My Evening Routine For Optimizing Overall Health & Longevity

Today we're going to talk about my evening routine for optimizing overall health and longevity. The first thing I got to tell you about when I think about the evening, it actually starts earlier in the day when I plan my dinner. I very rarely just leave it to chance and figure out what I'm going to eat when it's actually dinnertime. So I think ahead about what I would enjoy eating. That's where it actually starts. You know, it might be in the early afternoon and I'm trying to figure out what is exactly the right thing that I will want to eat tonight. Now that might not be intuitive to you in thinking about how to come up with, how do you know what you're going to want to eat? But if you're somebody who is in touch with what you enjoy eating, think about the foods that you prefer. And so one of my little tips I have for people that ask me how to do this is I say, take a notebook or open up your mobile device to your notes section and start making a list of what you enjoy. What are your favorite ingredients? What are your favorite dishes? What are your favorite meals you've had? Don't wait until you've got a plan for dinner to go ahead and take some time and create your own preferred meal list. Think back. Something that you always enjoyed eating that you know. Something that you loved eating when you were a kid. Something that you had wonderful when you were on vacation. A favorite meal that a friend or a family member cooked for you. Those are actually things or maybe you've had at somebody's house. Those are the kinds of things that if you write them down, it'll be so helpful to you because you'll have something to refer to, to spark your ideas. The other thing is about ingredients. What's the season? What's seasonal? Is it summertime and you want some asparagus or tomatoes? What's in the springtime? You know, all those kinds of things. You can actually make a list of seasonal foods. It's easy to look up online. And if you make your own list on your mobile device, on your notes section, and you can flip through it really, really quickly to say, you know, is there anything on here that seems to be just the right thing that I feel like eating later? That's actually what I do. That's my little tip on healthy eating. I'm actually very mindful and conscious of what it is that I would want to eat. And then it gives me something to look forward to. And planning is actually part of healthy living. That's one of my secrets. If you plan and think ahead, you're not going to leave it to chance and just let yourself bump into whatever. That can happen every once in a while. But I think from optimizing health and optimizing longevity, having some careful, deliberate thought ahead of time is really important. There's a couple of things to tell you a little bit deeper about that. If I'm going to cook, I've got to get the ingredients. Do I have them? So, you know, this is where I will need to do a mental checklist of what is necessary if I'm going to cook a meal that I feel like eating. And I might need to check the refrigerator or the pantry to make sure that I have everything that I need because I might need to actually stop by a grocery store or a market to go pick up some of the things in order to be able to knock out in the kitchen, in my kitchen, what I want to eat. Now, if I'm planning to go out where I know I'm going out, I actually am very aware of where I'm planning to go. I don't just say I want to go out to eat tonight. I try to figure out where I'm going to go or if I'm going to meet somebody for a preplanned dinner, I will look up the restaurant. I will click on menu and I will look through ahead of time what they are actually having on their menu. And I'll start thinking, is there something on there that I actually prefer? Like, what is just the right thing that I feel like eating that day for dinner? And that's even looking at the online menu. And by the way, sometimes looking at that menu will make me go to a different plan. If I thought I would go to this restaurant and I look at the menu, doesn't have what I want to eat, I don't force myself into it. I might just change and go to a different place. All right. So I try to be fluid and I write about this whole, you know, kind of dealing with your situation in the moment. In my book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, I read a whole chapter about Bruce Lee and his fighting philosophy was really not to be rigidly stuck to one style or one camp, but to really have the fluidity to be able to move around with your situation to figure out what you're going to want to eat. Now, if I'm traveling, you know, whether it's for work or for pleasure, for pleasure, I usually have more choice of where I'm going to go to eat. Sometimes for work. When I travel for work, I might be lecturing someplace. I might be having a meeting. If I'm stuck in a hotel, oftentimes there's not a lot of really great choices on the hotel menu, but you can still find something. And again, this is where recognizing the good ingredients is going to be really important. Now, the ingredients are actually something that the ingredient list, you can get the ingredient list that you can check what you like in my books, Eat to Beat Disease and Eat to Beat Your Diet. If you haven't actually read those books, Eat to Beat Disease and Eat to Beat Your Diet, you can order them online and there are lots of tables and charts. And what I actually tell people to do is go ahead and open up the book, take a Sharpie or a highlighter and either circle or highlight all those foods that you already love. Those are the foods, all the foods I list are healthy for you. And if you actually find and identify the ones you love, then you're already way ahead of the game. Then take a picture of that table in your phone. And anytime that you're actually wanting to reference something to eat that's healthy, all you got to do is open up your photos and look for those tables that you've already earmarked those healthy ingredients. All right. Now, I believe in really good food and I believe in good health. And so the idea is actually to identify which foods you like that are also healthy. Now you've got the perfect alignment to make a meal really hit the spot in terms of both your preferences, your palate, as well as your health. Now, the other thing I do is when I'm planning on eating, I plan on eating with people. Now, there's a lot of reasons for that from optimizing health and longevity. You know, of course, yes, I know it's much more convenient and easy to eat alone. Research studies have shown that it's important for both mental health and physical health when you eat with other people. There's a lot of reasons for this. First, when you eat with other people, you tend to eat more slowly. And that actually is helpful to your health because you then tend not to overeat. When you're eating by yourself and you're on a device looking and you're just like wolfing the food down, very easy to overeat, particularly if there's something tasty that you actually like. When you're with another person or other people, you are having conversation. And so, you know, the group tends to pace themselves and you're not wolfing down your food. Again, pacing yourself, taking your time allows your stomach to actually slowly get full. And when your stomach gets full, then it sends signals like leptin to your brain to say, hey, let's slow down. We're getting full. Let's not eat as much. And that actually also helps to prevent overeating. Now, overeating is actually quite harmful to optimizing your health and longevity over time. And here's why. When you overeat, you're actually putting too much fuel in your body. Our food is our fuel. And that fuel goes into our stomach, gets absorbed in our bloodstream, and it's glucose, right? It's fuel. And as our fuel levels go up in our blood, our insulin gets produced to bring it, bring that fuel into our muscles and into our body fat. Our fat is actually a fuel tank for our energy to store our energy. So it's all good thing. And if you're continuously putting food or overeating over time, not one time, but day after day, weekend and week out, month after month, what happens is that you're overwhelming your metabolism and you're putting way too much fuel into your system. Now, when you've got more fuel in your system than you're burning with activity, I'm talking exercise, just activities, daily living. What happens is that fuel tanks actually have to stretch. Your fat cells have to stretch to accommodate that. And then when you're still overeating, another fat cell fills up and another one and another one. And when you run out of fat cells, your body has stem cells, fat stem cells are called adipose stromal cells, stem cells. They'll actually make more fat cells and then they will blow up. And then another one, the next one will fill up and so on and so forth. And you can kind of see if you have a consistent pattern of overeating, putting too many calories, too much fuel in your body, what winds up happening is you build extra body fat. And when you actually start building extra body fat, especially the kind of harmful body fat called visceral fat, which is found inside the tube of our body. I don't care if you have a thin tube or you've got a big tube, that's just body size. You can still have too much extra body fat inside there. And inside that tube, the visceral fat can wrap around like a baseball glove and choke your organs. That's not good when you actually grow too much of it. That fat can become inflammatory. And just like in your gas station, if you overflow your fuel tank, right, let's say it wasn't the clicker that would signal that your tank is full and the gas kept on going in, what would happen? The gas would flow out of the tank, down the side of the car, around the tires and pool around your feet. And then you'd be standing in the middle of a dangerous, flammable, toxic mess. And that's what happens when you overeat. So one of the things that I try to do is be really mindful that I'm not going to overeat. And eating with company is one way to actually do that. Now, obviously I can't eat with company every single night. There are times that I'm eating by myself, but I have to be mindful and I'm going to mindful of that. I'm not going to overeat. All right. And when you're eating alone, you know, one of the things that's helpful about being mindful is not staring at the screen or watching a video. It's like eating popcorn in a theater. It's very, very easy to eat the whole thing. Now in the blue zones, part of the community pattern is actually for people to eat together. Friends eat together, families eat together, community members, extended family members eat together. I know that's not possible in every circumstance, but again, that is something that I think about, that it helps me optimize my health and optimize longevity. We know that calorie overload in the laboratory actually shortens life. Then you took up a talk about those animal models for longevity. We also know the calorie restriction, like removing a third of your calories starts to actually improve your longevity. It slows down cellular aging. And so on the basis of trying to eat less, which then doesn't cause overload, which doesn't cause fat to build up, which doesn't cause inflammation. You also get the fringe benefit of actually slowing down cellular aging. That's with mindfulness, which comes with eating together and thinking about what you're going to eat ahead of time is also really, really useful. Now there is a reminder for myself not to overeat, especially when I'm eating by myself. And it's an old Japanese phrase called Hara Hachi Banmi. Hara Hachi Banmi. It's an old Confucian saying actually translated into Japanese that basically means stop eating when you're 80% full. Leave the party before it's over. And how do you do that? Well, when you eat slowly and you pay attention to how your body feels, how your stomach feels, this is actually a process called interoception. Appropriate feeling on the outside, interoception is how you feel on the inside. When you get in touch with your own body and you feel pretty much how your stomach is filling up, hopefully not too quickly, you'll know when you are satisfied with your food, but not full. It's a fine line, but you'll actually get there when you actually go, you know what? I feel pretty good. I feel pretty satisfied, but you don't feel full. Too often we actually eat until we're full and then there's still more left and then we want to take seconds. That's almost instantaneous overeating, overconsumption, overloading on calories and overloading our metabolism and setting up for that dangerous, toxic, flammable mess. So I try to practice Hara Hachi Banmi, which means that I stop when I am 80% full. Now, the other thing that I do to optimize my health in the evening after dinner is I will deliberately take a break and with regards to whatever's going on and I'll try to go for a walk. Now, walking is actually a great form of exercise. Swimming is even better, but walking is actually really great and you don't need special workout clothes. You don't need to belong to a gym. You can just walk, go outside and walk, walk around the block, all right? And if you're not in a place that you can safely walk around a block, you can walk stairs, you can walk around your house, and people go, what am I going to do for half an hour? Walking, very easy. One is actually to just chill out, take it easy, be mindful, enjoy your surroundings. Take a look at the outside around you. That's actually really helpful and calming. For me, it's very, very calming to be able to do that. Now, I know sometimes I'm actually, there's a lot going on in my head. I need to be distracted. One thing, if you really wanted to do it, and sometimes I do it, I'll put on my favorite podcast or I'll put on a podcast episode that I haven't finished listening to. And while I'm walking, I'll actually be listening to the rest of the podcast. Anything to get 30 minutes of actually movement, all right? That gets the blood moving, that actually helps to burn some calories from the food I've just eaten, and it actually will help me sleep a little bit better as well, which is very, very important for detoxifying your brain, important for actually rebuilding your gut microbiome, rebooting your gut microbiome, and helping to fine tune my immune system. And so those are something important to do. Now, the other thing when you're walking is it actually improves your circulation. Blood is flowing through my muscles when I'm actually going for a walk. And what happens when blood flows through my blood vessels is it actually helps to give a little workout to the cells lining my blood vessels called the endothelial cells. This is the inner lining of blood vessels. And when you actually exercise, and even walking will do this, you get the lining exercised as well. And that lining is critical to keep in good shape. So exercise helps endothelial health, which is vascular health, blood vessel health, and we've got 60,000 miles of blood vessels in our body. All of that can actually be kept into shape by going for a walk. And this is what I do after dinner, whenever I can for 30 minutes. Now, of that 60,000 miles, by the way, 400 miles of them are into our brain. If you want good cognition with longevity, so you want to optimize your brain, you really want those blood vessels to be really healthy inside the noggin. All right, so endothelial health, brain endothelial health is very important. Muscle endothelial health is also important. And by the way, muscles, use it or lose it, right? So some of us may not have the time or the bandwidth to do regular workouts than we should. But if we don't have time, this walking is a simple way to be able to get what you need there. And by the way, walking for me at the end of the day also lowers my stress. All right, if it's raining, I will walk inside, walk around the house. Again, I put on some earbuds, listen to podcasts, it helps me sleep better. Clinical studies have shown that regular physical activity like walking lowers overall mortality and can give you an extra year of life or two compared to somebody who doesn't exercise regularly. And by the way, I do need to actually tell you something important. There is this urban legend, I'm sure you've heard it, that you should be walking 10,000 steps a day if you want to be healthy, right? So people, they're on their wearable, they're tracking, and oh man, I'm only 7,000 steps. I want to beat my 10,000 steps. Well, that's actually an urban legend. And you might be, your jaw might drop when I tell you where that came from. But there's no science behind 10,000 steps. In fact, the history of the 10,000 step for health idea was that it came from a Japanese step measuring device way back decades ago, where they came up with a marketing slogan to say 10,000 steps for your health. And so you should buy their measurement system to look for 10,000 steps. It's a marketing campaign, worked really well. It obviously has even gotten into the medical community where doctors are talking about 10,000 steps, but it's not really, really true. In fact, there has been a clinical study looking at steps and overall health. And it found in a study of 226,000 people that even 3,800 steps, almost a third less than 10,000, okay, can lower overall mortality. All right, so you don't need 10,000. Hey, if you can do 10,000, go for it. But even 3,800 has been shown, less than half, okay, almost a third can actually lower overall mortality. So if you're really aiming for optimizing your health and mortality, think about that. Can you take an overall course of the day, 3,800, whatever you did and walk during the day, hey, you know, a half an hour walking after dinner might help you close the gap and get what you actually need. Now, the other thing that I think about to optimize my health and think about longevity is that I don't eat after dinner. So when I eat dinner, I'm, you know, I'm enjoying my food. I'm savoring my food. As I told you, I'm looking forward to it. I've deliberately chosen something. It happens to be just the right thing that I wanted that evening. That day, when I'm done, I put the dishes away, all right, or if I'm at a restaurant, you know, I put my fork and knife and I'm done and my dishes are taken away. And after that, I don't eat again for the rest of that day, that evening. In fact, I'm not going to eat again until the next morning. And guess what? Even though when I was much younger, I had a habit of kind of going out and grabbing a bite or, you know, especially I was working late. I can tell you when I was in college and I was in medical school, you know, this is the younger me, you know, you're going out and getting a snack. And if you're with friends, let's go out for pizza or whatever. I don't do that. All right. When I want to optimize my health and I think about how to optimize longevity, I don't eat after dinner. I put the dishes away and that is it. And let me tell you why I do that. It is because my last meal, when I eat it with calories in, my glucose levels go up, which is absolutely normal. I don't like to use the terms glucose spike and glucose crash. That's really not a great way to think about it. It's more like a gentle wave that normally happens. It's completely normal for you eat food. It's food is fuel. Your fuel levels go up in your blood. Now your insulin comes out and helps to bring that glucose into your muscles and into your body fat, as I said earlier. All right. So then your blood sugars go back down to where they need to be. And then into your next meal, it kind of comes back up again. Well, what I do after dinner is I put my dishes away and don't eat anything. So that last rise of my blood sugar and insulin goes up and then it comes down because my insulin has drawn my energy into my muscles and my body fat as fuel storing tanks. Okay. That's it. I don't eat again. And then the insulin levels will go down. And when the insulin levels go down, something remarkable happens to my metabolism, to your metabolism too. And that is while we're eating during the day, all the way up until dinner, our metabolism is a fuel storing mode. Come on, give me some more. I want to store that fuel. Makes sense, right? Like basically we're machines. We need fuel to run. But in your last meal, when you're not eating and insulin goes down, our metabolism shifts gears. I say it's like a race car. You shift gears like a Ferrari. And now you're not storing fuel anymore. Now you're burning fuel. You're burning fuel down. You're burning down those calories that you've loaded up on during the day. It's like a car after you fill it up. Now you get in the driver's seat, turn on the car and drive down the highway. And now you're burning down fuel. That's what happens when you stop eating. You're not filling up the tank anymore. And the insulin goes down. That's the trigger for your metabolism to shift into gear. All right. Into fuel burning mode. Now I know that if I snack at night, what happens after dinner, if I'm going to grab a snack in the middle of the night, my blood sugar goes up, the insulin goes up. Guess what? I derailed my metabolism, shifting into fuel burning mode. Now it's going to go back to fuel storing mode. So if you're taking a midnight snack, you're cutting into the time, that precious time you have in the evening for your body to be actually in fuel burning mode. So what I do to optimize my health after I push the dishes away. All right. I don't eat again until the next day. And that's just fine. I'm eating. I stop when I'm 80 percent full. I put the dishes away and that's it. I'm not stuffed. All right. And then I'm actually going to go out for a walk. I'm burning off some of those calories. I'm getting my circulation going. I'm helping endothelial health. Right. It's going to make me sleep a little bit better. And then then I'm actually ready to go to bed. That's what I do. Now, I will also in the evening, I'll sip a cup of tea. I know for some people, the caffeine in tea gives them the jitters or makes it difficult for them to sleep. But for me, I can actually tolerate that. The caffeine of tea, which is a lot lower than coffee, doesn't bother me very much. So I will sip green tea. And it turns out that studies have shown that drinking tea relaxes you, calms you down, lowers the sympathetic nervous system. And so you're actually in a calmer state of mind, which actually helps sleep. Now, in addition to green tea and sometimes I'll have jasmine tea because I like the floral notes of it. It's also very relaxing. It's kind of like aromatherapy and tea therapy. You know, like one is in your nose and into your brain. The other one's inside of your body. It makes me very relaxed. The other thing sometimes I'll have is a probiotic tea. A probiotic tea is like Pu-erh tea, P-U hyphen E-R-H. Pu-erh tea is from the city of Pu-erh, used to be a town of Pu-erh in southwest China. They have smoky fermented tea. It's a digestive. It actually helps me feel like I'm digesting my food, which is the tradition of drinking this. But it's a probiotic tea and it actually has its own healthy bacteria. And so when I'm actually drinking the tea, it doesn't break my fast. It doesn't actually cause more insulin to go up, but it actually feeds my gut bacteria. And I know when I feed my gut bacteria, it helps me lower my inflammation, helps me digest my food, improve the way that my body processes lipids. Okay. Helps me manage my blood cholesterol a lot better. And it text messages my brain in order to be able to release social hormones and hormones that actually put me in a better mood, which is what I want to be at the end of the day. All right. Now there's a lot of studies on tea that show their benefits for longevity, decreasing the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, some forms of cancer, et cetera. So I actually strongly recommend people to try drinking tea. And if you're sensitive to caffeine, try a white tea. A white tea is an early in the season picked tea. Caffeine is a natural insecticide. So the tea plant makes more caffeine when you pick them later in the summer, when there's bugs flying around. But if you get a spring tea, first pick tea, not a lot of bugs. And so not a lot of caffeine. Of course you can get decaffeinated tea as well. My little pro tip to you is if you're going to get tea, get loose leaf tea. And if you don't like to just have loosely tea leaves in your mug for tea, then get a classic teapot where you can actually strain away the leaves or a tea ball. You can put the tea leaves in there and strain it and you don't have leaves. But I'll tell you, more recent studies have shown that tea bags, which I used to use occasionally, are sprayed with plastic on the outside and then microplastic can actually leach out into the tea. In fact, you know, there's been some studies that have shown that like one tea bag brewed actually for like 10 minutes will release up to a billion microplastic particles into your tea. Hey, if you want to actually optimize your health, you don't want to do that. So I use almost always loose leaf tea. There are millions of people in Asia who don't actually use tea bags or tea balls or, you know, they just actually put loose leaf tea into the teacup and it's perfectly fine. When you steep the tea, the tea leaves will eventually settle to the bottom and you just sip the liquid and you can add more liquid. So you can do that two or three or four times in order to be able to continue to get the good stuff out of the tea. Hey there, I want to share another resource with you. My free resource on foods that can impact on brain health, specifically Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Important research is helping us to appreciate that diet, your diet, can make a marked difference when it comes to your brain health. So I want to share three foods that you can add to your plate today that can help you avoid cognitive decline. Check out my resource available for free right now in the caption below. Now, back to the video. With Puerh tea, by the way, the fermented tea, studies have shown that drinking Puerh tea actually activates your fat burning mechanisms. It's brown fat thermogenesis. We have two different colors of fat in our body, white fat, which is the harmful fat, brown fat, which is a good fat. White fat is wiggly, jiggly. Brown fat is wafer thin. Brown fats around our neck, underneath our, behind our breastplate, a little bit behind our shoulder blades, a little bit in our belly. And when you turn on brown fat with things like Puerh tea, fermented tea, that brown fat fires up. It's like the stovetop of a gas stove, right? What do you do? Click, click, click, whoosh. Now you can actually put the pot of water to boil. And when you do that with tea and cause that click, click, click, whoosh with the brown fat, it's got to burn down. It needs fuel to be able to do thermogenesis, generate heat. It steals that heat, that energy, that fuel from your harmful white fat. So good fat, brown fat burns down harmful fat, white fat, especially the visceral fats that's in the tube of your body. Puerh tea will actually do that. Studies have been done showing an effect. It shrinks the waist circumference of people that drink it regularly. And partly it's because you're actually burning away that harmful visceral fat. Now, if you want the best out of your tea with the catechins, the polyphenols, don't put dairy milk in it. And the reason is that dairy milk will actually contain dairy fat that forms these little fat bubbles that trap the polyphenols. So when you drink it, the polyphenols all roll down your gut and are not absorbed as quite as well. And so you're missing out some of the good stuff. So I like to drink tea straight, but if you really have to cut it, I would actually use a soy milk and oat milk and nut milk. Totally fine. And almond milk that doesn't form those little soap bubbles. All right. And then finally, what do I do in the evening? I will wind up doing some reading. Now I love books. I love to read. I write books and I love to read books at my my office and my home is filled with books that I, you know, I collect and I love and I read them over and over again. I know a lot of people read on a Kindle or read on their device. I like to read with an old school book and I actually really like hardback books. Now, the reason is I like the feel of a book. So that's just me. And I like to read and turn the pages or something about the tactile aspect of reading old school. But there's another reason that I read hard like real books as well. And that's because on the screen, if I'm actually winding up my evening and I'm reading the blue light on a phone or a Kindle device actually gets into my eyes and actually disturbs my brain's ability to have good deep sleep. And this has been studied blue light from devices around bedtime. All right. Anywhere but with like anywhere within two hours of bedtime tends to disturb your good quality sleep. All right. So I try to put my cell phone away before I sleep. I know it's hard. It's hard for me as well. But I do it. I try to do it whenever I can. All right. And by the way, the other thing, of course, if you are looking at your device in the evening time, don't doom scroll. You know, doom scrolling is just reading through news articles that are giving you more and more bad news. Look, it's important in my mind for us to keep up with what's going on in the world. But just by reminding ourselves of all the bad things and having the algorithm serve up more bad things, it really is. It doesn't. It's the opposite of calming. It actually like riles me up. And I try to actually make my evenings all about winding down and being calm. And that gives me puts me in a better mood the next day and actually allows me to sleep better. So I'll be sharper the next day as well. Now, I would be remiss if I didn't tell you that before I go to bed in the evening, I practice oral hygiene. Oral hygiene is, you know, brushing your teeth, flossing, brushing your tongue. All of those things are really important because if you don't do practice good oral hygiene, brushing teeth, flossing teeth, brushing your tongue, for example, it's a setup for bacteria, harmful bacteria to grow while you're sleeping at night with your mouth closed. All right. It's like a it's like an incubator or a petri dish incubator for that bad bacteria to start growing. And if you don't brush your teeth, any food particles are just essentially fertilizer for that bad bacteria. And you get the whole night for it to actually grow, which you don't want it to do. So brush your teeth, get rid of those extra food particles, get rid of some of that bad bacteria. All right. And basically you're your own gut microbiome, which starts in the mouth. Our gut starts with the mouth. We'll kind of take over and you'll actually have a healthier mouth and you'll actually also have better breath. But very importantly, by brushing your teeth, you're lowering the risk of gum disease, gingivitis. All right. Gingivitis has been shown to the inflammation of the gum from due to infection bacteria. Harmful bacteria has been shown to be associated with heart disease, has been shown to be associated with cognitive decline, dementia, Parkinson's, and even Alzheimer's disease. So look, I'm sure most of us actually brush our teeth at night, but I'm just reminding you how important it is to keep your gums really, really in good shape. Now, for me, I'll tell you an extra little pro tip that I do. I happen to know that there are clinical studies looking at a probiotic called Lactobacillus Ruteri, R-E-U-T-E-R-I, Lactobacillus Ruteri. And this is a normal, healthy gut bacteria. Remember the gut starts in the mouth that actually has been shown to lower the risk of gingivitis. And it also fights the good bacteria that fights the type of bacteria that cause cavities as well. To me, that's a winner. So that is actually a probiotic that I take. I actually take the chewable version because I don't want to just swallow it down and it'll tumble down to the lower part of my gut where it belongs. I want to chew it and swish it around my mouth because I want my oral cavity, my mouth, my gums, my teeth, to be able to have the benefit of having that probiotic there as well. Now, I do try to get seven to eight hours of sleep every evening. What's the right number of hours? It's different for everybody. I know that we're always asked to give hours. If I were to tell you seven to nine hours is sort of the window, let's average it out and call it eight hours. That's actually probably the right amount. So I'm going to bed later. I'll try to sleep in a little bit. But don't think about it as like cheating your schedule. Think about it as just getting the right amount of sleep. So if I go to bed later, I'll try to wake up a little bit later. I'll just adjust my scheduled hours of sleep. Something about temperature. It turns out that research has been done showing that if you sleep at a cooler room temperature at night, like 67, 68 degrees Fahrenheit, that lower temperature actually helps you get better sleep and it actually helps to build a better immune system as well. All right. So cool down your room temperature. All right. Sleep for the right amount of time and get that good quality sleep. It's a reset, reboot for your immune system. Now, when I am getting a good nights of sleep, again, eight hours deep sleep, refresh, calm. I'm not trying to razzle dazzle my brain with blue light before I go to sleep. There's something that happens in the brain when you have good deep sleep. There is a sewer system called the glymphatic system in the brain. It's like a sewer system and it opens up when you're in good quality, deep sleep. It's like the sewers of Paris opening up and it drains the fluid, the toxin that's accumulated in the brain. And in fact, it's been shown that there's nerves that actually push that fluid containing all the toxins that build up during the day. I mean, look, our brain is on like on overdrive. Everyone's brain is on overdrive, working hard during the day. Whatever you do, it doesn't matter who you are, what you do for work or what activity you did. Our brain is a super active thing. And so there's all these toxins that get accumulated over the course of the day. The glymphatic channels open them up, drain them right out. And that's why, by the way, if you don't get a good night's sleep, what happens the next day? You feel kind of brain foggy. You haven't cleared out all those toxins. All right. So that's what I try to do is to get a good seven to nine hours. Let's call it a sleep. My gut microbiome reset itself during that time. And my immune system also reboots itself. So that's it. I'm telling you what I do in the evening, my process of what I think about to optimize my health and optimize longevity. Hope you learned something. And thanks for watching. I'll catch you on the next video. Hi there. If you enjoyed watching this video, I know you'll the next one. Stay here and check it out and I'll see you there.