challenging, but sleep is one of those things that you can control. I mean, we’re both parents, we know that some nights you can’t control it, kids wake up and you got to go deal with it, but to the extent that you can keeping in mind all of those things that affect sleep. What time of day you eat, whether or not you have alcohol before bed, trying to go to bed at a consistent time, again, to the extent you’re able, those are all levers to keep in mind and things that, again, with some effort you can control that can have that downstream effect

18:55 – Don’t sacrifice sleep

Be wary of the trap of thinking you can push sleep off to prioritize other tasks like work, exercise, meals or social time.

I spent a good part of my life sacrificing sleep for anything else. It was like, if I didn’t work out for the day, well then I’ll stay up later to get my workout in, or to do my work, or maybe I’m going to get my workout and then I’ll eat really late. And sleep is often the thing that just sort of, it sucks up all the other behavior. And that’s the thing that you just let fall off. And I think a lot of us feel, especially when we’re younger, you can just power through that. You’re used to going through college, not sleeping that much, staying up late, doing whatever. It’s been a real helpful for me to remember that no, no, it has a real significant impact. And I found for myself and again, consistent with what the study found that if I have bad sleep, if I’m paying attention to my sleep quality, whether that’s how much I woke up, whether it’s duration of sleep. If I know I had a short night’s sleep or this other metric that was talked about in here of how much variation was it from what I normally do, I do feel off the next day. And I do find that my response to things I eat the next day really, really varies. And so that’s really the first thing is I would say high level, just remember that sleep is a real input to your metabolic health, to how your body’s going to deal with food.

20:08 – The importance of consistency

If you want to get the most out of sleep, it is important to be consistent with your sleep schedule.

One of the takeaways I had from this that caused me to think a little bit more about my own habits was that consistency issue. Because I have been really fixated as I’ve been trying to improve my sleep quality on that duration thing. I’ve always felt like well that’s the thing, I’m used to just some nights it’s five hours some nights when I feel like I’m doing good, I’ll get my seven or eight, but I really pay no attention to what time of night I go to bed. And so this has helped me remember to try to not only get the duration of time, but try to keep it consistent, go to bed at a similar time, wake up at a similar time every day.

25:29 – Compounding effects work both ways

Just as compounding poor choices can lead to a negative effect, compounding healthy choices lead to a positive outcome.

You go for the walk and you feel better. And then you’re like, oh, that’s right. This is in my control. I don’t have to just give up. I don’t have to have a case of the F-its. I can just go for that walk and I feel better. And when I get back, because I feel better, I actually want to eat something a little healthier, and then I feel a little bit better. And then that all sets me up for a better night’s sleep tonight. And it compounds and builds the other way. So that’s the way I try to think about what these kinds of studies tell us about the choices we make.

Ben Grynol: (00:51)

I’m Ben Grynol part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level Sleep, if you ask many people, they will say they don’t get enough of it, or they know they should get more of it. And if you read the book by Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep, you know that sleep is integral for our overall health and wellness. Well, it’s a bit anecdotal. People do know this, but how does sleep relate to metabolic health? It’s one of the most important factors when you start to think about glucose stability, maintaining healthy glucose levels and maintaining lower variability over time.

Ben Grynol: (01:45)

So we’ve got this article on our blog, all about a study that was done on sleep and metabolic health outside of the type one and type two community. So Mike Haney, Haney as you’ve come to know him, editorial directorate Levels, I sat down, we discussed how sleep impacts things like your glucose levels, the next day, what his poor quality sleep do, what does poor duration of sleep do? And we deconstructed this article and discussed what was done, why it happened, and what were some of the findings around metabolic health and sleep. We didn’t go too deep into the science behind it, but we discussed a lot of the findings in the research. If you find sleep and metabolic health interesting, this is one to listen to. Here’s a conversation with Haney. So we’ve got this study. What exactly was it? What happened with it? Where was it published? When did it come out?

Mike Haney: (02:36)

Sure. So this study came out end of last year, end of 2021. It was done in combination with diabetes center in Sweden and the Harvard Chan public school health here. And actually most of the population that was studied was in the UK, and there was a little component that was in the US. About 10% of the component was in the US, but the controls and the whole setup was the same for all participants. And a couple of things were unique about this study that drove us to cover it. There’s a lot of research out there about sleep and metabolic health and the connections, and we’ve written a fair amount about it on the blog, but a couple things caught our eye here that made this study unique. The first and probably the biggest is that the population studied here, and it was about 1000 people were healthy subjects.

Mike Haney: (03:24)

So typically, one of the things that we see in a lot of the metabolic health research, whether it’s sleep or anything else that we’re looking at is the research has done for self-evident reasons, in people who have some sort of metabolic dysfunction whether that’s diabetes, often diabetes, sometimes it’s prediabetes, sometimes even obesity, because you’re trying to find ways to make people who already have some kind of impairment better. So a lot of the studies about nutritional interventions or sleep effects are in those populations. And that’s great, but it’s a little challenging for the kind of audience that we’re trying to talk to on the blog, which is a broader audience who might not have these problems yet. And our whole goal here is to try to help people not develop some of those problems like type two diabetes or obesity.

Mike Haney: (04:10)

And so we want to know what the effects of these various things are when you don’t already have a problem. When your metabolism and your system is otherwise sort of working quote unquote, “normally you’re okay” but it’s just harder and harder to find a research, or I should say increasingly there’s more of that research being done, but traditionally, a lot of the research is only in these other populations. So that was the first thing that caught our eye was like, oh, here’s a sleep study. And they screened for people who didn’t have any of those conditions, so it’s people who were basically otherwise healthy. The other thing that was kind of unique particular to sleep studies, a couple of things they did here. One is that the research was done in people’s homes. It was about a two week period in which they studied people.

Mike Haney: (04:51)

And a lot of times the sleep studies, again for kind of self-evident reasons, the research is often done in sleep labs because they want to really control the environment. And often the kind of measurement they’re doing and the monitoring they want do requires a lot of technology, a lot of machines and so people go sleep in sleep labs. But of course, most people sleep differently in a lab somewhere than they do at home. And so this one was actually conducting people’s homes and people wore a little monitor called actigraph that measured their sleep. And the third thing they did that was unique here is that they use standardized meals. So this is always a big challenge in any kind of study that involves nutrition is, do you let people eat what they normally eat and that has certain advantages, or do you standardize the meals and say only eat these things.

Mike Haney: (05:35)

In this case, they gave people standardized meals to eat. And what that allows you to do is compare not only what they call within person, which is basically one person’s response to various meals or various inputs meals, and sleep and various aspects of sleep, but also gives you a better opportunity control to compare between people. So now we know that subject a and subject B at least eight, the same meal, they might have other physiological differences. They might have other sort of sleep inputs, but at least the meal is the same. So those three things together made this study one that we wanted to look at. And just briefly what they looked at, what the study did was had people where a continuous glucose monitor, so they could get real time measurement of glucose response, eat standardized meals, and sleep kind of according to how they wanted to sleep over the course of two weeks.

Mike Haney: (06:27)

And then what they looked at was basically how their bodies responded, particularly their glucose sensitivity to those different kind of sleep input. So whether they slept longer or shorter than normal, how good their sleep was, which say like how often they woke up, how interrupted their sleep was. And another interesting aspect, they looked at which sleep studies always looked at was how quote unquote “typical their sleep night was.” So did they go to bed at the same time and sleep for the same amount of time? Or did things look different if they slept the same amount of time, but they just went to bed later. They just, if like they normally go to bed at 11:00 and they then on a particular night, they fell asleep at 1:00 instead, but slept the same amount of time. Did that have an impact the next day? And so they were really looking at glucose responses to the first meal you eat the next day after these different sleep inputs. And those were the results that they came out of that we can talk more about.

Ben Grynol: (07:19)

Yeah. One thing that is interesting to note is how much the quality and duration of sleep can change based on these inputs. So assume that a person has high cortisol, they’ve got a ton of stress, it’s like their sleep will be different and that everything is downstream, where you can have poor sleep. And that gives you poor glucose, variability or we’ll call it higher oscillation the next day, poor food choices, what you ate throughout a day, those things matter. Alcohol makes a huge difference, lack of exercise, not getting enough duration, these all end up being confounding variables when starting to look at these things. So it sounds like the study controlled for as many of these factors as possible, so that it could look at what was the next day glucose data to see how much variability there would be and what the average levels were.

Mike Haney: (08:15)

That’s right. And the other thing they did that’s helpful in that vein, is people also did oral glucose tolerance test as a control. So that’s a test that you’ll often get at the doctor if they see some kind of potential glucose issues or insulin issues. And an oral glucose tolerance test is where you basically drink disgusting drink that has 75 grams of sugar in it, but it’s very standardized. And then you measure how the body’s dealing with that glucose at set time periods often. Like half hour, hour, two hours afterwards, it’s usually called a two hour glucose tolerance test, but you often take measurements beforehand. And again, the idea there is just to have a very standardized input. It’s not like, well, you ate a carb heavy meal. Well, as we know, and we see it in our data and you see it in research, there’s a ton of individuality in how people process actual food.

Mike Haney: (09:04)

So even in these kinds of standardized meals where you can control for the macronutrients content, you can say this meal has X number of carbs, X amount of protein, X amount of fat. We still know people’s bodies are just going to respond differently. We see folks who spike on pasta and folks who don’t. So at least the oral glucose tolerance test, everybody’s taking the exact same thing and it’s really just a sugar drink. So it’s about as simple as you can get to say, all right, here’s a whole bunch of glucose at once, what’s your body going to do with?

Mike Haney: (09:30)

And it’s really what that’s largely testing is your insulin is how quickly is your insulin dealing with and responding to, and shuttling that excess glucose out of your bloodstream. And so that was also done with all of these subjects, which kind of gave you a control. It gave you something to measure against of like, all right, here’s other body response to that very standardized input, now we can sort of compare that to these various standardized meals and it gives them ability to control a little bit for those individual differences.

Ben Grynol: (09:55)

Nice. And then what ended up being some of the findings when they started digging into the data? What did they see that would’ve been maybe eye-opening or a new revelation when it comes to this data around sleep and the impact of sleep on glucose levels?

Mike Haney: (10:12)

There were a couple of aspects of it that I think were, were interesting or notable and a couple that were maybe expected. But I’ll say even when we see results that are expected, that’s still useful. Seeing consistent data across studies is always helpful. We like the new and exciting stuff where we’re, oh, we’ve never seen this before, but then of course those kind of results we also have to say, well, until we see that repeated in other studies, we’re not quite sure how seriously to take that. But the couple of things that were unique here, one was that the sleep duration didn’t make as big a difference here. And other studies, that’s an input that seems to really have an effect on glucose control, and just sort of general health, and all sorts of metabolites in your body the next day is sleep duration.

Mike Haney: (10:57)

We know that short sleep can impose, in one study, there’s a study where people got something like four or five hours of sleep for a couple of days, and their glucose control was sort of equivalent to that of people with diabetes. We know that short sleep can have a real effect here. It didn’t, but the author’s suggesting here, their conclusion on this is that maybe the reason we don’t see this is they say it’s that the effect of sleep duration in glycemic control may be non-linear. And what they basically mean by that is that you might actually need a pretty significant variation in the amount of sleep to get an effect. So, in other words, the difference between sleeping seven or eight hours, like if you typically sleep eight and you get seven, may just not have that big impact, if you slept four, you would see the very big impact.

Mike Haney: (11:41)

So that was one thing that I think was notable, maybe a little bit surprising, but also it’s one of those things that when you read it in there, you shouldn’t take to mean, oh, sleep duration doesn’t matter. There are these kind of new nuances in there that, well, maybe it’s about how much variation in the sleep duration you get. The other thing that was interesting in here was that point I mentioned, they studied about what they call sort of sleep timing, which is when you went to bed and variation from what you normally do. And what they found is that actually did happen in facts. So that’s an interesting one as well.

Mike Haney: (12:12)

If you’re really fixated on just getting your eight hours a night, if you find that’s what makes you feel better. And so you always work to get your eight hours, but it varies a lot day to day because maybe the schedule of your day varies or whatever, some days you go to bed at 10:00, some days you go to bed at 1:00 and you just say, well, whatever time I fall asleep, I’ll just make sure I get my eight and wake up the next day, they found that did actually have an impact on glucose control when you ate breakfast the next day. So that’s another interesting finding that I think we’d love to see more follow up study on to see how much of a difference that makes and to do more controls around, well, how much of a difference does it make, how much variation from normal really seems to produce an impact.

Mike Haney: (12:50)

The couple of findings they had that were a little bit more expected, but I think still interesting again, given some of these other controls of healthy population, sleeping in their beds. One was that what you eat actually really matters. Now, again, that seems sort of obvious, but to unpack that a little bit, the standardized meals that they had folks eat, there were a variety of them and they had different macronutrients compositions. So some were really high carbs, some were really high fat, some were high proteins. They had different makeups to them to see what to basically answer this question of like, well, okay, we can say that for instance, having variation from your normal sleep pattern impacts glucose control the next day. Well, is that true no matter what you eat? If I eat eggs and bacon, which a very high protein meal, high fat, but pretty low carb, is that going to have the same effect as if I eat a bowl of cereal the next day, and what they found is no, what you eat really matters.

Mike Haney: (13:43)

So the effect, the degree of effect that sleep caused was more significant when you ate a high carbohydrate meal than if you ate a high protein meal. And I think what, we will talk about takeaways in a minute, but I think to just underlines something I’ve really tried to keep in mind is, I’ve learned more about the relationship between sleep and metabolic health, which is if you know that your sleep was off a night before, and you usually do. Sometimes we might have nights of sleep where don’t realize how much we were waking up, but most of the time we know we went to bed too late. We slept too little, we were up a lot, whatever. I usually just take that as a clue to the next day, try to eat better. If you’re going to have your quote, unquote “cheat meal” or you’re going to eat something carby, or you’re tempted on something the next day, just know that probably your body is not going to handle it as well as if you were coming in on a really good night of sleep. And this study impacted that.

Mike Haney: (14:37)

The last thing I’ll mention, the last finding that again, was not unexpected, but was still good to see was that it wasn’t just duration. And it wasn’t just how normal or how much variation from normally your sleep was, it was also that quality of sleep thing or what they call it, sleep efficiency or disturbed sleep. That also had a real impact on glucose control the next morning. And it was basically, the better sleep you got, which meaning to say that the less disrupted, the more likely you were on average to have a lower glucose response to breakfast the next day. So again, sleep quality does matter.

Ben Grynol: (15:14)

Yeah. And one thing that we’ve learned is how be given an impact eating too close to bedtime can be. So that alone where your body’s trying to metabolize all this. You gave yourself all this food assume that it was standard. Like you ate at let’s just say it was, you ate at 5:00 PM versus you ate at 9:00 PM and assume you went to bed at 10:00 PM. In both cases, with that meal, your body is trying to metabolize something and you are going into a sleep state, you’re still going to be working through that food and processing it. You’re not using that energy. And so the way that your body will treat that the next day is going to vary. And so things like timing of the food input, alcohol makes a big impact or has a big impact on quality of sleep.

Ben Grynol: (16:03)

They’re all so many factors. And one thing we have also learned is that around compounding, where it’s like compounding of poor choices over a number of days leads to all of these downstream factors. So it’s not just a matter of like, oh, well, I can’t figure out why, poor sleep quality can be due to eating high, naked carbohydrate meals too many days in a row. It’s like, you can’t snap your fingers and say, great, I had a salad now I’m back to normal.

Ben Grynol: (16:33)

It takes a while for your body to get to a point of we’ll call your own homeostasis where you feel like you’re a little bit more balanced. So these are all factors that when thinking through some of these studies, it’s important to note it can’t just be a matter of get good quality sleep, get more sleep, eat meals that aren’t high carbohydrates that don’t have fat fiber protein. There’s so many factors that come into these things that we try and reinforce in all the information we put out. There are a lot of factors. They make a big difference and we have to take them all into consideration.

Mike Haney: (17:12)

Yeah, I think that’s right. And the thing that comes to mind as you mentioned that all the different things that can impact sleep is… The other thing, it always reminds me is that sleep is one of those things that is within your control. So there’s a lot of things that about health in general, that aren’t in your control, your genetic makeup. And sometimes even things like for a lot of folks that kind of food they have access to, or what they’re able to afford, or prepare whatever sometimes can be challenging, but sleep is one of those things that you can control. I mean, we’re both parents, we know that some nights you can’t control it, kids wake up and you got to go deal with it, but to the extent that you can keeping in mind all of those things that affect sleep.

Mike Haney: (17:51)

What time of day you eat, whether or not you have alcohol before bed, trying to go to bed at a consistent time, again, to the extent you’re able, those are all levers to keep in mind and things that, again, with some effort you can control that can have that downstream effect. And I think that’s useful when we think about these sort of, we call kind of the four main levers of glucose there’s others, but diet is the one we talk about all the time, but sleep, stress, and exercise are the other big three. And keeping in mind all of these factors about sleep and understanding that yes, sleep is going to have some kind of impact I think is really helpful.

Ben Grynol: (18:28)

So why don’t we go into the takeaways, what people can actually do. The takeaways and the conclusion, the way we can think about this information moving forward.

Mike Haney: (18:38)

Yeah. I think, really it’s a lot of the things we were just talking about. It’s basically remembering, I would say the high level takeaways. Remember that sleep matters. I think there’s a real instinct. I think a lot of us have, I can say, at least for myself, I spent a good part of my life sacrificing sleep for anything else. It was like, if I didn’t work out for the day, well then I’ll stay up later to get my workout in, or to do my work, or maybe I’m going to get my workout and then I’ll eat really late. And sleep is often the thing that just sort of, it sucks up all the other behavior. And that’s the thing that you just let fall off. And I think a lot of us feel, especially when we’re younger, you can just power through that.

Mike Haney: (19:20)

You’re used to going through college, not sleeping that much, staying up late, doing whatever. It’s been a real helpful for me to remember that no, no, it has a real significant impact. And I found for myself and again, consistent with what the study found that if I have bad sleep, if I’m paying attention to my sleep quality, whether that’s how much I woke up, whether it’s duration of sleep. If I know I had a short night’s sleep or this other metric that was talked about in here of how much variation was it from what I normally do, I do feel off the next day. And I do find that my response to things I eat the next day really, really varies. And so that’s really the first thing is I would say high level, just remember that sleep is a real input to your metabolic health, to how your body’s going to deal with food.

Mike Haney: (20:06)

I think on some of the specifics, again, one of the takeaways I had from this that caused me to think a little bit more about my own habits was that consistency issue. Because I have been really fixated as I’ve been trying to improve my sleep quality on that duration thing. I’ve always felt like well that’s the thing, I’m used to just some nights it’s five hours some nights when I feel like I’m doing good, I’ll get my seven or eight, but I really pay no attention to what time of night I go to bed. And so this has helped me remember to try to not only get the duration of time, but try to keep it consistent, go to bed at a similar time, wake up at a similar time every day. And then I think the other point we mentioned earlier of if you don’t, I think it’s important with all these factors to remember we talk about this a lot, having one of them go not ideally or not optimally right.

Mike Haney: (20:55)

You eat a meal that you know isn’t perfect, you have a bad night of sleep, you miss a workout in a given day doesn’t mean the day shot doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything else. The good thing about there being multiple levers of health, or particularly in this case of metabolic health and glycemic control is that if one Lever’s off, you can pull the other levers. And so again, I think it was a reminder for me looking at this study that if I know I had a bad night of sleep, which unfortunately is several nights, I know that I didn’t get as much or didn’t have the control, then I just pull those other levers the next day. And it’s like, all right, I’m going to be really careful about what I eat this morning. I’m going to have my, for me, it’s eggs would be my healthy breakfast, very protein, low carb, as opposed to the cinnamon roll or something else that I might be tempted to eat.

Mike Haney: (21:39)

Because I know that’s just going to compound the negative effect where I can help maybe counter the negative effect by just treating my body well, or making sure I get maybe low impact exercise the next day. I maybe don’t have enough energy to do a hard hit workout, but if I just go for a lot of walks the next day, well that’s pulling that exercise lever that again is going to give my body the best shot to, even in its slightly dysfunctional state because of my poor sleep quality, it’s going to set it up for the best success. So I think that notion that we learned here in the study about what you eat matters the next day was a reminder of that point of if one Lever’s off, just pull the other levers.

Ben Grynol: (22:14)

The one line that’s from the post, even a single night’s deviation from one’s normal sleep routine has a detectable impact on blood glucose control. Very important to know because it’s like, you think that, and that’s back to the idea of it compounds over time. And so it’s one of those things where, to your point, if you do have a poor night of sleep, whether it’s duration or quality or the time that you went to bed, certain factors where you go now I’ve got enough of a mental model for what this might mean. It’s like, yeah, just don’t eat the high carb breakfast the next day. Don’t make the choice that will lead you to make poor choices the next day for lunch or for dinner because you start to think, oh, the day is shot.

Ben Grynol: (23:01)

Like you said, you can always make adjustments and making those adjustments will get you to a balanced state over time. But that’s where people, all of a sudden, they go like, “Oh, I feel like I’m way off the rails. And I’ve been like this for seven days.” Because you had one bad meal that led you to sleep bad, and then you made a poor choice the next day and then you feel bad, and you missed a workout. Next thing you know you’re stressed, and there’s all these other things going on. And you’re like, “I can’t figure out what is going on.” It’s like, well you can’t just keep letting all of these other factors compound because it will lead you to have poor glucose control, and poor glucose variability, and average glucose levels are all of these factors. So what can people do if there’s, in addition to sleep hygiene, we’ve talked about that. Maintaining good sleep hygiene, making good choices. Are there any other things that people can do that we haven’t covered?

Mike Haney: (23:57)

No, I think that’s really it. I think it’s, to the point you were just making about the compounding effects of all of this stuff, just remember that it goes both ways. That poor outcome or poor choice, plus poor choice, plus poor choice, plus poor choice will lead to a very negative outcome. Whereas, one poor choice does not mean that your day is shot. And I think a lot of folks get… I follow The Rock on Instagram and he talks about occasionally as these posts where he calls the efforts, I won’t use the curse, but he says, “I got a case of the efforts.” And he’s known for discipline and he eats really well. And he does all these things, but he’ll say, “oh, I had a case of the efforts. And I ate the big plate of French toast” or whatever it was.

Mike Haney: (24:40)

And I always cringe a little bit when I see that, because I get it. I get that case. I get that sometimes you have a poor night sleep, what’s really going on is that because you had a poor night sleep, your decision making abilities just off. You’re just not as sharp as you would otherwise be. And so it’s so easy to get to that place where you go like, ah, screw it. Today’s already off. I had a poor night sleep. I deserve the cinnamon rolls, I’m going to eat those. And then like, ah, now I feel like crap because I ate the cinnamon rolls. I’m not going to go for that walk.

Mike Haney: (25:06)

And just trying to get yourself out of that mindset, and remember that one poor choice is something that it happened, and there was probably lots of reasons why it happened and just start from zero. Just like, all right, that’s done. Now let’s make the next good choice. Like, you know what, let’s not eat this in mineral. Let’s eat something else. And then let’s actually drag ourselves out and go for that walk. And then you get the effect going the other way.

Mike Haney: (25:29)

You go for the walk and you feel better. And then you’re like, oh, that’s right. This is my control. I don’t have to just give up. I don’t have to have a case of the efforts. I can just go for that walk and I feel better. And when I get back, because I feel better, I actually want to eat something a little healthier, and then I feel a little bit better. And then that all sets me up for a better night’s sleep tonight. And it compounds and builds the other way. So that’s the way I try to think about what these kinds of studies tell us about the choices we make.