This 10-Minute Exercise Reverses the Effects of Poor Sleep

Even just getting 1 to 3 hours less sleep per night for 3 nights in a row. I mean, think how common is it to not— to get 1 hour less of sleep a night for 3 nights in a row? So common. Yes. So common. It happens to me all the time, all the time. And there's been studies that have looked at, well, what does happen to normal, quote-unquote, healthy people that haven't been diagnosed with any sort of metabolic disease? Well, what happens is after 3 nights of getting 1 to 3 hours less sleep per night is that their body isn't disposing of glucose properly, so their blood glucose levels stay elevated. On top of that, insulin, they're not making enough insulin to lower the blood glucose levels.

And so you get this double whammy, almost looking like insulin resistant or prediabetic if you were to just look at the hard numbers. Yes. And again, this is just from not getting enough sleep for 3 nights in a row. And it's not even, like, full-on sleep restriction where you're taking away, you know, 4 or 5 hours of their sleep. It's just 1 to 3 hours less. And so, I mean, it really has profound effects on metabolism. And this sort of accumulates. So there's a cumulative effect. It's called sleep debt, right? So when you're getting less and less sleep each night, it's like you build up this sleep debt. Can you pay off the sleep debt ever?

The good news is, is that, believe it or not, at least with respect to the metabolic effects and also the cognitive effects, is that exercise can help negate a lot of that. And that's what I also learned with my own personal experience. Yeah. And your quote, you have a quote on this that I saw online that said, even 1 hour of sleep less per night for 3 nights can disrupt how your body processes sugar and lead to mild insulin resistance. But some good news here. HIIT can almost reverse it. So can you go with less sleep but then train hard and reverse the negative effects? So according to research, yes. And according to my own anecdotal data, yes. And there's reasons why.

So when you're doing high-intensity interval training, so this is where you're going, you know, you're doing intervals that are hard, so you're going above what you normally would do if you're just going for a jog. You're going, like, 80%, 85% of your max heart rate, and you're doing it for a period of time, that's an interval, and then you kind of have a recovery period where you're going lighter, right? So you're doing a lot of, you know, vigorous intensity exercise where it's like during that interval you can't talk because you're working out too hard. Yeah, yeah. So that's the real test here. What happens when you're working out really hard like that is that you're pushing your energy system to utilize glucose only.

And what happens is you utilize glucose only and you make a metabolite called lactate. And everyone thought lactate, this metabolite you're making when you're going hard, is this, you know, waste product, byproduct. It's not useful. Turns out very, very wrong. Lactate itself is not only used by other tissues, so when you're making lactate, your muscles are making lactate, because they're using glucose. The reason they're using glucose is because your body can't get oxygen to your muscle quick enough to use oxygen as energy, basically, and make it through something using the mitochondria. Right. So basically, you're making this lactate and using glucose instead, right? And the lactate then gets shuttled into the brain, it gets shuttled into the heart, into the liver.

And it's not only used as a very energetically favorable source of energy, it's also called— what's called a signaling molecule. It's the way your muscle communicates. With other parts of the body, including going back into the muscle. And so what lactate does is it signals to the cells, hey, make more of this or make less of this. And what it does to the muscle is the muscle's going, I'm consuming a lot of glucose here because that's the only energy I can use. I need to make a way to get more of it. And so lactate actually signals to your muscle to make transporters for glucose More of them come up. So transporters for glucose are kind of sitting below the surface of the muscle. They're not really letting glucose in all the time.

But when lactate comes around, they wake up, they go to the surface of the muscle, and they just allow a lot more glucose to come in. Where are they getting that glucose from? Well, the glucose is from your food or from gluconeogenesis, the process of making glucose from other materials like glycerol, for example, or amino acids. But is it pulling it from, like... Visceral fat or more from the food that you just intake? Usually, it's from the food or glycogen, stored as glycogen. But the point is that those glucose transporters that come up to the muscle stay there for, like, 48 hours. And so your body becomes very— all the glucose that you're eating for the next 2 days is getting taken up into your muscle very effectively and efficiently.

And so the net effect is, you know, this high-intensity interval training ...is getting that glucose out of your bloodstream and bringing it to your muscle where you want it. And so if you go back to the sleep story, you know, and there's multiple studies showing this, that people that even do high-intensity interval training before they're sleep deprived or they do it after they're sleep deprived, it doesn't matter. If you're doing it within a 48-hour window or so of being— getting less sleep, what's happening is your glucose regulation resets, right? Because you're causing that stress on your muscle to make more of those transporters, and so glucose gets taken in better. Right. And then it also affects insulin signaling as well. So there's a lot of other ways that it's happening.

So if I know I'm going to get less sleep tonight, is it useful to say, let me do a hard high-intensity interval training workout 6 hours before or in the morning and really push myself kind of hard for these 30 to 45 minutes, knowing I'm going to get less sleep and I'm going to need to be on the next day, like, I've got a lot of meetings and I'm running around or I'm traveling and I'm going to be, you know, Jet-lagged, what will that do for your mind or your body the next day? So those studies have been done. And with respect to the metabolism, yes, doing it before, for sure, it's going to affect. Now, if you're talking about cognition and brain function, I would say, unfortunately, you're going to want to do it the next day after you've been sleep-deprived for your meeting. Really?

So you wake up sleep-deprived. You should go do it then? Right then. Really? Yeah, right then. So— But you're already exhausted. You're like, where am I going? I forgot my keys. I got to go back. I'm like, wake up. I want to sleep right now. But do you have 10 minutes? Because that's what's been shown. 10 minutes of high-intensity interval training can improve blood flow to the brain. It improves memory. It improves cognition. And it only took 10 minutes to do it. So maybe not the 30 minutes, but 10 minutes. Not like a CrossFit style. Not like a full-on, like, the hardest thing that you usually do when you're on your game, but like 10 minutes. Right? Go on 10 minutes, get on a Peloton or a bike or whatever, and you do a 10-minute whatever your program is, and it will— I do it all the time.

I do it all the time. Because you're sleep-deprived all the time. Well, like, if I'm, like, going to Florida and I live in California and I have to give a talk at, like, 8:00 in the morning, which is, like, 5:00 in the morning my time, and I'm already sleep-deprived from the travel, right? I will absolutely get up and do a HIIT first thing in the morning before the talk, even though It's already pretty darn early for me. And you're tired. And I'm tired, and that's the last thing I want to do, but I'm like, 10 minutes? Really? I'll sit and drink coffee for 10 minutes. What's going to be better, right? Coffee sounds better. Boom. I get the coffee before the exercise. That coffee sounds pretty good when you're tired.

So how long will that positive effect last for if you do— you're sleep deprived the night before, you wake up, you've got a lot going on, but you're tired. You've got to wake up and get started. You do a 10, 15-minute HIIT-style workout. How long will that make you feel awake or feel sharp and clear? Like, how long would that last for? It probably depends on a lot of factors, other factors too. I will say this. You mentioned doing the HIIT, like, the day before you're going to go, you know you're going to be sleep deprived, right? And then you're exhausting yourself, then you're exhausted. But you know what? In a way— so I'm talking about, like, I talked about doing it right before whatever, your meeting or your podcast or whatever it is you have to be on point, right?

Mostly because, like, that's when you really, like, you do— it's like the peak. But I will say this. Yes, if you do it before, you still get brain benefits because, again, coming back to lactate. Yeah. So lactate, it all comes down to... In order to make lactate, you have to work hard. You have to be going 85% of your max heart rate, you know, and doing that 10, 20, 30 minutes, right? The more you do it, it's a dose-dependent effect. Wow. That lactate goes into the brain. In fact, the brain is one of the biggest consumers of it. And it increases something in the brain called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF. And this is something that will help you. It's something that increases the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus. It increases the connections between neurons, right?

So you're actually going to help with memory, long-term memory, short-term memory as well. Wow. And it also improves something called neuroplasticity. So that is the ability of your brain to adapt to a changing environment, right? And that's very important. As we age, our brain becomes, quote unquote, less plastic, less adaptable. We're not able to change. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, right? You've heard that. It's kind of like that. Your brain is less adaptable. Well, neuroplasticity is something that you want to maintain it with age. And brain-derived neurotrophic factor regulates that. Hmm.

So, because you're getting that brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and there have been a variety of, you know, studies that have really shown that you do increase it from particularly vigorous exercise. Again, the lactate's key. So, going back to your question, I do want to sort of caveat what I originally said with, yes, it is going to improve brain function doing it before. But if you're wanting that like immediate blood flow effect where you just, you feel it, like really doing it right before is better. Yeah, kind of better. And how long do you think that would last?

Like if you're going from LA to Florida one day, you sleep 4 or 5 hours a night, you got to wake up early, you work out, you got your speech, like how could you go till dinner pretty sharp or is it really going to last for like 3 hours? That sharpness before it starts to fade. Right. Yeah. You see what I'm saying? Like, all right, I did this HIIT workout. Now, I can go another 24 hours sleep deprived and still be on. No, I don't. Not for the brain. For the glucose stuff, it lasts. It lasts. The body, but not the brain. Not the brain. No. Yeah. It does. You do need at least like you're going to start to feel tired, right? And you might actually need like a little— Nap or something. A little nap. Yep.