High Stress + Poor Sleep = Low Testosterone

Lifestyle factors that reduce the male vitality hormone.

When COVID-19 arrived in the spring of 2020, I was 49-years-old and about to turn 50. I’d spent the better part of 2019 living on the island of Maui, surfing every day, and I felt as strong and vital as ever.

As was the case with so many of my fellow men and women, the pandemic—and the terror and propaganda PSYOP of the official response to it—seemed to inaugurate a new era of stress in my life. It began with the lamentable fact that my brothers and I invested a fortune in a family restaurant that opened in January 2020. We were just getting our systems in place and assembling a decent staff when we were shut down and our operating partner abandoned us, leaving us to flounder around and try to operate it on our own.

I often joked with my brothers that trying to operate a restaurant in the year 2020 was like getting beaten by a troupe of baseball-bat wielding chimps every day. I sometimes thought about making a documentary film about my experience titled The 400 Kicks in the Balls (an homage to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows). After struggling valiantly for 18 months, we finally threw in the towel and booked our losses.

Trying to recover financially from my restaurant misadventure obliged me to triple my workload in the pursuit of any other enterprise that could possibly yield an income. I thank God I discovered two fascinating true stories during this period that I was able to turn into two commercially successful books. It was also during this period that I had the great honor and privilege to start working with Dr. Peter McCullough.

The last two years have been the greatest intellectual adventure of my life, but this year I began to notice that the constant mental exertion of investigating and analyzing the endless train of astonishing stories was beginning to affect my sleep. I often awakened at 3:00, my mind racing over all of the bizarre, confusing, and distressing things that have been happening in our world for the last five years.

A couple of months ago I embarked on a major investigation of what happens to the body and mind of a middle-aged man who is frequently sleep deprived. The short answer is nothing good. Consistently poor sleep over a prolonged period of time is like a wrecking ball of one’s mental and physical health.

Among the many vital functions that are demolished by high stress and poor sleep is a man’s testosterone level. I recently got mine checked and wasn’t surprised to learn that it’s on the low side. High stress + poor sleep = low testosterone, which results in reduced mental, emotional, and physical vitality.

Instead of taking Testosterone Replacement Therapy, I decided to make several lifestyle changes to reduce stress and improve my sleep quality. These include:

1). Vigorous exercise and weight training in the mornings instead of jumping straight into work on the computer.

2). Daily walks in the sun, taking a complete break from phone communication and information.

3). Daily cold plunges in my apartment building swimming pool.

4). Daily meditation.

5). Reading print books and relaxing in the evenings instead of working on the computer.

Though only another testosterone test will tell the true tale, I believe that my lifestyle changes are starting to bear some fruit. At any rate, I’ve recently started sleeping and feeling better.

I recently stumbled across a paper titled Age-independent increases in male salivary testosterone during horticultural activity among Tsimane forager-farmers. The authors found that hard, outdoor physical labor—especially wood chopping—does wonders for increasing testosterone.

I shared the paper with my youngest brother, and we had a laugh at the thought that the stereotypical image of the burly and bearded lumberjack may be founded in physical-hormonal reality. My brother suggested that I put the paper’s findings to the test and start spending time on our family farm doing hard labor under the Texas sun. He and a crew of country boys were clearing a bunch of scrubby trees and brush, and he invited me to join them.

These circumstances gave me what I thought to be a highly comical idea for a before and after video of my transformation from a low testosterone desk jockey to a real Brush-Cuttin’ Cowboy of the kind that George W. Bush fantasized about being. And so I hired a great filmmaker named Charles Bush to shoot the following short video about my adventure in natural testosterone boosting. Charles just sent me the final cut.

Viewer Discretion Advised: As we got into the production, I couldn’t resist the urge to satirize the concept of “toxic masculinity” and to make fun of the recent Bud Light advertising fiasco. An old friend owns the largest Budweiser distributor in Texas, and he blamed “conservative” commentators (like me) for the huge backlash against his brand. In the event that he reads this post—sorry James, nothing personal, just having a bit of fun. After crying, laughter is the greatest stress reliever of all.