Sleep is one of the body’s most effective tools for maintaining metabolic balance. In this NightOwling lesson, circadian health expert and medical scientist Logan Pendergrast, Ph.D., explains how deep sleep improves insulin sensitivity and helps the body manage blood sugar more efficiently.
Dr. Pendergrast explores how consistent rest supports energy storage and release in fat cells, stabilizing daily metabolism and protecting long-term health. Disrupted sleep, on the other hand, can interfere with these processes, raising the risk of metabolic disorders over time.
This lesson reveals how healthy sleep patterns strengthen the body’s ability to regulate energy and maintain metabolic resilience.
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So next here we'll talk about metabolism
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and particularly how sleep affects what
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our body breaks down and how our body
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breaks it down. So sleeps helps us to
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regulate our sugar levels and how they
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are cleared from the blood. And it's
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during deep sleep that we see that our
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insulin sensitivity improves. And this
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improvement of insulin sensitivity helps
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us to clear sugar from our blood and put
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it into our muscles and our fat cells.
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And this is a good thing because if our
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sugar in our blood is elevated for long
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periods of time, it can actually damage
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other cells in the body. Uh,
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additionally with proper sleep, we see
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an improvement in the metabolism in our
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fat cells, meaning that those fat cells
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are able to take up energy and release
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energy more effectively.
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And then overall, we see that healthy
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sleep helps us to reduce our risk of
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type 2 diabetes. And this is shown in
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the science where we see that night
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shift workers who sleep less than 5
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hours per night have a 40% level
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increase in risk of type 2 diabetes.
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Meaning that our body and our sleep in
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particular is associated with diseases
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that we would otherwise think are not
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sleep associated.
