Dive Deep: Sleep, Light & Your Circadian Rhythm’s Role In Disease

Jason Prall

Yes, I appreciate that. The kind where it’s from all the work that you do, it means a lot. So thank you for that. Yes, it’s interesting that we’re in such an interesting time when it comes to longevity because we have this new medicine that’s coming online. with stem cells and biologics. And then we have, which is essentially dipping back into our innate intelligence. That’s an interesting thing to explore. Then we have the other side of the coin, which is like all this technology. which is interesting, potentially dangerous, and very weird in another way. We can go down some dark rabbit holes in that realm. We are in some ways. We’re at a very interesting nexus. It is critical to consider how we think about aging and longevity. There is historical context for aging, for longevity, and for life itself as a cycle. It’s important to explore these things from a foundational principle because if we lose that, then we’re going to start veering off into these random territories that are going to get us in trouble. So for me, when I wrote the book, it’s like longevity is an important thing. We want elders; we want experienced people to guide our younger generations. There are a lot of benefits to increasing longevity on the planet. What is longevity? What is aging? How do we think about aging? It’s a very deep topic. I interviewed you for my film series, The Human Longevity Project. 

I remember that we interviewed 80 to 90 health experts. You were one of them. and I asked this question to many of them. I said, “What is aging?” Not a single person gave me the same answer. These are very intelligent people who do a lot of work in a lot of different realms in the health sciences. So it’s interesting that we don’t have a definition of biological aging. I had to sit and think about what that is, and it’s a process. A lot of the time, when we’re thinking about aging, anti-aging, and longevity, what most people are talking about are the effects of, quote-unquote, aging. The damage that accumulates over time as a result of aging. We still don’t know what aging is or what causes this process in an organism, be it a salamander, a whale, a tiger, or a human. But it’s an innate process. It’s built into all of these organisms. There is an interesting thing when it comes to aging itself. Without going too deep into that rabbit hole, because we can get lost in that, it’s important to recognize that damage is one thing and aging is another thing. We can slow the rate of aging. I’m quite confident we can do that. I’m not so confident that we can stop aging altogether. 

I’m not convinced it’s impossible. We can’t go backward. Now, look, we use these terms colloquially. You probably use them. I use it. It’s okay, but what I want to say here is that the term anti-aging refers to damage reversal. The ability to turn back the clock from a damage perspective on a cellular level or an organ level. In a sense, it’s like anti-aging, but it’s just cleaning up some damage, and we’re utilizing the repair mechanisms that are built within us. But that’s an important distinction: yes, we can turn on repair; yes, we can clean up damage; and no, we can’t undo whatever aging is or whatever is guiding that process. Again, we don’t have it. We don’t know whether it’s doing that. I’m confident that we sure as heck can’t figure out how to undo that yet. That would be like Benjamin Button style, like going backward and starting to get younger, and in ten years I’m now 20 again. That’s just not going to happen. I just want to lay that framework down because I think it’s important, as we have these discussions about longevity, what it is we’re talking about, and whether it is slowing the rate at which one age ages cleaning up the damage that has already accumulated. We can do that to an extent because we have mechanisms built into our biology. We have that magic within us. That’s what’s cool.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yes, it’s good. We know that damage is going to happen. It happens to all of us. It’s a homeopathic stressor that creates adaptation and a level of resilience in our body. We know the damage is going to occur. We can’t get around that. The other factor is how well we respond and recover. I’ve heard the term healthy aging” refer to successful adaptations to the stressors that we’re under and how successfully we’re adapting.

Jason Prall

If we lose this ability to destroy cells, or, in other words, create death on a micro level, then we have cancer, so we want cells to die. We need cells to die. We need mitochondrion to die. That’s a critical aspect. There are a lot of longevity researchers that are in the mitochondrial sciences and that are in the cancer sciences that are looking at these rates of how much apoptosis we want and how much autophagy we want. If we have too much of something, it’s bad. If we have too much of another thing, it’s also bad because there is a dynamic balance that’s occurring inside the body. This becomes the art form of how we do this throughout our lives, knowing that this is going to happen. We want it to happen. We want to encourage it to happen. A lot of the things that we look at in the health world, right when it comes to, again, exercise, sunlight, fasting, and certain foods, are all hormetic stressors. In other words, they are damage-causing. They’re innately creating pressure on the system. selective pressure, adaptive pressure that the better organism has, and the amazing ability to both sense and then adapt and modify to meet that stressor. That’s what’s amazing about our human organism. yet we push it too hard. Then it gets out of this hormetic zone and gets straight damage. 

Yet again, just like if I were well, I was at the gym a few months ago and sliced my finger up and had to go get stitches and all that. And it was like it looked like another meat grinder. The nail was hanging off, and I was like, Oh, my God. yet the doctor comes in there and throws in, like four stitches through the nail bed and all this. But my finger miraculously heals right now; there is a lot of scar tissue in there. There is some reorganization of the tissue itself. But over time, it’s going to go back to a normal finger, pretty much all the way. Like, that’s remarkable. We have this intelligence within us. No matter how much damage we cause, we can almost recover from anything. That’s what’s remarkable. the younger that we are, because there is something important about youth itself. The number of stem cells we have, all the growth factors, all the magic—that is, within a young life form, there is vitality in there. That does wane over time. That is part of the aging process. But when we make mistakes early in life, we can still come back from them. This is remarkable. That’s what’s worth acknowledging here: it’s important to remember that there is an innate intelligence; there is a built-in magic to us. to honor that, to respect it, and not try to play God at every turn because it gets us into trouble. Trusting the in-built humanity is important in this process.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yes, it’s so good. There is a quote by B. J. Palmer, who is one of the developers of chiropractic, said, “Most people put more faith in a spoonful of medicine than they do in the power that took them from two cells and formed them into trillions of living, breathing, and pooping cells.”

Jason Prall

Yes, totally.  And that was one of the things that I thought about when I was writing my book about what aging is and when it starts. Like, it’s a very interesting concept because I’ve got a young one. I know you’ve had some kids, and when you watch them grow up, you think of them as getting older. But we don’t necessarily think about them as aging and declining. Aging tends to coincide with this idea of decline. Once we get to a certain point, maybe it’s 30, maybe it’s 40, whatever, whenever that is. But when do we make that shift in our minds about what aging is? Aging for a three-year-old is an important, developmental, complex, and defining process. The brain and nervous system are still being built. It’s not even on the line yet. It’s still myelinated, and there is still a lot happening to Complexify. The organism, as you mentioned, went from being a zygote to two cells and then comes out of these uniform cells, starts to differentiate, and turns into a liver cell, a kidney cell, and a skin cell. It’s like this is a wild process. It happens pretty reliably, to the point where we can predict all of these things. That’s what’s interesting about aging; when does that happen? Is a two-year-old aging? But from what I can tell and what I allude to in my book, aging is a part of the process of sexual development. In other words, we can’t separate the two. It’s this thing, and there are a lot of reasons for that. I don’t want to diverge too much, but again, this is an important point. There is so much magic in this process of development—developing into a human—and aging is inextricably linked to that process. To some degree, it’s like this embrace of the aging process while also understanding that if we do things well and align with these natural truths, then we can extend this process of life and do so in a healthy way.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yes, for sure. Aging is a constant. The question is, are you aging successfully or unsuccessfully? I just look at my family, and I’ve got family members; who’re in their seventies. No medications; able to do everything they want to do; don’t need extra help; still working; have a lot of life and vigor. then I’ve got family members in their fifties on five, or six medications, four different co-morbidities, and struggling daily. So, there is a 15-year gap between the two individuals I’m thinking of and yet significant differences in quality of life. So it’s clear I could see, okay, this person has been aging successfully. Someone might say she’s 71 years old. But she has the energy and vigor of somebody, probably in their forties, and then another individual in their fifties or late fifties, but she has the energy and vigor of somebody, towards the end stage of their life. late seventies and eighties.

Jason Prall

When I went around the world and interviewed, spoke with, and hung out with people in their eighties and nineties and beyond 100, this is the thing I noticed: again, remember, Julio is 105 in Sardinia, Italy, and he was old straight up. He was like, yay, big. He was old, and he couldn’t hear as well as he used to. He’s got big ears because our ears continue to grow. His eyesight wasn’t as keen as it used to be, but he was still playing chess with his 80-year-old son, or whatever it was. He was still able to ride a bike. He wasn’t able to ride it with the vigor of a 22-year-old, and he wasn’t able to. In other words, the decline is there, and yet he still maintains some amount of vitality. So this is again when I’m going to be aging, God willing, that I can continue to live without, I guess, being taken away too early. It’s interesting. Like, what does that look like? because I’m continuing to develop a deep acceptance that my limitations will take hold eventually. There is an important philosophical underpinning to that, which is that it’s morbid in a sense. It’s like you’ll never be younger than you are now. 

You can be healthier, and we can reverse this. But like this, it’s important to recognize where you’re at now, to honor this, and to be thankful for where you’re at because we’re going in one direction. We can clean some things up, we can get rid of some pain, we can lose some weight, and we can get better blood sugar regulation. We can do all kinds of cool stuff along the way. But the trend is this way, so it’s important to recognize that what we have is so valuable. Because, again, I saw very healthy adults, yet they were still limited in what they could do as they got there. Everybody thinks it’s wonderful to live 120–140. We have these ideas of what that means, and from what I can tell, it doesn’t look like 50. It doesn’t look like 42. It looks like 120, 105, or 110. So there is a limitation to that. There is an important aspect here: to regain any limitations that may have already set in and also to stave off any new limitations that are coming. But inevitably they will come, so it’s like acceptance and gratitude and also doing what I can to extend.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yes, that’s good. If anybody’s interested in and is listening to Jason’s interviews with a lot of these people who have aged successfully in these blue zone areas, you can just go to humanlongevityfilm.com and check that out. He’s got it. You can sign up and listen to them. In your book, you talk about the hierarchy of symptoms. This is an important concept for people to understand as well.

Jason Prall

Yes, this is where if somebody is dealing with symptoms, disease, whatever, whatever the case they might be dealing with, we tend to start with what I call level one. Which are the labels? This is when you go to a doctor and say, Oh, you have hypertension, or you have diabetes, or you have kidney disease or eczema. So they’re giving you a label. It’s important that, at the beginning, you accept that label. Many people. Some people don’t. But that’s generally where it is. Then, after some of the standard treatments, or maybe you’re already at that point where you’re rejecting that, you’re already beyond this idea. Well, then there is level two down; this is where a lot of the, let’s say, more integrative functional medicine, maybe even naturopathic, starts getting to the practitioner level, or maybe you’re just a researcher like me, where I started on my own and started learning some about some of this. Well, this is where you get into, like, “Okay, well, I don’t have hypertension or diabetes.” I’m looking at high hemoglobin A1C, elevated inflammatory markers, low thyroid hormone, or whatever the case is, so you can identify the next layer down of, that’s the problem, then you can go a layer below that. This is where the expressions live. This is like, It’s mitochondrial damage that is underlying all this. Or there is gastrointestinal inflammation, poor cellular communication, or chronic inflammation. There is a way to classify dysfunction on that level. then we can go below that, which is the behaviors. In other words, what’s causing the expressions? It’s the behaviors I’m eating improperly for my situation. Or I’m not exercising now because I’m exercising too much, or I’m getting poor sleep or have social isolation. I’m overworking. Whatever the case is, I have shallow breathing. Most of us don’t breathe very well; smoking, drinking, gambling, or any of these types of behavioral things might create symptoms. Then you have to ask yourself: Why is one doing those things? We all know about drinking too much, eating processed food, and overeating. Processed food is not good for us. That’s not rocket science. 

I don’t think we’re fooling anybody. Everybody understands it as well. Why are we doing it? Well, something is driving the behavior. Typically, what’s driving the behavior are these thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. This is the subconscious aspect. Most of it becomes conscious, but a lot of it is living in the unconscious, the subconscious, and there might be some shame, disappointment, ignorance, low self-worth, or insecurities that happen throughout our childhood. All these things that live under the surface that most of us aren’t aware of—sometimes we can become aware of them, but that’s what’s driving the behaviors. Again, why am I overeating? Why am I eating these foods that I know are not healthy? Even while eating unhealthy foods, for example, we can know that this is not good, and we still do it like it’s wild, showing how powerful these energies, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs are that are dictating behaviors. But then we can go a level deeper than that. This is the sixth level. It’s like, what is causing the limiting belief? What’s causing that low self-worth or that conditioning? Well, typically, it happens in what I call core wounds. Now, it could be a traumatic birth, and it just might. My son had a traumatic birth. The birth was fine. then he had low oxygen saturation. I had to get a home birth and had to take him into the hospital under these bright lights in this chaotic environment, which is the exact thing we were trying to avoid. Nevertheless, that was the situation. 

They did an amazing job of helping stabilize him, and everything was good there. But that itself is a traumatic wound. So that’s what’s possible at birth—developmental ruptures as we’re developing in our childhood. Between our caregivers, all these ruptures happen along the way. If they happen consistently, then they can get conditioned into us and create our worldview. In psychology, you might call this the internal working model. It’s the model through which I view reality and my place in it. In other words, I’m only lovable when I do all these good things right. Or when I succeed, when I listen, or when whatever the case is right, you must eat all the food on your plate. Well, that can create some beliefs and conditions around food. All kinds of these things get created at that core womb level. But there are significant emotional trauma, conditioning, physical trauma, and even inherited trauma. I work with a lot of people who have Jewish descent and lineage. Some stuff can happen in that line that’s not even there. It comes from Grandpa. Or grandmother.  There are inherited traumas. The research is very clear on this, by the way, even to the point where they’re tracing methylation and if something’s upregulated or downregulated on the methylation aspect. It’s wild how far science has gotten on that front. Or it could even be a core wound, a disharmony, in this environment. growing up in an environment that is not well-suited for life. So again, it could be an emotional situation. It could be just growing up in a very poor rural area. All you have access to are all these poor habits around you. There are a lot of things that can happen. But again, if those are core wounds at the surface, that dictates the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that dictate the behaviors. The behaviors expect expression at the cellular level or the internal level and then those are reflected in the markers that we might test for. 

They’re showing up in markers, and the markers give us the labels. So we tend to live at those first couple of levels, but it can be helpful to address some of the top-level symptoms. In other words, drugs may be beneficial for some people to help stabilize them. I’m not a huge fan of Big Pharma in any way. I would say that in an ideal world, those drugs don’t even exist. But there are been a lot of medications that could be very lifesaving for a handful of people just to get them stable. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so that can be helpful. Then again, looking at the markers, how do we manipulate them? That can be helpful too, but oftentimes that’s not enough. We’ve got to go to the expression and look at what’s happening at the mitochondrial level. It might be an organic acid test; it might be some gut test. Great. That may also not be enough. We may have to go deeper and say, What are the behaviors that you’re doing? This is where I worked with a lot of people who had autoimmune conditions and cancer, and you name the symptoms and the disease and look at their behaviors. What’s your circadian rhythm like? Are you getting enough sleep? 

Do you even know what that looks like? What’s your feeding schedule? How often do you eat? How much are you eating? Are you chewing on your food? What does your social environment look like? How much are you working on it? All the behavioral aspects of somebody’s life are worth analyzing because that’s going to dictate all those downstream things. Again, even if we change the behaviors, we also must look at what’s driving them. Why is the person acting this way? Is it just out of ignorance, or is there something deeper that is driving the behavior? Again, we work our way down. When we get to that core wound level, oftentimes that can be where we finally get a resolution to the autoimmune condition, the low thyroid symptoms, or whatever the case is. It can go that deep. We can work at all these levels, and the key is to try not to get stuck at one of those first couple of levels. Keep digging deeper, because that’s where you may find the ultimate solution that you’re looking for.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yes, that’s so powerful, and people need to understand that and go in. Touching back on what you mentioned, I see you. Are you working with people who had relatives who were Holocaust survivors? They were so there; they had never experienced that, but they had grandparents who experienced that incredible physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual trauma. So that is a driving factor, and sometimes in some of their behaviors.

Jason Prall

And in their beliefs too. That’s why it’s so hard for the clients that I work with. Again, I point that one out because it’s an obvious one and it’s one that the research has looked at. But this can be anything. It doesn’t matter.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

To almost all of us, if you would ask a few. It’s like, in my family, both my wife and I have a family member who was sexually abused.

Jason Prall

Yes.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

So that trauma has happened to both of our mothers. That trauma has impacted us.

Jason Prall

I had a grandfather who was in the Korean War. Where did the trauma of somebody who was in the war maybe do atrocious things to others, but that inevitably has a trauma on the perpetrating individual, too? There are all kinds of ways he was born into cultural environments. We, the land that we live on, and the people that are around us—whatever is happening in that environment or has happened in the recent past is going to impact us. There are all kinds of these things if you’re an indigenous Native American and you’re growing up on a reservation, and there is a lot of trauma as a Native American in this country. This is throughout our society—women and men, different races—and it goes through everything. But here’s what’s important to recognize: oftentimes somebody suffering from something could be anxiety. Let’s say somebody has high anxiety and they can’t get their brain to switch off, which is affecting their sleep. Then they come to see me, and they’re getting horrible sleep. They have high levels of anxiety. Those two things themselves are going to manifest in many other ways. In other words, chronic sleep, high anxiety, and high mental processes are going to create downstream effects in and of themselves. But then again, what’s creating the sleep and the anxiety issues? Well, it could be something that Grandma experienced during the Holocaust. Because that was such a trauma, it got passed through the lineage, and the grandson and granddaughter have no idea because they didn’t experience it directly. 

They don’t know that’s the thing that’s causing them. There are different techniques I used to get into and reveal that. But this is what’s so challenging because it’s not obvious, and even if that’s about your lineage, you don’t know that’s what’s causing the IBS or whatever the case is. It’s difficult to make these links. However, I want to point to a study that was done using a mouse model to show this link. It helps tell the story of why this happens. There was a mouse that was given the scent of cherry blossom, and then they electrocuted the mouse. Every time there was an association between cherry blossom scent and electrocution, it’s one of the words that the mouse got very hyperactive and hyper-vigilant around the cherry blossom set because it means electrocution. Not good. Well, then they bred that mouse with another mouse who’d never been electrocuted, and they had a pup. The first-generation pup, that first-generation puppet, also never was electrocuted. They gave the cherry blossom set to that first pup nervous system spike. In other words, the hypervigilance is now in the child. Then they took that first child and bred it with another mouse that had never been electrocuted. Now we’ve got a second generation, and it’s the mouse. 

Two generations removed from the original one-parent mouse, they got electrocuted, and they knew it was the same thing when they introduced cherry blossom, which spiked the nervous system’s hypervigilance. What’s cool about this is that nature has an amazing ability to pass down important information about the environment. This is a bridge; you can call it evolutionary, I guess, but it’s just a messaging signal to say that there is something in the environment that is very dangerous, and somehow it gets passed on. Now, I mentioned methylation. We see altered methylation patterns. We don’t know how it gets there. You talk to Rupert Sheldrake; he’ll tell you. It’s more of a genetic field—a field that operates outside the body. There is a lot of potential here. It could be through mitochondria; it could be genes; it could be water mechanisms. There are all kinds of theories and ideas about microtubules. There are all kinds of biophysics that we can get into. But the point is, this has been documented, and it just makes sense. If we’re dealing with something, it’s important. This is why it’s so important to get to that level six area if you can, generally with a therapist or somebody who can help you get there because some of this stuff is so hidden; it’s so out of our view and out of our own experience. It doesn’t make sense to us.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yes, that’s so powerful. In a sense, we want to prepare our offspring for any potential dangers to reproduce and continue to pass on our genetics. So, yes, if there is anything potentially dangerous, if there is any trigger that’s associated with whatever that danger is—that is what we’re trying to pass on. This is why, like babies, they have reflexes. These are all survival mechanisms. So, yes, it’s all built into our nervous system. Now, I wanted to pivot this because we could talk all day about philosophy and all of these topics. It’s so interesting. I would recommend you guys if, if you’re listening at this point, you’re interested. You want to get this book, Beyond Longevity. That’s what it is beyond the longevity book, dot com. Read more about this. But let’s talk about the impact of sleep, light, and circadian rhythm on our overall health and longevity.

Jason Prall

Yes, one of the views or lenses I like to look at human health through is this, let’s just say, evolutionary lens. Even though it’s not a philosophy, I wholeheartedly agree with it. But what we can say is that we look at organisms throughout nature. Certain things are preserved by all organisms and all life on earth. The fundamental thing that we all have in common with every organism is light. We all live on this planet, which operates on a day-and-night cycle. We’ve all had to adapt, whether we’re nocturnal or diurnal. So based on this changing environmental pattern between light and dark daily, as well as seasonality, the biology of every organism is going to be adapted to that. It is something that is well preserved throughout biology itself. So just because of that lens, we can say this is pretty important. We can’t escape this one. There are no organisms on the planet in history that we know of that have escaped this idea of circadian rhythm. There is a cycle that we must adhere to. Sleep is also one of those things that, if you’ve ever tried to go two or three days without sleep, good luck. Everything starts to shut down like it’s important. It’s like breathing, which is probably the most important thing because we can’t go too long without it. But we can go a couple of days without water. Water is important, but we can go a couple of days without water or food. We can go a long time without food. So these are a hierarchy of how I try to position things, like what’s important, so sleep is one of these critical things. The tricky thing about sleep is that we don’t know. We know a lot about it, and there is still a lot we don’t know. We don’t know why we need to sleep per se. There are deep spiritual contexts there, but we know that we need to sleep every day. It’s not something that you can bank on. You can’t get 15 hours of sleep and think, Oh, that’s just as good as two nights now; it has to be done regularly, and it must be on a clock. You must have this every day, at the same time, and in the same rhythmic pattern of sleeping. When you don’t, everything starts to go dysfunctional. I have my mother-in-law here from South Africa, and she just got here two days ago. She’s going through the process of what we all call jetlag. Well, all this is a disruption in the circadian rhythm. The internal clocks tell me that there are many clocks within us. Those within our body of her biology came from a different time zone and instantly got transported in a matter of 24 hours to a time zone that is 15 hours or 14 hours different, or something like that. So now her biology has to respond. It’s in a new environment, and it will, but it takes time to do that. 

This idea of entrainment. To get on the train for this cycle that she’s now on, it’s going to take a few days. In the meantime, her immune system is weaker. Her brain’s not going to work as well. Her detox function is diminished. Her heart rate variability is affected. Her metabolism and her ability to burn fat and be fuel-efficient are compromised by higher inflammatory markers. Everything is off because everything is guided by these time cycles. The master control clock is essentially in the brain. We have the hypothalamus, the pituitary, and the pineal gland. Those are the three key organs in the brain that govern the master clock throughout our body. But what’s interesting is that we have these little microclocks within each cell. They call these clock genes. These clock genes are Period, Bmal, and clock. There are all these names for them. But they are all part of the regulatory mechanisms of each cell. If you go to a Chinese medicine time clock, you can see which part of the day the liver is going to be more active. They have all that mapped out in the Chinese medicine way. Then, when we go to the Ayurvedic way, they have their map of the daily cycle of human function; they use vata, pitta, kapha, and all that. But they’ve mapped that out in their systems, and now Western science has done the same thing. We started to map out, okay, this is when growth hormone spikes, and here’s where aldosterone spikes, and here’s, of course, where melatonin spikes, and cortisol spikes, and all these things. We can map all these rhythms throughout the body. But these rhythms are only there; they don’t operate on the clock, like on the wall or on your iPhone. They operate off of the clock in the sky. The sun.  So based on where the sun is, how does it do that? How does your body regulate itself? Well, the light comes through the eyes, through the suprachiasmatic nucleus, and starts talking to the pineal and hypothalamus, and the pituitary is where a lot of that hormonal regulation is governed, and also on the skin, I should say. 

Those light frequencies are when it’s high in the sky; we’re getting the full light spectrum as it gets deeper and, on the horizon, some of those spectrums, the latter getting refracted back into space. Now, just like when the sun is low, you can look directly at the sun, like it’s red, and you can stare at it, and it doesn’t hurt your eyes. That’s because those shorter wavelengths are bounced back into space, and the red light does not impact you as much. But once it starts getting dark, you can’t look at the sun. That’s how your body’s able to recognize what time of day it is based on the light spectrum and the frequencies. We’re geared toward this. Even if you have your eyes closed, your eyelids are so thin that they can accept that the longer wavelengths will penetrate through the eyes, while the shorter wavelengths, to some degree, will penetrate through the eyes and wake you up. Because the eyelids are so thin, they allow for the penetration of that light through and to wake you up, as well as the heat. We have these things, like the light frequencies, the temperature, the food we eat, and exercise movement. Those are the main regulators of your circadian rhythm. They are the things that entrain your circadian rhythm and your internal clocks. If we don’t have those stimuli and they’ve done a lot of research on this, they’ll put people in, like a cave or underground, and pitch black, and their bodies start losing rhythm. It doesn’t know when to wake up or when to go to sleep. So, not only mentally do you not know when, but your actual biology loses track of the time. It’s operated on a 23-and-a-half-hour cycle, so it’ll start to wander. Your biology will start to wander internally on when to regulate thyroid hormone and all this stuff. We need those light stimuli, particularly food, as well as movement and temperature, to a lesser degree. We need those stimuli to say, It’s morning; okay, it’s 7 a.m.; turn on all these things. 

And by 7 a.m. the sun has risen to a certain point in the sky, and therefore, the body knows now that it’s time to kick on all this stuff, and vice versa. This is the rhythmic function of the body. When we lose it all, mortality increases. every single disease. The state increases anybody who walks in my door. No matter what they had—whether they had fungal overgrowth or compromised detox function—losing their hair, hormonal imbalances, cancer, or autoimmune conditions didn’t matter. Nasal activation syndrome—any of these conditions that people have—that’s the first thing I would check: what is their circadian rhythm, and what is their sleep looking like? If that is not well regulated, then it’s hard to reverse or recover from these conditions. That is, it’s an uphill climb if you’re not sleeping, if you’re awake at night, if you have a swing shift, and you’re traveling all the time between Europe and the States, and you’re bouncing all around. Good luck trying to get a good metabolism, lose some weight, have your hormones reflect healthy function, or detox properly. Your body’s a mess constantly because it’s not getting that regular cycle. That’s, I guess, the lowdown on the quick lowdown on this stuff. It’s so important. Now we have cancer drugs that we’re using, and Western medicine has figured out that, oh, if we apply these cancer drugs at a certain time of the day, they’re more effective than other times of the day. Again, in Chinese medicine’s data, they’ve known this for a long time: that you administer certain things at certain times of the day and they’re more effective, and that’s how it works. But we’re now starting to figure it out in our Western ways too. Again, it’s starting to become more of a thing. But I still don’t see that people appreciate just how powerful the circadian rhythm is. I can tell you story after story of people losing weight and hormones that were notoriously low, like testosterone. They couldn’t figure out how to get it up. They were looking to go on testosterone replacement therapy, and then they just fixed their circadian rhythm, and they lost the belly fat, and testosterone shot up like all this stuff starts to just naturally dissolve because they’re now in harmony with the way their body is meant to function.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yes.  And for most of us who are aware of our circadian rhythm, when it gets off, we feel it’s like kryptonite. I know. Just this past week, I took my twin boys to an Atlanta Braves baseball game. Oh.  We were out a little bit late, and I was driving home at, like, 10:00. At 10:00, I’m usually either just about to get in bed with all the lights off, talking with my wife, or I’m already in bed, starting the sleeping process. So here I am driving, and that’s telling my brain that I have to be very alert and the lights are on, things like that. So I’m telling my brain that it’s daytime and I need to be alert. I get home; it’s like 10:15 or 10:30. I put the kids to bed, and I’m ready to go to bed. I’m winding down, talking with my wife, lights off, and ready to go to bed. I get in bed at 11:00, and, like, I can’t fall asleep for an hour because I have already trained my brain that I am awake. I didn’t get the melatonin release that I needed. So I ended up falling asleep at 12. As you mentioned, even though I wear an eye mask at night, there is light that comes in a little bit of light that comes in my window, and I’m so responsive to that. It comes in, and it’s like, I don’t know, 6:50. Usually, I’m up at like 6:30 or so. I figured I was not going to set alarms and go to sleep until whenever I woke up. I wake up, and I’m like, I don’t need to get up. I’m still lying there, but I can feel the cortisol coming up. I can feel the wakefulness coming up. I’m not going to be able to sleep any longer. So, and then that day, I was tired. I was much more tired than I normally was because my circadian rhythm was off. There is a great quote that says mal illumination is to the body what malnutrition is to the body. What’s important for people to understand is the way that we’re illuminating or the light exposure that we’re getting. That’s an essential nutrient because nutrition, as well as light, send information to our body, and we can send the proper information at the right times or the improper information at inappropriate times. that’s critical.

Jason Prall

It’s interesting with food, right, because there is so much debate and discussion about food, and that’s great because there are still choices to be made that are important and things to learn. Yet there are so many things that are upstream of food. When I had my son and he slept in the bed with us for the first couple of years, I knew that he was a poor sleeper anyway. so I was getting poor sleep. My wife is getting poor sleep, like many new parents do. They get poor sleep for at least that first year.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

I had twins, so that was brutal.

Jason Prall

Yes. I can only imagine what your wife would say. That’s rough. Let’s imagine that scenario. If, without awareness, I have poor sleep for, let’s say, a year, I could develop certain, let’s say, markers or symptoms that I could go to a doctor and they could assess. If the doctor, practitioner, or whoever is helping me doesn’t have the awareness to ask me about my lifestyle and behaviors, then they’re going to treat the symptoms as if they were a problem. But the reality is what’s causing my symptoms, my diagnosis, whatever the case is, my expression, going back to the symptom hierarchy, right? Then they’re not going to get to the root. The root is that I’m not sleeping because I have a newborn or am in a situation that’s creating that. so that lifestyle is behavioral. Let’s say the challenge that I’m dealing with is going to affect my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs; it’s going to create, and I remember this very well. Even though I knew about food and nutrition, when to eat, and all this stuff, I would make poor choices because my ability to regulate and make decisions is weaker and my discipline is reduced. This is the case: they train Navy SEALs and military people like that for a reason. They sleep-deprived them, and they put them through training because that in and of itself is much more difficult. There are studies out there that look at sleep deprivation and compare it to drunk driving, and they find that sleep deprivation when driving is just as impaired as being drunk. There are some real issues at the brain level, so we don’t make decisions. 

Well, we have more depression or anxiety when we don’t get good sleep. Right now, for those things, we tend to use food as a coping mechanism. I noticed that during the time I was eating, I made more bad choices around food. I eat more processed food; more fatty and sugary food combinations are processed, and I know better. It’s not that we need to educate more about food per se. We need to educate, perhaps more like it’s upstream. when you get better and your light diet improves. In other words, you’re getting more light, particularly early in the morning, to set your circadian rhythm to train the body, the brain, the hormones, and everything else. But when it comes to food, and I know this, Dr. J, it’s like there are so many other things that are driving your hunger and your desire for food, whether it’s neuropeptide Y, insulin, or leptin. There are all these hormonal signals, and then there are the gut bacteria that are also sending signals to your brain about what to eat when to eat it, how much to eat, and all that. There is so much more guidance that way. When we get our light diet correct and get outside in the morning, we get that light nourishment, which spikes our cortisol. We get a good cortisol waking response rate, our hormones are online, and then we make good choices on top of that. Now, this choice around food is different. I get good sleep, and I go to bed before 10 p.m. and I’m not eating food right before bed and making good choices there. 

But now everything starts to snowball in a good direction. When I screw up the sleep thing because I have a newborn, everything starts to spiral downward. It’s hard to recover from that until you get the sleep thing right. Again, it’s sleep and light that are two of these things that are so upstream in most decisions. Again, if you don’t believe me, sleep-deprived yourself for a week and tell me how good decisions are, how many good decisions you’re making, and how much you want to go exercise or move around. Tell me how you feel—even more depressing, more socially isolated, or more socially active. There are all kinds of these things. again, when that core thing gets off and all these downstream things take hold. Now those downstream things are going to have a further impact. What choices are you making there? It’s again in a downward spiral. So we had to go back to the source. That’s why, for me, when I work with people, sleep and circadian rhythm are so fundamental because once we get that right, and that can take two or three weeks, just like my mother now, who’s here, it’s going to take her two weeks to get her circadian rhythm back in line with this time zone. She can do it more effectively if she gets outside. if she starts to do some of these things. But that’s the thing about sleep: when it’s destroying your circadian rhythm, it’s not very good. It can take two to three weeks of consistency and doing the right thing—getting to bed at a reasonable time, playing with the lights at night, and making sure those are dim—perhaps a little more orange than they used to. not watching TVs and screens. not eating before. There is a big one. This is one talking about food and your food choices. Not eating before bed is maybe one of the most important things that we can do. I can say here how that’s going to impact things down the line.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

What does that mean, how does it work, and how does it affect you? Circadian rhythm and melatonin production, and how does that happen?

Jason Prall

Our body is primed to operate with the solar cycle. When the sun’s highest in the sky, my digestion is typically going to be the strongest. So cortisol, of course, has a time in the morning. It’s going to boost up in the morning, and it’s going to wane. Now, if all of this is a mess and my hormones are firing at different times, our cortisol is weak and it’s inverted, and melatonin is all over the place now, the way my body functions is not going to be optimal, so I’m already at a disadvantage. Now, if I start layering things like eating food at 9 p.m., particularly big, heavy, fatty, dense meals, my digestion is weak; it’s not optimized. The hormones that are needed to process that food and metabolically utilize that energy are not going to be optimized. I’m not going to get it. I’m not going to be able to pull glucose out of the blood very well. I’m not going to get it and put it into cells very well. My metabolization is not going to be optimized. The ability of the liver to do its job and detoxify and gallbladder 2 to release bile acids. Everything about the digestive process is not going to be good. It’s not going to be optimized. Those foods are not going to get broken down. They’re going to create an environment in the stomach, in the small intestine, and in the large intestine that’s going to be more toward putrification as opposed to digestion, more towards things just going to stagnate. 

Just the migrating motor complex that moves through food and the digestive tract is not going to be optimized. Now we’re going to eat food sitting in this tube, not doing as much as it could. It’s going to start becoming this putrification factory. It’s not going to end up that way. Well, that creates an overgrowth of certain bacteria that are not optimal for health. It’s going to create more lipopolysaccharide releases. It’s going to create a leaky gut. It’s going to create more inflammatory markers in the digestive tract, and then outside of the digestive tract, in the whole system, we’re going to get elevated markers throughout the body. This is going to lead to the degradation of the actual GI system as a whole. Everything’s going to get more inflamed. Again, it’s this downward spiral function that once we start getting all this stuff, this is what can lead to things like SIBO. This is what can lead to things like inflammatory bowel disease. All these things that we don’t want are going to happen. And again, at night, what we want—if we don’t have a belly and a gut full of food to process because it’s big—you don’t realize how much energy is required to process food. Imagine you only have so much resource and you’re dedicating 40% of it to digesting a huge meal. Instead, what the body wants to do is start cleaning up and preparing for the next day. It wants to start turning over cells, processing certain hormones right through the liver, and detoxing the body naturally. There is a process that the body wants to get into, and we’re saying, No, don’t do that. Here. I have this big bowl of ice cream and pizza for you. Not only is that a tough food in general, but it also wants to do a different task. We’re preventing it from doing the cleanup tasks, and we’re giving it another job to do. Now, not only is that other job adding to the pile, but we’re not even able to clear the pile that’s built up. It’s like saying, Don’t clean up your house. Let’s just keep adding more trash, and eventually, it’s just going to result in some symptom, some diagnosis, or some issue. It can be anything. It can end up being joint pains, or it can end up being brain fog. You just don’t know what it’s going to end up doing.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Driving up all the inflammatory pathways. This is why I want to finish on that because this is key because a lot of people who follow me are huge advocates of intermittent fasting, and a lot of people who are listening are practicing a level of intermittent fasting. A lot of people fall into this idea of, Yes, I’m just going too fast all day. There was no huge meal at night. But like Jason is saying here, you could be throwing off your circadian rhythm. That’s not the ideal time. Everybody’s schedule is a little bit different. But based on our circadian rhythm, it’s better to have your compressed eating window get the benefits of intermittent fasting while consuming those meals while the sun’s in the sky.

Jason Prall

Yes.  You’re hitting on something interesting. The reason is that we’ve fallen into this trap of skipping breakfast, eating a moderate or mediocre lunch, maybe a nice salad with some other things there, and some protein. And then we have this nice big meal, or a lot of people are just doing one meal a day. and it’s not that one meal a day is bad. It’s just that you’re right. It’s the window into which we’re throwing in now. Why are we doing that? It’s because of our culture. Most of us work during the day, and then we want to have a meal. We want to share a meal with our family. That’s the time when we eat our big meal. Culturally, it’s appropriate, but biologically, it’s inappropriate. It’s the optimal window for those heavy, digestible meals, which is probably about 11 a.m. to two or three p.m. That’s the window where you have good blood sugar control, you’ve got good insulin regulation, and you’ve got good digestive capacity, and digestive capacity is the number one factor for, I would say, processing a meal effectively. If we’re eating too often and eating too much, we don’t have the digestive juice, we don’t have the hydrochloric acid, and we don’t have the digestive enzymes. We don’t have the ability for the liver to do its job. We lose the capacity to digest food in Ayurveda. That comes well; we get to go into that. That’s a whole other rebuttal. But the idea is that when we are hungry, that’s when this is something that we want to get in touch with. Again, what is hunger? What is real hunger? These little pangs that we get can often be resolved by drinking 16 ounces of water. They can be resolved by going for a walk. They can be resolved in many different ways, as opposed to just having another snack or another meal. So if someone’s looking to change their life and their relationship with food, this is a relationship that’s worth exploring. Get into hunger. Feel that hunger. When you go into that meal, you should be hungry. That’s so good. Every bite you take and every meal you eat will taste better. Your body will be able to process it better. I agree that if you have the capacity and the ability based on your lifestyle to eat, maybe it’s a later breakfast, and maybe it’s a large later lunch. This idea of breakfast, lunch, and dinner can be thrown out. This is a cultural thing. It is not set in stone.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Agree. Totally.  I do one meal on Wednesdays, and I eat a big lunch on Wednesdays, usually somewhere between one and 2:00. I sit with them; in fact, I usually make dinner for my family, and I sit there with them, and honestly, I’m not hungry. I eat a good amount of protein, satiating foods, and sleep; prioritizing sleep helps with that like you were talking about. Then you get into this process where you’re very metabolically flexible. so my body almost craves that. I do roughly a 24-hour fast once a week. When I get to that point, it’s almost like my body knows the signal. It’s like, Okay, I’m not even going to be hungry. The first few times I did it, I was hungry. I felt those feelings because I trained my body to say, Hey, this is the time of day when we eat. Now my body knows that periodically we don’t eat dinner. That’s right.  This is where I’m going to put all my energy into healing and repair. I’m going to take away hunger and cravings because I know how beneficial this is. Then tap into the innate intelligence. Of course, I’m programming it right by getting the proper amount of light exposure, getting the proper amount of sleep, and then the lunch that I eat is very blood sugar-stabilizing. It’s not like there are no processed foods in there. It’s higher in protein, fiber, polyphenols, and healthy fats. That helps train my body to fast through dinner. I’m watching all my kids eat them, chopping up food for them, and whatnot, as well as my wife. yet I’m able to enjoy the company without needing to eat.

Jason Prall

That’s the thing that you hit on something important there, which is this process of going through it. You work with a lot of people who have blood sugar control issues. They may be hypoglycemic. That’s another one for a hypoglycemic. I wouldn’t say to just start intermittent fasting. That’s going to be a disaster. There is a process to evolve and become more adapted. So, again, this is where the invitation is to explore that hunger edge for you. Like, where is that? You might get to this point where you say, “Geez, I’m hungry.” But there is generally a point at which you feel like you need to eat, and it’s not as bad. You just haven’t been to that edge yet in a while. So once you get to that edge, you can play with that for a little bit, and then you can push beyond it. So it may look like if you’re used to eating three, four, or maybe five meal snacks a day, you start cutting back on some of those. Your body’s going to send those signals, like, “Hey, it’s snack time. We’re supposed to have snack time,” and then you push through that, and then you get to lunch, and then you’re a little bit more hungry than usual? Well, that’s going to modify and adapt as you become more metabolically flexible; this is what is important. Yes. There are differences in the constitution. Certain people do better with fasting for longer periods and certain people don’t do as well. I’m in the middle. I’ve discovered that some people who don’t do great with long periods of fasting can do it, but it’s just not optimal for them. Maybe it’s like a 12- or 14-hour window consistently. That’s good. But these windows of time are important because the body can do other things and digest food. You figure it takes two to three hours to fully digest a meal. If you’re doing it right, that means you’re chewing your food thoroughly and all this stuff.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

It sometimes takes longer.

Jason Prall

You can track this with blood sugar monitors and other methods as well. Heart rate variability. There are all kinds of things that you can do; check this stuff and see how food’s affecting you. But as your body gets better at that, you’re going to have more adaptability and flexibility, and you can find your window. But at that time, when the body’s not dealing with food, the brain is sharper, and you have you again. Once it’s adapted, you have more energy, and your mood is more stable. You’re able to detox, and the key to longevity is giving your body these windows. But you must be doing the other things right as well. You got to get the circadian rhythm right and the sleep right. What we’re talking about here is going to seem impossible. When I was sleep-deprived with my little one, if I was trying to do this stuff, yes, I could do it. But I might be moody, or I might be just unable to effectively push through and get things done that I needed to get done.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

You may not get the health benefits of it. That’s like exercise. Exercise is what most people say. “Hey, is exercise healthy?” They’re going to say, “Oh, yes, of course it’s healthy.” But if you look at it under a microscope, it means it’s extremely catabolic and damaging to the tissues of our body. It’s the recovery process that’s where we heal. So it’s like we want to hit the right window where we’re challenging our body, getting this hormetic stress benefit, but not overtraining. When you add your newborn, your training level, if you’re I know I experienced this intensity level of my exercise when we’re not in a newborn stage versus what we’ve gone through with our twins and then with my two daughters in three newborn stages the intensity level of my exercise; if I tried to do the same intensity level and the same frequency of exercise during that newborn stage where my sleep wasn’t good, it’s worse for my body to some degree than not exercising at all.

Jason Prall

Yes, exactly.  This is maybe a good point to end on, which is that most of us in the modern world can start to explore more at the extremes. In other words, push yourself to the extreme and rest in the extreme. like, and most of us are eating too much and too frequently. What’s the other symbol? We need a little more time off from food. When I occasionally do, let’s say three or five days, the juice I’m feasting on—in other words, we get tons of juice. I’m getting some calories. I’m not fast per se, but there’s no physical material that I’m eating. But that’s still catabolic; it’s a hormetic process, and I’ve got to be gentle on my body. Now, could I go exercise? Yes, we can do that. We can do ten days of fasting and still perform exercises, no question. But the real benefits are that when we do something like that, maybe it’s a 24-hour fast, which is extreme. You take it easy that day; don’t push yourself; rest, meditate, pray, relax, lay down, go outside, and go for a late walk. These are the things that I invite people to explore more. If you want to look at what people lived in the longest regions of the world and how they lived, it was at the extremes. They were exposed to extreme heat because they didn’t have central heating or central cooling. They got exposed to extreme cold because they didn’t have central heating; they had fires. They lived directly by the circadian rhythm. 

They didn’t have lighting or electricity for most of their lives. They went long periods, often, to be honest, in maybe the more severe damaging effect. They didn’t have food. many times for months or years. They went without food because of certain government rationing, wars, and other things that were going on. They went through extremes. Now, I’m not saying we should do that, but we can invite a little bit more of this extreme nature of cold therapy and hot therapy in saunas, getting good periods of fasting and good periods of total rest, and pushing our bodies a little bit more. When was the last time you sprinted? When was the last time you used your body to its full capacity to start pushing these things? Wherever you’re at, it looks different, but that’s where we’re going to start to gain the benefits because the extreme side tends to be where the body’s starting to push and adapt and create more resilience and more adaptations that are positive, that is, that is this antifragile aspect of who we are. then the rest side will recover without that severe, significant rest. Again, on the inside, your digestive tract recovers when there is no food. Your microbiome diversity improves and blossoms when there are no food barriers. Detoxification, autophagy, mitophagy, all the recycling of proteins, and all the getting rid of waste happen when there are no barriers, when there is nothing else for that system to do except start to clean up. I get good at sleeping. the actual sleep architecture, these are important aspects. So again, what I see in our modern world is that we live in a constantly controlled 72-degree Fahrenheit environment all year round. It’s the same lighting all year round. We don’t get dipped into that. 

We’re not dipping into the extremes as much. We’re constantly feeding. We don’t go through feast and famine on a daily or seasonal level. Everything’s just the same. So that is creating a bit of a weakness in our Constitution. So there are, and again, you can even apply this to our immune system. We need to get sick. In other words, I wouldn’t even say sick. We need to be challenged by organisms in our environment.   You can even make this case for things like radiation that we know from the sun and even some of this other radiation that we might get from Fukushima-type things. There is research showing that small amounts of this radiation and small amounts of chemicals can be beneficial because they exert this hormetic effect. They’re creating an adaptive capacity now against some chemicals that, even at the micro level, are toxic and even more toxic. I want to open that can of worms, but the concept is such that we need to expose ourselves to the environment. We are stronger than we realize. We are more adaptable when we get the core foundations right, like getting good sleep, having a good social environment, moving regularly, eating good, high-quality foods at the right time, and digesting our food. Now that we can encounter our environment, we can resist it. We can be strengthened by it as opposed to taken down by it; it’s like resilience in fortitude that we’re building, and this is a chiropractic model. Yes. I wasn’t trained as a chiropractor, but everything I know about chiropractors like this is what we’re talking about building resilience through this engagement with our environment as opposed to building a bubble around us. That’s not the way we do this.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

like you said. Well, we’ll finish there. That was awesome. Guys, check out beyondlogevitybook.com to get Jason’s book. Jason, again, thanks for your time. We could have gone for four or five hours. We could spend a whole.

Jason Prall

There was a lot of talking. Yes.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yes, I know.

Jason Prall

You have me on.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

You got it.  All right, everybody be blessed.