- So when we think about sleep, some of the general rules of thumb that probably a lot of people have heard is that you're aiming for somewhere around seven to nine hours, but it's about so much more than that. As human beings, we're diurnal creatures, meaning to be active by day and largely at rest at night.

As we deviate outside of that, we find that they have rates going up of things like cancer, heart disease, mental health issues, and sleep-wake disorders, simply by just doing things at night. I just want to know why is sleep so important? - One, we know that this is crucial for our immune function, cardiovascular health, our emotional regulations.

Many of us don't even know what it can feel like or look like, wake up consistently feeling well-rested. I truly do believe that sleep is a skill, all great skills, no matter if you think that you have this handled, that you can venture into mastery and that there is always this opportunity for us to improve upon this area.

And even then, when you might think you have it handled, something happens. - Molly, thank you so much for being here. - Oh, thank you so much for having me. - I'm so excited. Sleep is so fundamental and it's such an important part of our lives. I think I constantly talk to people who aren't giving it as much attention as it deserves.

And I just want to know why is sleep so important? - Okay, so we really struggle to find a single domain of life that is not negatively impacted when our sleep is not working as well as it could. And what does that mean? So when you think about different domains of life, when you think about cognition, when you think about cardiovascular health, when you think about immune health, when you think about emotional regulation, mental health, et cetera, the ripple effects are so vast from a negative side of things when we're not getting the sleep that we require, whether in duration, regularity, the quality of that sleep.

But then on the flip side, from a more potentially positive spin, we struggle to find areas of life that are not positively impacted from a ripple effect when we do improve this area of our life. So it really has the possibility to absolutely reach in, have its tentacles into your whole experience of your life.

And that's one of the reasons I'm so passionate about it. - All right, so I think maybe to set a baseline, 'cause I'm sure we're gonna talk about lots of parts of sleep. Let's talk about like fundamentals. What are the different stages? What's important about them? Let's kind of set some understanding of sleep in general for people.

- Yeah, absolutely. So when we think about sleep, some of the general rules of thumb that probably a lot of people have heard is that for a healthy adult, you're aiming for somewhere around seven to nine hours. So that would be in the duration category. And that's what a lot of people are thinking about.

So how much sleep am I logging? But it's about so much more than that. So you can be someone that hits whatever, seven and a half hours every single night, but it might be all over the place as far as regularity. It might be fragmented. So you might be taking a very long time to log that seven and a half hours.

So that can be problematic. So we wanna get more granular on what our kind of goals are with our sleep. Also knowing that each individual is gonna have some bio-individuality on how much sleep they should be getting. But there are certain components that we would like to have as far as consistency, regularity, less of that sleep fragmentation, et cetera.

When we think about sleep stage classifications. Now, this is where a lot of people start to go a little funky, meaning that I have a lot of people coming my way and they're freaking out because they're tracking on Aura, Whoop, Apple, Garmin, et cetera. And they're saying, I'm not getting any deep sleep.

I'm not getting any REM, et cetera. So first off, when we think about those sleep stages, we can from a, if you're tracking, 'cause usually the application nowadays is that we're tracking with some sort of element of a sleep tracker. And so we're getting this information out and yet we're wondering, am I getting enough?

Is this okay? And the problem is, is that this is the least accurate data on our wearables. So all the information that's coming out, this is the least accurate. It's using its own algorithm within each wearable to make its best guess on, are you in deep sleep? Are you in REM?

Are you in light sleep? It's kind of how it's been boiled down to some of the generalized ways that we're thinking of our sleep. And the problem is, is that because it's that best guess, if the algorithm is changed, your results with your sleep staging is going to be markedly shifted.

So I work primarily with Oura Ring from a consumer grade tracker perspective. And just this year, well, just in 2023, a big algorithm change and there was entirely different results for many, many people on their deep sleep, their REM, et cetera. And if you were making decisions on those numbers beforehand, you were really kind of taken for a surprise when you got these totally new set of numbers.

So my big message for people, if they are tracking, is one, to not get too crazed about the REM deep sleep and your light sleep. Instead, you can look from a trends perspective, do not try to cross reference within wearables since they are using such different algorithms, but within each wearable, you can start to notice particular trends and see are there patterns that you can help support based on those trends.

And now, if we pan out even further, some of the generalized things that I think have a practical application is just simply to know that on your first half of the night, what most of us are looking for is a deeper, a more kind of higher ratio of deep sleep on the first half and a higher ratio of REM on the second half.

And what is important about that is even from a timing perspective, which I think a lot of people don't realize, is that if you manipulate the time by which you're going to sleep and say you just decide to go to bed later on your Fridays, Saturdays, and maybe even into Sundays or what have you, then you're lobbing off some of your possibility and potential to get deep sleep, that's that first part of your sleep, 'cause the body likes to try to stay on time.

So you're hitting some of your potential to get deep sleep on the first half. And then on the flip side, if you're someone that's waking up earlier on certain parts of your week or what have you, then you're cutting into some of your potential to get that REM. And probably most people have heard of some of the importance of both of these.

Deep sleep, really, really crucial for some of our brain health, our reparative mechanisms, growth hormone, and more. And then of course, for REM, you can almost think of it as like your inner therapist. So, so much from our cognition, our memory, our emotional regulation, fortitude, other things can all get impacted then if you are cutting into your morning timing.

So this is what's so interesting about sleep is that there's a real strategy by which we can navigate, what are we prioritizing? And the least sexy thing about all this is one of the best ways to prioritize this and help facilitate it is consistency, which virtually no one wants to hear.

But it's one of the most powerful things that can make such a difference with those ratios. - For someone who's not tracking with a device, is there a way to kind of estimate how your quality of your sleep is or what you're getting? Is it about how you feel in the morning or how many times you wake up or something like that?

- Yes, absolutely. So historically, 'cause of course I know I'm mentioning a lot of wearables and trackers, so for anyone listening that's like, "I'm not tracking," or has no interest in tracking or maybe was tracking, I see this a lot, and then they're just over it. They're like, "Well, I got what I needed to get," or what have you.

If you're not tracking, for many, many years, if you were struggling with your sleep, you wanted to get a sense of like, "How am I sleeping?" People would do, take a kind of sleep diary or sleep log. And so that's something you can do in a low-tech way, just pen and paper, and you can start kind of tracking for a period of time.

What time are you going to sleep? So you're getting into bed, and how long is it about taking you to fall asleep? Then from that point, what time are you waking up? But in between that time, there's often for many people, a lot that might go on. So they might wake up at three, four in the morning, and if so, how long are you waking up?

If you're really struggling with, it can be referred to as insomnia, kind of difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, what are some of the thoughts that are coming up throughout that period of time, so that we can just get kind of a read on both your results with your sleep, but also your relationship to your sleep.

Are you getting really thrown by some of these results? But then, of course, to your point, so once we're tracking for a period of time, it's like, what other information can we glean? Well, we can glean, what is our average bedtime? What is our average wake-up time? What are average number of kind of sleep fragmentations or wake-ups throughout the course of the night?

How long are we awake during that period? But then also, of course, the subjectivity, because even if you are tracking or aren't tracking, what's your subjective experience? 'Cause we're not just robots, it's not just results-oriented, like, how do we feel? So are you waking up really feeling very fatigued?

Now, there is something known as sleep inertia in the morning, where you might have that kind of just, you're coming back to life, back online, if you will, 'cause you've been in this altered state for hours, and now you're coming back, you know, kind of at a different level of cognition, so you might have a little bit of a sleepy haze to you.

That's often normal, but is it really augmented or really a struggle for you to wake up, go about your day-to-day activities? Are you finding that then you're consistently sleepy throughout the course of the day? This can then get into questions of even beyond just sleep deprivation or poor sleep, then possible sleep disorders, which Mount Sinai just quantified it as, that it appears that there's over 100 sleep disorders or sleep-wake disorders.

So there are a lot of things that could be undiagnosed that you wanna be aware of, too. Could you be dealing with that level of fatigue throughout the course of your day that could point to things like respiratory-based sleep disorders, like sleep apnea, upper airway resistance syndrome, or otherwise, and those can really impact the quality of your sleep.

So are there, like, red flags present? Another big red flag that I see a lot for people in relation to your point around, like, what else might we be able to tell if we're not tracking, is are you falling asleep the minute your head hits the pillow? And I get this all the time.

People are like, "Oh, yeah, I'm sleep. "I'm good with that. "I can sleep anytime, anywhere, doesn't matter. "I am out. "I don't have any problems with that." But actually, that would be a red flag for us that something might be a problem because that can denote or be a sign of sleep deprivation or an undiagnosed sleep disorder because we do want a little bit of a sleep latency period of time, so a kind of healthy sleep latency, if you will, and it will be bio-individual, but somewhere in the 10 to 15-minute range, quite usually, is kind of a healthy amount of time to go from an awake state, down-regulate, into this totally different sleep state.

So if you're seeing that for yourself, you're falling asleep really immediately. If you're then having a lot of those sleep fragmentations, if you're waking up really tired, also, in the realm of sleep disorders, are you waking up with dry mouth? Are you waking up with headaches? Things that might point to some of the things that you were doing throughout the course of the night.

Sleep, teeth grinding, bruxism, some of these sleep disorders that can really impact some of your sleep quality. So there's a lot to navigate. - Where do sleep cycles play in here? I feel like there was a time in my life where it was like, wow, do you need periods of 90 minutes?

And I'm like, is this a thing? Is that something we should discuss in advance? - Yeah, so I get a lot of people that will come my way, and they'll be strategizing about the sleep cycles. And it is very interesting, because it's very true. We will be navigating through these sleep cycles, and a little different for each person.

So it could be around these 90-minute timeframes, is the popular amount of time that seems to be a kind of an average, but it might be plus or minus for each individual. And the aim is to get through some of these sleep cycles, a number of these sleep cycles throughout the course of the night, of course.

And yet, I find that a lot of people are fixating on some of the sleep cycles and strategies around that, and missing some of the force for the trees on some of these other things that we can absolutely do to let those, the automaticity of that kind of come together on its own.

If we have these egregious sleep disorders that we're missing, that of course is gonna impact the workability of those sleep cycles, of how you're oscillating through those throughout the course of the night. But even beyond that, one of the things that I'm often seeing just on the ground is so many things that people are behaving, the behaviors that they're engaging in, environmental elements, et cetera, that are impacting their ability to navigate some of those sleep cycles effectively.

And then I guess the last piece about the sleep cycles would be a number of people talk about wanting to have, be woken up in kind of that ideal part of their sleep cycle. And I think there's kind of merit to that. And one of the things that I find is the more we kind of bring in some of these workable elements with our sleep, we really get dialed in on some of these components, that often it kind of just falls into place on its own quite frequently, so that you don't have to have the intervention of technology.

If people aren't familiar with this, some people are looking to find pieces of tech that can wake them up at certain parts of their sleep cycle is the aim. And you can absolutely experiment with things like that. But I would also point to getting us aware of how many things that we can do while we're awake that can facilitate that those all work effectively.

- And before we go too much further, why is sleep so important? Can we talk for a moment about what's going on in the body, why we need it, why it's so valuable? - Human beings for centuries and centuries, it is the one area of life that we have not been able to hack our way out of.

I know this is a podcast around all the hacks, and yet we have not been able to figure out a way to cut out this very vulnerable part of our day when we are just asleep for a stretch of time for seven to nine hours for most people. So why do we keep doing that?

Why is that so important? Well, one, we know that this is crucial for our immune function, cardiovascular health, for our emotional regulation. We know that it's also just so important for our waistline, for our whole experience of life is going to be colored if we don't prioritize this area.

And yet many of us don't even know what it can feel like or look like to wake up consistently feeling well-rested and what that can kind of the crossover effects of what that can look like. - I'm excited to dig into all of these things. I have a couple of random questions when it comes to sleep.

One is, how different is this on individual basis? And I ask this because we've talked about seven to nine hours and I have this one friend who can sleep almost nothing all the time and then sleep for like 13 hours on the weekend. And I'm like, are there just some people wired differently that need different amounts of sleep that can catch up differently?

Or like, is my friend just burning himself out? - It's a great question. I get that one a lot. So first off, it appears that we can have these particular coping mechanisms. So your friend is a person that I see a lot where they come in, we look at their stats and they might have four hours, five hours, six hours, then 13 hours.

And the problem with that is that that can kind of save the day for a while and stretch of time, but eventually we'll see hits on a number of areas across the board. So for men, we know that testosterone levels are massively hit when we do that on a stretch of time.

And even as we had an expert, Dr. Alison Brager, who'd come on as a representative of the U.S. Army that found that there's a point of no return after doing this for multiple, multiple times because you're not able to bring about that hormone stability after this long, long stretch of doing these things.

That's like one example, right? But for the most people, what we find is that there's a reason we have sort of this U-shaped curve of the suggestion for length of time that we suggest for people to sleep because we see impacts of all-cause mortality rates really going up when you're getting much below six hours of sleep, but it also goes on the other side when you're getting too much sleep consistently.

So that's concerning as well. So they're kind of getting hit at both sides of this. So we're getting the insufficient sleep for stretches of time, and then we're just logging these really long periods. So this is problematic for both sleep duration. We know that that's not getting you the quality of sleep that we want to get.

Also from that bio-individual perspective that you asked about. Besides, so we know that most people, it's like incredibly small percentage that might have this very strange, small, you know, kind of chance that they're short sleepers, but it's almost negligible, the percentage rate. So most people need to still fall into this realm of this seven to nine hours.

However, it goes a little bit less as we age, this is why sleep is dynamic. So as we get a little bit older, we do find that people might go closer to say that six to seven hours might still be a range that kind of appears and still be within a healthy domain.

But aside from that, when people start saying, I'm fine, this is workable for me, when we bring about more stability and consistency with their sleep, I can almost guarantee that what we see both on the ground and then in studies is that there's a change in the quality of that sleep for the better, and that will ripple into other metrics.

So things like the improvements in often blood pressure, their cardiovascular health, if we're looking at heart rate, HRV, heart rate variability, and otherwise. If we're talking about women, this could impact things like their cycle workability and others. - I have so many questions and I wanna go into optimizing and all this, but how important is it that this quantity of sleep happens at one point in time?

And it's interesting 'cause we have two young kids and I'm like, oh, well, they get sleep at night and naps. And I remember some point in my life reading about this crazy concept of like extreme polyphasic sleep where you could sleep for 20 minutes, like six or eight times a day, and that would be fine.

We don't have to go that far down that rabbit hole, but do you need to sleep all at once or can you break it up throughout the day? - Oh, yeah. And so people often will reference some of these findings that in centuries past, it appeared that we might've had kind of two parts to our sleep was one popular way of looking at sleep, and this kind of brings a sigh of relief for some people that are waking up throughout the course of the night, like, oh, okay, maybe this is just one part of my sleep and now I have a little period of being awake in a second part.

And then there's also the group that you're speaking to of the multiple naps throughout the course of the day. Now, what we find and how do we think about this? Well, we can also look at modern day hunter-gatherer tribes. So we can look at tribes like the Hudson tribe has been looked at from a sleep perspective.

And we don't find that to be indicative of how they're conducting themselves as one example, but also how we like to think about maximizing and optimizing for sleep today. It now has been drilled into that longer stretch of sleep. It's very healthy. It's still okay to have some wake-ups 'cause I know some people can get really concerned and nervous about stretches of time where they will have some wake-ups.

The difference is we're trying to understand how long are those wake-ups? What is your response from a psychological perspective during that? And then of course, parents during a stretch of times when we are, whether we choose to or not, being awakened throughout the course of the night and understanding, can we make up for that?

Well, one thing that we see is that largely we like to have this very clear diurnal system. So meaning that as human beings, we're diurnal creatures, meaning to be active by day and largely at rest at night. And what we find is that as we deviate outside of that, shift workers being an example of that, they're being more active, nothing different beyond just being more active at night.

And we find that they have rates going up of things like cancer, heart disease, mental health issues, and sleep-wake disorders simply by just doing things at night. So it points to how important it is to maintain this. So when we start juggling all of these things and we're sleeping for long stretches throughout the course of our night, we know that often from a circadian perspective, which is one of the areas I'm particularly interested in, is that that seems to spill into some of your results with your sleep.

So the big takeaway here is how can we sleep as much of the portion of our evenings and if you are needing to supplement that, which sometimes can happen, of course, as parents or we're traveling or we're sick or something is coming up, then you can supplement to a certain extent with naps unless you're dealing with insomnia.

Insomnia can be a time where you might wanna abstain from naps or be a bit more thoughtful about naps because you might be struggling with that ability to really clearly turn on and off that wake drive versus sleep drive. So by heightening your sleep drive, by not engaging in too many naps by day, that can be beneficial for someone dealing with insomnia.

But for the rest of us, if you're just looking to make up for some of that sleep, those naps can make sense, but we're looking to usually keep them somewhere in the domain of around, often the power nap area, so like the 20 to 25 minutes, but usually no longer than a sleep cycle, like you pointed to, so around that 90 minutes.

- Okay, but you can rejuvenate in a nap. So if you're someone who just, for whatever reason, isn't able to get a full night's sleep, is there an optimal time of day for that nap? - Yes, totally, great question. So earlier on in the day is what we're liking to position the timing for those naps.

So for most people, that would look like somewhere around before 3 p.m. or so. Of course, if you have a different sleep-wake schedule, adjust that accordingly. But kind of in your early afternoon, so that you're not tapping into some of those adenosine reserves, that kind of sleepiness chemical, if you will, that's building up throughout the whole course of the day.

You can think of this as when you're first waking up, you have some of the least reserves of this adenosine, this kind of sleepiness component, and then it's accumulating throughout the whole rest of the day. And we want it to be just toppling over, like at the brim when you get to sleep.

But there's a couple things that can impact the adenosine load. One of them can be naps. So that could kind of dump out some of your reserves of adenosine for the day. The another one, very common one, can be things like caffeine. And so that can make you, it won't dump it out in the same way, but it will make your brain think that it's kind of not present, like trick you into thinking that the adenosine, that sleepiness component, isn't building up.

So these are ways that you can both have it all. So it's how to be refreshed, get kind of that second wind. So leverage those naps in the day if you're not dealing with insomnia. Have that, and that can also spill into things like someone like Andrew Huberman is kind of popularizing this non-sleep deep rest protocols.

So kind of this trance-like state, if you will, where you're, whether it's yoga nidra, kind of a hypnosis-like state. So you might not even be fully asleep, but still your body is getting some of the benefits of being in that restorative state. So that can be another way to kind of recoup a little bit of energy throughout the course of the day.

- And so I watched that video, the Huberman thing, and I was like, oh, 'cause I wanted to ask this question about whether there's a way to get some of the benefits of sleep while not sleeping. But if what you're doing is, you know, kind of lying down and doing breathing exercises, like I felt like, oh, might as well be sleeping.

Like maybe if you can't sleep, but are there any, you know, if you were lying down, relaxing, listening to music or reading a book or doing anything a little bit more active than just meditating, for example, or kind of breathing exercises, can you get any of that benefit or does it really need to be sleep?

- So this is a huge one I find that can be really helpful for people that are dealing with sleep anxiety. So sleep anxiety can kind of go in the domain, this is something that I dealt with when I was going through my sleep kind of breakdown years back was this fixation on sleep and then this feeling that, oh, okay, so if I'm not getting my sleep throughout the course of the night, I'm just screwed.

You know, like I'm just not getting these results, but it turns out that one thing we can kind of keep in the back of our mind is that there is still some benefit from being in kind of a restorative state, even just in a, you know, laying supine position, your heart rate's coming down, closing your eyes can also help change some of your brain activity and allows for some of this restorative processes to happen of the body.

Now, is it the same as sleep? Not quite, but it still can give you a little bit of a respite in knowing that you're doing something generous for the body. Now this can apply both in the middle of the night if you're struggling to sleep, just knowing that you're still getting some restoration by being in kind of that peaceful, relaxed state, bringing the heart rate down.

So the body can still go to work on some of that repair, and yet that applies during the course of the day as well. Now I see this really in a cool way gamified with wearables lately. Two that are doing this well, I think, is both Whoop and Oura Ring.

So they're actually showing you your daytime stress load and then almost helping to reward, if you will, stretches of time when you're getting a little bit of restoration. So it will see, it will show you clearly and kind of give you a rundown or a quota for how much of that restorative time you're getting throughout the course of the day.

And so it can kind of help to gamify this protocol, if you will, instead of just like a nice to have. Now suddenly you're offsetting high amounts of stress throughout the course of the day with a little breather kind of recovery time. - When we think about optimizing sleep, who benefits from optimizing sleep?

Is this something for everyone? Are there some people who kind of maybe you have it good already or what things should people be asking themselves before they want to decide if this is a journey they want to go down? - Absolutely. Well, first off, I would like to offer for people that I truly do believe that sleep is a skill and like all great skills, no matter if you think and you have it, that you have this handled, that you can venture into mastery and that there is always this opportunity for us to improve upon this area.

And even then, when you might think you have it handled, something happens, you get divorced, you have a death in the families and we'll find it bleed into your sleep results. So I would offer for everyone to explore taking this area of life on as the foundation by which you are really setting up your wellness journey before nutrition, exercise, mental health strategies, of course, those are all so important and they're bidirectional, but we want to, I would offer that there could be some benefits by taking on a lens of prioritizing your sleep first and that will aid in your ability to fulfill on all those other things, get yourself to the gym, make the smart decisions when you're standing in front of the cupboard or what have you.

So from that place, what are some indications of that you might be struggling with your sleep and that you might wanna really take this area on? Well, one can be, we've talked a lot about sleep duration and some of the numbers you might be logging and you might say, I'm getting all those, but I still feel tired, sluggish, not at my best throughout the course of the day.

That could be a sign for us to look at some of the sleep that you're logging, is it as rich as it could be? Are you having a lot of labels around your sleep? I certainly used to say this, a bunch of labels for myself, I would say things like, I'm a short sleeper, I'm a bad sleeper, I'm a night owl, it's in my genes, I'll sleep when I'm dead, so it goes into narratives.

So you might have certain ways by which you're relating to your sleep, like it's just fixed and that's how it's gonna be versus that we would just have a set of results right now and that there's an opportunity for more of a growth perspective to improve upon this. If you're tracking, your sleep efficiency numbers might not be as high as we would like them to be.

Now, we don't want them to be too high because then that can mean you're falling asleep right as the minute your head hits the pillow. But often in kind of this high 80s, low 90s range might be an area that we might wanna look to optimizing for, I don't want people to stress out if they're not quite there, but it just could be an area of an opportunity.

If you're relying on a lot of things to improve your sleep, so if you have a lot of supplements, this whole particular stack that you need in just in order to kind of fall asleep or stay asleep, that could be indicative of the fact that now we're kind of bringing about, we have these external things that we now require to get great sleep.

And that's not to say that we won't do all kinds of cool things with optimizing your environment and bringing you all kinds of things to improve your sleep from an environmental and setting you up powerfully. But if you feel like you yourself cannot get great sleep, that can be a sign for us.

And then also if you have the sense that you used to sleep great and then something happened, I had kids, which understandably there may a stretch of time where your sleep absolutely will be disrupted. So I don't wanna stress anyone else with that. But we see there can be these narratives that get developed and then we start to lower the bar on what's possible for us, where we might be able to actually make a big difference with some of these results.

So that can be important, but also just getting curious about different stages of life. Your sleep is gonna look very different from teenage years to 20s, to 30s, 40s, 50s beyond. And we want to keep checking in and testing, seeing are there hormonal changes at play? Is there environment?

Did you move into a new house and now you're not getting the same level of sleep? Is there something going on in that space? Et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of signs and those are some. - I know you have a whole list of 10 on the website.

We'll link to that in the show notes. I want to talk about these environmental things. So we're gonna talk, I think for the rest of this conversation, let's talk a little bit about the environment, the different things that could be affecting sleep and we could talk about how to change them and kind of things you need to focus on.

We'll talk a little bit about technology. And I know you have some data for my sleep that might be fun to also kind of run through. - Yes, absolutely. - So what are kind of the factors? Let's start with the environment and routine stuff. - Okay. So first I would like for people to think about the fact that our circadian rhythm becomes paramount in this.

What is your circadian rhythm? It's around this 24 hour rhythm that as human beings, we're all operating within. I mentioned that we're diurnal creatures. So of those 24 hours, half of the day, we want to be ideally prioritizing getting, being out in the light movement activity. You're doing things when the light is out, but then when the sun sets and when darkness comes, we want to be prioritizing sort of a day mode versus night mode.

And when that night mode comes about, we want to really shift our environment accordingly. Why? Because there's something known as zeitgeibers or time givers. And these are just, you know, kind of sayings of what are some of the things that massively impact our circadian health. And the most important, if you get nothing else out of what I'm saying, I know we're talking about a lot of things, but if you get nothing else out of what I'm saying, it's minding your light dark cycles is our most paramount to strengthening our circadian rhythm.

You know, I go to these like sleep conferences and believe it or not, they're sleep conferences. And some of the biggest takeaways can be boiling down to having ultra bright days and dark nights. And that can sound so simplistic, but most of us are not doing this to the point that there was just this year, a call from a scientific consensus of focusing and pulling from almost 250 circadian scientists referencing almost 2,700 peer reviewed scientific papers pointing to the need to add warning labels on light bulbs when used at night.

So why? Because they found that the use of simply just boring old light bulbs that we're using on a routine basis are increasing rates of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, mental health issues, as well as of course our sleep awake challenges that we might be seeing. So something so simple as swapping out our light bulbs to go from our traditional LEDs, which now 'cause incandescence became illegal this year, so which were more closely aligned with the rhythms of nature.

Those are now illegal, you can't purchase those. So now you're left with fluorescents and LEDs. So of those, they tend to be very blue rich and blue is gonna disrupt your melatonin production to levels that most people don't realize the impact. So at the bare minimum, you're changing your light bulbs in your environment to mimic the rhythms of nature.

So one thing that we used to be around was fire and fire was kind of that first biohack and that was very red rich. So we want our light bulbs to be more of that red amber color or candle lights, Himalayan salt lamps, any of this very dim lighting.

So you wanna first start there, but it doesn't end there. You have to in the mornings to help inoculate yourself from any of those negative impacts of even any of this foe light. You really need to get that bright light exposure by day and much more than you're gonna be getting indoors.

Why? 'Cause the average indoor environment is usually somewhere below about a thousand lux. Whereas if you go outside in summer day, it can be up to a hundred thousand lux. So that is a huge difference and we do not understand what that's doing to our health and wellbeing, particularly our sleep.

So beginning there, then the second piece would be going into things like temperature timing, meal timing, exercise timing, thought timing and drug timing. So all of this timing phenomenon of where you're putting things in your day will impact your circadian strength and by effect your sleep-wake kind of signaling.

- Okay, so let's run through these. So for light, the takeaway is get rid of the blue lights in your kind of room and maybe replace them with brighter, warmer lights. - Yeah, and just make sure that it's not just says, 'cause some of them will say like, oh, warm tone LEDs.

But traditionally what we often see is that those are still insufficient. They're still have blue in many of them. So just making sure they should really look pretty amber hued or red. And now more of them will actually point to that they've been tested so that they'll still be sleep friendly.

So those are some things that I would make sure you're having. - And then I assume if once you're up, open all the windows. If you're not getting outside right away, at least open up the windows, but even better, go outside. - Even better, go outside. Because there are studies that show that it can take anywhere from 50 to a hundred times longer to reset your master clock when getting light from behind windows.

Like if we're watching the video, I've got all these windows behind me. This is, even though I've got so much light coming in here, it's still insufficient to reset my master clock in the morning if I was just to rest on my laurels and only get light from behind here.

So you really need to go outside. Why? Because the light is gonna hit your eyes. You don't want sunglasses on during this period in the morning, hats, any of those things that could obstruct that sunlight. You want it to go directly into your eyes, which is connected to that super chiasmatic nucleus.

And that super chiasmatic nucleus is kind of that master clock that then's communicating to all of these peripheral clocks in virtually every cell and organ in our body. So trillions of clocks that are looking to help stay on time and facilitate the workability of your sleep-wake cycle among many other things.

But if you don't get that signaling process, particularly in the first half of your day, so our ideal would be, 'cause I know some people are like, well, I don't have a lot of time, where do I put it? At least beginning with that first early morning piece. So when you first get up, our philosophy is kind of like get up and out.

So you wanna get up and out of bed, but outside, so the dog walkers and all the things are really winning the day here, the people that have reasons to bring their animals or pets outside or what have you. But even, so whatever's going on in your life, if you can set yourself up to get out there, that will make such a huge difference for then resetting this master clock.

And then it creates almost this invisible countdown to when you're gonna get sleepy in the evening, 16 hours or so later into the night of when you'll be developing more melatonin in the evening. So they're connected. - So this morning, I just looked, San Francisco, sunrise, 6.49. I was up before 6.49.

If I get up at six, is there a benefit to going outside when it's not bright yet? Or should I really be waiting until the sun is out and it's a bright day to go outside? - Yeah, so it's a very good question. Because for a lot of people, then there's a reality of life.

They've got circumstances, they've got kids, they've got jobs, they've got whatever. So what do you do when you're waking up before the sun is rising? Well, there's kind of a couple camps that have been emerging on this. So one from sort of a scientific circadian perspective, a lot of the recommendation will be, all right, well, if that's the case, then you can use faux interventions.

So you can use like sad lamps and things that, so seasonal affective disorder lamps, really bright lights, bright blue lights. So the time when we would be potentially cultivating more blue light would be in the morning. And so that would be the suggestion from that camp, is getting as much of that blue light in your eyes as possible in the morning.

Now, kind of more, if you'll say like ancestral health proponents will instead point to in the morning versus getting all that bright light and kind of the activity that that would be, if you can still align with the rhythms of nature and use a red light during that time, that would be the suggestion of this emerging kind of camp, is to then wait till you are getting outside to get that natural light and truly syncing up with those rhythms of nature.

Now, my suggestion on that is, if you are able to align with these rhythms, that's always preferable. We did that for thousands of years. Edison only came up with the light bulb about 144 years ago. So we have this kind of recency bias where we think that this is just always how it's been, but in the span of human history, this is a very new phenomenon that we can even do these sort of things.

So if you are leaning towards and have the ability to create your schedule in such a way, that could be great. So you could perfectly kind of align with those rhythms. But if you cannot, which I have plenty of clients who can't, then you could lean into technology to kind of help wake you up at the times that you are needing to get up.

- With the right lights in the room and that kind of stuff. - Exactly. There's even like glasses that are being created that will have blue lights that will shoot right into yours. So you could be, you know, making breakfast, doing whatever you need, and then you can be kind of, you know, Star Trek-esque.

- Okay, so that's lighting. What about what's in the room? You know, your mattress, your pillows, all that kind of stuff. - Okay, so one of my biggest suggestions, 'cause after light/dark is temperature being really important for your circadian health. So for temperature, what a lot of people are missing the mark on is that they might know, yeah, we want to sleep in kind of cool environment, but they might not know to what degree and some of the things that are available.

So one, some of the suggestion out of the Sleep Foundation is in the realm of around 60 to 67 degrees Fahrenheit for ambient sleep temperature, which many people I speak with are not in that range. So even just beginning there, and of course, we don't want this to be massively uncomfortable for you.

So play with this accordingly. But I think people are often surprised, especially when they start tracking to see when they lower the ambient temperature that they often get better sleep results, less sleep fragmentation, less wake-ups. 'Cause even if it's kind of a little chilly when you go in, then throughout the course of the night, you can benefit from that, especially when we're moving into REM and we start heating up the body.

And that's when often people might wake up 'cause now they're hot and when they didn't go to bed hot. But the other thing that I would definitely suggest if available to people, now this is a bit of an investment, but if it's on the table is a cooling mattress topper.

So like Chili, Sleep Me, Eight Sleep, Sleep Number, different companies that offer the ability to cool the mattress itself. Why? Because historically we would have slept outside on the ground as part of our thinking or closer to the ground, which would have been part of the coolest part of our environment.

So even though it can sound newfangled and fancy, we're kind of mimicking how we assume we likely had slept for thousands of years previously. So getting that cooling effect versus the kind of the cooking that can happen when we're in full mattresses covered with these heavy duvets and then have our own body temperature just in there for seven to nine hours throughout the whole course of the night.

And many of us are then waking up from that heat effect and that can be problematic. Forgetting the technology, if you just assume you've got a mattress, no topper, and you could choose between, but if the room's too cold, you often need a lot of sheets and duvets, or you could leave the room a little warmer, but a top sheet is one of those paths better.

If you assume you need a temperature that you can comfortably sleep in. Okay, so one, there's gonna be a bio-individual component to this 'cause each person's gonna run cooler or hotter, so it will depend on you. But I would begin with the most gentle process out of it. So if you're usually sleeping at 72 degrees, then I would have you begin at say 67 and see how are we faring with that.

'Cause we're not trying to freeze you out of your sleep results 'cause that can be negatively impactful as well. So we would begin at kind of the least, most impactful dose. So you would start at around that 67, see how that affects you. Now this is going to change depending on each individual.

So especially women of menstruating age, you might find different parts of your cycle, you're gonna be massively different on a temperature scale than you would be just two weeks prior if you're in luteal versus the beginning of your cycle. So these things are not, I know we'd like to be able to say, oh yeah, well you just put it at 63 and that's how it goes.

But it's not quite as, it doesn't quite work like that. So instead, we wanna keep beginning at what can be comfortable for you and keep working your way back. This is where trackers can really be helpful in the process too, to see how do you respond when you start like that.

- And when it comes to the environment in the bed, do you want, is more or less sheets better? - So I would say that what we're trying to do is a banana shape throughout the course of the night. So basically, you're starting in when you're comfortably warm, right?

And then we're helping to facilitate that we're cooling throughout the course of the night and facilitate that our body can be cool at some of those lower levels. And then when you get into REM, you would be warming up into the early morning hours. So you might find that if you do have a wake up, that you might kind of take off one of those sheets throughout the course when you're going into REM.

That's perfectly natural and normal. But it's not a static piece where you're just staying at the same temperature throughout the whole course of the night. So it might adjust for you. And what you ate, what time did you eat? Do you have alcohol? Do you have all these other things that might've impacted your body temperature?

But traditionally, we usually want breathable materials in your bed. So you want breathable sheets, breathable duvets. You want mattresses that are not gonna trap heat 'cause a lot of them are trapping that heat. So you want the ability for this to not get stuck and kind of insulating you.

- Obviously, you mentioned the technology. I'm a huge fan, right? I had an eight sleep. I don't, I didn't have one. I still have one. I have an eight sleep. It's been fantastic. They've been a partner of the show. So I haven't tried every product. I imagine there are many products you can use.

I just happened to have an experience there that was good enough to reach out to them and work with them. And it's very helpful when you're trying to do exactly what you described. I would prefer to fall asleep a little warmer, but I'm okay sleeping a little cooler. And for me to fall asleep, cool.

So this has been a good balance for me to have kind of a thin sheet on top, stay warm, falling asleep. So I've been a big fan. Everybody listening knows that allthehacks.com/8sleep and you can get a discount on the eight sleep cover. So totally vouch on the technology. What about pillows?

How does the, or sleep position, you know, sleeping on your side, your stomach, all those kinds of things. How does that affect sleep? Yeah, big deal. Particularly for the prevalence of mouth breathing, we're seeing a lot of that throughout the course of the night. And what position can kind of facilitate more of that is often sleeping on your back.

And so we're just trying to make sure that we're not mouth breathing. That's one of our biggest concerns with sleep. And so that can often spill over into rates of sleep apnea, upper airway resistance syndrome, which is much more prevalent than most people realize. So our understanding, we just had an expert on the podcast at ENT that pointed to our estimations are globally about one in four people having sleep apnea.

And of that only about 10% of these insurances of sleep apnea being actually diagnosed. So we're dealing with just a lot of people running around undiagnosed for some of these respiratory-based disorders. So sleeping on your back can often be a big flare up for that. So our opt-in recommendation for sleep is a side sleeping element 'cause we do see that when we're sleeping on our stomach, then that can sometimes mess with some of both our breathing and then of course, comfort and some of the other issues that might come up from spine positional piece.

But if you're not dealing with, if you're just like amazing of a breather and we're not dealing with that, then you could benefit from some of the elements of sleeping on your back. If so, there's of course different types of pillows that you might bring in for each one of those side sleeping versus back sleeping.

- What about mouth tape? I'm not comfortable sleeping on my back. If the goal is sleep on my back to prevent mouth breathing, could I just sleep on my stomach or my side and tape my mouth? - Great question. No, it's so funny 'cause there's a bit of a, I guess you could say debate or this topic of sleep, this topic of mouth breathing in the sleep community has really flared up.

And there's a lot of concern that so many people now are starting to mouth tape. And I can be such a fan of mouth taping, but I think here are the caveats. And this is why a lot of the sleep community is upset about it. Is that many people are just mouth taping and not taking the steps to get tested to make sure there's no respiratory based disturbances at play.

Because if you are, you truly are just band-aiding the problem to the point that it can actually make it worse in some cases. If you do have sleep apnea, upper air resistance syndrome, some of the snoring, but that's not to say that one, if we clear that out, make sure that's not present and you're good to go, then that you couldn't benefit from mouth taping.

And it's also not to say that then if we discover you did an at-home sleep test, easy breezy, you find out you have one of these disorders, which are really prevalent, then can we use mouth tape to help with the treatment process that you're also being treated for this and using mouth tape.

You can absolutely do that as well. But I think there's just a concern 'cause some people are now just blindly taking these steps without knowing that they might be doing some harm. - We can all buy these trackers and we're gonna get to technology in a little bit, but at what point does it make sense, or maybe high level, how much would it even cost to do some kind of more rigorous study on sleep, either at your home or in a lab?

- So exciting that we're at a time where now you can be tested at home and for some pretty reasonable price points, even out of pocket. So in the United States, there's a number of companies that you can be sent very quickly an at-home sleep test, often around $200 or so out of pocket to be tested for some of these breathing-based sleep disorders, so these respiratory sleep disorders.

Now, if you think that you might have something more egregious, we wanna be checked as far as sleep stages are concerned, 'cause again, to truly understand sleep stages, you really do wanna look at the brain and the brain activity. And then if you're concerned about things like restless leg or other things, narcolepsy, et cetera, there might be a time and a place to go in lab.

But now, if you're looking at that respiratory piece, you can just get tested by companies like Lofta, Empower Sleep, other companies are available, no affiliation, but these can send you a medical device that you can test at night in the comfort of your own home, which is a big deal, 'cause many people feel like they can't sleep well in some of these facilities, and so this can be a nice option in between.

- And are these more for testing kind of sleep-related disorders, or could they be a more accurate version of using sleep trackers? Or if you're someone who's like, I sleep pretty well, but I'm certainly open to getting from a 90 to a 100, is the sleep study at home, is that gonna help in that department, or is it more diagnosing things?

- Great question. So there are some pieces of tech, like the Wesper is one that you can use literally as like a little patch, and that will give you some information, kind of an in-between. It's not quite a consumer-grade tracker, it's not quite a at-home sleep test, but it's giving you more in-depth information, so that can glean some more information from something like that.

But the at-home sleep tests that are gonna give you a kind of medical stamp of approval of saying, okay, yes, it does appear that you do have sleep apnea, for example. If that's the case, then you're only gonna test for most of them one or two nights, most of the time, a couple nights max.

And out of that, if we do come back with some disorders present, that is gonna totally ripple into your results with your sleep trackers to go from whatever, the 80s to the high 90s, or whatever, in certain periods of time. And it won't be the whole story, but it will certainly help support the improvement of those stats.

And to clarify, you won't always just be getting 90s or something, I don't wanna misspeak for people that might think the minute you get diagnosed with sleep apnea or something, settle and treat it, then you're gonna skyrocket, but it's gonna be a big piece of the puzzle. - Let's go on to food, and let's also include drinking, probably has a huge impact on sleep.

- Absolutely. It's one of the more fascinating areas I find, and one of the more challenging areas for a lot of people to make this lasting change. What would this change look like? Well, one, you can understand something known as circadian rhythm intermittent fasting. And this is just a fancy series of words that basically means that we're looking to eat largely when the sun is out, and largely provide a bit of that digestive break in the evening when it's dark out.

Now, this is not to lose your mind over, because of course, there are certain periods of time when you will be eating when it's dark out. So we're just looking to kind of cluster a lot of your eating time closer to these rhythms of nature. And this is what we would have done for so many years.

So how can we bring this into our modern society? Right now, a lot of the research on this is coming out of the Salk Institute, Dr. Sachin Panda. We did a fascinating podcast episode with him, and highly suggest checking that out if you wanna learn more. But what I would say about the takeaways with that is that his finding after decades of research, lots of great books, et cetera, is that bare minimum, the last bite of food you have, you're having that about three hours before bed.

Now, I'll also say that we also find even just on the ground from a lot of wearable data, some benefits for people even going a bit further than that. So this is more in the anecdotal clinical setting. But if we look at things like four to five hours before bed experimentation with that, your last bite of food, often we see things like heart rate go down, HRV go up, changes in body temperature, blood oxygen, of course, your instances of sleep apnea.

'Cause we know that if you are having any respiratory based issues or mouth breathing, et cetera, that some of these things can flare up if you're eating too close to bed. So that would be the big takeaway is just minding those evenings and giving yourself some break. Because unfortunately, many people that we look at are now eating most of their day from when they first wake up to when they're going to bed, not too much before that.

So this is problematic. - Any particular foods to avoid either at different times of the day or all together? - Yeah, so there's a reason that we so often have people wearing continuous glucose monitors, because one of the more common reasons that people are having wake ups in the middle of the night, if it's not a sleep disorder or for outside of anxiety and depression and other things, it can get more layered.

But a very common reason is blood sugar instability. So we're looking to find, to bring in foods that are gonna help support kind of a healthy, where they fall in the glycemic index. Can we have something that's not gonna massively spike us throughout the course of the day and then have a subsequent crash?

Because how we're managing our days often gets mirrored in our nights in many regards, but that is not excluded with blood sugar. So that would be one of the areas that you can both measurably see to the point that many companies are now even integrating with companies like Oura or Whoop.

But we can say things like Vari is a company that integrates with Oura now so that you can overlay your sleep data and then see, oh, look, I crashed at 3 a.m. and I also had a wake up. So you can start to correlate some of those things that are very much connected.

So that would be one place to begin. And of course, inflammatory foods that you're having, so that can impact the airway and kind of the size of the airway. We're looking to avoid things like coarse sugars. So we'll see people just go on some of these kind of sugar cleanses or Whole30 or all these different things that people do.

And it will visually even look different in their sleep results in those sections of time when they do change their diet type, even aside from diet timing. But if you look at management of both, the timing and the type of food, then you can often get a real change in your sleep.

And to the point that I have seen reliably, people even having things like changes in up to around 10 beats per minute in the heart rate, just in a relatively quick period of time just by moving the timing. So their heart rate going down markedly just by moving that timing of that type of food.

And then of course, if they change the type of food as well, that can also be augmented. - Are there any foods that you would encourage people to add to their day or their evenings or anything to encourage sleep? - Yeah, so now this can get into lots of different topics on kind of food wars of protein versus, what are our macros or what have you.

But I will say that a couple things to think of. One, checking in on your choline, the amount of choline you're having and how that can play a role in things like your REM. So quality of REM, the duration of REM. - What's choline? - Choline can be both supplemental, but also in things like eggs and certain meats and certain things that you can be aware of.

We wanna be getting choline. And if you're not getting that in your diet, if that doesn't apply to you, then we might wanna supplement for some of those things. Now, of course, this is just one piece of the puzzle. So I don't want people to feel like they need to immediately go out and supplement, but being aware that some of these nutritional items are so important for our sleep quality.

So the most basic is that if we're looking, we wanna avoid things that are gonna spike us highly. So going, if you even Google the glycemic index and go on the things that are gonna be the most spike heavy, we wanna be kind of mindful of those because those are gonna show up in those sleep results.

And they also, if we're eating too close to bedtime, then that temperature spike can often go up and that can be counterproductive to helping us guide off to sleep. 'Cause you wanna remember that we're looking to set up our evening so that we're dropping our body temperature quite markedly in order to facilitate melatonin production and sleep onset.

But if you're eating late and the types of foods that are gonna be kind of upping your body temperature, that like those high glycemic load and what have you, then it can make your body temperature too high and that can be troublesome to fall asleep. - What about drinks?

I know caffeine and alcohol kind of have a huge impact on sleep, what's the concise advice there? - Okay, so this goes under the umbrella of chronopharmacology, the timing of your drugs. So where are you gonna put your drugs? Caffeine, we would like to keep on the first half of your day knowing that there's bioindividuality.

Some people are slow or fast metabolizers. So if it takes you a long time to metabolize that, then you might wanna be aware and move it a bit earlier in your day. So what could that look like? So for some people, I find them, we try to put it before around 12 p.m.

This is generalized depending on your sleep-wake schedule, but for most people, if you struggle to metabolize that. For some people, they might be faster metabolizers and they can get away with a little bit later, something like 2 p.m. or so, 'cause you have a bit more wiggle room. But you wanna kind of check in also subjectively.

This is where the subject, you can both test with DNA, testing to see how fast or slow a metabolizer you are, but then the subjective assessment of, are you more sensitive to and struggle to fall asleep when you have that higher amount of caffeine? So that would be on the caffeine piece.

For the alcohol piece, oh my goodness, this is the one where for most people with wearable data, that's one of the biggest takeaways they get is just how much they're impacted by even one drink or two drinks or what have you. And even if you're not tracking, then you can likely have a sense that you're waking up differently after a night of a drink or two, if you have stretches, long enough stretches of time without those.

So the sad truth is that I very rarely see people be able to have alcohol and it not show up in your sleep results. What that looks like is it typically improves sleep onset, but then, so it truly does often help people fall asleep in many studies, but then it falls all apart.

So then often we have a whole slew of sleep fragmentation. You're hotter throughout that course of the night, so it can impact the type of sleep that you're getting. So it can just be a whole mess. And similar to THC being another one that also seems to do something akin, so similar with often helping with falling asleep, but then the quality gets a little funky, but a little different on your readouts.

But certainly with alcohol, the earlier the better. So if you can do things like happy hour, if you can do boozy brunches, any of these, that's truly one of the best ways to make it so that it's not hitting at your sleep so much. But the truth is it is one of the lowest hanging fruits that you can have to take out of your rotation to improve your sleep.

- Okay, so we talked about food. Where does exercise fit into sleep? - Yeah, so exercise, if we think of our nature of exercise, one, any exercise for most people, 'cause we know most people are not exercising and moving their body enough. There's a lot of, some of the stats look at some of the average rates of even just steps per day, looking at somewhere in the realm around 3,000 steps per day.

This is a quote out of Dr. Sachin Panda. So if we're somewhere in that realm of 3,000 steps or so, or just really sedentary lifestyle, we for sure wanna be prioritizing exercise in general, 'cause we know that this makes such a difference for our sleep results. If you wanna improve that sleep quality, exercise is a place to look.

If you're someone that is into stats and you wanna improve things like your HRV, heart rate variability, exercise is definitely a place to look. But so first beginning there, so I don't wanna dissuade people from exercising, but the time can be helpful as well. So some of the circadian kind of approach can be, can you get a little bit of movement in the morning, ideally outside in the sunlight, so a morning walk or what have you.

But then if you do have this available to yourself, you're stronger, so you're more physically intensive types of workouts later into the day when your body has had the opportunity to warm up a bit and have less of a risk of injury, you're kind of more able to be more cognitively intact to take on this task of exercising at that time is a theory around circadian entrainment.

But please, if that does not work in your schedule, I don't want this to be a thing where well then I just don't work out because that is so not gonna serve us. - What about things like a little bit of yoga before bedtime, is that, you know, does that fall in the same bucket as exercise?

- Yes, so really good. The type of exercise is a big deal and the environment of that exercise that you're having that in. So if you're going and you're doing your yoga, but it's in a blue lit gym and it's gonna require that you're getting all amped up and this is like right before bed, this can be obviously kind of problematic because it's counter cues.

We're looking to as much as possible guide the body on what we want it to be doing when. So I would put yoga, stretching, some of these things as light movement of the body that can have a bit more latitude of where you put it if you have it in a relaxing environment.

So that can give you some space of like where you wanna put this in your day. But things like HIIT, you know, CrossFit, you know, strength training, some of these things, then you might wanna be a bit more strategic on where you're putting this. Also, if you're dealing with times in your life where you've got really, you're struggling with cortisol load and you might test for this.

So your cortisol pulse might be really high in the morning. You do something like a Dutch test or what have you. That might be a time when you don't wanna then have a high cortisol, then fast, then have, you know, coffee and then work out in the first thing in the morning.

That just might be too much. So this might be dynamic for you, depending on what's going on in your life. - So for a lot of people, maybe with a partner that, you know, one of their routines was watch a show before bed. If we're, obviously you could put on some blue, like glasses or something, or maybe watch on a laptop with a red profile, but are there some activities that you could maybe do with a partner before bed, you know, potentially, skip over yoga, 'cause we'll come to that after, that you could do before bed that might be more promotive of good sleep?

- Yes, absolutely. So one, we have a lot of different things that we can do to down regulate. Our whole goal in the evening is what are we doing in the hours leading up to help facilitate the brain coming out of this hyperactivity state to just calming itself down, walking down those stairs of kind of hyperactivity of the brain.

So how can we do that? So one, we can change the environment. So whether that's music, whether that's the type of conversations we're engaging in, like massage, you know, kind of reflecting on our day and a gratitude exchanges, different things with our partner, the stretching piece, different things that can help facilitate, okay, we're gearing up for sleep.

Some people will bring in things like Theragun and you can, you know, do this with your partner, but how can you make this a family affair? And the answer is yes, the more we can kind of all be engaging in this, the better. - And what about like playing cards?

Where does that fall in the spectrum of like ramping down versus up? - That is a great question. I have never gotten that before. So as far as cards, so one, I mean, I work with a lot of poker players, so their type of card playing often is linked with heavy stress 'cause they might have millions on the line or what have you.

So for them, it's a certain type of, you know, game, but if you're just playing maybe Uno or something, it's a whole maybe lower risk. So for that sort of engagement, what we think of even just from an ancestral perspective is the evenings were often meant for bonding, for connection, 'cause we know that loneliness and sleep are interconnected.

So anything that you can do to kind of bond with your partner, your tribe, your people, that seems to make sense that it can help support over time our results with our sleep. So you just wanna check in periodically, like, are you super competitive and you're getting really stressed out at the end of this, you know, card game, you know, does this, could this be moved a little bit earlier?

Do we need a bit more buffer time? So would we do this a bit earlier in our evening? And then maybe we add in some time to kind of wind down more with, you know, reading or something more low key. But if it's something that's just a really joyous, you know, activity for you and doesn't bring about stress, then that could be a great activity to bring in.

- So does that mean if it's non-stressful but highly functioning in your brain, it could be okay, like a crossword puzzle? - Yeah, so the big thing is, is that particularly right up before sleep, we're just looking to not be too cognitively engaged. So your evenings are this whole wealth of time where you can, you know, set yourself up for more off time.

So we're not working and we're moving over into connection or relaxation. But then I would say there is a bit of this buffer time before bed where you might not wanna just have the crossword puzzle in your bed. We do often say that you're looking to, if you're selecting your reading material or what have you, that things that could just get you a little too worked up might take away from our goals.

And so what that could look like is also, you know, things that excite you. So that even you stress, like EU stress, excitement things, those can still be activating. So we just wanna keep taking that inventory 'cause maybe for some people, the crossword puzzle is sort of just this relaxing, low key down regulatory activity.

For other people, they're stressed out about it. - Okay. So right, I wanna talk about technology and I have a couple of quick hits before then. So one is around kind of falling back asleep. Are there any tips you have for people, both in the first stage of trying to fall asleep and the wake up stage?

And what I'm gleaning from our conversation is, if you start optimizing all of these other things, you might not still have that problem. - Yes. - But for the purposes of getting through this, every now and then, I would say I typically sleep well and we'll talk about my data, but sometimes I'll wake up, stuff's on my mind and I'm just like, oh, I just need to go back to sleep.

Are there any kind of, whether it's breathing or thought exercises that can help people who are struggling to fall asleep on a short-term basis that maybe don't need a study to figure out insomnia or some other condition? - Sure. Okay, so you're waking up and hopefully you're kind of learning some of these things that we've been speaking about.

So over time, hopefully you have less and less of these, but in the meantime, you're having some wake ups. What do you do? So you're waking up, a couple of things that we would practice is one, acceptance. I know this can sound so light, but acceptance of the fact that you're up, because so many of us will fight and resist that we are awake at 3.20 a.m.

and we don't wanna be. And the more we start resisting this, why is this happening? Is there something wrong with me? Some sort of line of thought, this can wake you up more than we're looking to facilitate. So it sounds like a soft skill, but it becomes a real skill is to how to practice acceptance in the face of a reality that you might not like.

So one, practicing that. Two, if you are playing into it, you should know about something called CBTI, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, 'cause if you are struggling with staying asleep, you might benefit from some of those practices. Check that out, we got lots of podcasts on that. But some of the rules of thumb there can be that if you are awake for a stretch of time, going outside the bedroom and doing something light and relaxing in dim lighting.

I will say that that is one area that I sometimes have some of my clients not abide by. You can do that if that fits for you, if that's helping you and you do that until you're a little sleepy, great. But it's also important to know that there is the option of kind of laying in a relaxed position.

You can do things like breath work. If you want to bring in like meditations and other things, you can do that. And if you have kind of dim lighting, so red lights or what have you, you can bring in things like reading, writing. So writing out any of those stressors is a big suggestion.

So what that would look like is taking a piece of paper, have it always by your bed, little, I actually have pens that glow red. So you can use that pen or a way to have dim lighting and have two columns. And on the right hand side, you're putting in all of your problematic issues.

So anything that's coming up, you just kind of outline all of those things. And then on the other side, what you're doing is you're putting all of those solutions to those concerns. And then even if there is no solution and you have to practice acceptance, you are doing that in that time.

And so these different tools are ways to combat what is a really interesting piece is we just saw this recent study called the Mind After Midnight that showed that our thought patterns actually have a different way of behaving in the wee hours of the morning. So we see rates of suicidality, anxiety, depression, all these other things go up in these wee hours.

So it can also be helpful for you to know that that is the case for most of us. So you can be aware that you might not wanna believe some of the thoughts that are coming up in the same way that you might do throughout the rest of your day.

- Yeah, my tactic has previously been to throw on a meditation, an audio kind of like guided sleep meditation. Peloton has a ton of them. I don't know if you're familiar. Someone recently told me about the cognitive shuffle. - Oh no, what's that? - Okay, so I'll encourage everyone to try this.

You too. - Okay. - If you fall asleep and you wake up in the middle of the night and you're trying to go to sleep. So the way if I remember right that it worked is you pick a letter at random and you visualize a word that starts with that letter and then you take each letter in that word.

So let's say you say B and you say, you know, broomstick. Man, that's too long. Let's say blood. And then you go B and then you just visualize B words until you're out and then you visualize L words and two O's doesn't really help. But anyways, the idea is that you're just visualizing words and thinking about them.

So if the word was, you know, bat, you'd visualize a baseball bat and like kind of turn it around in your head and think about it. And then you'd move on to the next one and it's a bag and you visualize a bag and you imagine, you know, kind of like looking at it from all perspectives and thinking about it and, you know, imagining the word.

And the idea is it kind of puts your mind in this similar to a dream state and you just fall back asleep. I've tried it once or twice and it's worked. They swear by it. I haven't sworn to it, but that's one that I have heard that, you know, obviously not as good as just getting good sleep and not waking up.

But I will try to find a link and put it in the show notes. That's one that I've been playing with. The last in the kind of camp that I want to ask about is sleeping with a partner. I feel like I haven't found great data on this, but like, how does that affect your sleep?

What should you do if you do have a partner and one of you is sleeping well, maybe both of you aren't, what are best tips for people that share a bed? - So glad you asked that. This is our number one most popular episode. And I would definitely suggest that people listen to this with Dr.

Wendy Truxell. And this is her whole area of focus. And she has a book called "Sharing the Covers." And it's looking at sharing the bed with your significant other, kids, pets, et cetera, because we do see that that can be really disruptive, even if we think it's helpful. So meaning that a lot of people will look at them, their sleep results, and their sleep is clearly impacted when they have this other partner or whoever in bed.

And then we have them sleep by themselves and it's better, but then you ask them and they say, "Oh, I always sleep better with my partner." So point being, I'm not saying that everyone needs to separate from their sleep environment. Although what she's pointing to is called a, she's coining instead of a sleep divorce, a sleep alliance, nicer way to put it, so that you are during certain times when maybe you have different shifts that you're working or different schedules, or you're navigating treatment of things like sleep apnea, snoring, et cetera, or kids, dogs, maybe it's a temporary period of time that it can make sense.

It's not like a failure to be in different rooms if that's available to you. But the big takeaway is yes, your environment can really, really impact some of your sleep results, including the pets. And actually there are high on the rank of things that can disrupt us over the long term, even more so than kids often, because they're usually around for longer in the bed than kids for just a few years, but pets for a long time.

So you want to take inventory and kind of audit what is going on with anyone else that's in your bedroom and really have some real conversations and look at this in a way that is pulling for a great sleep. So if it's consistently not working, and some of these things are tricky to solve, restless leg syndrome, certainly we mentioned the snoring and other things that could keep people up.

So there's no shame if we do have to separate during those periods, but we want to be treating these problems if available to us very quickly with a lot, because it's not just a social disorder if we are having the snoring and sleep apnea, upper air resistance syndrome. Otherwise it's impacting both the person that that's happening to and the partner.

- And I know for people who aren't having issues, I know even just like the mattress toppers, I know they ate sleep, like we could choose temperatures differently. And so we started to make little changes, but we've got an episode. I'll link to the episode in the show notes for people who want to go deeper.

And when it comes to these trackers, we've talked a lot about Aura, 'cause that's the one I'm using and one you use with a lot of clients. What do you think of the spectrum of trackers? And if someone's using a whoop or are there preferred ones, ones that are like just not good, don't buy the marketing?

Or how do you think about that? - Yeah, so it's exciting. I think it's a really exciting time that a lot of these can be so helpful to at least just get you some data outside of logging pen and paper, because so much can start to get illuminated. And things like Garmin, Whoop, BioStrap, Aura, Apple, some can be brain-based like Muse headbands, Dream used to be one.

You can still kind of access that. But so now you have access to different ways for tracking your sleep, in addition to things like Fitbit and some of the OG ones. So a lot of these are gonna be helpful bare minimum. And for sleep in particular, there is a reason that for us still to this day for years and years, we've required that people have had the Aura ring to participate in our programs, just simply because as far as a sleep specified tracker, it does really shine in that area.

Now, of course, any consumer grade tracker has certain things that have those limitations. We touched on the sleep stage classifications, which definitely have their shortcomings. But there are things that we have a bit more weight in as far as its accuracy, like it's, are you awake or are you asleep?

That tends to fall more and say like the 90% percentage rate of accuracy as far as, okay, we could probably guess that it's pretty accurate for the most part. There might be some flaws here and there, but that's one of the reason we go with Aura, but we also, especially in recent years, have been starting to uptick our amount of working with people with the loop band.

So they're doing a lot of really cool things for sleep, even some cool stuff with like AI sleep coaching in there, which is really, really cool. So they're pulling your data and then they can say, oh, well, Chris, okay, well, let's look at your HRV and you had these trends for the last couple of months and here are some things you could do to improve these numbers, et cetera, et cetera.

So it's pulling with your actual data and then bringing from some of the latest in sleep science to provide practical application. So I think that's what we're gonna start seeing more of. And then in recent years, and this year in particular, we're seeing these daytime stress monitors link up more readily.

So like HRV tracking and how stressed are you by day, 'cause that can play a role in some of our sleep results by night. - Wow, okay. So it sounds like with everything that's going on, both with technology and AI and data, we're gonna get a lot of cool stuff in the future.

- Yes. - I am really excited. Maybe we'll have an update. We'll have a chat in a year or two and see where the whole world has evolved, or maybe even sooner. But in the meantime, we've gone over so much stuff. I wanna make sure people know where they can stay on top of everything.

You're publishing, reading, sharing with the world. - Absolutely. So at sleepisaskill.com, you can do a lot of things. So there you can take a sleep assessment to get some real-time kind of feedback on some things that you can do right away to improve your sleep. You can also go to free downloadable PDF on ways that you can optimize your bedroom.

We talked about some of these, and there's 18 high-tech, low-tech things you can do on there. And you can also sign up for our newsletter. We love kind of newsletter interactions called Sleep Obsessions. Goes out every Monday for over five years. So lots of readership there of people sharing what's happening for their sleep.

And so we give lots of tips on that, as well as our podcast. But if you're really looking to dive in, then we have cohort groups that we require the Oura Ring to participate. But then through that, you're coming in with particular stats with your sleep, and you're leaving with a whole different set of stats at the end of those interventions.

So our commitment is really being able to help get us back in the driver's seat of our sleep so that we're not so mystified by it and hoping that it improves or what have you, and instead really getting at the core of what's going on there. And then on the lightest side of things, we also offer audits.

So we'll give wearable audits. So kind of like what we did with you, but we would go much more in depth for a full hour just with that individual's data, and then set you up with particular things that you would be taking on for the next 90 days. And then we'd auto trigger some things for you.

So in 90 days, you send us screenshots of what you've done to improve. So hopefully we've seen actual measurable change, and we see a lot of really cool stuff for people when they start getting aware of what's going on with their stats and what they can do to make a difference.

- That's amazing. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. I have so much to go work on. - Yay! I hope that that is an exciting piece. And really the thing that I would like to leave is that my mission on the planet is to help support people with their sleep.

I really felt like when my sleep wasn't working, I felt like I was just losing my grasp on reality. I felt like I was just so disempowered. I couldn't function in a way that once I got up under that, it completely transformed my experience in my own life. And then now to be able to work with so many people, it's the most fulfilling thing on the planet.

So anytime I hear that, I get very excited. So please report back on what comes up. - I will. Thank you so much. - Amazing. Thank you.