The Best Sleep Podcast Ever: Everything You Need To Know About Sleeping Better, Hacking Sleep, Sleep Cycles, Insomnia, Sleep Apnea & More

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life.

Podcast, if you have insomnia, they say you should never nap. Now, to address this, there's a place for the drugs in certain situations, but I've never seen a study where a drug company will compare their drug to cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. And the reason for that, I'm pretty sure that cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, based on the literature, will would blow it out of the water. Because with cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which is the recommended treatment, you're really addressing the issue at its core with thoughts, behaviors, and feelings around your sleep. We have a module based on these premises within our software.

Faith, Family, Fitness, Health, Performance, Nutrition, Longevity, Ancestral Living, Biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show.

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All right folks, so I have recently been chatting with a guy who's super smart about sleep, has a PhD in cognitive psychology and is a sleep scientist. I've also been experimenting with this app that he made called Sleep Space. So his name is Dr. Dan Gartenberg and this Sleep Space app is kind of blowing my mind and I'll fill you in more on how it works and what it's measuring and all that good stuff. But first, let me tell you about Dan. He is the CEO of Sleep Space. He's also professor at Penn State University in the Department of Biobehavioral Health. And he has been developing these kind of like, sleep improvement technologies for the past 15 years. He's working for artificial intelligence groups in the Navy and in the Air Force. He's gotten more than $3.5 million in grant awards from the National Science foundation and the National Institute of Aging as a principal investigator. And all this investigation is basically based on solving one of arguably humankind's most important healthcare problems that affects most billions of people around the world, and that would be sleep. More specifically, poor sleep health. So some of his focus based on this Sleep Space app is developing a connected almost like a smart bedroom where you can use sound and light and vibration along with different wearables. And you can use this to diagnose and treat sleep disorders or even if you don't have a sleep disorder, just basically sleep better. So he's working on everything from solutions for insomnia to sleep apnea to reduce risk for Alzheimer's disease and heart disease based on your sleep patterns. And all of it's based around digital health technology, the same stuff I've been experimenting with with his app, Sleep Space. During the podcast, Dan will be able to fill you in a little bit more on his research on a ton of questions that I have for him about sleep that we've never talked about on this podcast. And we'll discuss this Sleep Space system as well and how it can be used. But there are probably going to be a lot of resources, a lot of links for today's show if you want to take a deeper dive or if you have a bunch of follow up questions for me or for Dan or your own sleep feedback to add. So I'm going to put all of the show notes@bengreenfieldlife.com Sleep Space Podcast that's BenGreenfieldLife.com Sleep Space Podcast and I guess first of all, hello, Dan.

Hello. Thank you so much. It's an absolute pleasure to be here.

Yeah, I know we've been trying to make this happen for a while and we've shared lots of texts back and forth. So here we finally are. And you know what, before we even dive into sleep, and I want to hear how you got interested in all this in the, in the first place, because I think you have an interesting story I got to tell you, paradoxically, I didn't sleep so well last night and I actually wanted to ask you about it. I thought, oh, I should ask Dan about this. So the one thing I did last night that was probably little bit different was I took my wife out on a date and it wasn't like super late and wasn't like we were, you know, out till midnight or anything like that. I think I was actually in bed by 9, 39 45. But I haven't really been drinking alcohol much lately. I actually have been primarily drinking as some of my listeners know, more like ketones at night or like ketone alcohol alternatives. And those actually, if anything, seemed to help support sleep and satiate the appetite at night. But I had an old fashioned and not only that, shocker, everybody's gonna, gonna paint me as a Tito taller, whatever that word is. Now I also shared half a glass of wine with my wife during my actual entree. So I technically had some whiskey, half a glass of wine last night and I didn't sleep so great. I woke up at midnight almost like wide awake. Slept another four, four and a half hours. So what's your take on alcohol and sleep, man?

Well, I mean it's so clear that alcohol just destroys your sleep architecture. And usually it's more than just one glass. So Alan Bybe and you know, I went out with my father in law and my wife last night and you know, I had one glass. I'm a makers on the rocks kind of guy.

You're a whiskey too?

I'm a whiskey man as well. Bourbon, usually one is okay I would say, I think when you push it much more, that's when you start getting a big problem. And for me, especially if it's a heavy meal combined with the alcohol, I think that that can push awakenings later on in the night. But some sleep scientists are really staunch, like no alcohol. I think periodically, every once in a while it's okay for us to imbibe, relax a little bit. We just have to make sure you moderate it. And then also I'd say people, even the best biohackers in the world like yourself sometimes have an off night. So also don't be too hard on yourself for one off night.

It sounds to me like you're one of those guys who's kind of on board with maybe a healthy drink with dinner isn't going to totally crush your sleep. But if you're trying to fully optimize everything, you're struggling with sleep, even that might not do you any Favors.

Exactly.

Okay. All right, got it. Okay. So. And. And by the way, I. I think sometimes the form of alcohol. I don't know your thoughts on this. I think that can affect it too, because, like, I can have a glass of organic wine and that. That's never affected my sleep at all. I think, if anything, that slight increase in inhibitory neurotransmitters isn't so huge that you, you know, wake up with some kind of a cortisol awakening response later on in the night can help. But for some reason, some of the harder alcohols, I think whiskey amongst them, sadly seem to, at least for me, more deleteriously impact sleep compared to a glass of wine. So do you think the delivery mechanism matters?

For sure. And, you know, Mass Gal is probably, arguably one of the best for this because it doesn't have a lot of artificial sugar, but, you know, bourbon will have a decent amount of sugar in it in whiskey. So, you know, tequilas, but especially Mezcal, I think if you. If you want to drink is probably your best option besides the ketone beverages and whatnot.

Yeah. Plus the added syrups and juices from something like an old fashioned. So a lot of sugar. That. That kind of adds up too. Yeah, that. That's a good point. So how'd you get interested in all this?

Yeah, it has been a long journey. It began with some personal issues as a teenager, actually. I think it's pretty common for a lot of teenagers to suffer from this thing called delayed sleep phase syndrome, which can be largely behavioral. It can also be a chemical imbalance for some people. But essentially, if you wake up really early for school, and for whatever reason, they make high school kids wake up at like, I remember waiting at the bus stop at 6 in the morning when it was still dark out, and then I would go out late on the weekends. I'm a teenager. I was partying or whatever at the time. And that dysregularity in my Going to bed really late on the weekends and waking up really early on the weekdays basically hindered my circadian rhythm. It threw off my rhythms. So I had a really hard time falling asleep. And coming from a family in the medical backgrounds, I heard all my life how broken our medical system was. In college, I ended up taking a neuroscience course by a famous professor, Julio Tononi, and his wife, Kira Sorelli, all about the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis and how sleep literally is the foundation of our consciousness. I just saw the connection that sleep has with every single health outcome. Maybe by making sleep More regenerative. We can finally shift this illness model in western medicine to a more wellness model. I've just been passionately trying to figure out ways to enhance every single night of sleep non invasively, whether that's with sound, light, export, temperature, lots of things. I'm just obsessed with this idea. What if we can get more out of our sleep so that seven and a half hours is as regenerative as possible.

Now the delayed sleep phase syndrome in teenagers thing is interesting because kind of like I guess maybe the flavor or the variety of the alcohol that you choose may or may not affect your sleep in certain ways. Do you think that delayed sleep phase syndrome is something that would be more of an issue in a teenager who's carrying on a modern lifestyle of partying and exposure to high amounts of light or screens or video games at night, et cetera. And the reason I ask that is because there's also like farm kids or honestly even my own kids. Like they're up bright and bushy tailed at like 5am Now. And this is something that they started doing about two years ago. Up until that point I simply told them hey, wake up when you're rested and you're ready to wake and start school when you're ready. Because they have the luxury of being homeschooled and for the longest time they would get up around 7am or so. And this was up until they were around 13 and their typical bedtime was like 9, 9:30. Now we were actually talking about this when we're in our date last night about how mom and I are pretty happy about their sleep habits. They voluntarily are in bed reading a book, wearing blue light blocking glasses, often with some kind of like half be wearable or you know, little biohacking kids. You know, they're sleep me chili pad systems underneath their bodies and they're embedded about 8:45. They're typically asleep by 9, 9:15, but they're up. And they use one of these sunrise alarm clocks that gradually makes the sun go up. But they're up at about 5am and I don't seem to think they struggle a lot with circadian rhythmicity issues nor delayed sleep phase syndrome. But they are up I would say on average a lot earlier than most teenagers I know.

Yeah, and I mean I think our society just as a whole has really lost touch with the circadian rhythm and the natural process of sunlight in the morning and darkness at night. And Covid has made it even worse. It basically forced us all to be indoor creatures which flattened out the Rhythm even more so, as you point out, a lot of this is behavioral. If you have a really regular sleep schedule, you're not going to have this issue. And regularity is really one of the most important things to building a strong circadian rhythm. Also not having chronic stress, for example, where cortisol is just overloading the system at all times. If a kid is chronically stressed versus they're a happy camper, which it seems like your kids are from the little that I've seen. I think that things like that can also play a role. So we're not in touch with our rhythms. It doesn't have to be this way for teenagers, of course, But I'll also mention that there's a natural process where teenagers sort of disentangle from their parents circadian rhythm. Thought of. It's thought to be an evolutionary biology thing where the teenager's supposed to sort of break away. And that's why there's this proclivity for a teenager to become more of a night owl. The schools really have it all flipped, you know, really usually most school systems. And Wendy Troxell gives a great TED talk about this. Most school systems have it. So the teenagers start their day the earliest and the younger kids start it later. You should, you know, they should really flip it around. It's a simple public, public health thing that they could do.

Okay, got it. It is interesting that you say that about the, the ancestral mechanism of teenagers wanting to have a different sleep schedule than their parents. Why would that be?

It's time for you to be a trailblazer. Go your own way. Break away from your parents. You know, you're meant to leave the community of 50 so you don't procreate with your cousin or whatever. So I think there's an evolutionary biology reason to where the teenagers kind of becomes dysregulated with their parents. Circadian rhythm.

That's interesting. I've never really heard somebody express it like that before, but I guess it kind of sort of makes sense with the delayed sleep phase syndrome in teenagers. Is that something that's a known phenomenon or is that like a phrase that you coined?

No, that's a known thing. And sometimes it's behavioral, which was my instance. And when they used to bill out for actigraphy and sleep labs, they would be able to identify these irregular patterns. So it can be external and it can also be internal where some people just don't have the right chemicals for a 24 hour clock. Most humans have a 24 hour circadian rhythm for whatever reason. Some people might have a chemical imbalance that creates this system where they just can't get into a normal cycle, a regular cycle. That's not the case with me. I was just a victim to the external factors of school and society.

Okay, got it. I know this is kind of a big question, but I think you have some interesting thoughts about it because I've seen you write and speak about this a little bit before. Why is it that people actually sleep?

Yes. So not only people, but every single animal sleeps. You know, even the fruit fly, they've done the classic studies of the fruit flies sleep. And there's, you know, a bunch of reasons. I'm going to give you the six main reasons right now. So number one is energy conservation. So you want to be able to have the energy to hunt your food during the day, and you get that energy by sleeping during the night. Another one is cooling of the brain. So there's this brain temperature and neurochemistry thing going on which is basically essential to our survival, where if you don't sleep, you will die. And there are some people that are unable to sleep and they basically die because of this brain temperature thing within a couple weeks of when they're born.

Okay, would that be actual damage to the brain cells from the brain not getting a chance to, I guess like a car get parked in the garage overnight?

Yeah, I mean, yes, essentially that's. That's a good metaphor for it for sure. Okay, then the other one is learning and memory. And that's where I got into this as a cognitive psychologist. And this theory that Professor Tononi brought forth, which is the synaptic homeostasis, where basically you down regulate all the synapses during the day and then you integrate and bring into your long term memory and personality. During REM sleep when you're dreaming, it's essentially a process for learning and memory. The fourth is emotional processing. And then the new ones that I'm really fascinated by and we're studying in our lab at Penn State are restoration and resilience. Resilience and brain metabolic clearance. So this, I think you've spoken about it before, this galvanic cleansing that happens during deep sleep, in particular glymphatic drainage.

I think it's called.

Exactly. And so that's what we're studying in our lab at Penn State.

Okay, got it. So a few questions based on all those reasons people sleep. And I think that's interesting for people to know that it's not not just say learning and memory consolidation or glymphatic drainage. Can we then make a case for stepping back and possibly kind of like hacking or improving some of those different scenarios? Like, I could throw a few examples at you. Brain cooling. I've seen devices out there now that you can wear. I think one is called eb, I believe, and it's literally like a forehead cooling device designed to shift blood flow away from the frontal cortex. And to my understanding, it's not necessarily for the sake of cooling the brain, allowing the cells to kind of like lower their metabolic activity. And maybe it is, but my understanding is it's intended to shift blood flow away from the frontal cortex to diminish things like ruminating thoughts that might keep you awake at night to either improve sleep latency or allow you to get back to sleep if you wake up in the wee hours. Do you think there's something to this idea of actively and mindfully cooling the head or cooling the forehead during sleep?

Yes, for sure. And I've looked extensively at this research. My technology hasn't tackled it, but I've really looked at how it can be tackled. So Nafsinger is actually the EBB guy at the University of Michigan, and. And he's done some of the pioneering work in this space. He initially identified that people who have insomnia, he used, like, fnirs to show that their brain was basically producing more metabolically and basically their brains were heating up. And then he invented the EBB device, which was the thing that cools your head. I don't know if you know this, but I think Chili Pad bought ebb, and then they sort of discontinued it.

Well, that doesn't surprise me, by the way, because in. In my own use of ebb, because I got a trial unit, it's too much on the head, especially for me, as a side sleeper. Then waking up, you know, a few hours after you've fallen asleep with all these wires coming out of your head and the heavy thing on the front of your head. Like, for me, it never worked. I wish there actually was a way because I could kind of sort of feel the benefits, but there was too much else going on and it was too clunky. I wish there was a way to. And maybe there is, and you could share if there is a way to cool the head without it having to be a bulky device on the head, you know.

So I'll give you two hacks right here. So there's a CEO of this company, Moona, that I've been talking with that makes a pillow. I think it's currently not Available.

What's it called?

Woona Moona M O O N A.

Okay.

And then there's a simple hack and there's actually a lot of peer reviewed evidence for this. The temperature thing in the bedroom is a little more complicated than I think a lot of people realize, really, because there's your ambient temperature, which as you eloquently put, like 60 to 68, you know, I think is what you usually recommend. Yes.

It should be the temperature of the room.

Right, the temperature of the room.

Right.

But then there's the temperature in the bed, which is usually quite warm. You know, we're talking like 92 degrees.

Yeah. Especially if your wife or your spouse is a furnace like mine is.

Right. And the sleep partner, my wife, usually. It's the opposite, actually. Usually the man has more metabolism going on and a higher body temperature. But navigating this with the sleep partner is a whole nother story. One of my other hacks is multiple blankets to sort of address the different temperature needs. But there's also the second main hack, and it's a little bit counterintuitive, which is different limbs and your head play a different role in this as well. So you have your core system, which is your chest and your head, and then your distal arms and feet, basically. And if you actually warm your feet, and there's a lot of scientific research on this, like wearing socks, for example. I think the pioneering person on this was Wurz justice that showed basically taking a warm bath and then putting on socks significantly reduced the time it takes to fall asleep and your sleep quality, essentially, because that actually lowers the body temperature. Counterintuitively, if your limbs are exposed to warmth and you're just in a warm bath, your internal body temperature decreases. And decreasing your internal body temperature is what helps you fall asleep.

Why do you think the body's temperature decreases if the extremities are warm? I know they had that Stanford cooling glove experiment where they showed that by cooling, I think the arteriovenous stenosis. I'm going to blank on the phrase, but you cool these small capillaries or microvessels in the hands in the case of that experiment, and it seemed to actually cool the rest of the body. And so when I heard about the results of that experiment, I kind of came to the conclusion that, well, it almost seems paradoxical then that if you cool the hands, the body cools, but if you warm the feet, the body cools. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I don't know. And that's why it's like even More complicated than the. I mean, I've done a pretty extensive lit review and I've just learned. I didn't know about the hands thing as that you just described. My basic understanding of it is it's how we sort of let go of or disseminate temperature. So there's this distal proximal temperature relationship. Proximal is like your inter. Your main body, like your thighs, stomach, forehead. So this is like your core body. And then there's distal. I always thought it was feet and hands, but maybe I'm wrong if you're saying that there's some other study. So basically, just imagine the temperature is flowing from your hands to your core or your core to your hands, and there's this increased distal proximal temperature is associated with better sleep initiation. So the relationship between your. I think it's hands and feet being warm versus your body, core, head being cold.

Yeah. And it may have to do with the unique nature of these. I think I would call this. It's arteriovenous anastomosis, I think is what they're called, that they're cooling in an experiment like that at Stanford. It could be that they're not in the feet and only in the hands. And thus perhaps it is the proximal distal relationship. You've just described being more important for the feet than for the hands. But I actually don't know. All I know is that I have tried what you've recommended and worn the socks like a smart wool sock during sleep, particularly when I'm traveling. And those darn hotels where even when the engineer comes up, they won't decrease the air conditioning any lower than 66. And like you mentioned, I actually like to sleep cold. Sometimes I'm like 63, 64, but I'll put on those socks. And that does seem to help. And then related to something else that you mentioned, you know, the. The warm bath also, I think can help. That's obviously a little more clunky and time consuming than the socks. But with the partner, I don't like the separate blankets idea because we like to snuggle. And when she's in her own blanket and I'm in my own blanket, that just doesn't work. What I do find is that if you simply have a good breathable top sheet, you can both be under the top sheet. And then, for example, she can have the blanket on and I can just have the sheet on. But we're close enough to where if we did want to snuggle for a little while and then I roll over later on in the night, I can just be under the top sheet and she's under the blanket. Although I'm curious if you've seen this. The chilipad company, I don't know if they're still making this, but they had a blanket for a while, a gravity blanket, actually, which as you know, has some research behind it for increasing the feelings of safety and activating the parasympathetic nervous system before sleep or during sleep. But it circulated cold water through the blanket. Have you seen that?

No, I'm not familiar with that. I'm going to have to check that one out.

Yeah, I don't know if they still make it, but that's interesting regarding the brain cooling, and I'm going to keep my eyes on that. You said it was a Mooney pillow, Muna?

Yeah. And this is a really simple hack is just getting one of those cold pillows and having a backup for when your pillow gets warm and either flipping it over or getting the other one in your backup pillow arsenal.

All right, folks, it's time for bubs. That's right. Glenn and Sean, the co founder at a company called bubs, were both coaches at SEAL Fit in Encinitas owned by Navy SEAL commander Mark Devine. They put on this fantastic event called Kokoro, which was like a Navy SEAL style hell week for civilians. These guys as coaches got to know each other and tragically what happened was that Glenn, who was a best friend of hundreds, wound up laying down his life saving Americans in Benghazi, Libya. And he was always about self improvement, about helping other people. And so what Sean wound up doing was founding this company, Bubs Natural, as a tribute to Glenn. As a matter of fact, Bubs donates 10% of all its profits to charity in Glenn's honor. And what does BUBS make? Well, Bubs has some of the best collagen you'll ever have. Collagen is like the glue that holds your body together. It's truly unflavored but extremely soluble, so you can put it in anything.

And it's better than a lot of.

The collagens out there because they use the purest form of collagen, sustainably sourced from grass fed and pasture raised cows in southern Brazil and Uruguay. They also have an MCT oil that pairs very well with the collagen. It's actually the only MCT oil in the world that's Whole30 approved, meaning it is super clean. They make apple cider vinegar gummies, which are actually pretty amazing for just like quelling Your appetite at night, healthy digestion, blood sugar management. And then they have their fountain of youth collagen where they take their really good collagen, they blend it with vitamin C and biotin and maquis berry, which is a Chilean berry, very high in antioxidants. Put all that together, you got Bubs Naturals and it's supporting a very good cause. Glenn, who was a larger than life personality, glowed with enthusiasm. He loved to feel great and do good and that's what they created Bubs to allow you to do so. Bubsnaturals.com Bubsnaturals.com use code BENG to save 20% on Bubs Naturals. I've been so impressed by a recent energy drink company that is now taking the world by storm. It's called Update that I've actually invested in this company. I want to come straight out and tell you that I recently wrote a check because I've been drinking this stuff for a few months now. And I'm so impressed that the clean energy without a crash, without a jitters. And I think the reason is Update uses a molecule that none of the other energy drink companies I'm aware of have touched or hold a patent to or able to use. And it's called Paraxanthine. Paraxanthine. I've done a podcast on it. You gotta go listen. It's a revolutionary new energy source that's isolated and refined from caffeine. And unlike caffeine, not only does it not give you jitters or a crash, but it gives you weird things like confidence and swagger and word recall and better focus and manages things like distractibility and attention deficits. I mean, it's crazy what this thing can actually do and just drink a can, but it's not got all the nasty stuff like the monsters and the Red Bulls etc have. It's very clean, very naturally sweetened, very low calorie and low carbohydrate as well, which is amazing. And all their ingredients are backed by peer reviewed scientific, scientific research. One of the best formulas on the face of the planet. My friend Sean Wells was a key part of isolating this paraxanthin component and figuring out how to get it into drink Update in the right ratios combined with the right ingredients to give you energy for hours and hours. And the cool thing is you can drink it before a dinner party and it doesn't affect your sleep deleteriously at night, which for me is amazing that I can get a pick me up without disrupting sleep. So you get 10% off of a update. Here's how. Go to DrinkUpdate.com Ben and use code BEN for 10% off your order. That's DrinkUpdate.com Ben and use Code Ben.

You mentioned that learning and memory consolidation, in addition to the brain cooling and the energy conservation is a third reason why we sleep. I know that this is probably one reason and maybe the emotional processing would fall into this category as well. White people will recommend that you sleep on something. You know that before you make a decision you sleep on it. Or sometimes people, you'll hear about them programming their brain with a certain question and then sleeping so that they can better arrive on the answer in the morning. Is there anything that you actively do or recommend based on the idea that we do engage in memory and learning consolidation during sleep that we could do before sleep to take advantage of that Mechanism?

No. Yeah, 100%. And I think it was Thomas Edison who famously would take naps to help himself ideate throughout the day. And I think you're privy to this too. A reasonable circadian rhythm sometimes is to slightly sleep deprive yourself. Like not really sleep deprivation, but maybe a little like 20 minutes less than you need. And then do a 20 minute nap in the afternoon to get the ideation.

I do that and I don't want to totally derail you, but I want to mention that I'll actually often short myself much more than that. Like many nights I'll sleep six to seven hours and for productivity's sake I'll be up at like sometime between 4 and 4.30am but then I slip down into the room besides my office and typically do anywhere from a 20 to sometimes as long as if it's been a super short night of sleep, a 60 minute siesta. And I've seen some evidence that that might be able to, even though it's shorter than a typical 90 minute sleep cycle, come close to simulating a 90 minute sleep cycle, thus dictating that you could theoretically, and I do this and it seems to work well for me, sleep six and a half hours in a night, do a 30 minute really good nap that simulates something close to a 90 minute sleep cycle and attain a similar feeling as you would have gotten having slept eight hours, even though you've actually only technically used seven hours and bought yourself a free hour.

Yeah, so I mean a couple things with the naps that all the listeners should probably be aware of if you ever have problems falling asleep and staying asleep. What you described is not ideal. This is something I think for like the optimizer, you don't have any issues with falling asleep, staying asleep. And that's one of the nuances of sleep science, I guess. I think what you're doing could be effective.

Okay, this would, this would be very anecdotal. You're referring to sleep deprivation therapy as a way to deal with like, insomnia.

Well, usually if you have insomnia. Yeah. They recommend to consolidate the time in bed to, if anything, reduce how much time you're spending in bed and to never nap, essentially.

Essentially to like exhaust yourself, to increase slow sleep drive.

Yeah, that's one of the main treatments for insomnia. And we can get into, into that a little bit more too.

Okay. Okay. So before I derailed you, you're explaining learning and memory consolidation and how to kind of take advantage of that in its fullest.

So this is one of those things that just makes me so passionate about this field, which is this idea of targeted memory reactivation. And there's recently been a meta analysis of a bunch of these studies. The classic study is that imagine you're doing some kind of cognitive assessment. You're focusing on your 10 year vision for yourself. You're trying to actualize some component of yourself. While you're doing that, you're smelling roses. And so we're building this association between a smell. I'm trying to use sound in my technology because I think it's more adaptable. But you're making some association between a stimulus and a cognitive state. And then we replay that stimulus when you're in different stages of sleep. At first I thought it would be best to do rem, but the recent evidence is suggesting to do it in lighter stages of sleep. And then that association primes those neurons and you actually do better on that cognitive assessment the next day. So essentially it's inception. It's a simple word for it. But I think programming our neural circuitry is more important than ever. Given like all of the stimuli and news and gadget, Instagram, things that we get throughout the day.

So if I understand correctly, what you're saying is to use a sensory stimuli, you give the example of smell, I would imagine perhaps it could work with something like vibration or sound. While you're engaged in a cognitive task that you want to be able to build upon during a night of sleep, you then take that same sensory stimuli and figure out a way to, during a night of sleep, be exposed to that same stimuli during a certain portion of the sleep stage. And I think. Did you say it was rem.

At first I thought it would be rem, but I've been reading some new papers showing that it's more like light ST sleep actually.

Okay, so theoretically, would this mean you could use some type of technology or artificial intelligence driven technology to using some type of sensor or wearable detect when you're in your lighter sleep stages. And then perhaps there's something like an essential oil diffuser or wearable vibrating device or sound device, or all three, perhaps next to your bed that would then release that same sensory stimuli that you were exposed to when you were engaged in the cognitive or learning task early in the day that you want to build upon during sleep. Am I on the right track here?

Exactly, yes. And I have a couple patents around that and so I'd love to collaborate with anyone who's trying to do something similar as me on this. And it currently exists in my software. So you can like focus on a specific. We play Relaxing Rain. I'm actually working with this guy Sage Rader who has this thing, neuro Acrobatics, where we're making it more immersive basically. And so you can focus on that during the day. And the hard part about this is playing a sound, replaying the sound so that your brain processes it, but it doesn't wake you up.

Wow. But you have that technology already. You have the capability within the Sleep Space app to pull it off.

Yeah. So we currently can do it within the Sleep Space app. I'm trying to validate it in a clinical trial right now, but we're one of the only pieces of software that actually a lot of the other pieces of technology can't do this because like your Oura ring, your whoop, your Fitbit, they're actually measuring the sleep after the sleep has occurred because you can predict your stages better if you have the full night of data. Whereas we built a real time algorithm. So we have an Apple Watch algorithm where every 30 seconds it'll detect your sleep stage. Or I have this little mechanism, the sleep space smart bed. Or you can just use any phone sensor as well if you want to.

I believe it ties to the OURA ring also, doesn't it?

Yeah. So we'll integrate with the Oura ring. We'll pull oura, we'll pull whoop. But I can't get the real time data from. I think I could. It would be a lot of dev speed spend to do it. Eventually I will, but I can't get the real time data from them. I can only get the real time data from the Phone or the Apple Watch, essentially.

Okay, still, that idea is fascinating. And you said you called it inception is the term.

Yeah.

Okay. I like that.

The scientific term is targeted memory reactivation.

Targeted memory reactivation. By the way, speaking of wearables, do you think that there's one wearable that you would recommend as being more accurate or what are your general thoughts on the accuracy of sleep wearables versus, say, measuring via polysonographic sonography or some type of more professional sleep lab equipment?

Yeah, so this is a lot of what the three and a half million dollars of funding got me, which is a really accurate algorithm that was built off of polysomnography. So we brought people into a lab, hooked them up to the electric electrodes, the polysomnography, and then measured Aura, Apple Watch, some Spectrum Pro, which is a more clinical device. So I have a really good handle on how accurate or inaccurate some of these things are. And we've recently pulled thousands of nights of polysomnography data from some open data sources. And also, essentially what's essential is to collect 24.7data so that the classifier is unbiased. And this gets a little bit data nerdy over here. If I were just to predict that you were asleep every single 30 seconds that you're in bed, I'm going to be like 90% accurate because you're most likely to spend time in bed asleep. Basically, we're collecting data over a 24 hour period in order to ensure that the classifier is more precise. And what I've seen our current algorithm, first we published a paper showing it was comparable to Aura in the journal Sleep. And I just got to revise and resubmit in our new algorithm and I'll just read you the AUC values. This is something similar to accuracy. I pulled this up for the podcast. So this is using heart rate and motion data compared to polysomnography. And our current score is 0.77 for light sleep, 0.90 for deep sleep, 0.85 for REM and then 0.95 for wake. That's out of 100.

And is that, is that good compared to say, like a whoop or an aura or some of these other wearables?

Yeah. So I would say that's very good. That's, I think, better than whoop and the other. It's pretty comparable, but maybe a little bit better than those other wearables and days and Body has done a lot of great research comparing the wearables like Fitbit as well. Usually the way that I Think about it is they're 80% accurate generally for certain populations. It can be way off because most of the algorithms were built from healthy individuals. And I think you might be privy to if you're in super good shape, at least with Aura's old algorithm, for example, like, you're sort of an outlier in the population. It dramatically overly stated how much deep sleep you were getting.

Yeah. I know several athletes and fitness enthusiasts who've been almost like, concerned about the balance between light sleep and deep sleep, because what is it light sleep supposed to be around 40 to 50% and REM something like 20, 25 and deep 15 to 20 something along those lines.

Yeah, I like to think about it is around those lines. I like to think about it in amount more because then it's like you're factoring in, like, how much you're sleeping and stuff like this. It's really hard to get more than like two and a half hours of deep sleep. Like, almost impossible. Like, almost physio. You're pushing on, like, the limits of physiology there.

Yeah.

So I'm almost. I'm super happy with like two hours deep, two hours rem. Like you're rocking it.

Yeah. Which would mean for eight hours in bed and additional. You'd have an additional sleep latency aside. Around 50% of light sleep.

Yes.

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. But one thing I don't understand, based on something you just described on that paper that you were citing your data from, you mentioned it's based on movement and heart rate. Now, you sent me this little smart bed thing that you've developed. It goes next to my mattress. I place my phone in there, and it has a handy little charger connection in it too, so my phone could stay charged. I put it in airplane mode, and then I start the sleep space app and it's tracking sleep. I was under the impression that it was just pulling the data from a wearable I was currently using, like the Aura. But is it actually somehow measuring heart rate and movement by being beside my bed?

Yes. So it's measuring movement, not heart rate. I think I can probably get it to measure heart rate at some point.

You just have to wear it. Wear a heart rate monitor, wouldn't you?

Well, I think there might be a way of me like a stethoscope looking through the mattress I should probably pat.

Interesting.

So mainly right now it's just using motion data, and I'm also measuring breathing to some degree because it's recording the sound. No data is saved on our server of, like, Sound in the room for privacy issues.

Those sensitive conversations I have with my lover at night. You aren't listening to those?

Yeah, I'm not listening in on that. Maybe. No, I'm just kidding. Okay, so we don't save and you can actually listen to it on the device. It's just saved locally. Like if you're interested in your snoring and stuff like this. And we can actually help get you diagnosed for sleep apnea. That's a whole nother story with this collaboration we have with the company Wesper.

Okay.

So yeah, the reason I invented that thing was both to track non invasively because I'm similar to you where I'll do like a big tracking night and then not wear anything for a while. Like I'm. I don't know if you can see me, but I'm wearing a circle plus, which is a ring, a Oura ring, an apple watch and a bio strap right now. You know, sometimes I do a big tracking night, but other times I don't want to. You know, there's something ritualistic about like taking off your clothes and being naked while you sleep, you know?

Yeah, yeah. The whole, the whole camping approach that, you know, if I go camping or sometimes when I'm traveling, I do go a little bit more device free. You're pretty weighed down though, man. That, that's a lot of. You're probably burning several extra calories per minute with all those wearables you have on. Saving money on a weight vest or over overpriced technology based weight vest.

I suppose I'm wearing thousands of dollars right now basically. But if I want to go really crazy, I'll wear a headset too.

Speaking of all that tech though, do you ever get concerned about the EMF impact for sleep and talk to me a little bit about that in the context of wearables, many of which can of course be placed in airplane mode, but also in the context of the room itself. You know, you'll get many building biologists and many folks these days talking about how your bedroom is the one place where you should go out of your way the most to lower EMF signals, to not have a WI fi router near the bedroom or have it unplugged at night to sometimes use dirty electricity filters. Some people will go so far as to Faraday shield their walls. I in full admittance do have a Faraday canopy, a push button Faraday canopy that shielded healing built for me that I push a button when I get into bed and it brings a canopy down around the bed of silver fabric. And I can't make a phone call or send a text message while I'm in bed, but it does feel like I'm in a little bit more protected space. And the only issue I have with it is it sometimes gets a little hot. So I've installed a small oscillating F fan above the bed to keep the air circulating. But how big of a deal is emf? Whether in the context of wearables or.

Any other context, I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out. And so I bought an EMF detector to see the EMF in my room because I wanted to make sure that my devices weren't emitting emf. For example, the sleep space smart bed. And by the way, the other reason we invented that is so we can play the sounds precisely on your side. I just want to bring that point out because we want to deliver the sounds precisely, but we don't want your partner necessarily to hear it. And we made it so it can work completely offline, which is really important to a lot of people. One of the reasons why I sort of love the biohacker is I think they have a lot of good intuitions about what's going on. I'm still sort of on the fence of the EMFS stuff. I mean, I've explored it pretty deeply. But as a scientist, I need to see a randomized clinical trial showing when people are exposed to emf. And it seems like something you'd be able to manipulate pretty easily. I've looked pretty deeply on this. If anyone wants to, in the show notes or whatever, send us a message about if this paper actually exists. I've never seen that. That research done.

Yeah.

That being said, I think certain people are definitely, maybe more sensitive to this. And there's definitely an intuition that's correct. With the phone being bad.

Yeah. And possibly that's not the emf. That could possibly just be due to the blue light. And also the fact that you're doing business and socializing while in bed, which should be a place reserved for sleep or sex.

That's kind of where I currently live. In the analysis of this, more so, which is like the stimulus control analysis of it, which is more like these phones are dopamine creation machines that rev us up and stress us out. And I think even the association of the phone can have a negative impact, let alone the blue light and whatnot. So that's why I'm trying to put the phone to bed in offline mode, which is sort of my imagine Because I want the phone is an amazing sensor as well. So this sort of I've been navigating how do we use the phone in a healthy way. That's been a lot of the tension that I've been trying to resolve in my work.

Yeah, yeah, a few follow ups on that one would be. It would be interesting actually to see that study done and also see that study done on people who have been diagnosed with, or possibly even suspect they have electrohypersensitivity because I do think there are outliers who are very sensitive to these type of things. And as an aside, rabbit hole, we don't need to go down. I often in lab testing find those people also tend to have elevated levels of things like mercury, aluminum, lead, et cetera, hinting to me that it may actually be due to the body acting as a sort of giant antenna. But I know that there's no studies around that. But I have seen a correlation between high metal load and electro hypersensitivity in certain people, which to me makes intuitive sense. But it's just a theory. But then based on this idea of the phone being able to be in airplane mode while your sleep space app is running, measuring things like sounds in the room and also generating certain sounds that lull you to sleep. And just so people know it's, you know, the way Dan's designed the app is it'll play sound for a certain amount of time in your initial sleep stages and then you can play ambient noise the entire night using a variety of different sleep sounds that he has in the app. And then you can also program it to detect your lighter sleep stages and play waking sounds or gradually wake you. And so it's kind of slick from that standpoint. But then there's also, and I bugged down about this initially because I thought you had to have the phone online to play them. But there are also things like meditations, breath work, and even something called Yoga Nidra in there. This is something I also wanted to ask you Dan, because I mentioned that I had a poor night of sleep last night. I still feel pretty fantastic today, but before I got out of bed this morning around 3:30, I played a Yoga Nidra session. Sorry I didn't use your app. I happened to have an hour long Yoga Nidra session saved the way on my phone. So I played that and I found that when I do that, I believe there's another name for Yoga Nidra, more fancy modern title for it. Non Sleep Deep Rest Protocol, I think is what you call it. I've found that even though I'm not asleep, I'm in like this half sleep, half wake state. And it seems to remarkably simulate sleep or combat the detriment of sleep deprivation with a yoga nidra session. Is there anything too yoga nidra, do you think?

It's definitely one of the most proven ways to get into this sort of theta brain like state. And you're probably getting little micro sleeps during this time. And it's for sure regenerative. Still, I think most sleep scientists would say you can't really replace a full sleep cycle because you're not getting delta wave sleep when you're doing that. That's pretty clear. So you can't fully replace your sleep by doing that. But it is still going to have some regenerative capabilities there.

Okay, gotcha. I want to jump back into some of the reasons that people sleep and a few hacks there, but actually this is relevant. A lot of guys, especially increasingly as they age, do wake up in the, in the wee hours, literally and figuratively, I suppose in this case to pee and then get back into bed and sometimes struggle to go back to sleep. Now, you know, I've installed red light bulbs in my bedroom, so if I do have to flip the lights on to go find the bathroom, it's not disrupting melatonin too much. And I'll often take some kind of inhibitory neurotransmitter like I don't know if, you know, I own a supplements company called Kion and we have something called Kion Sleep. So I'll take a dose of that or sometimes a little inositol or Ashwagandha or something. And I find that to be helpful in getting back to sleep. But for midnight or wakings in the early mornings, do you have any tips for people who want to get back to sleep after that's occurred?

Yeah. So I mean, I think one thing is also not to freak out just because you woke up in the middle of the night to pee. You know, it's sort of normal to wake up periodically throughout the night. We only think of it as problematic if it's like a really a lot of times like more than twice. And also if you're up for more than like five minutes. And this is something where sometimes when you think about it too much like oh, this is so horrible, it actually makes it worse because sleep is all about like letting go and not dwelling on what's currently going on. So also I guess just. Is it really that big of a problem? First and foremost now if you are up for, you know, more than 30 minutes, say that could be problematic. And there's a couple things that you can do. You know, you want to stay hydrated, definitely to get more deep sleep, but you could try to push the drinking a little bit earlier in the day. That's one of the main recommendations for this problem. If you want to also try to consolidate your sleep more because you're waking up a lot in the middle of the night. What's often recommended is counterintuitively to push your bedtime a little later, which will basically build up your homeostatic sleep drive, which is one of the main processes of sleep, which is related to the buildup of adenosine, which is all based on like, you know, coffee suppresses that. So you're basically making yourself more tired so you're less likely to wake up in the middle of the night.

Interesting. So that's kind of back to the same kind of theory as sleep deprivation therapy for insomnia.

Yeah. And I just want to be clear that, you know, sometimes sleep deprivation therapy gets a bad rep because sometimes. And there's no medical device advice. This is not medical advice or anything. I just want to stipulate that. But there's also. There's sleep deprivation therapy, but there's a less draconian version, which is sleep restriction therapy, where you're not being like so severe with it. Basically, they usually do that for older populations. And I just always have in the back of my mind that this is a tool where if I'm having trouble falling asleep and staying asleep to make sure I go to bed tired and to possibly push back the bedtime a little bit if I'm ever teetering on issues falling asleep, staying asleep.

Yeah, it actually is a good point. If I'm hunting or I've got a very busy day and I have one of those nights where I fall asleep and it's like my head hits the pillow and my sleep latency is like one to two minutes. It's actually pretty seldom that I wake up to pee. So that's actually a good point. Just making sure you're not over napping, over resting, or possibly even oversleeping and instead going to sleep when your body actually needs to go to sleep, that kind of makes intuitive sense related to insomnia. In addition to sleep restriction therapy, are there any research, proven methods for that that you really like?

The reason why I've been studying it is again, because of this deep sleep thing and the glymphatic drainage that's going on and its relation to Alzheimer's disease and related dementia. Because people with insomnia are more likely to get less deep sleep, so they're more likely to get Alzheimer's disease. And that's how I got these grants with the National Institute of Aging. The main theory for why people have insomnia is something called the 3Pmodel. This is a good framework for thinking about it. And so the P's are basically predisposing, precipitating and perpetuating factors that make you have insomnia.

Say that one more time.

Predisposing, predisposing, precipitating and perpetuating. So the predisposing factors are sometimes you just sort of have a biology that's more likely to be hyperaroused. I think my wife might be one of these people.

Yeah, I'll raise my hand.

Sometimes you're born with just sort of like a worrisome thinking style, or it's in your DNA somehow. So there's a little bit trait, like, to have, like, maybe a more negative thinking style or maybe, you know, you can't afford to not live by the trains. Train tracks, and the train is waking you up every night. That would be another example of a predisposing factor. Sort of like things you can't really control, whether it's your biology or just the circumstances of your life. So that pushes you into more likelihood of having insomnia. Say it kind of builds up on each other. And then you have a precipitating factor which almost everyone can relate to. And, you know, it's like your dog dies. You know, you're dealing with a death in the family, you have some work stress, and that night you have a particularly hard time falling asleep, which is pretty common. Almost all Americans have periodic insomnia. And so that would be a precipitating factor. And that can push you over the edge to having a night of insomnia, for example. And then what happens is you start building behaviors around that instance of insomnia. And these are the perpetuating factors. An example of that might be spending too much time in. In bed, because you think, oh, my God, in order for me to get the recommended sleep of 7 to 9 hours a night, I need to spend 10 hours a night in bed because I'm up so much of that time.

Right. Or take some kind of a mega nap in the afternoon.

Exactly. That would be another example of that. So you're not able to sleep, and then you're making it worse by taking a nap. And that's why if you. I love naps. I'm with you on like for the optimizer biohacker as a.

But if you have insomnia, for example, that's why they say you should never, never nap. Now, to address this, the recommended treatment isn't a drug. And the drug companies would. There's a place for the drugs in certain situations. And again, this is not medical advice. But I've never seen a study where a drug company will compare their drug to cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. And the reason for that, I'm pretty sure that cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, based on the literature, would blow it out of the water, essentially because with cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which is the recommended treatment, you're really addressing the issue at its core with thoughts, behaviors and feelings around your sleep. And we actually have a cognitive behavioral therapy or we have a module based on these premises within our software.

Yeah, I saw that. I didn't check it out yet. But in brief, how does CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy actually work?

So it's usually four modules. One is the sleep compression thing that we've been talking about. Another one is stimulus control, which is doing things to associate your bed with sleeping. The main thing that you've probably heard, save your bed for sleep. And sex only comes from stimulus control. I'm trying to do super stimulus control using sounds to make that relationship even stronger. And that's part of what we're validating in our studies. Then the other one is your standard sleep hygiene, which is we actually use that as a placebo in our study. Then cognitive training. So address active thoughts that form around sleep. Like the fact that I just can't sleep. There's nothing I can do. I have a brain chemical imbalance. Like addressing a thought like that with like a therapist. And then the final thing, there's actually five, I guess, is training relaxation. So it's ridiculous. Like that we. Not every human being in school is trained how to reduce their heart rate. So we'll actually do yoga. Nidra, Progressive muscle relaxation body scans.

Long exhales would be another that comes to mind for me. Like a 48 or a 478 type of breathwork pattern.

Yeah, we did a 444, the box breathing. We added that based on reading your book. But I'll try to add the 4, 8, 4.

I think it's more effective, honestly. And you know, being a Christian, I actually like to pray when I do it. So I'll do breathless prayer sessions where for example 4. Count in. You know, oh, Lord Jesus Christ, son of God. 8. Count out. Have mercy on me, a sinner, or something like that. Or breathe in. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Breathe out. I will not fear. So I'll just pull different Bible verses, which for me also tends to help with ruminating thoughts, because rather than your thought patterns going towards what neurotransmitter deficit or imbalance you might have that's keeping you awake at night while you're doing your breath work, instead your thoughts are focused on almost like a mantra. And I know some yoga nidra sessions will use mantras as well, but the mantra kind of keeps your mind from focusing on other ruminating thoughts, if that makes sense.

Totally. And yeah, that's. We recommend praying in the app as well as one of the things that you can do. And my wife does something similar with a more Jewish faith. But yeah, okay, that's definitely a good. A good practice.

Okay, gotcha. And obviously something you mentioned is a huge contributor to sometimes insomnia or other sleep issues, and that would be sleep apnea or snoring. I know the audio in the app will detect snoring and even help with the diagnosis of something like that, but what are your thoughts on sleep apnea and remedies for that, especially if folks may not like wearing a CPAP or having a CPAP on during a night of sleep?

Yeah. So I've been delving deep into this research because it's sort of where I'm pivoting to some degree. And as you mentioned, there's actually a new term for when insomnia comes co occurs with sleep apnea called comisa, which is actually pretty common.

I would have said insapnia.

You're more creative with the conventions, I guess. Komisa. It's hard to even remember. But yeah, actually there's a study that I was reading showing that treating. If you have komisa and you treat someone with insomnia, it actually reduces their hypopneas, which is when you stop breathing throughout the night. So that's just saying, like, these things feed into each other. If you're waking up a lot throughout the night from not being able to breathe, it could also make you have insomnia. So a lot of times there's this. I don't know if you've ever seen Inspire as an alternative treatment. It's actually like an implant that they put in you and it stimulates your muscles in your throat to open. A lot of times when they do that then they'll find that the people have insomnia and then they'll need to treat that. But I've been delving deep in this and you bring up a really good point that around 50% of people who are prescribed CPAP, which is the recommended treatment, don't use it after a year. And this is really bad because if you are untreated for sleep apnea, you have a 5.2 fold increase in cardiovascular disease and a threefold increase in all cause mortality. There's this famous study from Wisconsin showing that it essentially reduces your life expectancy by like five years is a simpler way to put it. And the crazier thing is that as the baby boomers age out and obesity remains pervasive, it's estimated that in 2030, around 50% of people are going to have sleep apnea. So it's really a huge problem. So when I'm trying to address this, I'm sort of identifying there's probably a lot of different phenotypes for the disease. And I think this is the case for a lot of diseases. And medicine usually just lumps everyone together. But what I'm going to try to do is phenotype the type of sleep apnea, sleep disorder, breathing person that you are. And this is where I see the medical system being so broken, where if you go to your pulmonologist, which is the person that usually prescribes the cpap, there's a lot of great pulmonologists I work with one of our advisors, Randall Evans, is a great pulmonologist. But a lot of times they're pedaling their gear. The pulmonologist will pedal the cpap, the dentist will pedal the MAD device, you know, the myofunctional personal pedal, their thing. There's randomized clinical trials showing that all of these things work for different situations. Definitely for some you really want a cpap. The future of medicine that I want to see is the pulmonologist being like, you know what we've identified using this AI and I'm trying to build something like this that you really need to go to your dentist and get this mad, this mandibular advancement device fitted for your sleep apnea and the dentist vice versa, saying like, I really can't help you, you're someone that really needs a CPAP or maybe it's just losing 30 pounds. That's really what you're going to need to have to do. So there's a bunch of solutions for sleep apnea, but everyone is giving their own specific solution and they're not looking at the person as a whole, which is really a problem with western medicine.

Yeah, yeah. You know my take on this. And again, I'm just kind of playing with a lot of these things, guinea pigging things. And I'm not a sleep physician or anything like that. But in my own experience, just in tracking pulse oximetry data, even though I don't have sleep apnea, I've noted with some of these strategies, I found an increase in it in not sleep apnea, but in my tissue oxygenation, my pulse oxygenation during the night, which can be done with something like an aura ring or a cheapo from Amazon 12 to 24 hour pulse oxygenation device that you can wear on your fingertip. So you can kind of analyze whether or not some of these strategies are working for you. But my take on sleep apnea is a, if you have a child, avoid them developing it. Pay attention to books like Jaws or James Nestor Book Breathe and do things like teach them how to engage in nasal breathing both during rest and exercise, put them on a diet or encourage them to consume a diet that doesn't have a lot of ultra processed soft foods in it and that instead has a lot of foods that require a great deal of mastication to allow for proper jaw development. And the same could be said for a diet somewhat similar to like the Wesson A price diet that seems to result in better facial, tooth and jaw symmetry, you know, with a lot of fat soluble vitamins like A, D, E and K, a lot of fermented dairy compounds, organ meats, bone broth, et cetera. I think that for general bone health and even the bone health in the face and the teeth and the jaws, that's very important. I think that addressing some of those issues with children is key. And then I also think that looking at biomechanics, because that's where a lot of my formal training comes from. Forward head posture especially increasingly common amongst people who are using their smartphone a lot and looking down or have poor desktop ergonomics with their monitor can result in the head positioning causing a little bit more mouth breathing and a different tongue posture that might also cause some type of sleep apnea issue. So I think that doing corrective exercises from a biomechanic standpoint and kind of an ergonomics analysis of your workplace and also your posture during the day, particularly when looking at your phone and not having your head slumped over and in a forward posture is helpful. I've recently come across some indication that there is a link between rib biomechanics and the fascial tissue surrounding the ribs and the serratus muscles and that positioning of the head, the neck, the airway and the jaw. So I think that if you have a foam roller keeping up by the bedside and doing some foam rolling or trigger therapy or deep tissue tissue therapy on either side of the rib cage can be helpful. And then of course there's this concept you alluded to, to the dentist piece. And I do think that's important if you have access to a dentist. Like I work with Dr. Nico Loud Dan down in Phoenix, and she does the full cone scans of the mouth and the different X rays and the microbiome analysis and a whole workup and then actually does have a specific mouthpiece shield design and I think some form of dental work or dental analysis, at least for, for me it's, it's been super helpful. I know it's a change almost immediately about one to two points consistently in pulse oxygenation using that mouthpiece at night that was custom designed by a dentist. And then the other thing is this concept of mouth taping, which I'm sure you're familiar with. So many people are doing it now and I don't think there's a lot of really great double blinded clinical research behind it. But like I use this stuff called hostage tape. There's another one called Somnifix, the hostage tape I like because it can be used if you have a hairy lips or hair on your face. The Somnifix works fine for most people, but combining something like mouth tape with one of those, if you want to enhance the nasal breathing patterns, even better. Some type of nasal dilator like the turbine and wearing that while you sleep, all those seem to help out as well. So paying attention to head, neck posture, the jaw health and jaw alignment, the rib biomechanics, the desk place and the phone use ergonomics and then mouth taping and, or the use of a nasal turbine at night. I think all of those can be very helpful.

Totally agree with so much what you're saying. I've tried the hostage tape before and you know, read James Nestor's book. Yeah. And learning how to Breathe and that's, you know, we have like a team of myofunctional therapists through sleep space. And I think this is going to be the future of a lot of this is training people how to breathe. Actually, besides, sleep breath is really the foundation even before sleep. So learning how to breathe, the one thing that I totally agree with, everything you Said the one thing that I would also add is the nose. So addressing blockages in the nose, for example, this was actually a sleep hack that personally helped me a lot recently is I started snoring, and I had never snored before. And it turned out that I went to an ENT and I was having some allergies to dust mites.

Oh, wow.

And there was a lot of dust mites, you know, in a bed in New York City. It's just you can't get rid of. You can't get around that. So we just totally outfitted our bed with way thing to address the dust mites, and then my snoring stops. So, you know, addressing the nose is.

Another thing that makes me think of three things, actually. One would be mold. And I think that mold can often be disguised as allergy symptoms when in fact someone has mold exposure, because that can build up in the sinuses and almost create like a biofilm in the nasal passages. So possibly, you know, reading a book, I think the best new book on mold is called Mold Medic. By the way, it's pretty comprehensive, super short. Most anybody can get through that and see all the different tests that can help with mold. And also what you can do with your home if you're concerned about mold exposure, secondarily, if you do have mold. One simple little hack I've found, because I travel a lot and I use this when I'm in Airbnbs or hotels where I suspect there might be mold, is I have this nasal spray made by a former podcast guest of mine, Dr. John Laurent. And it's a glyphosate based essential oil nasal spray. And you do a few huffs of that throughout the day in each nostril, and sometimes you get some nasty stringy stuff coming out. And apparently it helps to break down some of the biofilm in which mold resides as well. So using something like a nasal spray. And then finally, actually that same guy, Dr. John Laurence, as well as several other practitioners, can do intranasal balloon adjustments. This is like a chiropractic adjustment for all the maxillary bones and the sinus. And some people have that done. A lot of UFC fighters, people have been hit in the face do it, but a lot of people have nasal breathing issues do it. And it literally opens up the air passages. Sometimes tons of just like goo and mucus. And even sometimes, you know, in the case of my wife who had really poor nasal breathing and that fixed it for her, like blood was coming out of the nose, and then it just Kind of resets everything because a lot of those sinuses and those small muscles and bones are movable, but they actually go in with a balloon. You want to make sure that you do this right. Don't. Don't have your kids stick a balloon up your nose and blow it up. But it seems to work and fly under the radar for nasal issues. This intra. I think it's actually called an intracranial balloon adjustment or something like that. But I'll link to the podcast in the shownotes. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com SleepSpace podcast, I'll link to a podcast I did about that particular protocol. You haven't heard of that one by any chance, have you, Dan?

No, and thank you so much for this information. I'm actually dealing with this mold situation with my landlords right now.

Oh, yeah.

And dealing with it in New York, they're just. It's ridiculous. They won't fix it.

That book would be fantastic to check out.

I'm going to definitely check out the book in that nasal thing because we're 100% getting exposed to mold in our home. It's not good.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, earlier in the podcast, you talk about energy conservation as being one reason we sleep. Brain cooling. We talked about that Learning and memory consolidation. We talked about that emotional resilience that just generally makes sense for anybody who's been grumpy and hangry on a poor night of sleep. There are two more. Glymphatic drainage was one, but what was the sixth?

Basically, brain metabolic clearance. I guess that's lymphatic drainage.

Okay.

And then restoration and resilience. I'm referring to, like, more human growth hormone.

Okay, I see, I see. That makes sense. So a question I have about the. The drainage or the detoxification component I'd seen a few years ago. I think I even mentioned this in my book how even the idea of side sleeping, and I believe even side sleeping on one's right side may enhance the lymphatic drainage efficiency. Have you come across anything, or do you have any thoughts on sleep position for that or sleep position in general?

So, I mean, I thought the right side was better, mainly from a gastrointestinal perspective. I never tied it to the. I mean, it basically was, what's happening is in slow wave sleep, your cerebral blood fluid increases significantly, which results in a big reduction in the glial cell size, which allows the waste to get cleared through this glymphatic drainage system.

The mechanism there is deep sleep if the right side increases deep sleep, then I would probably say yes. But my understanding of the causal mechanism is is there a way to prime more regenerative deep sleep? And a lot of scientists and entrepreneurs, including myself, have been trying to tackle that.

A few of my friends who are super into sleep, two examples would be Dr. Peter Martone and Dr. Joe Mercola are big advocates of training you to sleep on your back. They just say it's better and they get better sleep cycles. Do you know of any data or research that indicates anyone's sleeping position is best or is it just a matter of personal preference and comfort?

So I think it's the type of sleeper. So obviously if you're like a CPAP person, if you're someone that has untreated sleep apnea, you're not supposed to sleep on your back because the physical, if you have obstructive sleep apnea, it blocks the air, it's more likely to block the airways. Then if you are someone like my wife who has certain like hip pain and back injuries, sleeping on your back is great for back pain, for example. That's what you know, many of a chiropractor and whatnot would recommend. If you have acid reflux, which I periodically get, you know, I think the right side is better. I always get is it right or left side? I think it's the right side.

Okay.

So yeah, trying to train, I've tried to train my myself to sleeping on the right side before to address that issue. I want, this is like the future of science that I want to create. I feel like everyone should be able to run these experiments on themselves to answer this question for themselves. It's sort of like a personalized science thing. And if you can answer it for yourself, that's sort of the most important thing. It's like what the quantify itself movement was about back in the day. And so that's the future that I envision is we're all continuously running this experiment on ourselves. Actually turns out I'm a left side speaker. You're all wrong. And if that's right for you, then all the power to you. You should be able to evaluate that with these wearables. And the wearables oftentimes don't really help you figure that out.

Yeah, it's kind of back to. Even though research has proven proven a moderate to high intensity exercise session is best timed in the afternoon, really the best exercise session is the one that occurs at a time when you're going to actually do it. And I think the Same would go for sleep. If sleeping on your right side enhances glymphatic drainage, but you don't sleep well on your right side. Well, I would say sleep however you sleep best. You know what, I'm 99% sure it's the right side because I recall writing about that in Boundless and feeling a little bit low about it because my wife sleeps on the left side of the bed. It's just the way we sleep. And I love to snuggle with her during the night. And I thought, gosh, now when I snuggle with my wife laying on my left side, I'm not going to get proper amounts of glymphatic drainage. But you know what? It's worth it. It's well worth the spooning.

Yeah, sorry, I'm just looking it up right now. Sleeping on the right side aggravates the heartburn, so it's actually the left side is better.

Aggravates the heartburn. But that's not necessarily synonymous with the glymphatic drainage, which would be a different mechanism altogether. So. So I don't know if you're. I'm not in front of Google right now, but you could always look it up, I suppose. You know, some of these things I'll forget. Like the alternate nostril breathing. I now have it down. When you breathe into the left nostril, it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. And when you breathe in through the right nostril, it activates the sympathetic nervous system. I'm 99% sure the right side is for glymphatic drainage, but I could be wrong. I'm sure either you or someone will hunt it down. We'll. We'll put it in the show notes once we find. I'm sure somebody knows and is like screaming through their. Through their headphones right now at us. Moving on, a couple of other things I just wanted to briefly address in the time that we have left this question. I didn't want to talk about too much in the earlier parts of my podcast because so many people simply rely upon popping a pill or worse yet, sledgehammering themselves to sleep with some kind of diazepam type of approach when it comes to pharmacological or supplemental remedies or interventions for sleep, are there any that you think have particularly good research behind them or that you would recommend or use yourself?

Yeah, so I'm with you where, you know, I'm trying to basically not use the trazodones. And there's Always a time and place for that. You know, talk to your doctor. And even like the idea of having that option. There is sometimes helpful for people that when they have, like a really serious problem, for example. But I'm always trying to be all natural or to, if I'm going to use something, cycle it out and in so I don't become dependent on it. And then there's also things that just aren't going to have any negative impact, such as, like magnesium or gaba, which I think can be beneficial to some degree. I think there's some evidence that there's some weak effects for those things. And so it could be a reasonable supplement. Also, like, even things like, you know, for some people. And I used to do this more with, like marijuana, for example, you know, CBD and CBN in particular is something that I might recommend to somebody that's particularly wound up and anxious just because they don't have the psychoactive component as like a thc, for example. So it's not going to negatively impact rem. So that's the main thing with the THC aspect is there's a pretty strong evidence that you're going to hinder your REM sleep with thc. But since cbn, CBD are not psychoactive, popping like a pretty large dosage of that, like a 25 milligram or whatever, will bring in your relaxation without the negative effects.

Yeah, I've found similar, you know, thc, not only do you get horrific deep sleep cycles, but you get zero dreams whatsoever, which makes me think that there's probably very little either emotional resilience or learning and memory consolidation taking place. So I'm not a big fan of that. Especially, as you've noted, Dan, the alternatives for the endocannabinoid system, CBD and cbn, I think, are safer. They're better for sleep. And in fact, you know, I do use supplemental interventions for sleep. I take magnesium, like you mentioned, and then I take CBD and that kion sleep that I mentioned, which is just a few inhibitory neurotransmitters and L theanine. And if I am traveling, I'll include melatonin. If I've traveled across multiple time zones or come back across multiple time zones, that stack works well for me. But I mean, There's. Oh, gosh, Dr. Andrew Huberman, he has a stack that he recommends. And you'll have other people who will utilize more like a natural herbal approach like St. John's Wort or Ashwagandha or Rishi or some type of adaptogenic approach. I Think it does come down a little bit to what works well for you. But I think we could establish, at least I would say, and correct me if I'm wrong, Dan, that many of these sledgehammers like the pharmaceutical interventions or marijuana and alcohol, despite fooling you into thinking that you might be getting a night of rest, are really not doing you many favors in the sleep on depending department.

Yeah, exactly. So you might be it. They induce a hypnotic state that you're not consciously aware, so you perceive that you're sleeping. But your brain, the quality of your sleep, your brain is more awake.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I, I wanted to give you a chance to share any final little known tips or hacks or tactics you personally would recommend or have found helpful for enhancing sleep. The inception idea was fascinating. Are there any others that would kind of fall into that category, whether it's some sort of dream therapy or consciousness manipulation or anything like that that you've messed around with?

Yeah, so I'll bring in my mad scientist toolbox right here. So the other thing we test in our lab is deep sleep stimulation. And this is where I actually got my start doing transcranial direct current stimulation when I was working for the Naval research lab and air Force research labs. So this work started where you could basically zap the brain with electricity in order to induce different brain states. And later it became known that you can play sounds that entrain this delta brainwave. It's basically like a whooshing sound at 1.2 hertz. And so 1.2 hertz is the oscillation of your slow wave brain waves. And we showed in a lab and in a peer reviewed paper that when we play these tones at just the right time and intensity during sleep, we could increase the delta wave sleep, the slow wave sleep.

Oh, wow.

Then we instantiated it in the sleep space app. I haven't validated it in sleep space yet. That's what I'm trying to do now.

Can you do it in sleep space?

We do it in sleep space, but it hasn't been validated.

How do you do it?

So if you're wearing an Apple watch, we'll estimate your sleep stage and then play the delta frequency when you're more likely to be in a deep sleep. And then we'll also estimate it with if you place your phone on your bed or use the smart bed mechanism.

Oh, so if I'm using the smart bed, I can do that. And do I need to press any specific setting on the sleep space app?

You just have to turn on the deep sleep stimulation in the settings.

Oh, easy. Okay, I'm writing that down right now. I'll mess around with that. Okay, so that's cool. Anything else?

Yeah. And so, you know, playing sounds like very precisely on your side of the bed, I think is an important thing. And in associating those sounds with sleeping, because if you do have a sleep partner, like my wife, I think she has more sensitive hearing, you know, she likes to sound a little lower than I do, for example. So like having sounds to associate with sleeping is something that I'm a firm believer in. And I think you're privy to this. We have this whole ritual with our lights turning red in the wind down. I know you do it when you wake up, but we actually have our whole light environment turn red during that wind down period. And honestly a big thing is knowing where you are in your circadian rhythm and having that metacognition of like, okay, if I'm in like a grant writing deadline or something, I'll actually push like a third wind as like a night owl and know that I need to be like that for like a week. Because sometimes we just have like work habits and things that we have to get done. But having the metacognition of like, oh, I'm going to do this for a little while and then I'm going to get my sleep back and get into a more relaxed state of consciousness is really important. And knowing when you're having struggles with falling asleep and staying asleep and doing that protocol when you're having those issues and it's sort of like imagining like a ladder where first you're trying to make sure you can fall asleep and stay asleep. Actually before that you're trying to rule out any underlying sleep issues like restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea, Then you're trying to improve your sleep efficiency. And then after all of those things are completed at the top of the ladder, is making your sleep quality as good as it could be and optimizing your consciousness.

When you say optimizing your consciousness, what do you mean?

Basically trying to incept yourself.

Okay, okay. Like what we discussed. That would be an example of optimizing consciousness. Yeah, okay, okay, got it. By the way, I should throw in there. I thought of it when you were talking about the red light manipulation. There is a website I recently found a couple of weeks ago, bluelightdiet.com and they have a blog post there called the Circadian Control panel that walks you step by step for your iPhone on how to put a quick shortcut button and so I've got four shortcuts on my phone now on the home screen. One is weight, one is red, one is blue for super alertness, and then one is sleep that automatically just turns off WI fi, Bluetooth, airplane mode, shifts it to red. It's super convenient and it's just a simple shortcut. So I'll link to that in the show notes if people want to do that to their phones, because I found it to be just super convenient. One button. When I'm ready to go to bed, I push the sleep button and boom, everything's out. But then I can push the red button if it's like 7pm And I'm still tooling around on my phone and doing things. So that doesn't disable any of the, the, any of the network. All it does is turn the screen red. Then later on I can press the sleep button and that goes screen even more red and dim. And then turns all the networking capabilities off.

I love that. And I mean, what happens to, I think a lot of people is they go to use their phone and then they end up looking at Instagram, for example. So to have that one button and I have it, I have a similar not. I want to check out what you just mentioned, but having a shortcut where you just do one button into like the sleep thing makes it so you're not. I'm eventually going to make it so with an NFC tag, you can activate it without even opening your phone. I think that'll be like the next level of some of this stuff.

Yeah, that would be super cool. All right. Very last thing, because I told my kids I'd ask you, both of them sleep with their dogs. Any comments on pet sleeping or whether that totally throws the sleep wearable recognition fully out of whack? I imagine it does, but. You okay with pet sleeping or not? I told them I was interviewing you. They said to ask.

So generally most doctors would say no pet sleeping and try to find a way to get the pet to sleep sort of by you and not in your bed. Dogs are definitely better than cats, since cats are nocturnal, after all. So they're going to be swatting you in the face while you're sleeping and whatnot and running around it and night because it's when they're supposed to be active and hunting. I appreciate that having the comfort of a warm body next to you can relax you and possibly help with your sleep quality by bringing, you know, bringing you into a more relaxed state. So I think there is something to that. But you Know, the animal can also definitely cause problems. So I'm not strongly against sleeping with the dog, but. And if it works for you, then all the power to you. But generally they can also disturb your sleep sometimes as well.

Yeah, that makes sense. My theory is similar to when I used to co sleep with infants and I would actually sleep better, is similar to the research the Heart Math Institute has done on how the heart rate variability, or heart's electrical signal of the horse jockey and the horse will align when the jockey enters the stable and they'll both be kind of in the same brainwave state. Based on that, that if a pet is resting in bed with you, there's a chance that if that pet is resting, their own rested heart signal may actually somehow be something that you pick up via the electromagnetic signal emanated by the heart, which actually has an electromagnetic field, and that therefore, by being in the room with another rested mammal, it might actually somehow affect your brainwave patterns to sleep better. That's a theory of mine. But I guess it depends on how active your dog is in the evening, because that could obviously backfire on you.

Yeah, I mean, I think there is definitely some stuff going on subconsciously with frequencies that we as scientists just don't understand yet. And it wouldn't surprise me if that, you know, I think we do resonate with each other's frequencies in some ways that it's just hard to study. Yeah, but I think there has been research. I mean, there is research showing exactly what you just said where our bodies can sync up to one another.

Yeah, it's super interesting. What you need to do is market like a. A false or a fake dog pillow that has a certain electromagnetic signal emanates so people can snuggle with Fido in a fully rested state without Fido's dream snakes.

Ah, it's the next startup.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, Dan, I mean, we covered a lot. We didn't even tap into half the features on the Sleep Space app, but hopefully people are at least a little bit interested in checking it out as well as all of your work and your research. So everything I mentioned, from the a little trick for the iPhone to papers that Dan has sent me to Resources, the Sleep Space app. I think I do have a link for that over there as well. Dan also has a sleep bed system or a smart bed system that I've started to experiment with. And after this podcast, which I was kind of waiting for, to ask all my little selfish questions and potentially even experiment more with it, I will definitely be using even more of especially some of those deep sleep stage stimulators and other elements. So, Dan, this has been absolutely fascinating. Probably one of the more comprehensive sleep podcasts I've done. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

My pleasure. It was awesome. Thanks for having me.

Awesome. Awesome. All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Dan Gartenberg of Sleep Space, signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com Sleep Space podcast. Have a fantastic week.

I am coming to London June 16th through the 18th and I'm going to be a part of the health Optimization Summit over there. And if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com calendar you can check out that event. Fantastic. Kind of like biohacking meets wellness meets massive health technology expo. But while I'm there, I'm going to be in London with my whole family. We're actually going to head to Italy afterwards and cycle through Italy. But I decided to put on a very special private, intimate VIP event with me while I am in London. It's at this crazy place called Hum2n. Hum2n. Like human except for the two so Hum2n labs. They are a creme de la creme biohacking facility. I mean the best hyperbaric chambers, amazing selection of IVs, super nutrient cocktails, cryotherapy, red light therapy. We're basically going to party and biohack and do a Q and A with me and the fine proprietor of that facility, Dr. E, who's a wealth of knowledge and an of himself at that event. It's Monday, June 19, so it's going to be private networking, live Q and A, great food, great cocktail mocktails, experiential biohacks, a variety of healthy gourmet foods. It's just going to be really amazing. You're going to get a swag bag too. Your swag bag includes super nutrient IV cryotherapy, red light therapy and hyperbaric oxygen that's worth £750 alone. Then you got the H2MN supplements. They're going to give you their brainchild sharpener and their super blend protein. You get a travel voucher to take you to and from the event, meaning using a company called Uno. They will bring you to and from the event if you have trouble finding it or don't want to drive. So there's a lot more that are going to go into those Sway bag too. But right now I have to tell you, this thing is going to fill up fast. It's in London June 19th and you get there by going to BenGreenfieldLife.comHUM2N London that's BenGreenfieldLife.com HUM2N London and that will allow you to claim your spot at this fantastic event. So BenGreenfieldLife.com HUM2N London.

More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed, and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. And if you liked it, or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.