Sleep Away Your Cancer

Nathan is also director of the health and healing club, president of the Holistic Leadership Council, which I’m, I have the honor of being part of a producer of the conquering cancer summit, host of the conquering cancer documentary series, which is a must see. So really reach out and get access to that documentary series and director and producer of the award winning documentary film, cancer. The integrated perspective in 2005 at only 18 years old, Nathan began his health healing and spiritual journey, eventually overcoming a decade of brutal teenage addiction, house arrest, jail and challenging times of homelessness to become an international author, filmmaker, researcher and educator. Nathan has received numerous awards, including the Accolade 2020 Outstanding Achievement humanitarian award and the Outstanding Community service award from the California Senate for his work in education and empowerment with natural and integrated methods for healing cancer. With more than 15 years in the health and wellness field as a researcher and advocate, Nathan has reached millions of people around the world with his inspiring messages of hope and healing. You can go and receive a free download of his book, becoming cancer free at Nathan crane dot com. Well, thank you so much for being here with me today.

Nathan Crane​

Dr. Michael Karlfeldt, thank you so much for that really warm introduction. Thanks for putting on this amazing summit and I’m just honored to call you a friend and a colleague and somebody who I appreciate and respect very much so. So very happy to be here and to help provide whatever information we can in this to support people and not only in wanting to prevent cancer, but people who are dealing with a cancer diagnosis or caretakers who are helping taking care of somebody or other doctors and physicians who are just educating themselves to learn more about, hey, what can we do to help our bodies naturally prevent and fight cancer. And this is one of those things, You know, sleep is one of those things that I consider. 

You know, we talk about regenerative medicine and your summit is going to cover a lot of really cutting edge leading edge, you know, regenerative medicine, solutions from technology to lifestyle, diet, you name it. But I want to make sure we didn’t leave sleep out because oftentimes people just overlook sleep and they’re like, yeah, I’ll get to that when, when I can and not realizing that it’s, it’s the number one free thing that we all can maximize too enhance our body’s natural regenerative capabilities to not only fight cancer but heart disease, diabetes, neurological disease and early death. So I’m glad that you said, you wanted this topic and really glad that we had talked about it today

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

And you’re absolutely right. I mean sleep at it entangles itself in every aspect of our health. And we wanted to kind of bring it to you connected with cancer because obviously cancer is kind of that, that final straw, you know, when, when it’s really, when we really need to hit, hit it hard and make major changes. So if you can make, if you can shift something as severe as cancer, then you can then obviously prevent a lot of diseases, you know, by using sleep as a tool. So tell me kind of in a, in a brief verbal summary as to why is sleep important for somebody that is battling cancer.

Nathan Crane

Yeah, that’s a great question. So let’s first look at what are the core causes of cancer. And colleague, a friend of mine, you might know him. Dr. Sunil Pai has an integrative clinic in Albuquerque new Mexico. And when I interviewed him years ago for my documentary on cancer, one of the things he said that stuck out so profoundly to me that I have since reused again and again and again because it really covers those core causes of cancer, he broke it into six core causes. And those six core causes are inflammation or better said, chronic inflammation, elevated blood glucose, environmental toxins, stress, unhealthy diet and lifestyle behaviors. Now, in those six core causes, there are multi sub factors and subcategories in each one of those. And actually almost all of those could just be coupled under diet, lifestyle and environment really. 

But you know, if we break it down those six, it really helps us to realize, oh, stress is a direct, not only correlated but causative factor in cancer as well as heart disease and other diseases, environmental toxins, diet lifestyle behaviors, etcetera. Right, And so how many of those six core causes are directly or indirectly impacted by sleep, just about every single one of them, chronic inflammation is impacted by sleep, elevated blood glucose is impacted by sleep, environmental toxins are impacted by sleep. And I’ll talk about why in a moment stress diet and lifestyle behaviors, sleep is one of those really important lifestyle behaviors. So why? And we’ll get into specifics and we’ll get in some really key strategies as well as some science behind this, of how everyone tuning in can improve their sleep so they can help prevent and help their bodies fight cancer naturally. 

But one of the things that’s really important to understand is what happens in sleep is our body goes into a few phase of sleep and the two that we want to talk about today, mostly our rem sleep and deep sleep. And in fact if we focus most of our time on deep sleep, we’re going to get the most benefit there. And the reason being is the more deep sleep you get and that’s your deepest level of sleep. It’s beyond rem sleep. Deep sleep is where a few things happen. One your body goes into autopsy ji or some people might call auto Fiji and that’s essential for fighting cancer because what’s happening is your body goes into this reparative process where it identifies cells that have been damaged or destructed or dysfunctional and it repairs them and it gets rid of the dysfunctional cells. 

So that’s a really important thing that happens in sleep is autopsy gee but you only get there when you get to deep sleep. So if you’re not getting very much deep sleep which a lot of people aren’t. It’s not just it’s not the dreaming rem sleep that most people associate with its deep sleep where you’re so deep where literally like you know noises and things can be happening. Your kids can be pulling on your toe, the dogs can be barking, you know the cat jumps on your face whatever like you ain’t coming out because you are so deep you know beyond beyond the the thinking mine deep in the subconscious, deep into that place where the body goes okay now I can recharge now I can regenerate now I can repair these these damaged cells and that’s important because damaged cells if they become chronically fermented then they become cancerous. Right? And so we want our body to repair these damaged cells as quick and as often as possible. And so you know some other things that happen in sleep that are really important is we’re activating that parasympathetic nervous system where the body goes into that rest and digest and healing state. 

You know melatonin is produced and melatonin is more than just a sleep hormone. Right? Melatonin is a natural antioxidant. It helps our bodies to detoxify free radicals. It also helps with bone formation, helps with our immune sys, helps with cardiovascular function. So melatonin is essential a healthy dose of melatonin production is essential for a lot of things other than just sleep helps you get to sleep. But then it’s also doing a bunch of other functions to keep your body healthy and to help fight cancer. You know and then you know we’ve got we can talk about the difference in melatonin versus cortisol and the different levels and we’ll talk about how to balance these things. But so people have a really good understanding of how important sleep really is. It also helps with energy restoration with cell regeneration helps with increased blood supply to the muscles that promotes growth and repair of tissues and bones strengthens the immune system as they talk about. 

We know about 70% of human growth hormone also happen in deep sleep which is really important as you age for repair of tissues and repair of the body. Physical repair regeneration also helps with fat burning. Growth hormone also stimulates the autopsy process that we talked about. And really ought ta Fiji again is the body’s way of just cleaning out those damaged cells in order to regenerate newer healthier cells. So if you want to know about how much deep sleep should you be getting each night. Really. A minimum goal should be 20%. So if you’re sleeping eight hours about an hour and a half of that should be deep sleep. 

Now how do you know you’re getting deep sleep? You have to track it with some kind of tracking device like this. There’s a lot out there or a ring and this one I use this whoop W. H. O. P. And there’s different devices out there. I think Apple probably has one. There’s quite a few. I don’t endorse this company. But I use it personally because I like the checking my sleep and seeing what affects it and how I feel in the morning and how much deep sleep am I getting how much rem sleep. So rem sleep is also important too because that really helps you feel mentally recharged. So if you’re not getting enough rem sleep you might feel tired and groggy and you might make bad decisions during the day. Go grab that bag of you know salty oil potato chips which we know are not good. If you have a cancer diagnosis go eat a tub of ice cream because you’re just feeling terrible. So you know rem sleep is important. So you feel good mentally and emotionally. But when we’re talking about cancer specifically in the physiology of what’s happening that’s why deep sleep is so important.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I mean it’s a huge amount of information there. I just want to kind of reiterate a few things. Some key points that you’re making. So people really understood. And so while you are sleeping you’re actually getting rid of cells that can become cancerous. So that’s what the top Aji is key. So you continually want to clear out these dysfunctional. You know either you destroy them or if there’s a way to repair them, you will do that and you do that while you’re sleeping. So if you don’t take that time to sleep, you’re than accumulating more and more cells that are then that have the ability to become cancer. So it’s like whether you have cancer or not cancer. I mean just for that alone, you should treasure that amount of time of sleep as like the most golden thing that you can do. I mean, I know we live in this, you know, sympathetic environment. We want to be. We always look up to the type A person that produced great and try to squeeze out as many hours out of his 24 hours per day. But if we don’t recognize that’s you, that’s sad to say, Yeah, darn it. Here we are, talking about it. But we’re trying.

Nathan Crane

But to that point it’s a good point because because once we prioritize sleep like I now it used to not be a priority, but I used to get sick a lot more often a lot easier and would become more fatigued, chronically fatigued and things like that because it was like starting my business is in the early days and just researching and learning and helping people was so excited, so passionate. I mean, I would go sometimes 48 hours working researching, studying without sleeping at all. And as I learned more and more about health, I learned, okay, sleep is actually very important. Now, I’m at the point in my life where it’s like, oh you guys are gonna be out till midnight, no, thank you, I’m going home at 10 o’clock, you know, like that’s how I am and I’ve been that way for a long time because once you prioritize it, you feel so much better and you know, it’s contributing to your long term health, you know, it’s contributing to your disease prevention, potential disease reversal, so it has to become a priority, you know, to your point that’s wonderful, you brought that up that even if you’re someone who’s highly energetic and go, you know, kind of a go getter creator, someone who likes to just constantly create and learn and help and build things and all of that. 

Like, if you get your quality sleep and you make it your priority, you will be way more effective in your business and your life, and your health, with your family, you will feel better and you’ll live a longer life, ideally, hopefully, you know, you don’t get hit by a bus or something like that, you’ll have the opportunity to potentially live a much longer life and contribute more to the world in a better way. So where maybe I would get three hours of sleep at night or four or five or sometimes go days, you know, a couple of days without sleep now. To me, it’s, it’s a minimum of seven plus hours per night every single night. It’s just, but to get that, so here’s the other thing that’s a lot of people don’t realize I used to be in bed for seven or eight hours a night and thought that I got seven or eight hours of sleep until you start tracking it. 

You realize that to get seven or eight hours of sleep, you need to be in bed nine or 10 hours in most cases, depending on how efficient you are, how much liquid you drink at night, how often you wake up, you know, all of that. And so you, if you’re pretty efficient, you could be in bed for eight hours to get seven hours of sleep. If you’re somewhat inefficient, you’ll need to be in bed for nine hours to get seven hours of sleep. So that’s really important to try because you see that actually, you’re like, well I’m in bed for nine hours, I’m getting nine hours sleep. No, you’re not because a lot of that you’re actually in what we call awake and that awake is you’re not physically awake, but your heart rate is elevated and your brain waves are elevated to the point where you’re not in rem sleep. You’re not in light sleep and you’re not in deep sleep. Getting all that region, it benefits you’re in a state of called awake sleep. 

It’s kind of a misnomer. It sounds weird but that’s really what’s going on and then a bulk of your sleep is actually gonna be light sleep. And that’s just kind of like that’s kind of like a state where you can think of just kind of resting, digesting. Your eyes are closed, you’re giving your brain which is a much needed rest from all the physical stimulus that we have all around us. But your body and your body is resting. You’re going to a parasympathetic state which is wonderful that activates some healing capacity. But where you get the most benefit is once you get to remand into deep sleep as we talked about. So you know again if you want 7 to 9 hours of sleep you gotta be in bed 8 to 10 hours every night minimum. And that’s why it has to become a priority.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

And I could relate you were talking about when you’re saying with deep sleep and you know a bowling ball is dropped and you still won’t wake up. I actually lived in L. A. you know during the I think it was like 93 or 94 earthquake that took place there and I slept straight through it. So it’s good. Yeah. Yeah exactly. So you highlighted them the benefit, I just want to go through them again so that people really understand the benefit and then I want to get into what can we do to maximize that because obviously you know, we can see the benefit but what do I do? So we know then that it helps to detox the body. We know that it clears out all the cells that become can become cancerous. And we know also that it produces melatonin which is like one of the top anti aging hormones are produced in the body. I mean we use peptides like Epitaph allen you know, to increase the telomere length and telomerase is kind of the end caps of our genes and and the faster they break down the faster wage. 

So if we can reverse that process, we are then able to benefit from that anti-aging and melatonin that helps with that process. And melatonin also helps to detoxify have metals, chemicals out of the brain and then we have all the regenerative aspect, you know, all bones muscles, ligaments, you know, all of that is being regenerated energy is recharge also. We process a lot of traumas and emotions and things that are then taking place throughout the day so we don’t carry them with us and we can kind of process that. So all those are kind of the benefit. And obviously if we would have a pill that would give us all those benefits. I mean that would be worth billions about billions on the market. So what can we do to be able to then maximize our sleep? There are some factors that interfere with our ability to get that good sleep that you’re talking about?

Nathan Crane

Perfect question. So two things come up and then we’ll dive into, you know, kind of what I’ve discovered as the I don’t want to call them sleep hacks. They’re really like profound sleep strategies that work if you do them. So one thing the appeal, so people think, oh I can just take melatonin, I’ll be fine and no that’s not. Yes, you are, might get some benefit, you might get more rem sleep when I take melatonin. I dream a lot more, but it actually doesn’t make my deep sleep any better. And in fact it can impact my overall sleep sometimes where I’m in a light sleep longer or a little bit more rem sleep, but less deep sleep. 

So melatonin is not the answer. In in terms of a pill. CBD can be helpful as well. So CBD I take some times at night and feel like I get a good restorative sleep, but same thing for me. CBD can also make me dream more be more rem state. Not necessarily in as long of a deep state. So again, there are some solutions from nature we can use and I’ll talk about some more of those things that can help in a moment, but there is no magic pill that’s gonna make your sleep. We have to get into real strategies that work priority, is it? And then do these things and they’re pretty simple to do once you create a habit out of it, it happens pretty pretty quick and pretty easy. And then you look forward to it every single night. But your morning routine is just as important as your nighttime routine. I have to say that and I’ll share with you why and the hormonal response of why it is in just a second before we do the really important question we have to answer is how much sleep is enough sleep. And so I’ll cover this in like two minutes and then we’ll get into the strategies because people say, well five hours, I feel fine, you might feel fine. But if you look at majority of sleep studies that have been done, I’ll read you a few. You’ll see that like there’s a maid analysis of 16 major studies that included over 1.3 million men and women. They found that people who slept less than six hours had a much greater risk of death from all diseases than people who slept 7-9 hours. 

So that was just duration of sleep, not quality of sleep. They were looking at just, how long are you actually sleeping at night? Less than six hours. Your disease rate all cause more all cause morbidity increases. If you’re 7 to 9 hours you have a much better baseline of health. There was another study 23,620 middle aged participants in Europe from 94 to 98 they found that people who slept less than six hours once again had a two times increased risk of stroke, a 50% chance increased risk of cancer and 30% chance of overall chronic disease. They also found that daytime Sleep had an increased risk of chronic diseases among people who had hypertension versus people who are getting their sleep at night. 

So, and that has a lot to do with the Circadian Rhythm and we might talk a little bit about that. There was another study from 2011. They had 1240 participants after they adjusted for race, age, smoking, family history and so on. They found that people who slept less than six hours per night had a 50% higher chance of colon cancer. And they stated that a shorter duration of sleep significantly increases the risk of cancer. There was another study from an NIH study cohort, they found an increased risk in stomach cancer in males who slept less than six hours versus those who slept 7 to 8 hours and the list goes on and on and on and on. You can find tons of these studies in peer reviewed journals like Pub med. 

The big key takeaway here is actually two part, one is less than six hours is greatly associated with all cause mortality, increased cancer risk stroke etcetera. All of these studies find that sweet spot between 7 to 9 hours of sleep. And actually if you look at the data people who sleep beyond nine hours actually tend to have an increased risk of all cause mortality as well. Which is interesting to me and I think there’s more research that needs to be done in that area. But I really think my theory is that has a lot to do with the circadian rhythm. And that’s people who sleep more than nine hours consistently like every single day for years and years. If you sleep 10 hours one night because you’re really tired or once in a while. I do not think that’s going to increase your all cause mortality. We’re talking about every night kind of situation sleeping 7 to 9 hours every night is what all majority of the studies show. So how long should you sleep at night? 7 to 9 hours. Right key takeaway write that down for everybody tuning in and do more research on that on your own if you’d like to. But I did a ton of research on that for everybody here. Now let’s get into the nighttime routine and then we’ll talk about the morning routine and why that’s just as important. So what time should we get to bed? Well according to a new study from the U. K. They were looking at cardiovascular disease. They found that people who went to bed between 10 PM And 11 PM at night had the least risk of cardiovascular disease risk. People went to bed after 11 PM. Like at midnight for example, they had a 25% increased risk of cardiovascular disease. 

And so similarly what I found interesting was people went to bed earlier than 10 p.m. They also saw an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Again, I think there’s more research that’s needed on that. But what they found is there’s a sweet spot between, you know, around 10 p.m. 11 P. M. If you’re getting to bed during that time, you’re going to be kind of in that sweet spot of less risk of disease. Now how do we get to bed around that time? Now there’s a lot of people who work through the nights and those, you know, those are different question. We can answer that separately. But for the average person, the number one thing is we have to turn technology off minimum one hour but ideally two hours before we want to go to bed. 

So if you want to be in bed or sleep at 10 PM, you really should be turning off your tv, your phone, your electronics, everything that emits this blue light. And it stimulates your brain around two hours, minimum one hour. Most people have a hard time with two hours. But ideally you would do it at eight p.m. Nine P. M. At the latest. Turn it off because that that blue light mimics the light from the sun and it stimulates cortisol and it’s telling your brain, hey, the sun’s still out, even though it’s dark outside, you’re watching tv, you’re on your computer, you’re looking at your phone, you get the lights on, your brain is not producing the melatonin, it needs to produce, it’s still producing cortisol. 

And cortisol is the wake up hormone. So, you know, if you look at the circadian rhythm of nature, if we were living outside in nature, like go camping, for example where there’s no external lights, you go to bed much earlier, right? Anybody who has ever been camping, it, it might get dark at seven PM. Eight PM, you might have a fire for an hour or so and then you’re in bed like you’re, you’re more tired earlier, especially you start the fire earlier. If you wait too late, that’s a whole different story. But if you spend like a week camping out nature, you’ll find yourself going to bed naturally much earlier because you’re in tune with the circadian rhythm and your brain isn’t being stimulated by all these lights all night long. So starting the getting to bed process earlier during the technology off, your phone has a setting, my phone I have, there’s a setting in settings called night shift. So you go to settings, go to display and brightness and turn on night shift. So if you do have your phone on in the evening, it’ll dim the blue light and make it more of an orange light. So that’s one little kind of hack you can do. There’s an app on your computer called F dot lux F dot L U X. So again in the afternoon it starts turning down that blue light and making your computer screen more orange. So that’s an app that I use another big one. Or you can use. I think I have them in my I don’t have them right here. They’re in my other room or you can use blue light blocking glasses as well. As soon as the sun goes down, put those on blocks that blue light so that your brain starts producing more melatonin instead of cortisol. 

So just some little hacks you can do there if like it’s impossible for you to turn all your technology off. The other thing I do too is all the light bulbs in the house I replaced with blue light blocking bulbs. And I’ve actually noticed a difference when I replaced the bulbs that actually get to bed earlier and better if you wake up to go to the bathroom instead that big bright light, it’s like an orange light and it doesn’t mess up your hormone distribution as much. You don’t feel it as much, you can go to bed faster and easier. But you can get these bulbs, they last years and years and years, it’s more of an orange glow instead of that bright white light. And I just replace all the bulbs in the house. If you can’t do all the bulbs, replace the ones where you spend the most time at night. So if it’s a kitchen, the living room, your bedroom, of course your bathroom replace those ones so that when those lights are on at night again your brain’s going it’s night time, it’s time to relax. 

Let’s produce more in this great antioxidant, it’s time to get ready for bed, right? You’re not going on this yo yo of like cortisol melatonin, cortisol melatonin, your brain and your endocrine system is all screwed up and it’s like what the heck what are you doing to me? You know and then you don’t get into that deep sleep that you need or not enough of it. The other thing is caffeine, caffeine really should be stopped eight hours before bed. Now many of us get addicted to caffeine. Many of us become tolerant to caffeine and many of us can drink a cup of coffee an hour before bed and say it doesn’t affect me. The reality is even though you’ve grown a tolerance to, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect your sleep. And the way you can test that for yourself is if you’re tracking your sleep and stop drinking caffeine for a week or two weeks completely and see how your sleep improves or stop drinking caffeine eight hours before bed. So have your last cup of tea or coffee at two PM. If you’re going to bed at 10 p.m. I mean that’s eight hours is really minimum because half caffeine has a really long half life in the body. So and it will affect your sleep. So really again cutting out caffeine, cutting it down, cutting it back earlier and you’ll notice an improvement in your sleep. The other one is two completely black out your curtains in your bedroom. So and turn off all the lights. So there was a study that was done I saw a few years ago where they literally put a tiny tiny light under the blankets where you can’t even see it. But somehow the body recognized it. And when they had that little teeny tiny light, like it was like under somebody’s leg under the blankets and you visibly cannot see it and everything else was black, it negatively impacted the people sleep in the study. 

And then when they got that light completely out of the room, their sleep improved. So they’ve shown this again and again that even the tiniest light, any blue light whatsoever in your room. So it could be a light that’s coming in from outside from the street lamps for example, could be the light that’s coming off of the clock in the kitchen and it’s seeping through your room any little teeny tiny light except for Starlight and moonlight. And they’ve studied this in depth that those lights from nature don’t have the same and in fact they have an opposite effect. They have a soothing, calming, restorative sleep impact effect on your brain on your endocrine system versus the man made lights. It’s very, very interesting. So blacking out your room completely blackout curtains. Turning off the, you know, your phone, I put my phone on sleep mode so it doesn’t disturb me at all and then turn it upside down. 

And so there’s just nothing from the phone that’s emitting any light. You know, close all your doors, all that kind of stuff and you’ll find I did the same thing. I had, I was in a blacked out room in Escondido and had to be around 78 2009 somewhere in there. And I woke up and I turned on my phone and I had like 50 missed calls and like 30 text messages. And I was reading like fire and flames and death and escaped the city before it’s too late. And I woke up from this deep sleep and I’m like what is going on? I’m freaking out the whole room, I mean is like totally pitch black. So I go out and I walk outside and it was like being in some crazy End of the world movie. I’m not kidding. 

And you know, my car was covered in ash, there was nobody on the streets anywhere. And I’m walking around. I see like the sky is like blacked out with like orange in the distance and I’m like what is going on? Those fires that were just tearing through the neighborhoods were getting so close. They were closing the highway to get out of Candida to Oceanside. I literally made it within like a half an hour. And to your point of, you know, your experience with the earthquake. I was in such a deep sleep and such a blacked out room that when I woke up from that I just was in another world. But you know, that’s what you want. If you want to get into that deep healing restorative space and something, a lot of people go, well what if someone tries to call me? It’s emergency? Well that’s up to you. You know, it’s like emergencies for me can wait till the morning. That’s how I prioritize my sleep. If your sleep is that important to you, you’ll also make the same decision. If it’s not, you’ll leave your phone on and it’ll bother you all night, it’ll mess up your sleep and that’s also your choice. You know, but I’m not gonna wake up at three AM and answer a phone call anyway, so it’s like if it’s an emergency. Get to it when I wake up at seven o’clock in the morning and that’s just the decision I’ve made because I’ve made sleep so important because it’s so important for me as a father, as a researcher, as a teacher, as an author. It’s important for me as an athlete. You know, it’s important for my longevity. 

So it’s one of those things that I have prioritized. I encourage others to do the same. So caffeine eight hours before minimum changed all the lightbulbs in the house. You can put the apps on your phone computer that can help the blue light blocking glasses and black out your room. Turn off the wifi at night. I highly recommend it. I just plug it into a because then you’re not bombarded with those E. M. S. While you’re sleeping. That’s a whole other conversation, a ton of science on that specifically related to cancer and you know, breaking down damaging the DNA of the cells. But turning off the wifi can plug it into one of those strips and then just click the button at night. You only have to unplug it. 

Just turn it off and turn on in the morning. It’s wonderful.It works very easy. And then your nighttime practice. So mine is, you know, I’ll read, I will meditate and go through the things that I’m grateful for in my mind. Oftentimes I I lay on a mat like a red light therapy matt for a little while or the one I really like is it’s like an acupressure acupuncture type of matt and I feel so like restored from that. It’s quite amazing. But I’ll lay on that mat for a while, I’ll read, I’ll meditate, I’ll do my gratitude practice. Some people will take a bath and put on candles, put in some essential oils that help create calmness in the brain. 

Like lavender, for example, lavender is a wonderful kind of nighttime. I am soothing essential oil. You can put in a diffuser, you take a bath with it, but your nighttime routine keep it the same every night and at the same time and you’ll find that you get into that circadian rhythm and it’s much easier to get to bed to sleep at the same time every single night. And then you get into, you know, these are just some of the things that I do every night. If you just do these things alone, you can see a huge improvement and impact in your sleep. Also sleeping cool. They found that, you know, a cooler room, I believe it’s 70 something degrees. I can’t remember what the study showed, but when you’re not sweating while you’re sleeping, ideally you’re in, you’re in a cooler room. That helps you get into a longer deeper sleep. There’s a lot more you can do, but I think it’s enough for people tuning in right now. Like just do those things, you can actually change those in a few days and start to notice a massive improvement.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love that. I mean with with the it’s so great, you know, because you have had to really kind of bio hack your sleep meaning because you you are such a productive individual and you have to function on such a high level and and when you recognize that when you have certain patterns, you know, like like what you’re doing in your sleep patterns and how is that impacting you as a father, You know, my emotions, how I interact with my Children, how you conduct yourself and in business, how quickly I’m able to, you know, solve issues, you know, run my business. You want to be able to minimize the amount of time and it’s a as possible when you’re running your business so that you can then spend as much time with what you love, which is your family, relationships, connections and so then you really want to make sure that you take care of yourself, take care of your mind and how you feel emotionally and and sleep becomes so important with that in addition to just kind of the health benefits. 

So one thing that really, I mean, I love everything you say about the wifi is one of the things that I really and like you said, we can spend hours just on that alone, but for people to recognize that it’s not only the signal from the wifi, I mean that that in itself it’s all the information that’s piggybacks on that, that that signal and that information always changes, which means that the body can never adapt to that signal. It can never adapt. So will always be in a stress state, always produce cortisol because it has, you know, it’s always something that is changing. And so I really love that aspect. So another component of it is in relationship them to your sleep. You have people that they have a stressful day and they have a nightcap, you know, in order to be able to kind of wind down, they need to shut down their brain quickly. You know, how does things like alcohol, food, you know, how does that interact with your ability to sleep?

Nathan Crane

Yeah, that’s a good question. So food, that’s something I didn’t mention. Food takes generally depending on what you’re eating at least a couple of hours for the digestive process to happen. 2 to 3 hours, depending. I mean heavy fats can take longer, but at night generally you want to stop eating 2 to 3 hours. Three hours really is ideal before bed. And why is that? Because let’s say you eat at nine o’clock, you go to bed at 10 o’clock well for the next hour or two hours, maybe three hours you’re body is expending its healing energy on digestion. So the blood, the energy that your brain is telling your body to produce, its putting all that energy into, hey, we got to digest this food, we gotta break this down, we gotta send these molecules here and there, we gotta send these vitamins we got but you know, extrapolate this and that. And so when it should be saying hey we gotta clean up these abnormal cells before they become cancerous. We need to reduce this inflammation over here before it becomes chronic. We need to do all these other things that happen in in in sleep. And so your energy focusing on healing. It’s focused on digestion. So if you can have your last meal be done eating by seven p.m. For example and then you’re sleeping at 10 p.m. Well, majority if not all of your digestion has happened and now your body can focus on getting into that restorative rejuvenating state. It’s a really important thing with food. I’m glad you brought that up. 

The second thing is about alcohol. What’s interesting, I haven’t done a ton of research on alcohol affecting deep sleep for example, I’m sure there’s some impact there, but we do know and I’ve done a lot of research on alcohol and cancer, alcohol is a known carcinogen. We know that alcohol causes cancer does my wine. Red wine cause cancer unfortunately. Yes. Red wine is associated with a significantly higher cancer risk. It is carcinogenic generally. It’s very high in sugar as well and we know that sugar feeds on cancer. So people say, well yeah the resveratrol, well yeah, just eat grapes or just, you know, just take resveratrol capsules. You’re gonna get way more benefit from that and drinking the wine. Well, I love my wine. I have one glass of night with dinner. I’ve well if you’re emotionally attached to it and it’s one glass at night and you would feel terrible mentally, emotionally physiologically without it, you just couldn’t do without it.

You might be better off having that glass than getting rid of it because you’re gonna stress yourself out about it. But if you’re like me and realized alcohol, alcohol has no more place in my life ever. And I cut alcohol out 100% going from a, you know, young alcoholic to the point of realizing, hey, I’m way happier, I’m way healthier, I’m way better. I’ll live way longer. Hopefully without any alcohol in my system whatsoever, then I just don’t ever have any alcohol and I don’t miss it and I don’t look towards it. And there’s nothing that it would do for me that a healthy diet or meditation or exercise or fulfilling life will do better without the side effects. So alcohol has side effects. It has, you know, the negative attributes to it. It’s gonna potentially contribute to inflammation in the body, That excess sugar is gonna feed the cancer. It is going to damage the D. N. A. And make your body have to work harder to repair that D. N. A. So my suggestion is try to reduce alcohol as much as possible. If you can and if you’re willing to and if you’re really serious then just find a way to cut alcohol completely out of your life because there’s really no benefit to you in drinking alcohol other than like I said that mental emotional attachment to it where you feel you know so so good about it, you would feel 10 times worse without it than with it. Now I’m you know we’re talking about the not the alcoholic, we’re talking about someone who has a glass of wine with dinner once in a while situation right? The alcoholic we know you know you could even stop almost immediately and potentially die because your body has become so dependent on and that becomes your number one food source. Actually alcohol is classified as a food by the way. Which is quite crazy because there are no nutrients in majority of alcohol for the body whatsoever but our body becomes so dependent on it and then we’re not getting the other nutrients we need from the foods and things because we’re getting you know filled up with the alcohol itself. 

So anyway that’s my recommendation there with alcohol and with food again at least three hours before bed now be done eating three hours before bed now you’re like well yeah I had dinner at seven but then I had a little snack at nine. Well, guess what? That little snack is going to take two or three hours to digest. So you really want to fast between your dinner and the next morning you know, with water or, you know, a little bit of tea, but nothing that’s gonna stimulate an insulin response. So no glucose, nothing with sugar, nothing with, you know, carbohydrates or protein or anything like that. Because the moment you stimulate the insulin response with any kind of food, a snack or whatever, immediately your body goes, oh, insulin release. Now we’re going digestive process. We’re getting out of regenerating, he’ll prob process and and you start the cycle all over again, Right? So that’s that part.

And then the other thing that I want to mention was the morning routine. The morning routine is just as important as the night time because in the morning, you know, cortisol gets this kind of bad rap. Like we talked about cortisol, like it’s the devil, You know, and the reality is, cortisol is not this terrible hormone. It’s actually a hormone that has a lot of important functions as you, you know, cortisol is, but where it gets a bad rap is because far too often because of stressful lives and not good sleep patterns and too much alcohol, too much stress to, you know, overexposure and stimulus and too much blue light at night and all the stuff we have too much cortisol and too much cortisol then can become inflammatory and cause some problems. But cortisol is what happens to the brain starts signaling the body to produce cortisol in the morning, especially with the sunlight. So what they found is if you start your morning with the 1st 30 minutes, getting sunlight into your body and into your eyes. So what I’ll do is I’ll make a cup of tea for example, I’ll go sit outside in the sun and I’ll read and getting that sunlight first thing in the morning helps produce the cortisol, which says, hey, sleep time is over. It’s time to get ready for the day. And so it gets you into the next phase of your circadian rhythm, which again keeps your circadian rhythm in balance. So when the sun goes down and you’re not bombarded by blue light, you’re going to get to bed easier earlier because your brain goes, hey, at this time we get up and we get the sunlight and the cortisol every single morning. So again, that circadian rhythm creates this kind of continuity creates a pattern that the brain and the body. 

The physiology gets used to. So cortisol, it, you know, increases glucose in our bloodstream. It enhances our brains use of glucose that increases the availability of substances in our bodies. That also helps repair tissues very similar to melatonin actually, which is quite interesting cortisol can also help reduce inflammation regulates our metabolism again, levels peak after dawn generally and decline during the day, as long as we’re not stressed out all day, you get stressed out. You, you know, get fearful, angry, anxious, whatever boom, you’re gonna activate the sympathetic fight or flight response and cortisol is going to be dumped and then, you know, all of a sudden you have excess cortisol production. And your body is constantly this fight or flight inflammatory state. 

So we we I want to be more calm and balanced throughout the day as often as possible because cortisol down regulates our immune system and we need our immune system activated if we’re dealing with cancer or some chronic disease so that it can fight that cancer. So again, blue light is activating cortisol which is actually white. Like we see the lights in our house, they look white, but it’s actually kind of a blue light. So we want to replace that with orange lights. We want to do stress reduction practices during the day. Maybe meditation. Now, what’s interesting is something like horror missus, like a hermetic stressor, like high intensity exercise or a sauna might produce cortisol a little bit. But then the reverse of that is now your body goes into repair, regenerate rejuvenation, healing phase right after. 

So there’s a healthy level of like high intensity exercise, you’re going to produce some of these hormones that are kind of fight or flight intentionally because as soon as you’re done, the body actually adapts and gets healthier and stronger. So it can adapt to that kind of fight or flight situation, easier. Now, that’s an intentional hore medic stressor that makes us healthier and stronger and live longer. The ones that are not intentional that are chronic, like all day people stressed out is what’s gonna lead to more chronic disease. So nighttime routine, super important. The list of all the things that I mentioned, actually all that, that whole list. If people want to download it, it’s in my book, they can get for free at becomingcancerfree.com. that book they can download for free right there and then the whole list, I have a whole chapter on sleep in there. So people can have that nighttime list and also the morning routine list. So, you know, in case people weren’t taking notes, they can go get that at becomingcancerfree.com.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

And that, I mean, you have so many great resources like, you know, like that free e book and you have the health and healing club where people can become members. And there’s just a huge list of of, you know, videos educational material that that people can really use in order to be able to to buy a hack, you know, and their whole whole well being and then obviously we want to prevent cancer, but if you’re dealing with cancer, then what can I do to kind of maximize my immune system to reduce inflammation, support tissue repair and and all these different processes that you you want to make sure functions at its optimum. So yeah. And so for people to kind of tie type back into, you know, in regards to cancer and the sleep. Is that inflammation? I mean you mentioned inflammation cancer is an inflammatory process. 

So we want to stay out of inflammation. But at the same time, like you’re mentioning also is that it is good to do these type of, you know, focused stressors like, you know, fasting, you know, fasting puts a body in a state where it cleans out a lot of unwanted material that that the body wants to get rid of that can promote cancer. You know, exercise, you know, that puts the body in an oxidative stress which would think which we don’t want to be an oxidative stress, but the body then has mechanisms where it actually in response produces a lot of antioxidants and a lot of regenerative components that that then shifts you into that healing state after. So that’s why, you know, not being in that chronic state but doing these kind of focused, intense exercise is really important. 

One thing that I wanted to bring in also is, you know, we’re talking about hormones, you know, and you mentioned several times, you know, you gotta be to bed by 10 to 11 and we know, you know like hormone for instance that’s being produced that that’s crucial and we talked about the pineal but we also have what’s called the HP. A. Access or H. P. T. Axis or H. P. O. Or H. P. Test. I mean all of those hypothalamus pituitary and then all the other hormones that are regulates. So for you know cancers are driven by like hormones like you got prostate, you got a variant, you get breast, you got uterine, you know all of those when you have a deal this regulated hormonal system you know that is then going to drive these cancer processes. So by getting to bed in time and allowing the pituitary the pineal they hypothalamus all of that do its best job and we know that it peaks around midnight and so if you can be at sleep deep sleep at midnight we are going to get the most benefit of that whole system. So I really just want to drive home that point. So people really understand how important in regards hormonally and also we talk about the detoxification and yes we want to be able to detoxify all the cells and clear out all the toxin cells. But we also need to recognize that liver control About 80% of all our hormonal activity that’s the one that breaks down all the unwanted hormones and then also you know allows the the good hormones to be there you know circulating in the system so if we don’t allow the liver to do its job while we’re sleeping now, we have all these excess estrogen or excess hormones that are then stimulating growth cancer, prostate cancer or whatever it may be. So there’s so many components in regard to cancer where sleep is so crucial in addition to regenerative. But we’re talking about cancer right now.

Nathan Crane

100%. Yeah. Thank you for sharing and recapping that. I mean if anything, if there’s anything that people take away from this, it’s one makes sleep a huge priority in your life from tonight. Moving forward number to create a sleep routine in the morning routine. So nighttime routine in the morning routine that you can follow day in and day out as closely as possible. Number three realize the importance of caffeine, food, alcohol and lights technology. Blue light stimulation on the brain and the body and its effect on sleep. And if you get that alone, those key takeaways, you can improve the quality of sleep, improve your body’s ability to fight all kinds of chronic diseases and help extend your lifespan to healthier age of well-being right. 

Nobody wants to live to be 100 if they’re sick and unhealthy and in pain. But if you’re hell healthy and vital and have energy and feel good, you know, 80 90 100 years old. It seems kind of exciting for most of us. Right? So sleep is back to the title of you know, this talk really, it’s your number one free regenerative solution for cancer and all chronic diseases. So I really hope everybody tuning in takes that away and got some good helpful information out of this. And I wish you all just amazing good quality, lots of wonderful sleep tonight and every night moving forward.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love it. I love And again, can you just reiterate where people can find you your resources so that people that wants to be benefited by all the things that you bring to the world. Where are some of the websites that they can go?

Nathan Crane

Absolutely, yeah, thank you for that. So Nathancrane.com, if you join my newsletter there, I will send you half a dozen incredible resources for health and well being cancer prevention and healing. As well as you can stay up to date on a lot of the great resources that I research and share with others. Just Nathancrane.com to get the book that I mentioned for free becoming cancer free. Just go to becomingcancerfree.com,

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Awesome. Thank you so much Nathan for everything that you do and for bringing this incredible information out to the world. Thank you.

Nathan Crane

Absolutely. It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me