Master the Skill of Sleep with Mollie Eastman

00:00:00.000 | - So when we think about sleep,

00:00:01.640 | some of the general rules of thumb

00:00:03.300 | that probably a lot of people have heard

00:00:04.600 | is that you're aiming for somewhere around seven to nine

00:00:07.360 | hours, but it's about so much more than that.

00:00:10.320 | As human beings, we're diurnal creatures,

00:00:12.320 | meaning to be active by day and largely at rest at night.

00:00:16.320 | As we deviate outside of that,

00:00:18.240 | we find that they have rates going up of things like cancer,

00:00:22.120 | heart disease, mental health issues,

00:00:24.520 | and sleep-wake disorders,

00:00:25.840 | simply by just doing things at night.

00:00:28.520 | I just want to know why is sleep so important?

00:00:30.640 | - One, we know that this is crucial

00:00:32.840 | for our immune function, cardiovascular health,

00:00:36.000 | our emotional regulations.

00:00:37.680 | Many of us don't even know what it can feel like

00:00:39.940 | or look like, wake up consistently feeling well-rested.

00:00:44.000 | I truly do believe that sleep is a skill,

00:00:46.440 | all great skills, no matter if you think

00:00:48.560 | that you have this handled,

00:00:50.080 | that you can venture into mastery

00:00:52.480 | and that there is always this opportunity

00:00:54.400 | for us to improve upon this area.

00:00:56.600 | And even then, when you might think you have it handled,

00:00:58.720 | something happens.

00:00:59.960 | - Molly, thank you so much for being here.

00:01:03.560 | - Oh, thank you so much for having me.

00:01:05.240 | - I'm so excited.

00:01:06.080 | Sleep is so fundamental

00:01:07.680 | and it's such an important part of our lives.

00:01:09.840 | I think I constantly talk to people

00:01:12.320 | who aren't giving it as much attention as it deserves.

00:01:14.880 | And I just want to know why is sleep so important?

00:01:17.600 | - Okay, so we really struggle to find a single domain

00:01:22.600 | of life that is not negatively impacted

00:01:25.880 | when our sleep is not working as well as it could.

00:01:28.840 | And what does that mean?

00:01:30.200 | So when you think about different domains of life,

00:01:33.800 | when you think about cognition,

00:01:35.600 | when you think about cardiovascular health,

00:01:37.440 | when you think about immune health,

00:01:38.800 | when you think about emotional regulation,

00:01:41.240 | mental health, et cetera,

00:01:42.560 | the ripple effects are so vast

00:01:45.560 | from a negative side of things

00:01:47.620 | when we're not getting the sleep that we require,

00:01:50.760 | whether in duration, regularity, the quality of that sleep.

00:01:54.800 | But then on the flip side,

00:01:55.960 | from a more potentially positive spin,

00:01:58.560 | we struggle to find areas of life

00:02:00.340 | that are not positively impacted from a ripple effect

00:02:03.320 | when we do improve this area of our life.

00:02:06.200 | So it really has the possibility

00:02:08.800 | to absolutely reach in, have its tentacles

00:02:12.440 | into your whole experience of your life.

00:02:14.720 | And that's one of the reasons I'm so passionate about it.

00:02:16.880 | - All right, so I think maybe to set a baseline,

00:02:19.560 | 'cause I'm sure we're gonna talk

00:02:20.440 | about lots of parts of sleep.

00:02:22.360 | Let's talk about like fundamentals.

00:02:23.960 | What are the different stages?

00:02:25.400 | What's important about them?

00:02:26.600 | Let's kind of set some understanding

00:02:28.480 | of sleep in general for people.

00:02:30.120 | - Yeah, absolutely.

00:02:31.400 | So when we think about sleep,

00:02:33.040 | some of the general rules of thumb

00:02:34.720 | that probably a lot of people have heard

00:02:36.020 | is that for a healthy adult,

00:02:38.720 | you're aiming for somewhere around seven to nine hours.

00:02:41.740 | So that would be in the duration category.

00:02:43.920 | And that's what a lot of people are thinking about.

00:02:46.080 | So how much sleep am I logging?

00:02:48.560 | But it's about so much more than that.

00:02:51.080 | So you can be someone that hits whatever,

00:02:54.160 | seven and a half hours every single night,

00:02:55.780 | but it might be all over the place as far as regularity.

00:02:59.000 | It might be fragmented.

00:03:00.640 | So you might be taking a very long time

00:03:02.920 | to log that seven and a half hours.

00:03:05.400 | So that can be problematic.

00:03:07.120 | So we wanna get more granular

00:03:09.080 | on what our kind of goals are with our sleep.

00:03:12.600 | Also knowing that each individual

00:03:14.680 | is gonna have some bio-individuality

00:03:16.960 | on how much sleep they should be getting.

00:03:19.840 | But there are certain components

00:03:21.160 | that we would like to have as far as consistency,

00:03:23.680 | regularity, less of that sleep fragmentation, et cetera.

00:03:27.800 | When we think about sleep stage classifications.

00:03:31.160 | Now, this is where a lot of people

00:03:32.560 | start to go a little funky,

00:03:34.920 | meaning that I have a lot of people coming my way

00:03:37.800 | and they're freaking out

00:03:39.280 | because they're tracking on Aura, Whoop,

00:03:43.080 | Apple, Garmin, et cetera.

00:03:45.680 | And they're saying, I'm not getting any deep sleep.

00:03:48.240 | I'm not getting any REM, et cetera.

00:03:50.760 | So first off, when we think about those sleep stages,

00:03:54.600 | we can from a, if you're tracking,

00:03:57.040 | 'cause usually the application nowadays

00:03:59.080 | is that we're tracking with some sort of element

00:04:02.480 | of a sleep tracker.

00:04:04.280 | And so we're getting this information out

00:04:06.600 | and yet we're wondering, am I getting enough?

00:04:09.040 | Is this okay?

00:04:11.560 | And the problem is,

00:04:12.840 | is that this is the least accurate data on our wearables.

00:04:17.840 | So all the information that's coming out,

00:04:20.120 | this is the least accurate.

00:04:21.240 | It's using its own algorithm within each wearable

00:04:24.480 | to make its best guess on, are you in deep sleep?

00:04:28.080 | Are you in REM?

00:04:29.000 | Are you in light sleep?

00:04:30.080 | It's kind of how it's been boiled down

00:04:32.280 | to some of the generalized ways

00:04:34.240 | that we're thinking of our sleep.

00:04:36.800 | And the problem is, is that because it's that best guess,

00:04:41.800 | if the algorithm is changed,

00:04:44.200 | your results with your sleep staging

00:04:46.160 | is going to be markedly shifted.

00:04:48.480 | So I work primarily with Oura Ring

00:04:50.680 | from a consumer grade tracker perspective.

00:04:53.200 | And just this year, well, just in 2023,

00:04:56.680 | a big algorithm change

00:04:58.360 | and there was entirely different results

00:05:00.920 | for many, many people on their deep sleep,

00:05:03.560 | their REM, et cetera.

00:05:05.320 | And if you were making decisions

00:05:07.680 | on those numbers beforehand,

00:05:09.760 | you were really kind of taken for a surprise

00:05:13.560 | when you got these totally new set of numbers.

00:05:16.520 | So my big message for people, if they are tracking,

00:05:19.200 | is one, to not get too crazed about the REM deep sleep

00:05:24.200 | and your light sleep.

00:05:26.080 | Instead, you can look from a trends perspective,

00:05:29.520 | do not try to cross reference within wearables

00:05:32.920 | since they are using such different algorithms,

00:05:35.560 | but within each wearable,

00:05:37.400 | you can start to notice particular trends

00:05:39.720 | and see are there patterns that you can help support

00:05:43.200 | based on those trends.

00:05:44.480 | And now, if we pan out even further,

00:05:46.760 | some of the generalized things

00:05:48.160 | that I think have a practical application

00:05:50.200 | is just simply to know that on your first half of the night,

00:05:53.480 | what most of us are looking for is a deeper,

00:05:56.800 | a more kind of higher ratio of deep sleep on the first half

00:06:01.480 | and a higher ratio of REM on the second half.

00:06:04.600 | And what is important about that

00:06:07.240 | is even from a timing perspective,

00:06:09.320 | which I think a lot of people don't realize,

00:06:11.160 | is that if you manipulate the time

00:06:14.160 | by which you're going to sleep

00:06:15.880 | and say you just decide to go to bed later

00:06:18.080 | on your Fridays, Saturdays,

00:06:19.640 | and maybe even into Sundays or what have you,

00:06:21.920 | then you're lobbing off some of your possibility

00:06:25.280 | and potential to get deep sleep,

00:06:27.520 | that's that first part of your sleep,

00:06:29.320 | 'cause the body likes to try to stay on time.

00:06:32.720 | So you're hitting some of your potential

00:06:34.840 | to get deep sleep on the first half.

00:06:36.840 | And then on the flip side,

00:06:38.560 | if you're someone that's waking up earlier

00:06:40.640 | on certain parts of your week or what have you,

00:06:42.800 | then you're cutting into some of your potential

00:06:44.960 | to get that REM.

00:06:46.480 | And probably most people have heard

00:06:48.280 | of some of the importance of both of these.

00:06:50.480 | Deep sleep, really, really crucial

00:06:52.760 | for some of our brain health,

00:06:54.320 | our reparative mechanisms, growth hormone, and more.

00:06:58.600 | And then of course, for REM,

00:07:00.320 | you can almost think of it as like your inner therapist.

00:07:02.600 | So, so much from our cognition, our memory,

00:07:05.720 | our emotional regulation, fortitude, other things

00:07:08.960 | can all get impacted then

00:07:10.600 | if you are cutting into your morning timing.

00:07:14.000 | So this is what's so interesting about sleep

00:07:17.000 | is that there's a real strategy

00:07:19.120 | by which we can navigate, what are we prioritizing?

00:07:23.200 | And the least sexy thing about all this

00:07:25.200 | is one of the best ways to prioritize this

00:07:27.560 | and help facilitate it is consistency,

00:07:30.400 | which virtually no one wants to hear.

00:07:32.800 | But it's one of the most powerful things

00:07:35.520 | that can make such a difference with those ratios.

00:07:38.520 | - For someone who's not tracking with a device,

00:07:41.400 | is there a way to kind of estimate

00:07:44.080 | how your quality of your sleep is or what you're getting?

00:07:46.760 | Is it about how you feel in the morning

00:07:48.400 | or how many times you wake up or something like that?

00:07:51.000 | - Yes, absolutely.

00:07:52.200 | So historically, 'cause of course I know

00:07:54.520 | I'm mentioning a lot of wearables and trackers,

00:07:56.200 | so for anyone listening that's like, "I'm not tracking,"

00:07:58.840 | or has no interest in tracking or maybe was tracking,

00:08:02.840 | I see this a lot, and then they're just over it.

00:08:04.440 | They're like, "Well, I got what I needed to get,"

00:08:06.280 | or what have you.

00:08:07.120 | If you're not tracking, for many, many years,

00:08:10.560 | if you were struggling with your sleep,

00:08:12.120 | you wanted to get a sense of like, "How am I sleeping?"

00:08:14.200 | People would do, take a kind of sleep diary or sleep log.

00:08:18.320 | And so that's something you can do in a low-tech way,

00:08:20.720 | just pen and paper, and you can start kind of tracking

00:08:24.160 | for a period of time.

00:08:25.360 | What time are you going to sleep?

00:08:27.360 | So you're getting into bed,

00:08:28.640 | and how long is it about taking you to fall asleep?

00:08:32.400 | Then from that point, what time are you waking up?

00:08:34.920 | But in between that time, there's often for many people,

00:08:38.600 | a lot that might go on.

00:08:39.960 | So they might wake up at three, four in the morning,

00:08:43.280 | and if so, how long are you waking up?

00:08:46.240 | If you're really struggling with,

00:08:48.320 | it can be referred to as insomnia,

00:08:50.200 | kind of difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep,

00:08:53.200 | what are some of the thoughts that are coming up

00:08:55.240 | throughout that period of time,

00:08:57.280 | so that we can just get kind of a read

00:08:59.920 | on both your results with your sleep,

00:09:02.040 | but also your relationship to your sleep.

00:09:04.040 | Are you getting really thrown by some of these results?

00:09:07.560 | But then, of course, to your point,

00:09:09.680 | so once we're tracking for a period of time,

00:09:12.080 | it's like, what other information can we glean?

00:09:14.320 | Well, we can glean, what is our average bedtime?

00:09:17.120 | What is our average wake-up time?

00:09:18.880 | What are average number of kind of sleep fragmentations

00:09:21.360 | or wake-ups throughout the course of the night?

00:09:22.920 | How long are we awake during that period?

00:09:26.120 | But then also, of course, the subjectivity,

00:09:28.440 | because even if you are tracking or aren't tracking,

00:09:30.880 | what's your subjective experience?

00:09:33.520 | 'Cause we're not just robots,

00:09:34.600 | it's not just results-oriented, like, how do we feel?

00:09:38.000 | So are you waking up really feeling very fatigued?

00:09:40.640 | Now, there is something known as sleep inertia

00:09:42.800 | in the morning, where you might have that kind of just,

00:09:46.280 | you're coming back to life, back online, if you will,

00:09:49.400 | 'cause you've been in this altered state for hours,

00:09:52.740 | and now you're coming back, you know,

00:09:54.840 | kind of at a different level of cognition,

00:09:57.200 | so you might have a little bit of a sleepy haze to you.

00:10:00.060 | That's often normal, but is it really augmented

00:10:03.620 | or really a struggle for you to wake up,

00:10:06.420 | go about your day-to-day activities?

00:10:08.260 | Are you finding that then you're consistently sleepy

00:10:10.840 | throughout the course of the day?

00:10:11.980 | This can then get into questions of even

00:10:14.740 | beyond just sleep deprivation or poor sleep,

00:10:17.100 | then possible sleep disorders,

00:10:18.820 | which Mount Sinai just quantified it as,

00:10:21.860 | that it appears that there's over 100 sleep disorders

00:10:24.940 | or sleep-wake disorders.

00:10:27.180 | So there are a lot of things that could be undiagnosed

00:10:30.620 | that you wanna be aware of, too.

00:10:31.960 | Could you be dealing with that level of fatigue

00:10:34.860 | throughout the course of your day

00:10:36.260 | that could point to things like

00:10:38.380 | respiratory-based sleep disorders, like sleep apnea,

00:10:41.380 | upper airway resistance syndrome, or otherwise,

00:10:44.760 | and those can really impact the quality of your sleep.

00:10:47.880 | So are there, like, red flags present?

00:10:50.860 | Another big red flag that I see a lot for people

00:10:54.540 | in relation to your point around, like,

00:10:56.540 | what else might we be able to tell if we're not tracking,

00:10:59.440 | is are you falling asleep

00:11:01.300 | the minute your head hits the pillow?

00:11:03.020 | And I get this all the time.

00:11:04.380 | People are like, "Oh, yeah, I'm sleep.

00:11:06.660 | "I'm good with that.

00:11:07.500 | "I can sleep anytime, anywhere, doesn't matter.

00:11:10.800 | "I am out.

00:11:11.660 | "I don't have any problems with that."

00:11:13.020 | But actually, that would be a red flag for us

00:11:15.100 | that something might be a problem

00:11:16.780 | because that can denote or be a sign of sleep deprivation

00:11:20.980 | or an undiagnosed sleep disorder

00:11:23.060 | because we do want a little bit of a sleep latency

00:11:25.820 | period of time, so a kind of healthy sleep latency,

00:11:29.640 | if you will, and it will be bio-individual,

00:11:32.940 | but somewhere in the 10 to 15-minute range,

00:11:35.840 | quite usually, is kind of a healthy amount of time

00:11:38.940 | to go from an awake state, down-regulate,

00:11:41.820 | into this totally different sleep state.

00:11:44.900 | So if you're seeing that for yourself,

00:11:46.460 | you're falling asleep really immediately.

00:11:48.900 | If you're then having a lot of those sleep fragmentations,

00:11:52.060 | if you're waking up really tired,

00:11:53.600 | also, in the realm of sleep disorders,

00:11:57.540 | are you waking up with dry mouth?

00:11:59.660 | Are you waking up with headaches?

00:12:01.420 | Things that might point to some of the things

00:12:04.940 | that you were doing throughout the course of the night.

00:12:07.060 | Sleep, teeth grinding, bruxism,

00:12:09.600 | some of these sleep disorders that can really impact

00:12:13.540 | some of your sleep quality.

00:12:14.900 | So there's a lot to navigate.

00:12:17.020 | - Where do sleep cycles play in here?

00:12:19.220 | I feel like there was a time in my life

00:12:20.940 | where it was like, wow, do you need periods of 90 minutes?

00:12:25.340 | And I'm like, is this a thing?

00:12:27.060 | Is that something we should discuss in advance?

00:12:29.740 | - Yeah, so I get a lot of people that will come my way,

00:12:34.380 | and they'll be strategizing about the sleep cycles.

00:12:38.260 | And it is very interesting, because it's very true.

00:12:40.620 | We will be navigating through these sleep cycles,

00:12:43.900 | and a little different for each person.

00:12:45.460 | So it could be around these 90-minute timeframes,

00:12:47.500 | is the popular amount of time

00:12:49.700 | that seems to be a kind of an average,

00:12:51.460 | but it might be plus or minus for each individual.

00:12:53.740 | And the aim is to get through some of these sleep cycles,

00:12:56.540 | a number of these sleep cycles

00:12:57.580 | throughout the course of the night, of course.

00:12:59.940 | And yet, I find that a lot of people are fixating

00:13:03.680 | on some of the sleep cycles and strategies around that,

00:13:07.700 | and missing some of the force for the trees

00:13:10.780 | on some of these other things that we can absolutely do

00:13:13.500 | to let those, the automaticity of that

00:13:16.220 | kind of come together on its own.

00:13:18.900 | If we have these egregious sleep disorders

00:13:21.500 | that we're missing, that of course is gonna impact

00:13:24.140 | the workability of those sleep cycles,

00:13:27.220 | of how you're oscillating through those

00:13:28.820 | throughout the course of the night.

00:13:30.100 | But even beyond that, one of the things

00:13:32.420 | that I'm often seeing just on the ground

00:13:34.940 | is so many things that people are behaving,

00:13:38.260 | the behaviors that they're engaging in,

00:13:40.020 | environmental elements, et cetera,

00:13:42.340 | that are impacting their ability

00:13:45.220 | to navigate some of those sleep cycles effectively.

00:13:48.420 | And then I guess the last piece about the sleep cycles

00:13:52.140 | would be a number of people talk about

00:13:54.420 | wanting to have, be woken up in kind of that ideal part

00:13:58.460 | of their sleep cycle.

00:13:59.780 | And I think there's kind of merit to that.

00:14:02.700 | And one of the things that I find is the more

00:14:04.900 | we kind of bring in some of these workable elements

00:14:08.780 | with our sleep, we really get dialed in

00:14:11.420 | on some of these components,

00:14:12.860 | that often it kind of just falls into place

00:14:16.420 | on its own quite frequently,

00:14:18.180 | so that you don't have to have the intervention

00:14:19.860 | of technology.

00:14:21.100 | If people aren't familiar with this,

00:14:22.420 | some people are looking to find pieces of tech

00:14:24.700 | that can wake them up at certain parts

00:14:27.860 | of their sleep cycle is the aim.

00:14:30.740 | And you can absolutely experiment with things like that.

00:14:34.140 | But I would also point to getting us aware

00:14:38.740 | of how many things that we can do while we're awake

00:14:42.460 | that can facilitate that those all work effectively.

00:14:46.860 | - And before we go too much further,

00:14:49.020 | why is sleep so important?

00:14:50.980 | Can we talk for a moment about what's going on in the body,

00:14:53.100 | why we need it, why it's so valuable?

00:14:55.260 | - Human beings for centuries and centuries,

00:14:57.660 | it is the one area of life that we have not been able

00:15:00.900 | to hack our way out of.

00:15:02.540 | I know this is a podcast around all the hacks,

00:15:04.340 | and yet we have not been able to figure out a way

00:15:07.820 | to cut out this very vulnerable part of our day

00:15:10.940 | when we are just asleep for a stretch of time

00:15:13.980 | for seven to nine hours for most people.

00:15:16.100 | So why do we keep doing that?

00:15:17.620 | Why is that so important?

00:15:19.140 | Well, one, we know that this is crucial

00:15:21.980 | for our immune function, cardiovascular health,

00:15:26.020 | for our emotional regulation.

00:15:30.020 | We know that it's also just so important for our waistline,

00:15:33.500 | for our whole experience of life is going to be colored

00:15:39.380 | if we don't prioritize this area.

00:15:41.540 | And yet many of us don't even know what it can feel like

00:15:44.100 | or look like to wake up consistently feeling well-rested

00:15:49.100 | and what that can kind of the crossover effects

00:15:52.940 | of what that can look like.

00:15:54.060 | - I'm excited to dig into all of these things.

00:15:55.940 | I have a couple of random questions when it comes to sleep.

00:15:59.220 | One is, how different is this on individual basis?

00:16:04.220 | And I ask this because we've talked about seven to nine

00:16:07.180 | hours and I have this one friend who can sleep almost

00:16:10.740 | nothing all the time and then sleep for like 13 hours

00:16:13.380 | on the weekend.

00:16:14.220 | And I'm like, are there just some people wired differently

00:16:16.780 | that need different amounts of sleep

00:16:18.300 | that can catch up differently?

00:16:19.700 | Or like, is my friend just burning himself out?

00:16:23.220 | - It's a great question.

00:16:24.060 | I get that one a lot.

00:16:25.060 | So first off, it appears that we can have these particular

00:16:30.060 | coping mechanisms.

00:16:31.380 | So your friend is a person that I see a lot

00:16:35.180 | where they come in, we look at their stats

00:16:37.240 | and they might have four hours, five hours, six hours,

00:16:41.260 | then 13 hours.

00:16:43.340 | And the problem with that is that that can kind of save

00:16:46.820 | the day for a while and stretch of time,

00:16:49.420 | but eventually we'll see hits on a number of areas

00:16:52.980 | across the board.

00:16:53.820 | So for men, we know that testosterone levels

00:16:57.140 | are massively hit when we do that on a stretch of time.

00:17:01.060 | And even as we had an expert, Dr. Alison Brager,

00:17:06.060 | who'd come on as a representative of the U.S. Army

00:17:08.540 | that found that there's a point of no return

00:17:11.180 | after doing this for multiple, multiple times

00:17:14.940 | because you're not able to bring about that hormone

00:17:18.140 | stability after this long, long stretch

00:17:20.740 | of doing these things.

00:17:21.580 | That's like one example, right?

00:17:23.660 | But for the most people, what we find is that

00:17:27.280 | there's a reason we have sort of this U-shaped curve

00:17:30.660 | of the suggestion for length of time

00:17:33.460 | that we suggest for people to sleep

00:17:35.580 | because we see impacts of all-cause mortality rates

00:17:39.260 | really going up when you're getting much below

00:17:41.780 | six hours of sleep, but it also goes on the other side

00:17:45.260 | when you're getting too much sleep consistently.

00:17:48.660 | So that's concerning as well.

00:17:50.420 | So they're kind of getting hit at both sides of this.

00:17:52.880 | So we're getting the insufficient sleep

00:17:54.980 | for stretches of time, and then we're just logging

00:17:58.020 | these really long periods.

00:18:00.340 | So this is problematic for both sleep duration.

00:18:02.660 | We know that that's not getting you the quality of sleep

00:18:05.100 | that we want to get.

00:18:06.980 | Also from that bio-individual perspective

00:18:08.980 | that you asked about.

00:18:09.980 | Besides, so we know that most people,

00:18:14.760 | it's like incredibly small percentage

00:18:17.680 | that might have this very strange, small, you know,

00:18:21.320 | kind of chance that they're short sleepers,

00:18:23.900 | but it's almost negligible, the percentage rate.

00:18:27.300 | So most people need to still fall into this realm

00:18:31.740 | of this seven to nine hours.

00:18:33.540 | However, it goes a little bit less as we age,

00:18:36.020 | this is why sleep is dynamic.

00:18:37.940 | So as we get a little bit older,

00:18:39.500 | we do find that people might go closer to say

00:18:41.900 | that six to seven hours might still be a range

00:18:45.020 | that kind of appears and still be within a healthy domain.

00:18:49.760 | But aside from that, when people start saying,

00:18:53.300 | I'm fine, this is workable for me,

00:18:56.200 | when we bring about more stability and consistency

00:19:00.140 | with their sleep, I can almost guarantee

00:19:02.940 | that what we see both on the ground and then in studies

00:19:06.880 | is that there's a change in the quality of that sleep

00:19:10.100 | for the better, and that will ripple into other metrics.

00:19:13.860 | So things like the improvements in often blood pressure,

00:19:18.500 | their cardiovascular health, if we're looking at heart rate,

00:19:21.500 | HRV, heart rate variability, and otherwise.

00:19:24.520 | If we're talking about women, this could impact things

00:19:26.940 | like their cycle workability and others.

00:19:30.340 | - I have so many questions and I wanna go into optimizing

00:19:32.920 | and all this, but how important is it

00:19:36.380 | that this quantity of sleep happens at one point in time?

00:19:40.620 | And it's interesting 'cause we have two young kids

00:19:42.620 | and I'm like, oh, well, they get sleep at night and naps.

00:19:46.180 | And I remember some point in my life reading

00:19:49.100 | about this crazy concept of like extreme polyphasic sleep

00:19:53.540 | where you could sleep for 20 minutes,

00:19:54.980 | like six or eight times a day, and that would be fine.

00:19:57.940 | We don't have to go that far down that rabbit hole,

00:20:00.180 | but do you need to sleep all at once

00:20:02.540 | or can you break it up throughout the day?

00:20:04.160 | - Oh, yeah.

00:20:05.000 | And so people often will reference some of these findings

00:20:08.920 | that in centuries past, it appeared that we might've had

00:20:13.020 | kind of two parts to our sleep was one popular way

00:20:17.460 | of looking at sleep, and this kind of brings a sigh

00:20:19.940 | of relief for some people that are waking up

00:20:22.020 | throughout the course of the night, like, oh, okay,

00:20:23.740 | maybe this is just one part of my sleep

00:20:25.980 | and now I have a little period of being awake

00:20:27.900 | in a second part.

00:20:28.840 | And then there's also the group that you're speaking to

00:20:32.540 | of the multiple naps throughout the course of the day.

00:20:35.420 | Now, what we find and how do we think about this?

00:20:38.700 | Well, we can also look at modern day hunter-gatherer tribes.

00:20:41.980 | So we can look at tribes like the Hudson tribe

00:20:44.100 | has been looked at from a sleep perspective.

00:20:47.420 | And we don't find that to be indicative

00:20:50.860 | of how they're conducting themselves as one example,

00:20:54.580 | but also how we like to think about maximizing

00:20:57.500 | and optimizing for sleep today.

00:20:59.380 | It now has been drilled into that longer stretch of sleep.

00:21:04.380 | It's very healthy.

00:21:07.500 | It's still okay to have some wake-ups

00:21:09.540 | 'cause I know some people can get really concerned

00:21:11.380 | and nervous about stretches of time

00:21:12.900 | where they will have some wake-ups.

00:21:14.980 | The difference is we're trying to understand

00:21:16.580 | how long are those wake-ups?

00:21:20.320 | What is your response from a psychological perspective

00:21:22.940 | during that?

00:21:24.180 | And then of course, parents during a stretch of times

00:21:27.220 | when we are, whether we choose to or not,

00:21:29.860 | being awakened throughout the course of the night

00:21:32.420 | and understanding, can we make up for that?

00:21:35.460 | Well, one thing that we see is that largely

00:21:39.300 | we like to have this very clear diurnal system.

00:21:43.060 | So meaning that as human beings, we're diurnal creatures,

00:21:46.060 | meaning to be active by day and largely at rest at night.

00:21:50.440 | And what we find is that as we deviate outside of that,

00:21:53.440 | shift workers being an example of that,

00:21:55.440 | they're being more active, nothing different

00:21:57.400 | beyond just being more active at night.

00:22:00.220 | And we find that they have rates going up

00:22:03.480 | of things like cancer, heart disease, mental health issues,

00:22:08.440 | and sleep-wake disorders simply

00:22:10.400 | by just doing things at night.

00:22:12.580 | So it points to how important it is to maintain this.

00:22:16.200 | So when we start juggling all of these things

00:22:18.900 | and we're sleeping for long stretches

00:22:20.680 | throughout the course of our night,

00:22:22.080 | we know that often from a circadian perspective,

00:22:24.640 | which is one of the areas I'm particularly interested in,

00:22:27.640 | is that that seems to spill

00:22:30.960 | into some of your results with your sleep.

00:22:33.440 | So the big takeaway here is how can we sleep

00:22:37.940 | as much of the portion of our evenings

00:22:42.120 | and if you are needing to supplement that,

00:22:44.880 | which sometimes can happen, of course,

00:22:46.200 | as parents or we're traveling or we're sick

00:22:48.800 | or something is coming up,

00:22:50.680 | then you can supplement to a certain extent with naps

00:22:54.240 | unless you're dealing with insomnia.

00:22:57.200 | Insomnia can be a time where you might wanna abstain

00:22:59.840 | from naps or be a bit more thoughtful about naps

00:23:02.800 | because you might be struggling with that ability

00:23:05.240 | to really clearly turn on and off

00:23:08.180 | that wake drive versus sleep drive.

00:23:10.700 | So by heightening your sleep drive,

00:23:12.960 | by not engaging in too many naps by day,

00:23:15.360 | that can be beneficial for someone dealing with insomnia.

00:23:18.760 | But for the rest of us,

00:23:19.960 | if you're just looking to make up for some of that sleep,

00:23:22.600 | those naps can make sense,

00:23:24.920 | but we're looking to usually keep them

00:23:27.820 | somewhere in the domain of around,

00:23:30.760 | often the power nap area, so like the 20 to 25 minutes,

00:23:35.000 | but usually no longer than a sleep cycle,

00:23:37.480 | like you pointed to, so around that 90 minutes.

00:23:40.440 | - Okay, but you can rejuvenate in a nap.

00:23:43.900 | So if you're someone who just, for whatever reason,

00:23:46.520 | isn't able to get a full night's sleep,

00:23:48.560 | is there an optimal time of day for that nap?

00:23:51.160 | - Yes, totally, great question.

00:23:53.320 | So earlier on in the day is what we're liking

00:23:56.260 | to position the timing for those naps.

00:23:59.680 | So for most people, that would look like

00:24:02.100 | somewhere around before 3 p.m. or so.

00:24:04.800 | Of course, if you have a different sleep-wake schedule,

00:24:07.880 | adjust that accordingly.

00:24:09.120 | But kind of in your early afternoon,

00:24:11.740 | so that you're not tapping into

00:24:13.800 | some of those adenosine reserves,

00:24:15.640 | that kind of sleepiness chemical, if you will,

00:24:18.280 | that's building up throughout the whole course of the day.

00:24:20.840 | You can think of this as when you're first waking up,

00:24:23.200 | you have some of the least reserves of this adenosine,

00:24:25.560 | this kind of sleepiness component,

00:24:28.000 | and then it's accumulating

00:24:29.640 | throughout the whole rest of the day.

00:24:31.540 | And we want it to be just toppling over,

00:24:34.380 | like at the brim when you get to sleep.

00:24:37.520 | But there's a couple things

00:24:38.960 | that can impact the adenosine load.

00:24:41.520 | One of them can be naps.

00:24:42.800 | So that could kind of dump out

00:24:44.580 | some of your reserves of adenosine for the day.

00:24:47.080 | The another one, very common one,

00:24:49.000 | can be things like caffeine.

00:24:51.200 | And so that can make you,

00:24:52.560 | it won't dump it out in the same way,

00:24:54.580 | but it will make your brain think

00:24:56.220 | that it's kind of not present,

00:24:57.640 | like trick you into thinking that the adenosine,

00:24:59.840 | that sleepiness component, isn't building up.

00:25:02.240 | So these are ways that you can both have it all.

00:25:07.160 | So it's how to be refreshed, get kind of that second wind.

00:25:10.240 | So leverage those naps in the day

00:25:12.400 | if you're not dealing with insomnia.

00:25:14.340 | Have that, and that can also spill into things

00:25:17.720 | like someone like Andrew Huberman is kind of popularizing

00:25:20.880 | this non-sleep deep rest protocols.

00:25:23.760 | So kind of this trance-like state, if you will,

00:25:26.600 | where you're, whether it's yoga nidra,

00:25:29.680 | kind of a hypnosis-like state.

00:25:31.720 | So you might not even be fully asleep,

00:25:34.360 | but still your body is getting some of the benefits

00:25:36.800 | of being in that restorative state.

00:25:39.120 | So that can be another way to kind of recoup

00:25:42.320 | a little bit of energy throughout the course of the day.

00:25:44.760 | - And so I watched that video, the Huberman thing,

00:25:48.500 | and I was like, oh, 'cause I wanted to ask this question

00:25:51.200 | about whether there's a way to get some of the benefits

00:25:54.360 | of sleep while not sleeping.

00:25:55.920 | But if what you're doing is, you know,

00:25:58.880 | kind of lying down and doing breathing exercises,

00:26:01.080 | like I felt like, oh, might as well be sleeping.

00:26:02.860 | Like maybe if you can't sleep, but are there any, you know,

00:26:06.560 | if you were lying down, relaxing, listening to music

00:26:08.920 | or reading a book or doing anything a little bit more active

00:26:13.040 | than just meditating, for example,

00:26:15.160 | or kind of breathing exercises,

00:26:17.360 | can you get any of that benefit

00:26:18.840 | or does it really need to be sleep?

00:26:20.600 | - So this is a huge one I find that can be really helpful

00:26:23.800 | for people that are dealing with sleep anxiety.

00:26:26.760 | So sleep anxiety can kind of go in the domain,

00:26:30.080 | this is something that I dealt with

00:26:31.240 | when I was going through my sleep kind of breakdown

00:26:34.800 | years back was this fixation on sleep

00:26:38.480 | and then this feeling that, oh, okay,

00:26:40.360 | so if I'm not getting my sleep

00:26:42.280 | throughout the course of the night, I'm just screwed.

00:26:45.120 | You know, like I'm just not getting these results,

00:26:47.220 | but it turns out that one thing we can kind of keep

00:26:50.440 | in the back of our mind is that there is still some benefit

00:26:53.920 | from being in kind of a restorative state,

00:26:55.960 | even just in a, you know, laying supine position,

00:26:58.640 | your heart rate's coming down,

00:27:00.600 | closing your eyes can also help change

00:27:04.600 | some of your brain activity

00:27:06.720 | and allows for some of this restorative processes

00:27:10.480 | to happen of the body.

00:27:11.560 | Now, is it the same as sleep?

00:27:13.120 | Not quite, but it still can give you a little bit

00:27:16.240 | of a respite in knowing that you're doing something generous

00:27:20.240 | for the body.

00:27:21.260 | Now this can apply both in the middle of the night

00:27:23.160 | if you're struggling to sleep,

00:27:25.360 | just knowing that you're still getting some restoration

00:27:28.280 | by being in kind of that peaceful, relaxed state,

00:27:30.480 | bringing the heart rate down.

00:27:32.080 | So the body can still go to work on some of that repair,

00:27:36.160 | and yet that applies during the course of the day as well.

00:27:39.280 | Now I see this really in a cool way gamified

00:27:42.440 | with wearables lately.

00:27:44.640 | Two that are doing this well, I think,

00:27:46.640 | is both Whoop and Oura Ring.

00:27:49.680 | So they're actually showing you your daytime stress load

00:27:53.400 | and then almost helping to reward, if you will,

00:27:56.600 | stretches of time when you're getting a little bit

00:27:58.960 | of restoration.

00:28:00.640 | So it will see, it will show you clearly

00:28:03.280 | and kind of give you a rundown or a quota

00:28:07.280 | for how much of that restorative time you're getting

00:28:09.760 | throughout the course of the day.

00:28:11.120 | And so it can kind of help to gamify this protocol,

00:28:14.720 | if you will, instead of just like a nice to have.

00:28:16.840 | Now suddenly you're offsetting high amounts of stress

00:28:19.400 | throughout the course of the day

00:28:20.600 | with a little breather kind of recovery time.

00:28:23.440 | - When we think about optimizing sleep,

00:28:25.560 | who benefits from optimizing sleep?

00:28:27.440 | Is this something for everyone?

00:28:28.480 | Are there some people who kind of maybe you have it good

00:28:31.320 | already or what things should people be asking themselves

00:28:34.280 | before they want to decide if this is a journey

00:28:37.000 | they want to go down?

00:28:37.840 | - Absolutely.

00:28:38.680 | Well, first off, I would like to offer for people

00:28:43.280 | that I truly do believe that sleep is a skill

00:28:45.920 | and like all great skills, no matter if you think

00:28:48.520 | and you have it, that you have this handled,

00:28:50.840 | that you can venture into mastery

00:28:53.520 | and that there is always this opportunity for us

00:28:55.920 | to improve upon this area.

00:28:58.160 | And even then, when you might think you have it handled,

00:29:00.280 | something happens, you get divorced,

00:29:02.680 | you have a death in the families

00:29:04.560 | and we'll find it bleed into your sleep results.

00:29:07.560 | So I would offer for everyone to explore

00:29:11.480 | taking this area of life on as the foundation

00:29:14.800 | by which you are really setting up your wellness journey

00:29:18.240 | before nutrition, exercise, mental health strategies,

00:29:23.240 | of course, those are all so important

00:29:24.760 | and they're bidirectional, but we want to,

00:29:28.240 | I would offer that there could be some benefits

00:29:30.400 | by taking on a lens of prioritizing your sleep first

00:29:33.800 | and that will aid in your ability to fulfill

00:29:36.280 | on all those other things, get yourself to the gym,

00:29:38.160 | make the smart decisions when you're standing

00:29:40.280 | in front of the cupboard or what have you.

00:29:42.760 | So from that place, what are some indications

00:29:45.480 | of that you might be struggling with your sleep

00:29:48.120 | and that you might wanna really take this area on?

00:29:51.480 | Well, one can be, we've talked a lot about sleep duration

00:29:54.680 | and some of the numbers you might be logging

00:29:56.080 | and you might say, I'm getting all those,

00:29:57.400 | but I still feel tired, sluggish,

00:30:01.720 | not at my best throughout the course of the day.

00:30:04.400 | That could be a sign for us to look at some of the sleep

00:30:07.560 | that you're logging, is it as rich as it could be?

00:30:11.400 | Are you having a lot of labels around your sleep?

00:30:13.880 | I certainly used to say this, a bunch of labels for myself,

00:30:17.320 | I would say things like, I'm a short sleeper,

00:30:19.000 | I'm a bad sleeper, I'm a night owl, it's in my genes,

00:30:22.000 | I'll sleep when I'm dead, so it goes into narratives.

00:30:24.720 | So you might have certain ways

00:30:26.680 | by which you're relating to your sleep,

00:30:28.080 | like it's just fixed and that's how it's gonna be

00:30:30.880 | versus that we would just have a set of results right now

00:30:34.600 | and that there's an opportunity

00:30:35.720 | for more of a growth perspective to improve upon this.

00:30:40.160 | If you're tracking, your sleep efficiency numbers

00:30:42.800 | might not be as high as we would like them to be.

00:30:46.320 | Now, we don't want them to be too high

00:30:47.600 | because then that can mean you're falling asleep

00:30:49.320 | right as the minute your head hits the pillow.

00:30:51.800 | But often in kind of this high 80s, low 90s range

00:30:56.240 | might be an area that we might wanna look to

00:30:58.720 | optimizing for, I don't want people to stress out

00:31:00.560 | if they're not quite there,

00:31:01.480 | but it just could be an area of an opportunity.

00:31:05.440 | If you're relying on a lot of things to improve your sleep,

00:31:09.360 | so if you have a lot of supplements,

00:31:11.880 | this whole particular stack that you need

00:31:14.360 | in just in order to kind of fall asleep or stay asleep,

00:31:18.160 | that could be indicative of the fact

00:31:20.320 | that now we're kind of bringing about,

00:31:22.880 | we have these external things

00:31:24.520 | that we now require to get great sleep.

00:31:26.840 | And that's not to say that we won't do

00:31:28.440 | all kinds of cool things with optimizing your environment

00:31:31.240 | and bringing you all kinds of things to improve your sleep

00:31:33.440 | from an environmental and setting you up powerfully.

00:31:36.760 | But if you feel like you yourself cannot get great sleep,

00:31:41.760 | that can be a sign for us.

00:31:43.920 | And then also if you have the sense

00:31:46.920 | that you used to sleep great and then something happened,

00:31:50.200 | I had kids, which understandably there may a stretch of time

00:31:54.560 | where your sleep absolutely will be disrupted.

00:31:56.480 | So I don't wanna stress anyone else with that.

00:31:59.520 | But we see there can be these narratives that get developed

00:32:03.720 | and then we start to lower the bar

00:32:05.720 | on what's possible for us,

00:32:07.960 | where we might be able to actually make a big difference

00:32:10.040 | with some of these results.

00:32:12.280 | So that can be important,

00:32:13.440 | but also just getting curious

00:32:15.640 | about different stages of life.

00:32:17.360 | Your sleep is gonna look very different

00:32:19.680 | from teenage years to 20s, to 30s, 40s, 50s beyond.

00:32:24.360 | And we want to keep checking in and testing,

00:32:28.120 | seeing are there hormonal changes at play?

00:32:31.360 | Is there environment?

00:32:32.640 | Did you move into a new house

00:32:33.880 | and now you're not getting the same level of sleep?

00:32:35.880 | Is there something going on in that space?

00:32:38.120 | Et cetera, et cetera.

00:32:39.040 | So there's a lot of signs and those are some.

00:32:41.440 | - I know you have a whole list of 10 on the website.

00:32:43.720 | We'll link to that in the show notes.

00:32:45.440 | I want to talk about these environmental things.

00:32:47.160 | So we're gonna talk,

00:32:48.480 | I think for the rest of this conversation,

00:32:49.600 | let's talk a little bit about the environment,

00:32:51.440 | the different things that could be affecting sleep

00:32:54.560 | and we could talk about how to change them

00:32:56.080 | and kind of things you need to focus on.

00:32:57.800 | We'll talk a little bit about technology.

00:32:59.240 | And I know you have some data for my sleep

00:33:01.600 | that might be fun to also kind of run through.

00:33:03.000 | - Yes, absolutely.

00:33:04.680 | - So what are kind of the factors?

00:33:06.840 | Let's start with the environment and routine stuff.

00:33:09.960 | - Okay.

00:33:11.160 | So first I would like for people to think about the fact

00:33:15.200 | that our circadian rhythm becomes paramount in this.

00:33:18.720 | What is your circadian rhythm?

00:33:19.920 | It's around this 24 hour rhythm that as human beings,

00:33:23.400 | we're all operating within.

00:33:24.800 | I mentioned that we're diurnal creatures.

00:33:26.440 | So of those 24 hours, half of the day,

00:33:28.880 | we want to be ideally prioritizing getting,

00:33:32.560 | being out in the light movement activity.

00:33:35.280 | You're doing things when the light is out,

00:33:37.840 | but then when the sun sets and when darkness comes,

00:33:41.680 | we want to be prioritizing sort of a day mode

00:33:44.040 | versus night mode.

00:33:45.800 | And when that night mode comes about,

00:33:47.520 | we want to really shift our environment accordingly.

00:33:50.320 | Why?

00:33:51.160 | Because there's something known as zeitgeibers

00:33:53.280 | or time givers.

00:33:54.720 | And these are just, you know,

00:33:56.080 | kind of sayings of what are some of the things

00:33:58.680 | that massively impact our circadian health.

00:34:01.880 | And the most important,

00:34:03.960 | if you get nothing else out of what I'm saying,

00:34:05.520 | I know we're talking about a lot of things,

00:34:06.800 | but if you get nothing else out of what I'm saying,

00:34:08.960 | it's minding your light dark cycles

00:34:12.480 | is our most paramount to strengthening our circadian rhythm.

00:34:16.280 | You know, I go to these like sleep conferences

00:34:18.520 | and believe it or not, they're sleep conferences.

00:34:20.440 | And some of the biggest takeaways can be boiling down

00:34:24.160 | to having ultra bright days and dark nights.

00:34:28.000 | And that can sound so simplistic,

00:34:30.280 | but most of us are not doing this

00:34:32.600 | to the point that there was just this year,

00:34:35.720 | a call from a scientific consensus of focusing

00:34:39.400 | and pulling from almost 250 circadian scientists

00:34:43.320 | referencing almost 2,700 peer reviewed scientific papers

00:34:48.320 | pointing to the need to add warning labels on light bulbs

00:34:52.680 | when used at night.

00:34:54.440 | So why?

00:34:56.080 | Because they found that the use of simply

00:34:59.120 | just boring old light bulbs that we're using

00:35:01.440 | on a routine basis are increasing rates of cancer,

00:35:05.280 | diabetes, heart disease, mental health issues,

00:35:09.480 | as well as of course our sleep awake challenges

00:35:12.760 | that we might be seeing.

00:35:14.280 | So something so simple as swapping out our light bulbs

00:35:18.240 | to go from our traditional LEDs,

00:35:20.520 | which now 'cause incandescence became illegal this year,

00:35:23.640 | so which were more closely aligned

00:35:25.440 | with the rhythms of nature.

00:35:26.680 | Those are now illegal, you can't purchase those.

00:35:28.720 | So now you're left with fluorescents and LEDs.

00:35:32.120 | So of those, they tend to be very blue rich

00:35:35.880 | and blue is gonna disrupt your melatonin production

00:35:38.320 | to levels that most people don't realize the impact.

00:35:41.760 | So at the bare minimum,

00:35:43.400 | you're changing your light bulbs in your environment

00:35:46.080 | to mimic the rhythms of nature.

00:35:48.700 | So one thing that we used to be around was fire

00:35:51.280 | and fire was kind of that first biohack

00:35:53.240 | and that was very red rich.

00:35:55.320 | So we want our light bulbs to be more

00:35:57.760 | of that red amber color or candle lights,

00:36:01.760 | Himalayan salt lamps, any of this very dim lighting.

00:36:04.760 | So you wanna first start there, but it doesn't end there.

00:36:08.000 | You have to in the mornings to help inoculate yourself

00:36:10.840 | from any of those negative impacts

00:36:12.840 | of even any of this foe light.

00:36:14.880 | You really need to get that bright light exposure by day

00:36:18.840 | and much more than you're gonna be getting indoors.

00:36:21.440 | Why?

00:36:22.280 | 'Cause the average indoor environment

00:36:23.920 | is usually somewhere below about a thousand lux.

00:36:26.760 | Whereas if you go outside in summer day,

00:36:30.640 | it can be up to a hundred thousand lux.

00:36:32.960 | So that is a huge difference

00:36:35.000 | and we do not understand what that's doing

00:36:37.200 | to our health and wellbeing, particularly our sleep.

00:36:39.600 | So beginning there, then the second piece

00:36:42.680 | would be going into things like temperature timing,

00:36:45.500 | meal timing, exercise timing,

00:36:48.440 | thought timing and drug timing.

00:36:51.280 | So all of this timing phenomenon

00:36:53.440 | of where you're putting things in your day

00:36:56.040 | will impact your circadian strength

00:36:58.600 | and by effect your sleep-wake kind of signaling.

00:37:03.600 | - Okay, so let's run through these.

00:37:05.200 | So for light, the takeaway is get rid of the blue lights

00:37:09.280 | in your kind of room and maybe replace them

00:37:11.420 | with brighter, warmer lights.

00:37:14.480 | - Yeah, and just make sure that it's not just says,

00:37:18.460 | 'cause some of them will say like, oh, warm tone LEDs.

00:37:21.920 | But traditionally what we often see

00:37:24.360 | is that those are still insufficient.

00:37:25.760 | They're still have blue in many of them.

00:37:28.760 | So just making sure they should really look

00:37:30.560 | pretty amber hued or red.

00:37:33.080 | And now more of them will actually point

00:37:34.960 | to that they've been tested

00:37:35.980 | so that they'll still be sleep friendly.

00:37:38.400 | So those are some things

00:37:39.760 | that I would make sure you're having.

00:37:41.760 | - And then I assume if once you're up,

00:37:43.640 | open all the windows.

00:37:44.620 | If you're not getting outside right away,

00:37:46.460 | at least open up the windows, but even better, go outside.

00:37:49.000 | - Even better, go outside.

00:37:50.000 | Because there are studies that show

00:37:51.440 | that it can take anywhere from 50 to a hundred times longer

00:37:54.120 | to reset your master clock

00:37:55.920 | when getting light from behind windows.

00:37:57.840 | Like if we're watching the video,

00:37:59.000 | I've got all these windows behind me.

00:38:01.160 | This is, even though I've got so much light coming in here,

00:38:03.240 | it's still insufficient to reset my master clock

00:38:06.720 | in the morning if I was just to rest on my laurels

00:38:09.240 | and only get light from behind here.

00:38:11.320 | So you really need to go outside.

00:38:13.200 | Why?

00:38:14.040 | Because the light is gonna hit your eyes.

00:38:16.600 | You don't want sunglasses on during this period

00:38:18.880 | in the morning, hats, any of those things

00:38:21.000 | that could obstruct that sunlight.

00:38:22.520 | You want it to go directly into your eyes,

00:38:24.240 | which is connected to that super chiasmatic nucleus.

00:38:27.720 | And that super chiasmatic nucleus

00:38:29.640 | is kind of that master clock

00:38:31.640 | that then's communicating to all of these peripheral clocks

00:38:34.640 | in virtually every cell and organ in our body.

00:38:37.080 | So trillions of clocks that are looking to help stay on time

00:38:42.080 | and facilitate the workability of your sleep-wake cycle

00:38:45.720 | among many other things.

00:38:47.320 | But if you don't get that signaling process,

00:38:50.200 | particularly in the first half of your day,

00:38:52.440 | so our ideal would be,

00:38:54.120 | 'cause I know some people are like,

00:38:54.960 | well, I don't have a lot of time, where do I put it?

00:38:57.360 | At least beginning with that first early morning piece.

00:39:01.040 | So when you first get up,

00:39:02.680 | our philosophy is kind of like get up and out.

00:39:05.320 | So you wanna get up and out of bed,

00:39:07.640 | but outside, so the dog walkers and all the things

00:39:10.800 | are really winning the day here,

00:39:12.080 | the people that have reasons to bring their animals

00:39:15.480 | or pets outside or what have you.

00:39:17.680 | But even, so whatever's going on in your life,

00:39:20.240 | if you can set yourself up to get out there,

00:39:22.640 | that will make such a huge difference

00:39:24.160 | for then resetting this master clock.

00:39:25.960 | And then it creates almost this invisible countdown

00:39:28.880 | to when you're gonna get sleepy in the evening,

00:39:31.520 | 16 hours or so later into the night

00:39:34.440 | of when you'll be developing more melatonin in the evening.

00:39:37.280 | So they're connected.

00:39:38.480 | - So this morning, I just looked,

00:39:39.960 | San Francisco, sunrise, 6.49.

00:39:42.520 | I was up before 6.49.

00:39:45.120 | If I get up at six, is there a benefit to going outside

00:39:47.880 | when it's not bright yet?

00:39:49.360 | Or should I really be waiting until the sun is out

00:39:51.800 | and it's a bright day to go outside?

00:39:53.560 | - Yeah, so it's a very good question.

00:39:56.000 | Because for a lot of people,

00:39:57.200 | then there's a reality of life.

00:39:58.880 | They've got circumstances, they've got kids,

00:40:00.560 | they've got jobs, they've got whatever.

00:40:02.440 | So what do you do when you're waking up

00:40:04.400 | before the sun is rising?

00:40:05.880 | Well, there's kind of a couple camps

00:40:08.280 | that have been emerging on this.

00:40:09.960 | So one from sort of a scientific circadian perspective,

00:40:14.680 | a lot of the recommendation will be,

00:40:16.440 | all right, well, if that's the case,

00:40:17.920 | then you can use faux interventions.

00:40:20.400 | So you can use like sad lamps and things that,

00:40:23.280 | so seasonal affective disorder lamps,

00:40:24.800 | really bright lights, bright blue lights.

00:40:27.360 | So the time when we would be potentially

00:40:30.400 | cultivating more blue light would be in the morning.

00:40:33.080 | And so that would be the suggestion from that camp,

00:40:35.720 | is getting as much of that blue light in your eyes

00:40:37.760 | as possible in the morning.

00:40:39.280 | Now, kind of more, if you'll say like

00:40:42.720 | ancestral health proponents will instead point to

00:40:47.040 | in the morning versus getting all that bright light

00:40:51.000 | and kind of the activity that that would be,

00:40:52.960 | if you can still align with the rhythms of nature

00:40:55.120 | and use a red light during that time,

00:40:57.440 | that would be the suggestion of this emerging kind of camp,

00:41:00.960 | is to then wait till you are getting outside

00:41:03.960 | to get that natural light and truly syncing up

00:41:06.480 | with those rhythms of nature.

00:41:08.040 | Now, my suggestion on that is,

00:41:10.200 | if you are able to align with these rhythms,

00:41:13.280 | that's always preferable.

00:41:14.520 | We did that for thousands of years.

00:41:17.000 | Edison only came up with the light bulb

00:41:19.160 | about 144 years ago.

00:41:21.080 | So we have this kind of recency bias

00:41:22.920 | where we think that this is just always how it's been,

00:41:25.160 | but in the span of human history,

00:41:27.600 | this is a very new phenomenon

00:41:29.040 | that we can even do these sort of things.

00:41:30.880 | So if you are leaning towards

00:41:33.520 | and have the ability to create your schedule in such a way,

00:41:36.640 | that could be great.

00:41:37.480 | So you could perfectly kind of align with those rhythms.

00:41:40.560 | But if you cannot, which I have plenty of clients who can't,

00:41:43.840 | then you could lean into technology

00:41:46.120 | to kind of help wake you up

00:41:48.080 | at the times that you are needing to get up.

00:41:50.360 | - With the right lights in the room and that kind of stuff.

00:41:52.640 | - Exactly.

00:41:53.480 | There's even like glasses that are being created

00:41:56.280 | that will have blue lights that will shoot right into yours.

00:41:58.480 | So you could be, you know, making breakfast,

00:42:00.080 | doing whatever you need,

00:42:00.920 | and then you can be kind of, you know, Star Trek-esque.

00:42:04.400 | - Okay, so that's lighting.

00:42:07.960 | What about what's in the room?

00:42:09.920 | You know, your mattress, your pillows,

00:42:12.040 | all that kind of stuff.

00:42:13.960 | - Okay, so one of my biggest suggestions,

00:42:16.440 | 'cause after light/dark is temperature

00:42:19.640 | being really important for your circadian health.

00:42:23.160 | So for temperature,

00:42:24.120 | what a lot of people are missing the mark on

00:42:25.760 | is that they might know,

00:42:27.240 | yeah, we want to sleep in kind of cool environment,

00:42:29.440 | but they might not know to what degree

00:42:31.480 | and some of the things that are available.

00:42:33.720 | So one, some of the suggestion out of the Sleep Foundation

00:42:36.520 | is in the realm of around 60 to 67 degrees Fahrenheit

00:42:40.320 | for ambient sleep temperature,

00:42:42.200 | which many people I speak with are not in that range.

00:42:46.120 | So even just beginning there,

00:42:47.760 | and of course,

00:42:48.600 | we don't want this to be massively uncomfortable for you.

00:42:51.760 | So play with this accordingly.

00:42:53.400 | But I think people are often surprised,

00:42:55.760 | especially when they start tracking

00:42:56.960 | to see when they lower the ambient temperature

00:42:59.080 | that they often get better sleep results,

00:43:00.760 | less sleep fragmentation, less wake-ups.

00:43:03.080 | 'Cause even if it's kind of a little chilly when you go in,

00:43:05.680 | then throughout the course of the night,

00:43:07.520 | you can benefit from that,

00:43:09.440 | especially when we're moving into REM

00:43:11.160 | and we start heating up the body.

00:43:12.560 | And that's when often people might wake up

00:43:14.800 | 'cause now they're hot

00:43:15.720 | and when they didn't go to bed hot.

00:43:17.680 | But the other thing that I would definitely suggest

00:43:20.120 | if available to people,

00:43:21.360 | now this is a bit of an investment,

00:43:22.640 | but if it's on the table is a cooling mattress topper.

00:43:27.640 | So like Chili, Sleep Me, Eight Sleep, Sleep Number,

00:43:32.640 | different companies that offer the ability

00:43:35.000 | to cool the mattress itself.

00:43:37.120 | Why?

00:43:37.960 | Because historically we would have slept outside

00:43:40.880 | on the ground as part of our thinking

00:43:42.920 | or closer to the ground,

00:43:45.000 | which would have been part of the coolest part

00:43:47.000 | of our environment.

00:43:49.040 | So even though it can sound newfangled and fancy,

00:43:51.840 | we're kind of mimicking how we assume

00:43:54.440 | we likely had slept for thousands of years previously.

00:43:58.240 | So getting that cooling effect

00:44:00.160 | versus the kind of the cooking that can happen

00:44:03.760 | when we're in full mattresses

00:44:05.680 | covered with these heavy duvets

00:44:07.360 | and then have our own body temperature

00:44:09.440 | just in there for seven to nine hours

00:44:12.000 | throughout the whole course of the night.

00:44:13.360 | And many of us are then waking up from that heat effect

00:44:17.840 | and that can be problematic.

00:44:19.360 | Forgetting the technology,

00:44:20.840 | if you just assume you've got a mattress, no topper,

00:44:23.280 | and you could choose between,

00:44:24.760 | but if the room's too cold,

00:44:26.720 | you often need a lot of sheets and duvets,

00:44:28.840 | or you could leave the room a little warmer,

00:44:30.560 | but a top sheet is one of those paths better.

00:44:33.520 | If you assume you need a temperature

00:44:35.400 | that you can comfortably sleep in.

00:44:36.920 | Okay, so one, there's gonna be

00:44:38.600 | a bio-individual component to this

00:44:40.320 | 'cause each person's gonna run cooler or hotter,

00:44:42.400 | so it will depend on you.

00:44:44.160 | But I would begin with the most gentle process out of it.

00:44:48.680 | So if you're usually sleeping at 72 degrees,

00:44:52.160 | then I would have you begin at say 67

00:44:55.000 | and see how are we faring with that.

00:44:57.600 | 'Cause we're not trying to freeze you

00:44:59.840 | out of your sleep results

00:45:01.160 | 'cause that can be negatively impactful as well.

00:45:04.280 | So we would begin at kind of the least, most impactful dose.

00:45:09.280 | So you would start at around that 67,

00:45:11.480 | see how that affects you.

00:45:14.200 | Now this is going to change depending on each individual.

00:45:17.960 | So especially women of menstruating age,

00:45:20.400 | you might find different parts of your cycle,

00:45:22.520 | you're gonna be massively different on a temperature scale

00:45:25.360 | than you would be just two weeks prior

00:45:27.800 | if you're in luteal versus the beginning of your cycle.

00:45:31.000 | So these things are not,

00:45:32.440 | I know we'd like to be able to say,

00:45:33.920 | oh yeah, well you just put it at 63

00:45:35.960 | and that's how it goes.

00:45:38.080 | But it's not quite as,

00:45:39.960 | it doesn't quite work like that.

00:45:43.240 | So instead, we wanna keep beginning

00:45:46.120 | at what can be comfortable for you

00:45:48.520 | and keep working your way back.

00:45:49.960 | This is where trackers can really be helpful

00:45:52.240 | in the process too,

00:45:53.320 | to see how do you respond when you start like that.

00:45:56.640 | - And when it comes to the environment in the bed,

00:45:59.920 | do you want, is more or less sheets better?

00:46:03.360 | - So I would say that what we're trying to do

00:46:07.480 | is a banana shape throughout the course of the night.

00:46:10.160 | So basically, you're starting in

00:46:12.600 | when you're comfortably warm, right?

00:46:15.120 | And then we're helping to facilitate

00:46:16.960 | that we're cooling throughout the course of the night

00:46:19.080 | and facilitate that our body can be cool

00:46:22.040 | at some of those lower levels.

00:46:23.360 | And then when you get into REM,

00:46:24.960 | you would be warming up into the early morning hours.

00:46:29.080 | So you might find that if you do have a wake up,

00:46:32.000 | that you might kind of take off one of those sheets

00:46:34.280 | throughout the course when you're going into REM.

00:46:36.960 | That's perfectly natural and normal.

00:46:39.720 | But it's not a static piece

00:46:42.480 | where you're just staying at the same temperature

00:46:44.320 | throughout the whole course of the night.

00:46:45.440 | So it might adjust for you.

00:46:47.440 | And what you ate, what time did you eat?

00:46:50.480 | Do you have alcohol?

00:46:51.440 | Do you have all these other things

00:46:52.360 | that might've impacted your body temperature?

00:46:55.960 | But traditionally, we usually want breathable materials

00:47:00.200 | in your bed.

00:47:01.040 | So you want breathable sheets, breathable duvets.

00:47:04.760 | You want mattresses that are not gonna trap heat

00:47:07.280 | 'cause a lot of them are trapping that heat.

00:47:09.520 | So you want the ability for this to not get stuck

00:47:12.760 | and kind of insulating you.

00:47:14.920 | - Obviously, you mentioned the technology.

00:47:17.640 | I'm a huge fan, right?

00:47:18.480 | I had an eight sleep.

00:47:19.320 | I don't, I didn't have one.

00:47:20.160 | I still have one.

00:47:21.000 | I have an eight sleep.

00:47:22.400 | It's been fantastic.

00:47:23.880 | They've been a partner of the show.

00:47:25.080 | So I haven't tried every product.

00:47:27.480 | I imagine there are many products you can use.

00:47:30.040 | I just happened to have an experience there

00:47:31.760 | that was good enough to reach out to them

00:47:33.320 | and work with them.

00:47:34.160 | And it's very helpful when you're trying

00:47:36.520 | to do exactly what you described.

00:47:38.800 | I would prefer to fall asleep a little warmer,

00:47:40.880 | but I'm okay sleeping a little cooler.

00:47:42.640 | And for me to fall asleep, cool.

00:47:44.720 | So this has been a good balance for me

00:47:46.520 | to have kind of a thin sheet on top,

00:47:49.000 | stay warm, falling asleep.

00:47:50.240 | So I've been a big fan.

00:47:52.160 | Everybody listening knows that allthehacks.com/8sleep

00:47:55.240 | and you can get a discount on the eight sleep cover.

00:47:58.400 | So totally vouch on the technology.

00:48:00.560 | What about pillows?

00:48:01.400 | How does the, or sleep position,

00:48:03.360 | you know, sleeping on your side, your stomach,

00:48:05.520 | all those kinds of things.

00:48:06.360 | How does that affect sleep?

00:48:07.560 | Yeah, big deal.

00:48:09.720 | Particularly for the prevalence of mouth breathing,

00:48:12.880 | we're seeing a lot of that

00:48:13.920 | throughout the course of the night.

00:48:14.840 | And what position can kind of facilitate more of that

00:48:18.520 | is often sleeping on your back.

00:48:21.000 | And so we're just trying to make sure

00:48:22.800 | that we're not mouth breathing.

00:48:24.200 | That's one of our biggest concerns with sleep.

00:48:26.320 | And so that can often spill over into rates of sleep apnea,

00:48:29.800 | upper airway resistance syndrome,

00:48:31.400 | which is much more prevalent than most people realize.

00:48:34.800 | So our understanding,

00:48:36.080 | we just had an expert on the podcast at ENT

00:48:40.240 | that pointed to our estimations are globally

00:48:43.520 | about one in four people having sleep apnea.

00:48:46.320 | And of that only about 10% of these insurances

00:48:51.280 | of sleep apnea being actually diagnosed.

00:48:54.480 | So we're dealing with just a lot of people

00:48:57.120 | running around undiagnosed

00:48:58.880 | for some of these respiratory-based disorders.

00:49:02.880 | So sleeping on your back can often

00:49:05.040 | be a big flare up for that.

00:49:06.680 | So our opt-in recommendation for sleep

00:49:08.720 | is a side sleeping element 'cause we do see that

00:49:12.000 | when we're sleeping on our stomach,

00:49:13.720 | then that can sometimes mess with some of both our breathing

00:49:17.920 | and then of course, comfort and some of the other issues

00:49:20.600 | that might come up from spine positional piece.

00:49:24.080 | But if you're not dealing with,

00:49:25.160 | if you're just like amazing of a breather

00:49:27.480 | and we're not dealing with that,

00:49:28.480 | then you could benefit from some of the elements

00:49:31.840 | of sleeping on your back.

00:49:32.960 | If so, there's of course different types of pillows

00:49:35.720 | that you might bring in for each one of those

00:49:38.920 | side sleeping versus back sleeping.

00:49:41.680 | - What about mouth tape?

00:49:43.080 | I'm not comfortable sleeping on my back.

00:49:44.680 | If the goal is sleep on my back to prevent mouth breathing,

00:49:47.840 | could I just sleep on my stomach or my side

00:49:49.680 | and tape my mouth?

00:49:50.720 | - Great question.

00:49:51.800 | No, it's so funny 'cause there's a bit of a,

00:49:56.200 | I guess you could say debate or this topic of sleep,

00:50:00.640 | this topic of mouth breathing in the sleep community

00:50:03.000 | has really flared up.

00:50:04.480 | And there's a lot of concern that so many people now

00:50:07.720 | are starting to mouth tape.

00:50:09.000 | And I can be such a fan of mouth taping,

00:50:11.680 | but I think here are the caveats.

00:50:13.200 | And this is why a lot of the sleep community

00:50:14.680 | is upset about it.

00:50:15.760 | Is that many people are just mouth taping

00:50:19.480 | and not taking the steps to get tested

00:50:23.240 | to make sure there's no respiratory based disturbances

00:50:26.280 | at play.

00:50:27.120 | Because if you are, you truly are just band-aiding

00:50:30.440 | the problem to the point that it can actually make it worse

00:50:33.360 | in some cases.

00:50:34.720 | If you do have sleep apnea, upper air resistance syndrome,

00:50:38.320 | some of the snoring, but that's not to say that one,

00:50:41.840 | if we clear that out, make sure that's not present

00:50:44.800 | and you're good to go,

00:50:46.080 | then that you couldn't benefit from mouth taping.

00:50:48.360 | And it's also not to say that then if we discover

00:50:51.160 | you did an at-home sleep test, easy breezy,

00:50:53.360 | you find out you have one of these disorders,

00:50:55.680 | which are really prevalent,

00:50:57.040 | then can we use mouth tape to help

00:51:00.000 | with the treatment process

00:51:01.600 | that you're also being treated for this

00:51:03.680 | and using mouth tape.

00:51:05.040 | You can absolutely do that as well.

00:51:07.440 | But I think there's just a concern

00:51:08.960 | 'cause some people are now just blindly taking these steps

00:51:12.880 | without knowing that they might be doing some harm.

00:51:15.720 | - We can all buy these trackers

00:51:16.840 | and we're gonna get to technology in a little bit,

00:51:18.360 | but at what point does it make sense,

00:51:20.440 | or maybe high level, how much would it even cost

00:51:23.760 | to do some kind of more rigorous study on sleep,

00:51:26.800 | either at your home or in a lab?

00:51:28.440 | - So exciting that we're at a time

00:51:30.920 | where now you can be tested at home

00:51:33.720 | and for some pretty reasonable price points,

00:51:36.760 | even out of pocket.

00:51:38.120 | So in the United States, there's a number of companies

00:51:41.640 | that you can be sent very quickly an at-home sleep test,

00:51:44.920 | often around $200 or so out of pocket

00:51:48.840 | to be tested for some of these

00:51:51.480 | breathing-based sleep disorders,

00:51:53.640 | so these respiratory sleep disorders.

00:51:55.680 | Now, if you think that you might have

00:51:57.680 | something more egregious, we wanna be checked

00:52:00.520 | as far as sleep stages are concerned,

00:52:02.440 | 'cause again, to truly understand sleep stages,

00:52:04.800 | you really do wanna look at the brain

00:52:07.080 | and the brain activity.

00:52:08.040 | And then if you're concerned about things

00:52:09.520 | like restless leg or other things, narcolepsy, et cetera,

00:52:12.920 | there might be a time and a place to go in lab.

00:52:15.280 | But now, if you're looking at that respiratory piece,

00:52:19.160 | you can just get tested by companies

00:52:21.320 | like Lofta, Empower Sleep, other companies are available,

00:52:25.800 | no affiliation, but these can send you a medical device

00:52:29.760 | that you can test at night in the comfort of your own home,

00:52:32.280 | which is a big deal, 'cause many people feel like

00:52:34.640 | they can't sleep well in some of these facilities,

00:52:38.480 | and so this can be a nice option in between.

00:52:41.040 | - And are these more for testing

00:52:44.600 | kind of sleep-related disorders,

00:52:46.560 | or could they be a more accurate version

00:52:50.280 | of using sleep trackers?

00:52:51.360 | Or if you're someone who's like, I sleep pretty well,

00:52:53.840 | but I'm certainly open to getting from a 90 to a 100,

00:52:58.080 | is the sleep study at home,

00:53:00.320 | is that gonna help in that department,

00:53:01.800 | or is it more diagnosing things?

00:53:05.440 | - Great question.

00:53:06.280 | So there are some pieces of tech,

00:53:08.120 | like the Wesper is one that you can use

00:53:12.400 | literally as like a little patch,

00:53:14.200 | and that will give you some information,

00:53:16.000 | kind of an in-between.

00:53:16.920 | It's not quite a consumer-grade tracker,

00:53:19.440 | it's not quite a at-home sleep test,

00:53:21.880 | but it's giving you more in-depth information,

00:53:24.240 | so that can glean some more information

00:53:26.520 | from something like that.

00:53:27.960 | But the at-home sleep tests that are gonna give you

00:53:31.120 | a kind of medical stamp of approval of saying,

00:53:34.200 | okay, yes, it does appear that you do have

00:53:36.320 | sleep apnea, for example.

00:53:38.640 | If that's the case, then you're only gonna test

00:53:41.240 | for most of them one or two nights,

00:53:43.880 | most of the time, a couple nights max.

00:53:45.800 | And out of that, if we do come back

00:53:48.700 | with some disorders present,

00:53:50.480 | that is gonna totally ripple into your results

00:53:53.800 | with your sleep trackers to go from whatever,

00:53:56.920 | the 80s to the high 90s, or whatever,

00:54:00.280 | in certain periods of time.

00:54:01.840 | And it won't be the whole story,

00:54:03.320 | but it will certainly help support

00:54:05.280 | the improvement of those stats.

00:54:07.520 | And to clarify, you won't always just be getting 90s

00:54:10.040 | or something, I don't wanna misspeak for people

00:54:13.040 | that might think the minute you get diagnosed

00:54:15.280 | with sleep apnea or something, settle and treat it,

00:54:17.080 | then you're gonna skyrocket,

00:54:18.800 | but it's gonna be a big piece of the puzzle.

00:54:21.440 | - Let's go on to food, and let's also include drinking,

00:54:23.840 | probably has a huge impact on sleep.

00:54:25.960 | - Absolutely.

00:54:26.800 | It's one of the more fascinating areas I find,

00:54:30.680 | and one of the more challenging areas

00:54:32.600 | for a lot of people to make this lasting change.

00:54:35.800 | What would this change look like?

00:54:37.040 | Well, one, you can understand something known

00:54:40.440 | as circadian rhythm intermittent fasting.

00:54:43.480 | And this is just a fancy series of words

00:54:45.840 | that basically means that we're looking to eat largely

00:54:49.400 | when the sun is out, and largely provide a bit

00:54:53.520 | of that digestive break in the evening when it's dark out.

00:54:57.000 | Now, this is not to lose your mind over,

00:55:00.400 | because of course, there are certain periods of time

00:55:02.240 | when you will be eating when it's dark out.

00:55:05.000 | So we're just looking to kind of cluster

00:55:08.600 | a lot of your eating time closer to these rhythms of nature.

00:55:12.320 | And this is what we would have done for so many years.

00:55:14.880 | So how can we bring this into our modern society?

00:55:17.720 | Right now, a lot of the research on this

00:55:21.120 | is coming out of the Salk Institute, Dr. Sachin Panda.

00:55:25.120 | We did a fascinating podcast episode with him,

00:55:27.880 | and highly suggest checking that out

00:55:29.520 | if you wanna learn more.

00:55:30.920 | But what I would say about the takeaways with that

00:55:34.240 | is that his finding after decades of research,

00:55:37.320 | lots of great books, et cetera,

00:55:38.920 | is that bare minimum, the last bite of food you have,

00:55:43.000 | you're having that about three hours before bed.

00:55:46.640 | Now, I'll also say that we also find even just

00:55:50.800 | on the ground from a lot of wearable data,

00:55:53.000 | some benefits for people even going a bit further than that.

00:55:55.640 | So this is more in the anecdotal clinical setting.

00:55:59.240 | But if we look at things like four to five hours

00:56:03.800 | before bed experimentation with that,

00:56:06.520 | your last bite of food,

00:56:08.000 | often we see things like heart rate go down,

00:56:10.600 | HRV go up, changes in body temperature, blood oxygen,

00:56:14.560 | of course, your instances of sleep apnea.

00:56:17.480 | 'Cause we know that if you are having

00:56:19.400 | any respiratory based issues or mouth breathing, et cetera,

00:56:23.080 | that some of these things can flare up

00:56:25.080 | if you're eating too close to bed.

00:56:27.400 | So that would be the big takeaway

00:56:29.440 | is just minding those evenings

00:56:32.480 | and giving yourself some break.

00:56:34.200 | Because unfortunately, many people that we look at

00:56:38.120 | are now eating most of their day

00:56:40.440 | from when they first wake up to when they're going to bed,

00:56:42.960 | not too much before that.

00:56:45.040 | So this is problematic.

00:56:47.280 | - Any particular foods to avoid

00:56:49.360 | either at different times of the day or all together?

00:56:51.880 | - Yeah, so there's a reason that we so often

00:56:56.040 | have people wearing continuous glucose monitors,

00:56:58.840 | because one of the more common reasons

00:57:01.320 | that people are having wake ups in the middle of the night,

00:57:04.520 | if it's not a sleep disorder or for outside of anxiety

00:57:08.720 | and depression and other things, it can get more layered.

00:57:11.920 | But a very common reason is blood sugar instability.

00:57:16.040 | So we're looking to find, to bring in foods

00:57:19.440 | that are gonna help support kind of a healthy,

00:57:22.840 | where they fall in the glycemic index.

00:57:24.600 | Can we have something that's not gonna massively spike us

00:57:27.600 | throughout the course of the day

00:57:28.760 | and then have a subsequent crash?

00:57:31.040 | Because how we're managing our days

00:57:33.400 | often gets mirrored in our nights in many regards,

00:57:36.480 | but that is not excluded with blood sugar.

00:57:39.800 | So that would be one of the areas

00:57:41.920 | that you can both measurably see to the point

00:57:44.120 | that many companies are now even integrating

00:57:48.240 | with companies like Oura or Whoop.

00:57:50.840 | But we can say things like Vari is a company

00:57:54.000 | that integrates with Oura now

00:57:55.560 | so that you can overlay your sleep data

00:57:58.080 | and then see, oh, look, I crashed at 3 a.m.

00:58:01.400 | and I also had a wake up.

00:58:03.320 | So you can start to correlate some of those things

00:58:05.360 | that are very much connected.

00:58:07.200 | So that would be one place to begin.

00:58:08.640 | And of course, inflammatory foods that you're having,

00:58:12.840 | so that can impact the airway

00:58:14.760 | and kind of the size of the airway.

00:58:17.080 | We're looking to avoid things like coarse sugars.

00:58:21.160 | So we'll see people just go on some of these

00:58:24.240 | kind of sugar cleanses or Whole30

00:58:26.480 | or all these different things that people do.

00:58:28.320 | And it will visually even look different

00:58:31.160 | in their sleep results in those sections of time

00:58:33.920 | when they do change their diet type,

00:58:36.240 | even aside from diet timing.

00:58:38.680 | But if you look at management of both,

00:58:41.560 | the timing and the type of food,

00:58:43.680 | then you can often get a real change in your sleep.

00:58:46.720 | And to the point that I have seen reliably,

00:58:49.600 | people even having things like changes

00:58:52.320 | in up to around 10 beats per minute in the heart rate,

00:58:55.760 | just in a relatively quick period of time

00:58:57.520 | just by moving the timing.

00:58:59.480 | So their heart rate going down markedly

00:59:02.120 | just by moving that timing of that type of food.

00:59:04.600 | And then of course, if they change the type of food as well,

00:59:07.680 | that can also be augmented.

00:59:09.400 | - Are there any foods that you would encourage people

00:59:12.760 | to add to their day or their evenings

00:59:15.320 | or anything to encourage sleep?

00:59:17.000 | - Yeah, so now this can get into lots of different topics

00:59:21.440 | on kind of food wars of protein versus,

00:59:24.560 | what are our macros or what have you.

00:59:25.960 | But I will say that a couple things to think of.

00:59:28.960 | One, checking in on your choline,

00:59:31.880 | the amount of choline you're having

00:59:33.160 | and how that can play a role in things like your REM.

00:59:36.120 | So quality of REM, the duration of REM.

00:59:39.120 | - What's choline?

00:59:40.480 | - Choline can be both supplemental,

00:59:42.760 | but also in things like eggs and certain meats

00:59:46.720 | and certain things that you can be aware of.

00:59:49.360 | We wanna be getting choline.

00:59:50.640 | And if you're not getting that in your diet,

00:59:52.200 | if that doesn't apply to you,

00:59:53.800 | then we might wanna supplement for some of those things.

00:59:56.080 | Now, of course, this is just one piece of the puzzle.

00:59:59.040 | So I don't want people to feel like

01:00:00.160 | they need to immediately go out and supplement,

01:00:02.320 | but being aware that some of these nutritional items

01:00:06.640 | are so important for our sleep quality.

01:00:10.240 | So the most basic is that if we're looking,

01:00:14.160 | we wanna avoid things that are gonna spike us highly.

01:00:17.120 | So going, if you even Google the glycemic index

01:00:20.360 | and go on the things that are gonna be

01:00:22.080 | the most spike heavy,

01:00:24.520 | we wanna be kind of mindful of those

01:00:26.880 | because those are gonna show up in those sleep results.

01:00:29.960 | And they also, if we're eating too close to bedtime,

01:00:34.480 | then that temperature spike can often go up

01:00:38.080 | and that can be counterproductive

01:00:40.600 | to helping us guide off to sleep.

01:00:42.440 | 'Cause you wanna remember that we're looking

01:00:44.240 | to set up our evening so that we're dropping

01:00:46.680 | our body temperature quite markedly

01:00:49.080 | in order to facilitate melatonin production

01:00:51.800 | and sleep onset.

01:00:53.520 | But if you're eating late and the types of foods

01:00:56.000 | that are gonna be kind of upping your body temperature,

01:00:59.600 | that like those high glycemic load and what have you,

01:01:03.120 | then it can make your body temperature too high

01:01:06.240 | and that can be troublesome to fall asleep.

01:01:09.360 | - What about drinks?

01:01:10.520 | I know caffeine and alcohol kind of have a huge impact

01:01:14.000 | on sleep, what's the concise advice there?

01:01:17.880 | - Okay, so this goes under the umbrella

01:01:21.120 | of chronopharmacology, the timing of your drugs.

01:01:24.120 | So where are you gonna put your drugs?

01:01:25.800 | Caffeine, we would like to keep on the first half

01:01:28.720 | of your day knowing that there's bioindividuality.

01:01:31.240 | Some people are slow or fast metabolizers.

01:01:33.840 | So if it takes you a long time to metabolize that,

01:01:37.920 | then you might wanna be aware

01:01:39.040 | and move it a bit earlier in your day.

01:01:41.040 | So what could that look like?

01:01:42.360 | So for some people, I find them,

01:01:44.640 | we try to put it before around 12 p.m.

01:01:46.880 | This is generalized depending on your sleep-wake schedule,

01:01:49.760 | but for most people, if you struggle to metabolize that.

01:01:53.840 | For some people, they might be faster metabolizers

01:01:56.100 | and they can get away with a little bit later,

01:01:58.160 | something like 2 p.m. or so,

01:02:01.560 | 'cause you have a bit more wiggle room.

01:02:04.280 | But you wanna kind of check in also subjectively.

01:02:07.240 | This is where the subject, you can both test with DNA,

01:02:11.240 | testing to see how fast or slow a metabolizer you are,

01:02:14.280 | but then the subjective assessment of,

01:02:16.920 | are you more sensitive to and struggle to fall asleep

01:02:20.220 | when you have that higher amount of caffeine?

01:02:22.680 | So that would be on the caffeine piece.

01:02:24.160 | For the alcohol piece, oh my goodness,

01:02:26.280 | this is the one where for most people with wearable data,

01:02:31.280 | that's one of the biggest takeaways they get

01:02:33.440 | is just how much they're impacted

01:02:34.960 | by even one drink or two drinks or what have you.

01:02:39.160 | And even if you're not tracking,

01:02:40.800 | then you can likely have a sense

01:02:42.540 | that you're waking up differently

01:02:44.600 | after a night of a drink or two,

01:02:47.080 | if you have stretches,

01:02:48.240 | long enough stretches of time without those.

01:02:50.400 | So the sad truth is that I very rarely see people

01:02:55.400 | be able to have alcohol

01:02:58.860 | and it not show up in your sleep results.

01:03:01.120 | What that looks like is it typically improves sleep onset,

01:03:04.960 | but then, so it truly does often help people fall asleep

01:03:08.560 | in many studies, but then it falls all apart.

01:03:11.600 | So then often we have a whole slew of sleep fragmentation.

01:03:15.440 | You're hotter throughout that course of the night,

01:03:17.520 | so it can impact the type of sleep that you're getting.

01:03:20.880 | So it can just be a whole mess.

01:03:22.120 | And similar to THC being another one

01:03:25.080 | that also seems to do something akin,

01:03:27.680 | so similar with often helping with falling asleep,

01:03:30.920 | but then the quality gets a little funky,

01:03:33.320 | but a little different on your readouts.

01:03:35.320 | But certainly with alcohol, the earlier the better.

01:03:39.200 | So if you can do things like happy hour,

01:03:41.680 | if you can do boozy brunches, any of these,

01:03:45.600 | that's truly one of the best ways to make it

01:03:48.160 | so that it's not hitting at your sleep so much.

01:03:50.600 | But the truth is it is one of the lowest hanging fruits

01:03:54.000 | that you can have to take out of your rotation

01:03:57.880 | to improve your sleep.

01:03:59.120 | - Okay, so we talked about food.

01:04:00.520 | Where does exercise fit into sleep?

01:04:02.640 | - Yeah, so exercise, if we think of our nature of exercise,

01:04:06.480 | one, any exercise for most people,

01:04:10.040 | 'cause we know most people are not exercising

01:04:11.840 | and moving their body enough.

01:04:13.040 | There's a lot of, some of the stats look at

01:04:17.220 | some of the average rates of even just steps per day,

01:04:20.600 | looking at somewhere in the realm

01:04:21.760 | around 3,000 steps per day.

01:04:23.400 | This is a quote out of Dr. Sachin Panda.

01:04:26.320 | So if we're somewhere in that realm of 3,000 steps or so,

01:04:30.600 | or just really sedentary lifestyle,

01:04:32.840 | we for sure wanna be prioritizing exercise in general,

01:04:36.320 | 'cause we know that this makes such a difference

01:04:38.020 | for our sleep results.

01:04:39.160 | If you wanna improve that sleep quality,

01:04:41.240 | exercise is a place to look.

01:04:42.960 | If you're someone that is into stats

01:04:45.480 | and you wanna improve things like your HRV,

01:04:47.520 | heart rate variability,

01:04:48.560 | exercise is definitely a place to look.

01:04:50.840 | But so first beginning there,

01:04:52.560 | so I don't wanna dissuade people from exercising,

01:04:55.600 | but the time can be helpful as well.

01:04:59.320 | So some of the circadian kind of approach can be,

01:05:03.080 | can you get a little bit of movement in the morning,

01:05:05.440 | ideally outside in the sunlight,

01:05:07.880 | so a morning walk or what have you.

01:05:10.440 | But then if you do have this available to yourself,

01:05:13.880 | you're stronger, so you're more physically intensive

01:05:17.480 | types of workouts later into the day

01:05:19.640 | when your body has had the opportunity to warm up a bit

01:05:22.520 | and have less of a risk of injury,

01:05:25.440 | you're kind of more able to be more cognitively intact

01:05:29.520 | to take on this task of exercising at that time

01:05:33.100 | is a theory around circadian entrainment.

01:05:36.680 | But please, if that does not work in your schedule,

01:05:39.600 | I don't want this to be a thing

01:05:41.080 | where well then I just don't work out

01:05:42.940 | because that is so not gonna serve us.

01:05:45.720 | - What about things like a little bit of yoga

01:05:47.840 | before bedtime, is that, you know,

01:05:50.080 | does that fall in the same bucket as exercise?

01:05:52.880 | - Yes, so really good.

01:05:56.560 | The type of exercise is a big deal

01:05:59.080 | and the environment of that exercise

01:06:00.920 | that you're having that in.

01:06:01.880 | So if you're going and you're doing your yoga,

01:06:04.860 | but it's in a blue lit gym

01:06:07.880 | and it's gonna require that you're getting all amped up

01:06:10.920 | and this is like right before bed,

01:06:12.880 | this can be obviously kind of problematic

01:06:15.360 | because it's counter cues.

01:06:17.020 | We're looking to as much as possible guide the body

01:06:19.920 | on what we want it to be doing when.

01:06:22.380 | So I would put yoga, stretching,

01:06:25.400 | some of these things as light movement of the body

01:06:29.040 | that can have a bit more latitude of where you put it

01:06:32.400 | if you have it in a relaxing environment.

01:06:35.140 | So that can give you some space

01:06:36.720 | of like where you wanna put this in your day.

01:06:38.720 | But things like HIIT, you know, CrossFit,

01:06:42.520 | you know, strength training, some of these things,

01:06:44.720 | then you might wanna be a bit more strategic

01:06:47.080 | on where you're putting this.

01:06:48.400 | Also, if you're dealing with times in your life

01:06:50.680 | where you've got really, you're struggling

01:06:52.360 | with cortisol load and you might test for this.

01:06:54.840 | So your cortisol pulse might be really high in the morning.

01:06:57.580 | You do something like a Dutch test or what have you.

01:07:00.400 | That might be a time when you don't wanna then

01:07:02.300 | have a high cortisol, then fast, then have, you know,

01:07:06.600 | coffee and then work out in the first thing in the morning.

01:07:09.160 | That just might be too much.

01:07:10.320 | So this might be dynamic for you,

01:07:12.060 | depending on what's going on in your life.

01:07:14.160 | - So for a lot of people, maybe with a partner that,

01:07:16.440 | you know, one of their routines was watch a show before bed.

01:07:19.600 | If we're, obviously you could put on some blue,

01:07:22.920 | like glasses or something,

01:07:24.240 | or maybe watch on a laptop with a red profile,

01:07:26.800 | but are there some activities that you could maybe do

01:07:29.320 | with a partner before bed, you know, potentially,

01:07:33.360 | skip over yoga, 'cause we'll come to that after,

01:07:35.440 | that you could do before bed

01:07:36.920 | that might be more promotive of good sleep?

01:07:40.760 | - Yes, absolutely.

01:07:43.080 | So one, we have a lot of different things

01:07:45.680 | that we can do to down regulate.

01:07:47.680 | Our whole goal in the evening is what are we doing

01:07:50.300 | in the hours leading up to help facilitate the brain

01:07:53.400 | coming out of this hyperactivity state

01:07:55.780 | to just calming itself down,

01:07:57.720 | walking down those stairs of kind of hyperactivity

01:08:00.760 | of the brain.

01:08:01.600 | So how can we do that?

01:08:02.760 | So one, we can change the environment.

01:08:04.660 | So whether that's music,

01:08:06.560 | whether that's the type of conversations we're engaging in,

01:08:09.640 | like massage, you know, kind of reflecting on our day

01:08:13.680 | and a gratitude exchanges,

01:08:15.720 | different things with our partner, the stretching piece,

01:08:19.720 | different things that can help facilitate,

01:08:22.320 | okay, we're gearing up for sleep.

01:08:24.360 | Some people will bring in things like Theragun

01:08:26.520 | and you can, you know, do this with your partner,

01:08:29.600 | but how can you make this a family affair?

01:08:32.840 | And the answer is yes,

01:08:34.820 | the more we can kind of all be engaging in this, the better.

01:08:37.720 | - And what about like playing cards?

01:08:39.600 | Where does that fall in the spectrum

01:08:41.200 | of like ramping down versus up?

01:08:43.640 | - That is a great question.

01:08:45.520 | I have never gotten that before.

01:08:46.840 | So as far as cards, so one, I mean,

01:08:49.640 | I work with a lot of poker players,

01:08:50.860 | so their type of card playing often is linked

01:08:54.640 | with heavy stress 'cause they might have millions

01:08:57.200 | on the line or what have you.

01:08:58.360 | So for them, it's a certain type of, you know, game,

01:09:01.840 | but if you're just playing maybe Uno or something,

01:09:03.680 | it's a whole maybe lower risk.

01:09:05.340 | So for that sort of engagement,

01:09:09.360 | what we think of even just from an ancestral perspective

01:09:12.040 | is the evenings were often meant for bonding,

01:09:14.640 | for connection, 'cause we know that loneliness

01:09:17.880 | and sleep are interconnected.

01:09:19.160 | So anything that you can do to kind of bond

01:09:21.120 | with your partner, your tribe, your people,

01:09:24.080 | that seems to make sense that it can help support

01:09:27.240 | over time our results with our sleep.

01:09:30.000 | So you just wanna check in periodically,

01:09:32.840 | like, are you super competitive

01:09:34.320 | and you're getting really stressed out

01:09:35.600 | at the end of this, you know, card game, you know,

01:09:39.200 | does this, could this be moved a little bit earlier?

01:09:42.320 | Do we need a bit more buffer time?

01:09:44.400 | So would we do this a bit earlier in our evening?

01:09:46.920 | And then maybe we add in some time

01:09:48.600 | to kind of wind down more with, you know,

01:09:50.240 | reading or something more low key.

01:09:53.120 | But if it's something that's just a really joyous,

01:09:56.280 | you know, activity for you and doesn't bring about stress,

01:09:59.060 | then that could be a great activity to bring in.

01:10:01.520 | - So does that mean if it's non-stressful

01:10:03.480 | but highly functioning in your brain,

01:10:06.520 | it could be okay, like a crossword puzzle?

01:10:09.540 | - Yeah, so the big thing is,

01:10:12.080 | is that particularly right up before sleep,

01:10:15.720 | we're just looking to not be too cognitively engaged.

01:10:19.800 | So your evenings are this whole wealth of time

01:10:22.280 | where you can, you know, set yourself up for more off time.

01:10:26.760 | So we're not working

01:10:28.160 | and we're moving over into connection or relaxation.

01:10:32.360 | But then I would say there is a bit of this buffer time

01:10:35.280 | before bed where you might not wanna just

01:10:37.760 | have the crossword puzzle in your bed.

01:10:40.240 | We do often say that you're looking to,

01:10:42.400 | if you're selecting your reading material or what have you,

01:10:45.760 | that things that could just get you a little too worked up

01:10:48.480 | might take away from our goals.

01:10:50.600 | And so what that could look like is also, you know,

01:10:52.520 | things that excite you.

01:10:53.520 | So that even you stress, like EU stress, excitement things,

01:10:57.840 | those can still be activating.

01:11:00.520 | So we just wanna keep taking that inventory

01:11:03.160 | 'cause maybe for some people,

01:11:04.840 | the crossword puzzle is sort of just this relaxing,

01:11:07.120 | low key down regulatory activity.

01:11:09.240 | For other people, they're stressed out about it.

01:11:11.400 | - Okay.

01:11:12.320 | So right, I wanna talk about technology

01:11:14.640 | and I have a couple of quick hits before then.

01:11:16.600 | So one is around kind of falling back asleep.

01:11:19.160 | Are there any tips you have for people,

01:11:21.120 | both in the first stage of trying to fall asleep

01:11:23.600 | and the wake up stage?

01:11:24.800 | And what I'm gleaning from our conversation is,

01:11:27.880 | if you start optimizing all of these other things,

01:11:29.960 | you might not still have that problem.

01:11:31.680 | - Yes.

01:11:32.520 | - But for the purposes of getting through this,

01:11:35.480 | every now and then, I would say I typically sleep well

01:11:38.320 | and we'll talk about my data,

01:11:39.480 | but sometimes I'll wake up, stuff's on my mind

01:11:41.800 | and I'm just like, oh, I just need to go back to sleep.

01:11:43.640 | Are there any kind of, whether it's breathing

01:11:46.000 | or thought exercises that can help people

01:11:48.400 | who are struggling to fall asleep on a short-term basis

01:11:51.680 | that maybe don't need a study to figure out insomnia

01:11:54.480 | or some other condition?

01:11:55.880 | - Sure.

01:11:56.800 | Okay, so you're waking up and hopefully you're kind of

01:11:59.800 | learning some of these things

01:12:00.680 | that we've been speaking about.

01:12:01.600 | So over time, hopefully you have less and less of these,

01:12:03.600 | but in the meantime, you're having some wake ups.

01:12:05.880 | What do you do?

01:12:07.000 | So you're waking up, a couple of things

01:12:09.840 | that we would practice is one, acceptance.

01:12:12.840 | I know this can sound so light,

01:12:14.260 | but acceptance of the fact that you're up,

01:12:16.080 | because so many of us will fight and resist

01:12:18.920 | that we are awake at 3.20 a.m. and we don't wanna be.

01:12:22.320 | And the more we start resisting this, why is this happening?

01:12:25.260 | Is there something wrong with me?

01:12:27.000 | Some sort of line of thought, this can wake you up

01:12:30.040 | more than we're looking to facilitate.

01:12:32.460 | So it sounds like a soft skill, but it becomes a real skill

01:12:36.440 | is to how to practice acceptance in the face of a reality

01:12:41.440 | that you might not like.

01:12:43.080 | So one, practicing that.

01:12:45.720 | Two, if you are playing into it,

01:12:47.880 | you should know about something called CBTI,

01:12:50.000 | Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia,

01:12:52.280 | 'cause if you are struggling with staying asleep,

01:12:55.160 | you might benefit from some of those practices.

01:12:57.360 | Check that out, we got lots of podcasts on that.

01:13:00.280 | But some of the rules of thumb there

01:13:03.280 | can be that if you are awake for a stretch of time,

01:13:06.640 | going outside the bedroom and doing something light

01:13:10.560 | and relaxing in dim lighting.

01:13:12.380 | I will say that that is one area

01:13:16.000 | that I sometimes have some of my clients not abide by.

01:13:21.000 | You can do that if that fits for you,

01:13:22.800 | if that's helping you and you do that

01:13:25.080 | until you're a little sleepy, great.

01:13:27.640 | But it's also important to know that there is the option

01:13:30.440 | of kind of laying in a relaxed position.

01:13:33.680 | You can do things like breath work.

01:13:36.320 | If you want to bring in like meditations and other things,

01:13:41.320 | you can do that.

01:13:42.880 | And if you have kind of dim lighting,

01:13:46.560 | so red lights or what have you,

01:13:48.480 | you can bring in things like reading, writing.

01:13:51.960 | So writing out any of those stressors is a big suggestion.

01:13:54.960 | So what that would look like is taking a piece of paper,

01:13:57.760 | have it always by your bed, little,

01:14:00.320 | I actually have pens that glow red.

01:14:02.440 | So you can use that pen or a way to have dim lighting

01:14:06.400 | and have two columns.

01:14:08.440 | And on the right hand side,

01:14:10.840 | you're putting in all of your problematic issues.

01:14:15.440 | So anything that's coming up,

01:14:17.620 | you just kind of outline all of those things.

01:14:20.160 | And then on the other side,

01:14:21.880 | what you're doing is you're putting all of those solutions

01:14:25.080 | to those concerns.

01:14:27.360 | And then even if there is no solution

01:14:30.600 | and you have to practice acceptance,

01:14:32.480 | you are doing that in that time.

01:14:34.740 | And so these different tools are ways to combat

01:14:39.820 | what is a really interesting piece

01:14:42.080 | is we just saw this recent study

01:14:44.120 | called the Mind After Midnight

01:14:45.920 | that showed that our thought patterns

01:14:48.720 | actually have a different way of behaving

01:14:51.960 | in the wee hours of the morning.

01:14:54.080 | So we see rates of suicidality, anxiety,

01:14:57.280 | depression, all these other things go up in these wee hours.

01:15:00.800 | So it can also be helpful for you to know

01:15:02.760 | that that is the case for most of us.

01:15:05.040 | So you can be aware that you might not wanna believe

01:15:08.560 | some of the thoughts that are coming up in the same way

01:15:11.080 | that you might do throughout the rest of your day.

01:15:14.080 | - Yeah, my tactic has previously been

01:15:17.160 | to throw on a meditation,

01:15:18.280 | an audio kind of like guided sleep meditation.

01:15:20.960 | Peloton has a ton of them.

01:15:22.560 | I don't know if you're familiar.

01:15:23.600 | Someone recently told me about the cognitive shuffle.

01:15:26.640 | - Oh no, what's that?

01:15:28.120 | - Okay, so I'll encourage everyone to try this.

01:15:30.120 | You too. - Okay.

01:15:30.960 | - If you fall asleep and you wake up

01:15:32.440 | in the middle of the night and you're trying to go to sleep.

01:15:33.960 | So the way if I remember right that it worked

01:15:35.920 | is you pick a letter at random

01:15:38.240 | and you visualize a word that starts with that letter

01:15:41.400 | and then you take each letter in that word.

01:15:46.000 | So let's say you say B and you say, you know, broomstick.

01:15:48.920 | Man, that's too long.

01:15:50.000 | Let's say blood.

01:15:51.160 | And then you go B and then you just visualize B words

01:15:54.960 | until you're out and then you visualize L words

01:15:57.240 | and two O's doesn't really help.

01:15:59.360 | But anyways, the idea is that you're just visualizing words

01:16:02.520 | and thinking about them.

01:16:03.360 | So if the word was, you know, bat,

01:16:05.840 | you'd visualize a baseball bat

01:16:07.160 | and like kind of turn it around in your head

01:16:08.800 | and think about it.

01:16:09.680 | And then you'd move on to the next one and it's a bag

01:16:12.480 | and you visualize a bag and you imagine, you know,

01:16:14.480 | kind of like looking at it from all perspectives

01:16:16.480 | and thinking about it and, you know, imagining the word.

01:16:19.560 | And the idea is it kind of puts your mind

01:16:22.640 | in this similar to a dream state

01:16:24.760 | and you just fall back asleep.

01:16:26.040 | I've tried it once or twice and it's worked.

01:16:27.600 | They swear by it.

01:16:28.920 | I haven't sworn to it,

01:16:30.000 | but that's one that I have heard that, you know,

01:16:33.160 | obviously not as good as just getting good sleep

01:16:35.120 | and not waking up.

01:16:36.040 | But I will try to find a link and put it in the show notes.

01:16:39.480 | That's one that I've been playing with.

01:16:41.120 | The last in the kind of camp that I want to ask about

01:16:44.400 | is sleeping with a partner.

01:16:46.440 | I feel like I haven't found great data on this,

01:16:49.640 | but like, how does that affect your sleep?

01:16:52.080 | What should you do if you do have a partner

01:16:54.280 | and one of you is sleeping well, maybe both of you aren't,

01:16:56.560 | what are best tips for people that share a bed?

01:16:59.320 | - So glad you asked that.

01:17:00.320 | This is our number one most popular episode.

01:17:03.960 | And I would definitely suggest that people listen to this

01:17:06.240 | with Dr. Wendy Truxell.

01:17:08.280 | And this is her whole area of focus.

01:17:10.440 | And she has a book called "Sharing the Covers."

01:17:12.840 | And it's looking at sharing the bed

01:17:15.840 | with your significant other, kids, pets, et cetera,

01:17:20.720 | because we do see that that can be really disruptive,

01:17:23.680 | even if we think it's helpful.

01:17:26.640 | So meaning that a lot of people will look at them,

01:17:30.120 | their sleep results, and their sleep is clearly impacted

01:17:34.280 | when they have this other partner or whoever in bed.

01:17:37.160 | And then we have them sleep by themselves and it's better,

01:17:40.840 | but then you ask them and they say,

01:17:42.240 | "Oh, I always sleep better with my partner."

01:17:44.480 | So point being, I'm not saying that everyone needs

01:17:45.960 | to separate from their sleep environment.

01:17:48.400 | Although what she's pointing to is called a,

01:17:51.880 | she's coining instead of a sleep divorce,

01:17:54.200 | a sleep alliance, nicer way to put it,

01:17:57.520 | so that you are during certain times

01:18:00.280 | when maybe you have different shifts that you're working

01:18:02.840 | or different schedules, or you're navigating treatment

01:18:05.920 | of things like sleep apnea, snoring, et cetera,

01:18:09.560 | or kids, dogs, maybe it's a temporary period of time

01:18:14.280 | that it can make sense.

01:18:15.520 | It's not like a failure to be in different rooms

01:18:17.880 | if that's available to you.

01:18:20.400 | But the big takeaway is yes, your environment

01:18:23.400 | can really, really impact some of your sleep results,

01:18:26.120 | including the pets.

01:18:27.080 | And actually there are high on the rank of things

01:18:29.560 | that can disrupt us over the long term,

01:18:31.440 | even more so than kids often,

01:18:33.120 | because they're usually around for longer in the bed

01:18:35.720 | than kids for just a few years, but pets for a long time.

01:18:39.640 | So you want to take inventory and kind of audit

01:18:44.280 | what is going on with anyone else that's in your bedroom

01:18:48.400 | and really have some real conversations

01:18:51.720 | and look at this in a way that is pulling for a great sleep.

01:18:56.600 | So if it's consistently not working,

01:18:59.000 | and some of these things are tricky to solve,

01:19:01.840 | restless leg syndrome, certainly we mentioned the snoring

01:19:05.920 | and other things that could keep people up.

01:19:07.840 | So there's no shame if we do have to separate

01:19:10.880 | during those periods, but we want to be treating

01:19:13.920 | these problems if available to us very quickly

01:19:18.920 | with a lot, because it's not just a social disorder

01:19:22.640 | if we are having the snoring and sleep apnea,

01:19:26.160 | upper air resistance syndrome.

01:19:27.520 | Otherwise it's impacting both the person

01:19:30.200 | that that's happening to and the partner.

01:19:33.440 | - And I know for people who aren't having issues,

01:19:36.360 | I know even just like the mattress toppers,

01:19:39.080 | I know they ate sleep,

01:19:39.920 | like we could choose temperatures differently.

01:19:41.480 | And so we started to make little changes,

01:19:43.600 | but we've got an episode.

01:19:45.440 | I'll link to the episode in the show notes

01:19:46.800 | for people who want to go deeper.

01:19:47.920 | And when it comes to these trackers,

01:19:50.240 | we've talked a lot about Aura,

01:19:51.240 | 'cause that's the one I'm using

01:19:52.520 | and one you use with a lot of clients.

01:19:54.200 | What do you think of the spectrum of trackers?

01:19:56.240 | And if someone's using a whoop or are there preferred ones,

01:19:59.560 | ones that are like just not good, don't buy the marketing?

01:20:02.080 | Or how do you think about that?

01:20:03.600 | - Yeah, so it's exciting.

01:20:05.600 | I think it's a really exciting time

01:20:06.800 | that a lot of these can be so helpful

01:20:09.000 | to at least just get you some data

01:20:10.600 | outside of logging pen and paper,

01:20:13.960 | because so much can start to get illuminated.

01:20:16.520 | And things like Garmin, Whoop, BioStrap, Aura, Apple,

01:20:21.520 | some can be brain-based like Muse headbands,

01:20:26.000 | Dream used to be one.

01:20:28.120 | You can still kind of access that.

01:20:30.360 | But so now you have access to different ways

01:20:33.160 | for tracking your sleep,

01:20:34.960 | in addition to things like Fitbit and some of the OG ones.

01:20:37.960 | So a lot of these are gonna be helpful bare minimum.

01:20:41.040 | And for sleep in particular,

01:20:43.480 | there is a reason that for us still to this day

01:20:45.800 | for years and years,

01:20:46.880 | we've required that people have had the Aura ring

01:20:49.440 | to participate in our programs,

01:20:51.220 | just simply because as far as a sleep specified tracker,

01:20:57.080 | it does really shine in that area.

01:20:59.560 | Now, of course, any consumer grade tracker

01:21:02.120 | has certain things that have those limitations.

01:21:04.360 | We touched on the sleep stage classifications,

01:21:06.560 | which definitely have their shortcomings.

01:21:09.040 | But there are things that we have a bit more weight in

01:21:14.920 | as far as its accuracy,

01:21:16.040 | like it's, are you awake or are you asleep?

01:21:19.240 | That tends to fall more and say like the 90% percentage rate

01:21:24.080 | of accuracy as far as,

01:21:26.480 | okay, we could probably guess that it's pretty accurate

01:21:29.040 | for the most part.

01:21:29.880 | There might be some flaws here and there,

01:21:31.880 | but that's one of the reason we go with Aura,

01:21:35.040 | but we also, especially in recent years,

01:21:37.080 | have been starting to uptick our amount of

01:21:39.560 | working with people with the loop band.

01:21:41.400 | So they're doing a lot of really cool things for sleep,

01:21:44.440 | even some cool stuff with like AI sleep coaching in there,

01:21:48.280 | which is really, really cool.

01:21:49.380 | So they're pulling your data and then they can say,

01:21:52.720 | oh, well, Chris, okay, well, let's look at your HRV

01:21:54.840 | and you had these trends for the last couple of months

01:21:57.360 | and here are some things you could do

01:21:59.080 | to improve these numbers, et cetera, et cetera.

01:22:01.520 | So it's pulling with your actual data

01:22:04.520 | and then bringing from some of the latest in sleep science

01:22:08.880 | to provide practical application.

01:22:11.680 | So I think that's what we're gonna start seeing more of.

01:22:13.680 | And then in recent years, and this year in particular,

01:22:17.640 | we're seeing these daytime stress monitors

01:22:20.480 | link up more readily.

01:22:22.360 | So like HRV tracking and how stressed are you by day,

01:22:26.800 | 'cause that can play a role

01:22:28.000 | in some of our sleep results by night.

01:22:30.400 | - Wow, okay.

01:22:31.240 | So it sounds like with everything that's going on,

01:22:33.200 | both with technology and AI and data,

01:22:35.720 | we're gonna get a lot of cool stuff in the future.

01:22:37.640 | - Yes.

01:22:38.480 | - I am really excited.

01:22:39.300 | Maybe we'll have an update.

01:22:40.720 | We'll have a chat in a year or two

01:22:42.080 | and see where the whole world has evolved,

01:22:44.680 | or maybe even sooner.

01:22:45.960 | But in the meantime, we've gone over so much stuff.

01:22:48.920 | I wanna make sure people know

01:22:50.160 | where they can stay on top of everything.

01:22:52.120 | You're publishing, reading, sharing with the world.

01:22:55.200 | - Absolutely.

01:22:56.400 | So at sleepisaskill.com, you can do a lot of things.

01:23:00.680 | So there you can take a sleep assessment

01:23:03.200 | to get some real-time kind of feedback

01:23:06.200 | on some things that you can do right away

01:23:07.880 | to improve your sleep.

01:23:09.540 | You can also go to free downloadable PDF

01:23:12.140 | on ways that you can optimize your bedroom.

01:23:13.920 | We talked about some of these,

01:23:15.000 | and there's 18 high-tech, low-tech things

01:23:17.000 | you can do on there.

01:23:18.120 | And you can also sign up for our newsletter.

01:23:21.520 | We love kind of newsletter interactions

01:23:24.400 | called Sleep Obsessions.

01:23:25.640 | Goes out every Monday for over five years.

01:23:28.200 | So lots of readership there of people sharing

01:23:31.400 | what's happening for their sleep.

01:23:32.640 | And so we give lots of tips on that,

01:23:35.400 | as well as our podcast.

01:23:36.760 | But if you're really looking to dive in,

01:23:38.960 | then we have cohort groups

01:23:41.280 | that we require the Oura Ring to participate.

01:23:44.700 | But then through that,

01:23:45.540 | you're coming in with particular stats with your sleep,

01:23:48.600 | and you're leaving with a whole different set of stats

01:23:51.280 | at the end of those interventions.

01:23:54.160 | So our commitment is really being able to help

01:23:56.920 | get us back in the driver's seat of our sleep

01:23:59.560 | so that we're not so mystified by it

01:24:01.800 | and hoping that it improves or what have you,

01:24:04.480 | and instead really getting at the core

01:24:07.200 | of what's going on there.

01:24:09.180 | And then on the lightest side of things,

01:24:10.680 | we also offer audits.

01:24:12.480 | So we'll give wearable audits.

01:24:14.440 | So kind of like what we did with you,

01:24:16.080 | but we would go much more in depth for a full hour

01:24:19.980 | just with that individual's data,

01:24:22.720 | and then set you up with particular things

01:24:25.040 | that you would be taking on for the next 90 days.

01:24:27.520 | And then we'd auto trigger some things for you.

01:24:30.200 | So in 90 days,

01:24:31.040 | you send us screenshots of what you've done to improve.

01:24:33.720 | So hopefully we've seen actual measurable change,

01:24:36.040 | and we see a lot of really cool stuff for people

01:24:38.640 | when they start getting aware of what's going on

01:24:40.980 | with their stats and what they can do to make a difference.

01:24:43.560 | - That's amazing.

01:24:44.640 | Thank you so much for being here.

01:24:46.320 | I really appreciate it.

01:24:47.240 | I have so much to go work on.

01:24:49.040 | - Yay!

01:24:49.880 | I hope that that is an exciting piece.

01:24:52.560 | And really the thing that I would like to leave

01:24:55.080 | is that my mission on the planet

01:24:57.160 | is to help support people with their sleep.

01:24:59.680 | I really felt like when my sleep wasn't working,

01:25:02.520 | I felt like I was just losing my grasp on reality.

01:25:07.520 | I felt like I was just so disempowered.

01:25:10.960 | I couldn't function in a way that once I got up under that,

01:25:15.960 | it completely transformed my experience in my own life.

01:25:18.560 | And then now to be able to work with so many people,

01:25:21.540 | it's the most fulfilling thing on the planet.

01:25:24.040 | So anytime I hear that, I get very excited.

01:25:27.280 | So please report back on what comes up.

01:25:30.280 | - I will.

01:25:31.120 | Thank you so much.

01:25:32.120 | - Amazing.

01:25:32.960 | Thank you.

Master the Skill of Sleep with Mollie Eastman

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