Advanced Guide to Better Sleep

So sleep. A lot of people just are whimsical about it. They think I'm just going to lay my head on the pillow and it's just going to happen or not. But you really need to invest in establishing the habits and hygiene around this. You need to think about sleep as you would anything you take seriously. You need to try to perfect the craft.

Actually, I'm super interested for each of you. What do you think is the has the greatest impact on your sleep negatively? Like if you could choose one thing that's like the highest I'll share first. Mine is like intense television. So like really like. Yeah, like.

What are you watching, Mike?

Nothing right now.

This is fun, Mike. Tell us, tell us more. Okay.

All right, fine.

If you realize sleep is the number one performance enhancing drug, it's. There's no more powerful drug in the world you can take on a daily basis, then it's worth prioritizing your life around sleep. Hi, everybody. This is the Don't Die podcast with Brian Johnson. Today we're talking about sleep and how it is the number one best performance enhancing drug in the world that you can take every single day. If you are struggling with sleep, we are going to try to condense the shortest and best list ever created to help you achieve high quality sleep every single day. Yeah, I think ironically we're talking about sleep today. Have we not?

I am so tired.

I'm exhausted. Mike, how are you?

I'm doing fine.

You're good?

I'm just great.

Kate and I went to Las Vegas. We went to Vegas on Monday. Today's Thursday, so we had two nights there and yeah, I had a terrible night's sleep the first night.

Me too.

Yeah, yeah.

I've heard there's lots of sleep in Vegas. That's a general right.

It was like, evening, Brian. Evening, Kate. We went out. No, I'm just joking. We actually tried to go to sleep early and then. It's just so hard when you're in a new hotel room, not in your environment.

Environment is so key to getting good sleep, right?

Yeah. I mean, actually the first day we were there, we had a whole bunch of unexpected events that happened. So we, we brought half our calories with us. We're always prepared. But then the other half requires us to be prepared to find some form of, you know, vegetables, like some dish. And, and we had no time. We had kind of some emergency things pop up and so we didn't get to eat until 4 or 5pm and so then it was a complicated situation. Like, do you yeah. Do you fast or do you eat? And I rolled the dice and I ate and it raised my heart rate. Like it did everything I talk about nonstop and it wrecked my, it wrecked my sleep.

Did you guys hit the buffet? Was it like an all you can eat Vegas buffet?

That's the crazy thing. It was like hummus, raw vegetables. It was all very, very clean, but still made a huge impact.

Yeah, digestion's digestion doesn't matter what it is, keeps you awake.

Today we are talking about sleep and we got some feedback from previous sessions. So we're learning and the, the feedback is, it's hitting and people want to hear practical tips as fast as possible. And then if we jump into the science a bit later, that's cool as well. So we're going to try to do that format today and walk into some of the more specific suggestions we have. And so we have been talking about sleep over the past couple years and the importance to basically every other thing you care about in life. So people typically think about sleep as it relates to health, but people don't typically think about sleep as it relates to how much money they make and whether they're going to get a promotion and whether they can find, you know, a, A mate, whether they can have, you know, like, imagine having children. Like everything you do in life maps back to sleep. And today we want to talk about why that's the case, the science behind it, and then some things you can do to improve your sleep in life.

First half we're going to talk about the practical protocol, what you should know that you should do. And the second half we'll get more in, deep in the science and what the literature says that supports how we've arrived at this protocol.

And also to remind you, Dr. Mallon was formerly an a, emergency medicine doctor, actually going through medical school and residency. And then er. Doctor Sleep was not a part of your daily routine or your lifestyle for many, many years?

No, no, the, the lack of sleep was a part of my daily routine and lifestyle for many, many years. So I'm still playing catch up. I'm. Yeah, I'm five years, five years into playing catch up and I'm still figuring things out.

Yeah. The irony that the system actually encourages doctors, the people that we hold most sacred for our health, to service their own health in that wild.

Yeah. Like when I'm in a moment of crisis.

Right. Yeah. And with the data we have, the data that physicians make poor choices when they're sleep deprived, yet we still encourage the same very thing. So yeah, it's crazy.

Mike, do you remember what it felt like to be that sleep deprived or is it just kind of a blur?

Oh, God, yeah, I do. It is the worst feeling. Uh, you know that, like that sinking sensation in your gut when you feel. Like when you wake up too early or maybe you're getting up for a plane or something like that. It's that sinking sensation in your gut magnified 10x and just this overwhelming urge to lay your head down wherever you are at that very moment. Like at a computer in a patient's room, like wherever you are, you're just like, you're, you're constantly, you're half listening to the patient and half like. Or the nurse or whomever, and. And half like just wanting to put your head down sideways and close your eyes. It's the. It's the worst feeling in the world for sure.

That's so messed up. Yeah, yeah. Same thing with. We were recently on this weekend, we were catching up with some friends and one of these people went to a very prestigious school growing up and they were saying how. Same thing, they put their students through rigorous, intense educational programs that are at the detriment of their sleep. Like, the schedule that they're required to follow, it's mandatory, required them to get little sleep and so the same thing, it's like wild that we would do that to the brain.

When I was in a split custody situation with the children's mom and I would beg them to get good sleep, like, you know, they would have homework until like 11 o' clock midnight. And they get up in like 5 in the morning to do early morning seminary for their church. So they'd be getting four, five hours of sleep. And I just was. I went all out, like, please, like, please get sleep. I don't care what your grades are, just please get sleep. Because the evidence I was finding was that it was significantly influencing going to impair their emotional capacity, not just now, but also later in adulthood that you miss out on that important development phase. But man, it was such a grueling situation and it was so hard personally to be one step removed from being able to care for them. And just seeing this happen, and I just was powerless. So it's. It really is very. It's not just about your own wellbeing, but it's about others as well.

Totally. Actually, before we jump into the protocol, do you want to mention the kernel study that you did? Cause I find that so fascinating. I think that resonates with a lot of people in their lived experience. Of being sleep deprived.

Yeah. So at kernel we built this device, this brain interface you put on your head. It's like a bike helmet and it's like a blood oxygenation device. You, you know, the one you put on your fingers. It's looking at, it uses, using light to look at oxygen levels of the brain and you could then use that as a proxy for neurons firing. And we did a small study. This is n equals 1. We looked at my deep sleep and actually my sleep and as it relates to my willpower. And what we found is when I had lower levels of deep sleep, I think on, on the average was somewhere around 35 to 45 minutes versus an hour and a half to two hours of deep sleep. My willpower plummeted. And the way we measured this is a go, no go task where you see images in the screen and you try to basically stop yourself from pushing the button when you see red versus green. And that measures your ability to control like impulse control. And so this intuitively makes sense that if you don't get good sleep the following night, you know, when you're staring down the pint of ice cream with a bag of chips or like whatever your vice is, your likelihood of, of withstanding that temptation is very low. If you haven't had deep sleep the night before, significantly influence on the, on the willpower. So that's also. Yeah, it really is a, it forms this domino effect either pointing positively or negatively. But you get into a vicious loop otherwise negatively if you start skipping on sleep and you fall into that cycle where you. Yeah. Anyway, we'll get into the habits of how this makes these effects complicated.

Yeah. Frontal lobe is first to go, I guess. Right. So the decision, decision making, the willpower section of the brain is the area where we, we start to see the most reduction in performance with, with sleep disruption, which is important for not just like whether you're pushing a red or a blue button, but also your ability to drive a car, your ability to make life saving decisions if you work in a hospital, your ability to prevent yourself from, you know, eating a bag of potato chips, whatever, whatever that decision making capacity is, is going to be impaired. And yeah, it's interesting you used the word impair earlier, Brian. And there was I think a study looking at people with, with sleep deprivation and actually showing that it's, the effects are similar to being legally drunk. Which is interesting because like we allow, you know, tractor trailer drivers to drive sleep impaired, we allow physicians to work sleep impaired. You know, we, we don't, we don't monitor people sleep to determine if they're capable of performing their job or not. And that's kind of scary.

Yeah. So if you're watching this podcast, give us a rating. How are we doing so far? And then compare that to previous podcasts. Are we both Brian and I are a little sleep deprived. So theoretically, this should be a technically a worse podcast. So let us know.

All right, should we get going on?

Let's do it. So this is all of your power laws to have amazing sleep coming from the man that got eight months of perfect sleep.

Okay, so as I go through this, Kate and Mike jump in at any point if you want to add personal antidote, evidence, observations. Cool.

Sounds great.

Let's do it.

The first observation is for someone to realize that you have never been taught how to sleep. You know, you've been taught how to drive a car, potentially, you've been taught sex ed in school. You learned how to do algebra and geometry, and you learned history lessons. But in society, there is no course anywhere to learn how to sleep, which is really insane that it's such a fundamental part of our existence and there's just no education anywhere. I try to become an expert in sleep, and the way I did this is I achieved eight months of perfect sleep using a wearable. And I wanted to demonstrate you really can. And doing that, I discovered a lot of things that I just didn't find anywhere. And so I'm going to explain to you in very simple terms how you can also master sleep, that if it's evaded you for years, where you feel like no matter what you do, you just can't get good sleep. I'm going to try to make this so it's not mysterious anymore. It's actually the body responds in a very predictable way to what you do in life. And hopefully these tips will help you unravel that mystery and then be able to start making gains on a daily basis.

And I'm gonna probably jump in while you're talking and ask questions that I know that people often ask you when you bring up each of these things.

All right, so the. The first idea, the first concept is that you need to think about sleep as you would anything you take seriously. A hobby, your job, you know, being a parent, you need to try to perfect the craft, and that means you need to take it seriously. So sleep. A lot of people just are whimsical about it. They think, I'm just gonna lay my head on the pillow and it's just gonna happen or not. But you really need to invest in establishing the habits and hygiene around this. And so the mindset is really important. And what I like to frame this as is for example, every day most of us have meetings and we have set times. Those meetings begin. So if the meeting begins at 9:00am and you show up at 9:04, you typically acknowledge the group and say I'm sorry for being late. Right? Even for a four minute infraction basically violates a social norm where you've disrespected other people's time in doing that. Now when, if Your bedtime is 10pm and you go to bed at 10:04pm it's not customary that you apologize to yourself for being late, right? You're just like whatever. And if it's 11 or 12 or 1 or 2, you don't even care. And what I want to suggest is that you need to approach sleep with the same level of social rigor as you would in a meeting that Your bedtime is 10:00pm, be on time at 10:00pm and if you're even a few minutes late, acknowledge that's a form of disrespect to yourself. That's how serious sleep is. Otherwise if you, it slips in your mind of being this lackad is thing that you can just push around. That's us number one on, on mindset around sleep.

I was just gonna say some things that we, we don't do this. I don't do this. I don't think you do Brian or Mike. But I've heard that some people set an alarm for their bedtime as opposed to their wake time to indicate that kind of importance in their life. And then the other thing that comes up when people talk about this is like they're like I need to make this, you know, travel. And so something that both Brian and I do when we're traveling is we don't book any flights that compromise our. So if we're. I think when we flew to Honduras, for example, we intentionally flew to Miami, slept one night and then got on a flight the next day to avoid having get there at like 2am or whatever the time was. So seems impossible until you accept it as fact. And then pretty quickly you self resolve and create systems in your life to actually put sleep as your number one priority.

Honestly, like your, your experience with resting heart rate before going to bed is, is important. So I, I'd like for you to share about that. But in general, the concept behind resting heart rate is the idea that we are attempting to achieve a lower resting heart rate when we sleep. And that's because resting heart rate is a marker for parasympathetic nervous system activation and for adequacy of sleep. The more, the higher sleep duration you get, the more recovered you are, the higher your resting heart rate will be and the more activated your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the. The rest and relax ve of your nervous system. So we're certainly using resting heart rate to track and monitor our success on a nightly basis in terms of how well we are resting our bodies. And the goal should be that you stay at your baseline and or slightly lower. Now, things will determine where your resting heart rate baseline is. For example, your aerobic fitness. The more aerobically fit you are, the lower your resting heart rate will be. Traditionally, the younger you are, the lower your resting heart rate will be. Although age is not necessarily predictive of that. It's just that as we get older, we often lose some fitness and lose restfulness. So it tends to, to, to creep up. Uh, but in general, we should be focusing for a lower resting heart rate. Now, what you do, Brian, which I think is super interesting and I think you should share with the listeners, is tracking your resting heart rate prior to sleep, as opposed to the lowest heart rate you've had while you're sleeping, which is what most of these devices like whoop and, or, and things like that do. What are you doing there, Brian?

What Mike said about resting heart rate is exactly right. And my experience has been this is that my sleep depends upon my resting heart rate before bed. And so I've tried to structure my entire life around this idea of things that increase my resting heart rate are bad. Of course, excluding exercise, like, that's a different topic. Things that lower my resting heart rate are good. And then you can map your daily life habits and decisions on these two, whether it goes up or whether it goes down. So, for example, when you eat food close to bedtime, your heart rate goes up. And when your heart rate goes up, your sleep quality goes down. If you have a fight with someone right before bed, your heart rate goes up, your sleep goes down. If you are on your screens or working and you're in a high stress or in a more aroused state, heart rate goes up, sleep goes down. And so you start pattern matching all these things in your life where anything that increases your heart rate is going to lessen the quality of your sleep. And it goes back to what Mike said is the increase in the heart rate. You're activating your sympathetic nervous system, either in terms of Stress or some kind of arousal or metabolic activity to digest food. And so I've tried to build my entire life around this one number. To lower my heart rate before bed, which means it determines what I eat, when I eat, how I do a night nighttime wind down routine. So for example, I'm trying to resolve my internal stress and my worries, trying to avoid rumination. I'm trying to have a 30 to 60 minute block of time before bed where I can turn screens off, go for a walk, meditate, read a book, like Take it easy, but have a demarcation between workday and rest day. But I've built all these sets of habits around how to reduce my resting heart rate in that final moment before bed. And that will then boost sleep quality.

Can I ask a question, Brian? Like maybe it's a personal question. Do, do you experience anxiety?

I think I experience anxiety in the form of that my mind is always working on problems. And if it hasn't solved the problem in a way that I feel like is appropriate, my mind will just continue to grind on that problem until it feels like it's actually addressed it.

Okay. Just because like the, the description that you gave around checking your resting heart rate before sleep, like I could just see, like personally I see myself doing, if I did that on a regular basis, the, I would, I would struggle if I checked it and it were elevated because I would be like, oh, I'm gonna have a bad night of sleep. I'm, I'm guaranteed to have a bad night of sleep. I'm screwed. Like, you know, and then I, I, I will inevitably have a bad night of sleep because I now have anxiety about having a bad night of sleep. Like sleep anxiety is a thing that a lot of people have to worry about. So like, I love the fact that you have found this, like check my resting heart rate before I go to sleep to know how I'm gonna sleep kind of thing. Like, but I, I could see how for some people who maybe run a little hotter, that might actually, it might be sort of like a, a loop that it puts them in that it makes it harder for them to, to get good sleep. I don't know your thought, your thoughts on that. Has anybody ever express or thought about that?

Yeah, and I'm curious Brian, like when you do see an elevated heart rate, what's your experience of it before bed?

Yeah, I mean this happened actually on Tuesday night when Kate and I, we, we were actually finishing up the day. We had eaten late. Uh, I, I rolled the dice and decided to eat to get my calories today, and I did a quick check on my resting heart rate, and it was, I think, 53 beats per minute. Typically, by that point, I'm around, like, 4:46 to 47. And then by the time I put my head on the pillow, I'm 44 beats per minute. And so I did say to Kate, oh, no. Like, this is a challenging situation, because I know that at this level of heartbeat, and I'm in a room that is not my home environment. You know, my. My mattress is not cold. Um, so I know these circumstances are going to probably create a troubled environment. And sure enough, it happened. And. And so maybe, you know, did I psych myself out by saying that? You know, possibly. But I would say that now that I've been so attuned to my sleep pattern for so many years, I can almost guess exactly what's gonna happen with my heart rate, my stress, my rem, my deep. It just feels so algorithmic to me that I guess the way I think about it, Mike, is my body is so predictable with the inputs that I don't feel like I really psych myself out. It just kind of feels it's inevitable. And that's true if my heart rate's low or heart rate's high. But I think your point is correct, that a lot of people don't have wearables because they wake up in the morning, and if they see they got a bad score, they're like, now I feel terrible. Like. And they feel terrible about themselves the entire day because the algorithm told them they feel terrible. So, yeah, I know it's a thing. And people struggle with that. And I think it's a great point. I personally don't. I really love the data, and whether it affects me or not, it doesn't bother me if it affects me or not. But it does seem like the patterns I just are very stable of. What I see is what I get.

Yeah. And I feel like maybe I'm not the kind of person that indexes really high on that loop cycle, but when I do experience that kind of anxiety where I wake up and I'm like, my sleep score is crap. Am I gonna feel like crap today? I. I think if you do it enough times, if you stick through the process, eventually it evens out. Cause you can't keep. At least in my experience, you can't keep having this anxious attachment to the data, because eventually you kind of disassociate from it anyway, and you just live your life. So that's been my experience. But again, maybe I'm less of a looper than some people out there.

I'm interested in how low your resting heart rate is before sleep, Brian. Like I think that's worth calling out. So you just, you just said out loud that your resting heart rate is generally in like 45, 46 range before sleep. Correct. And, and if I'm not mistaken you're, you're like resting heart rate while you're sleeping, like your lowest heart rate of the night is not much lower. Is that correct?

That's correct. Yeah. I think last night, let me check. I think last night I was 42.

Okay, so, so maybe like you are three to four points above your actual resting heart rate. That I think that's pretty remarkable. Like I'm pretty sure most people are not nearly that low before they go to bed and that's probably a function of wind down routine, lack of exercise, you know, late in the, late in the day, not eating for hours. I mean your, your fasting window prior to bed is, is what, six or seven hours right now? Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean so like that's, that's notable for sure you're not like most people. I would say the average American is not reaching that, that lowest heart rate until 2 to 3am and you're pretty much already there by the time you're going to sleep.

That's the crazy thing about Brian's. I feel like he's almost, it's like a, it's like a pre sleep Brian that exists during this wind down routine that is a form of sleeping in a way. It's like the, like the, you know, prelude to sleeping that like it feels like all of the habits he does throughout the day. Because I've been around Brian when he's been really diligent with his routine for the day and then when he hasn't, like when we're traveling and there's a really big difference to the type of person that he is. So I wonder, Mike, like, like deviation between resting heart rate before bed and resting heart rate itself might also be an indication of how well you followed a sleep protocol for the day.

Yeah, totally agree. I think like, I guess what we're getting at here in what, what is super interesting is is this indicator in of itself the heart rate prior to sleep A. Is it even a better metric than your resting heart rate right while you're sleeping? Classically we think about the rest and heart rate while you're sleeping. But it's an interesting point because what it's Showing is, it's showing how prepared you are for sleep rather than how successfully you slept. Right. And I, I, I wouldn't be surprised if the earlier heart rate in the evening is a better overall metric than what you finally got to at the end of your sleep cycle.

I love that. It's like you're a professional sleeper and here's how you measure how well of a professional you are at it. Like, here's your job score for being a professional sleeper.

There are things that could get in the way. Like so if your bedroom's not optimized, you're having disrupted sleep, things like that, that wouldn't, this metric wouldn't really speak to that. This is really speaking to like the performance of your day, evening and how well you've set yourself up for success during sleep.

I mean, one of the reasons why I talk about this, and I take your point as a valid one, that when you create a measurement for people, it can create anxiety. You know, it can become a bigger problem than it is an effective solution. And I guess I do this because two reasons. One is most people I personally engage with feel absolutely overwhelmed with health. You have to think about a hundred different things, like how much protein, how much fat, what kind of fat are cdls good, are they bad? Like you have to, like, you have to dice through like an infinite number of questions and you never know who to trust. You don't know what to believe. You just like all on an island stuck by yourself and you don't know what to do. And so I talk about resting heart rate as a way to simplify that complexity and just say, look, yes, the world of health and wellness is very complicated. You know, it's not like there's just one answer. But where you can find stability, where you can anchor your boat, is your resting heart rate before bed. That is where you can find peace and comfort and control. Like you control that variable to a very large degree versus you can't control like what you know are seed oils good or bad. Like solving that debate is a very hard thing to do. Or the cholesterol debate. And so then if you just say what elevates heart rate and what lowers it, you get into basically the most important life decisions people make. Do you have late night snacks? You know, if you're on the couch and you're watching your favorite movie, do you down a pint of ice cream? Do you have a bag of cookies? Do you, you know, smoke some weed? Do you have a glass of wine? Do you like all these questions that come up, you know, do you work until the very moment you go to sleep? And so all those things fall into the area of control that the person has over their life. And so that's why I, like, this is that it really gives people a tangible thing they can measure. When people get wearables, like, the very first thing they say, it will tell me, I got a wearable and I saw that alcohol wrecks my sleep, right? Like, that is like the number one thing people say. And so this is like. And then they see, like, okay, alcohol is bad for sleep. When I sleep poorly, I feel miserable. And then they make other connections. When I eat late, I sleep poorly and I feel bad. And so, like, you make these series of. Of. Of discoveries. So that's why I just want to put them on the path to say, learn what increases your heart rate and learn what lowers your heart rate. And you will just build life habits based upon these observations.

Yeah, it reminds me of wearing a CGM and just like, learning. Just like, you know, you're just getting data and you're just collecting data and starting to figure out, like, what are. What are the inputs that matter? Right? Like, actually, I'm super interested for each of you. What do you think is the. Has the greatest impact on your sleep? Negatively? Like, if you could choose one thing that's like, the highest I'll share first. Mine is, like, intense television. So, like, really, like. Yeah, like, what are you watching, Mike?

Nothing right now. This is fun. This is fun, Mike, tell us. Tell us more.

Okay, all right, fine, fine. So I recently, I have. I have dabbled in the pit, which is on.

On Max.

It's that it's a new, like, emergency medicine show that's like, hyper.

Oh, God, this is good.

Yeah, it's basically, like. It's basically for me, just like, reliving is like, all of the trauma in my adult life. Yeah, I watched that. Yeah. If I watch that right before bed. Yeah, it jacks me up for sure.

Yeah, so that makes sense.

That's at the top of the list.

In what way? Like, does it take you back to where you were? Is like a form of therapy? Or do you, like, what is it?

You know, it's interesting. I've been thinking about that. Like, I don't know, this is totally a tangent, but, like, I think it is a bit therapeutic in a way. But it forces me through things that maybe I think I've just walled off and haven't processed. So, like, it's. It's like representing these things for me. They're like, okay, time to work through those feelings and that like trauma that I took on from that family, that person who died and you know, like all that stuff. But like it is not conducive to getting a good night of sleep for sure. Especially if you watch in the evening right before bed. So that's my bad one right now.

I'm so curious if you imagined watching that show at like 11am does it hit the same like I can kind of imagine that there's like this link between before bed activity. It's like a weird wind down in a way. But ironically you're kind of getting yourself more aroused.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm like at 11am I'm in work mode, you know, I'm not sure that I could like open up emotionally enough to even connect right at that time. Like I, I don't know. That's a good question. Yeah, yeah. I never thought about or think I could find the time in my life to watch a TV show at 11 o' clock in the morning.

Exactly. It doesn't. Yeah, yeah.

Mike, do you, have you seen through the data how much does watching the pit. It's a pit, right?

Yeah, yeah. Um, I mean like a lot. It's like. So it'll do, it'll be multiple things. Heart rate, heart rate variability decreases, which we haven't talked about yet, but that's another metric for sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system activation. Right. So the higher your heart rate variability, the more sympathetically activated you are, or I guess less sympathetically activated you are, which is ideal. So higher heart rate variability. Ideal resting heart rate also goes up. And traditionally you won't rest in heart rate down, just like we were talking about. And then the other thing that is very remarkable, similar to alcohol or a late meal, my resting heart rate, my lowest resting heart rate happens much later at night. So earlier in the evening while I'm sleeping, my resting heart rate stays up. So it takes your, your nervous system a while to relax after you activate it. Right. And that's what we're seeing with all of these different types of inputs. Whether it's exercise or a meal, or stress, thinking about work, answering emails until midnight, watching the pit, whatever it is you're activating your sympathetic nervous system, it takes a while to relax. And you, you see that by looking at your heart rate trend throughout the night and not seeing it drop until late in the morning, until late in the morning or late at night.

That's really cool. I've never thought about looking at when my lowest resting heart rate happens. I'm gonna start doing that every morning. That's. That's a cool tip.

You're looking for a hammock. You actually want the, the, the view. You want it to look like a hammock where it starts like just a little bit higher, is relatively flat, hits like lowest around like midpoint of night, and then slowly increases as your body prepares to wake back up. That's ideal. The standard American generally sees it's more like a mountain and then a valley. A valley right before. Right before they wake up, which is not what you want. Yeah. What do you think is the. Has the greatest impact on your sleep? Negatively?

I think both Brian and I say the same thing, which is food. Like that if you. Oh, man. That without a doubt is the number one thing. Any snacks before bed? I feel like a lot of times, Brian, I will be in public with people and be like, you know, like, have dinner at 5pm Just try that. And they're like, yeah, yeah, I eat early. But they don't take into account the snacks that they're having before bed.

Really.

That's just like part of their ritual. But I feel like that makes the biggest difference for me for resting heart rate.

Yeah, I mean, I guess stress and food. So I tip. My mood is usually very stable and I typically do a very good job of stress. I think a lot of people have this misconception that my life is like this lavish, carefree and my life is like. Is brutal. Like it's. There's a lot of tough stuff happening all the time. And so it really. I guess I've had to work very, very hard for that. But sometimes the topic of the stress becomes really intense and I just. I'm trying to somehow achieve some kind of reconciliation with it, either resolving myself with the situation or trying to solve the problem of the situation. And I can't quite do it. That will get me almost. I think my kind of like the pit. Like that will nail me as well. But then definitely food. And so my lesson from Tuesday in eating later is I would rather go hungry and miss out on some calories for the day. Then I would try to pick up the calories later in the day almost like. And this is again an update for me because I. We always. We're always evolving in blueprint. And I'm always trying to test my body to say, are the conditions I thought were true before still true now? You know, like, for example, we've made all like with the sauna over the past 23 days, like, is it the case that my cardiovascular fitness has changed and now if I eat a bit later in the day, it's not going to have the same kind of. I'm always doing these experiments every day and all these different capacities. And now it's like, okay, if I, I should just have a cutoff, like it's noon or one. If I hit that point and I haven't had a chance to eat, I'm not doing it. And then the consequence on how I feel is so devastating to me because I love feeling great. And like today I've got a little bit of a headache, right. Even though last night was a great night's sleep, it takes you a couple days to recover from a really bad night. Sleep, sleep. And so that one night I'm still trying to recover from. So it's just, it's not, it's not worth it to me in almost any capacity to, to. I mean, we try very best, but yeah, it's very rarely worth it to me.

You guys, I want to get through all these tips and we've got a lot of time to go. So one, become a professional sleeper. Two, measure it with the resting heart rate. And just really quickly before we move on for that. Brian, because I'm actually, I'm even more motivated from this conversation. Can you talk me through how you measure it? So like, do you lie down for five minutes, close your eyes? Like, is there any practical way? Or like, is it like a rough estimate?

Yeah. So first, just to wrap up that previous segment on the heart rate, let's throw this up on screen. This image I have that shows which things increased heart rate by what amounts. Like for example, alcohol before bedtime is between 5 and 10 beats per minute. Anxiety stress elimination has the biggest one of 5 to 25 beats per minute. Um, late night exercise, 4 to 10 beats per minute. So we'll put that on screen just so you get some context on how significant of an increase a given thing is that you can anticipate. We need to add the pit there that we're missing.

I was just about to say that.

That falls under anxiety, stress and rumination.

They.

I'm sorry, K. I'm sorry, what was your, what was your comment on moving on?

Yeah, yeah, just. We've covered it. So press sleeper number one, Resting heart rate before bed. Oh, yeah, that's right. Um, I want to know how, how to measure resting heart rate.

Okay. That's right. So if you have a wearable, uh, this is what I do personally. So I will put my head on the pillow and I will take a few deep breaths. As Mike said, it takes a, you know, a minute for your body to calm down. Like so like there's, I can calm my heart rate down in like 60 seconds, but a longer duration time. Like if you're, if you're aroused from watching a movie or from having a fight or from working or like some high intense social engagement, it's gonna take you 30 to 60 minutes to calm your body down. It's very, very hard to accelerate that process. So I'll get back to that in just a minute. On like the, the protocol, the very, the protocol in a very concise fashion. But yeah, so put your head on the pillow, take a few deep breaths and then if you have a wearable, you might have a real time indicator of what your heart rate is. And if you don't, just simply take your fingers, put it on the side of your neck, measure your pulse, count the number of beats in six seconds and then multiply that by 10. And so you're probably somewhere between, you know, 50 and 70 beats per minute, thereabouts. And then your goal is to lower your heart rate. So let me just do this in a very concise fashion. So here's what I would suggest you do. Get your baseline measurement tonight and now make it your goal in 30 days to lower your resting heart rate by 10%. So if you measure in tonight at 60%, within 30 days try to be at 56 beats per minute. And the way you do that is you intuitively learn or quantitatively learn what things increase your heart rate, which things lower your heart rate. So eat as you start. If your bedtime's 10, have your final meal a day at 6pm if you are going to bed at 10 at 9pm, begin your wind down routine by 9pm that means screens are off. You have, you're going for a walk and meditating, breathwork, talking to a friend. You have a book in hand, but you are not on a screen. That is challenging because we are all addicted to our screens. You have to acknowledge you're addicted and you have to, to make that separation helpful. Things in your home environment. Have blue, I'm sorry, have red and amber lights, turn off blues. Be mindful of stimulants. You know, a cup of coffee at 4pm leaves a half a cup of coffee of caffeine in your body by 10pm Cause there's roughly a six hour half life. Everybody metabolizes caffeine differently. But like there's A proxy approximation. Be mindful of certain medications and stimulants like adhd. Medication will also elevate your heart rate. And then don't. If you're going to have a fight with your partner or someone, don't do it in that last moment before bed. Like try to plan a pre morning, like a morning fight when you're both, you know, well rested and ready to go. But don't do that. That's really, really bad for sleep. But you're gonna learn all these intuitions. So if you, if you realize sleep is the number one performance enhancing drug, it's, there's no more powerful drug in the world you can take on a daily basis, then it's worth prioritizing your life around sleep. And if you also believe that sleep will be make you more successful in everything you do, then it justifies. And that is very counter to our current culture where people say sleep doesn't matter and actually successful people don't sleep. That's a ridiculous idea. It's foolish. I mean, I think people who are successful who don't sleep could be more successful if they slept. They're successful despite their lack of sleep. And so it's just like we've bought this really bad notion of success and lack of sleep with a few characters. It's just not the right, it's, it's foolish. So yeah, that would be, basically my suggestion is like in all the stuff we talked about, this is the single thing you can do in your life to have control. And this will be your resting heart rate before bed is your best accountability partner. Because if you're looking at whatever your vice is right before you go to bed, if you eat it or you do it, you know it's gonna increase it. It will help stop you. So that'd be my take on how you collapse the complexity of health into something very simple, controllable.

I know you've been saying this recently. Lower by 10 in 30 days. I found that I can only like move my resting heart rate both up and down by a couple of beats and across like maybe like six months. I could do that kind of dramatic change.

Yeah, no, I think that's fine because I, I'm guessing that a lot of people have a meaningful amount to like, so there's low hanging fruit that most people are not aware of this at all. They're not aware of the things that elevate. And I think you're probably already pretty dialed in with your own protocol. So I think my guess would be 10% would be totally achievable for most people. Mike, what's your take?

Most people? I think so. I think the average American has a lot of room to move on this. Like, just about everyone I talk to is still eating late meals, watching tense television, doing work emails until 9:00pm like, yeah, I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit out there in the world.

Okay, cool. Okay. All right, so now should we get into the actual steps that someone can do to lower the resting heart rate?

All right, you guys, so we've been very conversational about these topics and let me try to run through these in a very short time frame that you can send to a loved one and just say, listen to this, you know, two or three minute segment on how to get great sleep. So let me try to move through this very quickly. So I'm going to give you 10 tips on how to make sleep well, 10 tips on how to achieve high quality sleep. So number one, reframe your identity that you are a professional sleeper. You take sleep as seriously as you do your work and that means you really invest in creating the craft. Okay, so you are a professional sleeper. Number two is that you want to have your final meal today at least four hours before bed. You can experiment with 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I have my last meal of the day around eight hours or so before my bedtime and that allows my body to digest food. You're going to find when you eat earlier, you're going to find that it will give your body time to digest and will lower your heart rate and improve your sleep. You're also going to find that certain foods you eat. For example, if you have something heavy like a pasta or a bread or pizza, it's going to cause a longer elevated heart rate. So the kinds of foods will increase your heart rate. So what you eat and when you eat will dramatically affect your heart rate, which then affects your sleep. So eat earlier and lighter to achieve high quality sleep. Number three is you need to have a 30 to 60 minute wind down routine every day. You can't just finish work and then 30 seconds later you just put your head on the pillow and fall asleep. Your body needs to wind down. You need to calm your mind, calm your body. And so the way I do this is I need to have a book in my hand. So I try not to do any screens whatsoever. So screens off and then something like go for a walk, meditate, breath, work, call a friend, have a book in hand. But you want to do something calm and relaxing. Evidence shows that A book in hand, for example, is as efficacious as a sleep pill. So you really want to have that last 30 to 60 minutes to get your body ready for sleep. You really need that time duration. And I realize we are all addicted to our phones, so just go through the process of acknowledging your addiction and setting aside. Next is when you wake up, you want morning light. Almost immediately. I get my morning light within five minutes. I think the window is like around 20 to 30 minutes. I wake up before the sun rises around 4:30am So I use a 10,000 lux light in my home. Otherwise you can just go out and get sunlight. But that sets your circadian rhythm and it starts all of the positive processes. Your body needs to be on a certain rhythm. 4 Is you want to be consistent in your bedtime. So if Your bedtime's at 10pm, be in bed at 10pm every night. Now of course you're going to have exceptions. There will be social events, there'll be other things. So just try your best. But when you have the ability to do so on your schedule, try to be on bed at the same time every single night. When I was achieving eight months of perfect sleep, my bedtime was 8:30pm I was in bed plus or minus like one minute every night. At least I tried. It was like a very, very, very close time frame. And it is, I'll tell you, it is amazing what the body does when it's given consistency. It's like I would fall asleep instantaneously. Next is you want to be mindful of stimulants. And that's because caffeine has roughly a six hour half life. So a cup of coffee at 4pm is a half a cup cup of coffee in you at 10pm when you're asleep. So if you're going to consume caffeine, try to have it earlier in the day to give your body time to process. And that's also true for other stimulants like Modafinil. And then for the evening light, you want to be mindful that to not have blue lights. So try to have screens off or if your screens are on, you know, in the evening there's tools like Flux F dot lux that you can have on a browser that kills the blue light. You can also turn your, your mobile device to have red mode so you have red light but you want to try to eliminate blues that will suppress melatonin. So red lights and amber lights. Next is you want to have for your room temperature is you, you want to have a Cooler temperature. Your body's going to do better with temperature around, you know, 69 to 71 Fahrenheit thereabouts. I use a temperature controlled mattress in eight sleep, which really is very useful to modulate my temperature throughout the night. But sleeping hot is very challenging. You also want to have a peaceful sleep environment, so you want to be mindful of noise. So oftentimes people can have like a noisy neighbors, you can be by a noisy street. So try your best to situate your, where you sleep in your home and the environment so you don't get interrupted by various noises. If you do have noise around, you can use like a sound machine to try to offset that. That's, that does a good job. Or have some earplugs, but be mindful that those things will interrupt your sleep. And then finally you can have a wearable where you use apple watch, aura, whoop, they're all good. And just so you create intuitions on what things you do in life and how those relate to your sleep quality. That's been the best thing I've done is I just really learned what I do in life and how it affects my sleep, which allows me to build lifestyle routines. So much of health is not about like take this supplement and do this therapy. It's about lifestyle and habits. And that's what this entirely is about. Is making sleep a number one lifestyle priority and then building systems around that.

I like that, Brian. I also like that, I like that you ended with. It's. It's very personalized, right? Like some of those things that you recommended are really going to land for some people and some of them might not be as important for, for other people. If I might, I've got like three others that I might add to that list. So just to like be specific about the cell phone, you mentioned cell phone use. I think that there is a significant advantage to like literally plugging your phone in away from your bed. And so many people sleep with their phone right beside them and they have difficulty fighting that urge to pick it up just to check it one last time before they go to sleep. If you plug it in in a different room or on the other side of the room, you're much less likely to be drawn to that phone. So I think that's just a nice little trick for people just to help keep it out of their environment right before they sleep. Um, another one is you mentioned the, the nighttime routine, which is super important. I think a really beneficial part of that, at least for some people, is journaling whether that's writing down your worries, which you've mentioned in the past, or the. Whether it's like, gratitude journaling or just, like, writing about your day. Like, whatever it is. There's something that really, I don't know, connecting about just putting a pen on paper, just, like, holding a book in your hand. And I think that it allows people to, like, put down some of that anxiety from the day and transition into, like, their sleep. Their sleep environment. And then a third one I'll mention is really common in something called cbti, which is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. Um, that is a really helpful thing for people who have true insomnia. Like, they literally cannot fall asleep or they wake up in the middle of the night. And this tool is where basically bed is reserved for sex and sleep. And you literally do nothing in your bed except for have sex and go to sleep. Like, those are the only things. And this allows you to sort of train your brain to realize what bed is for. And this can be beneficial for anyone, not just people with insomnia, but actually, like, creating a. A relationship between. All I do in this position, in this place is either sleep or have sex, and that's it. And that can be really helpful for a lot of people. So just thought I'd add those. Those few caveats, too.

Okay, I'll. I'll come in with the last. Last one. That's going to be the most painful potentially for people is to sleep separately from their partner. I will say that has made an enormous difference in my life. And so if you can, even if it's just another bed in the same room, if you can sleep separately to your partner, I would highly encourage it. I know some people can't. They don't have the luxury of that. So, you know, do what you can. But that has. Is. Is a really big one.

I struggle with this one so much.

Kate, do you sleep in the same bed as your partner?

We do. We do. And, like, she has brought up on a couple occasions how much I disrupt her sleep and. Yeah, but I, like, I have this, like, attachment. I don't know. It's like, it's. I think it's from, like, my childhood, like, with my grandparents sleeping in separate rooms and me, like, associating that with them not having a good relationship anymore. And, like, it is so ingrained in me that I just. I have this, like, mental block around the idea. You know what I mean? Just to be totally honest. And I recognize that's stupid. Like, it doesn't make any sense. I Should be able to recognize that I can still love someone and sleep in a different bed with them. But it's just like, it's challenging for me. And I suspect it's that way for a lot of people.

Definitely. There is such a stigma about it. It means that there's something wrong and it's not being acknowledged, it's not being communicated. I have the same. I had originally the same perception. And it's so to be like, to maybe give you some voice from the other side is like, once you start doing it, it's like, oh, nothing changed about the relationship and you have better quality sleep. So like that. Yeah, I think you should try it out. Even if it's just like, you know, a couple of days or something like that and then see how you feel about it.

When I had my. I had shoulder surgery and we did actually do it for about a month when I had that, because, yeah, it's just hard to. Hard to. Hard to do that. And the challenge was I think I was in a really uncomfortable bed and I didn't have my eight sleep, so I wasn't as stoked about it.

Yeah, Andy just had surgery, so that would have been painful.

You guys, I think this podcast is really just therapy.

Yeah, I think so.

Three for the three of us.

Yeah, mostly. I think hopefully that's okay. I think, yeah, a lot of people need the same therapy.

That's true.

If I, If I remember correctly, looking through the evidence, I think it was a mixed point bag in terms of. I think some people actually experienced a higher quality sleep when they repaired with someone else, and then others improve their sleep. So I, I initially, I think imagined that everybody would have better sleep because you just have the asynchronous nature of sleep where you've got disruptive patterns going bedtime, getting up at night, et cetera. Sounds. But I. If I'm not mistaken, there's data to suggest that some people do legitimately sleep better when they are paired.

Yeah. I'd be curious to see if that's like after a normalized length of time in both scenarios or if that's like a short study.

Yeah.

Be very curious to look into that. Maybe we can add that to our topic list.

I think we, I think we should, we should do another. I mean, like, we do lots of episodes on sleep, but I feel like we could do one on this specifically and maybe even have like, I don't know, somebody who knows what they're talking about. Like, not to say that we don't, but like in expert and in, like, in, in sleep to come and like talk to us about this. That'd be, that'd be kind of cool.

Yeah. I mean, Brian, in your data, what was your experience? Because obviously you've had partners in the past, I'm sure you've shared, yeah, you would have shared a bed with plenty of people. Sounds inappropriate, but you know what I mean.

Yeah, I don't have data from those time periods of my life, but I do remember that the number of wake events that I had was 3, 4, 5, 6. Whereas now my number of wake events that I actually can remember is 0 to 1. So substantially. It's, I, I mean, I think I, oddly, at age 47, I'm getting the best sleep in my life legitimately, even though my biological processes, you know, are of a 47 year old. Right. I mean we're, we're doing good to push these things down, but it's just much easier to get sleep when you're a teenager, early 20s, you have all your biology just like in your favor. And so, yeah, I think for other people who are asking questions, like I would say if you, if you have insomnia or you're struggling with sleep, of course there are situations where you do need professional help to, you know, to address these sleep challenges. And so these things are simply to say that in American society, when something is wrong, we turn to a pill. And that is our way of thinking. We don't turn to lifestyle habits. And what we're trying to point out here is that no one has ever taught you how to sleep, including like when you eat something dramatically affects your sleep quality. And so if you start knocking out these low hanging fruit on fruit on, basically when you eat what you eat, alcohol, stimulants, et cetera, you may find gains here that dramatically improve your situation. But give your body time to adjust and give it a few weeks. Your body needs some time to get into a new rhythm. If you still have challenges, that's, that's certainly fine. You can step up and try to find other solutions, but most of the time people are not even doing these basic things. This is also true, you guys, if this, this podcast could essentially be about mental disorders too, right? It could be about mood disorders. So like we could be talking about depression or anxiety. And like the best protocol to address first line of defense for depression and anxiety is to nail your sleep. Now I know that's hard to say, I've been depressed. And when you're depressed, it's very hard to sleep because you've Got a whole bunch of other complicated situations. And I was also overeating to try to address my depressive symptoms. Like, it's complicated. Also, that first line of defense is getting these basic biological processes in place. Let your body repair. So I'd say, yeah, like, this is I sleep. Should warrants being the number one priority for everybody on planet Earth. There's just nothing that does the body more good.

Did you want to drop your mic, Brian? I felt. That felt pretty good.

Thanks. Yeah. I mean, gosh, he's like, I just wish somebody would have been in my life to tell me these things. I don't make. I don't know. Why do I have to navigate this for 20 years by myself without someone pointing out these very obvious things in life? Like, I just. Like, I. I went through so much pain, so. And I hate to see other people go through pain when these solutions are just so reachable and doable by people.

I think it's a poetic ending for today's episode.

Feels good. Yeah. Mike, as a conclusion, can you tell us what's happening on the Pit? What episode are you in? I might need to know this. How is this. Is this a series?

Yeah, yeah, it's a. It's a whole series. I'm only on episode three, so.

And how many are there?

I think there's like 15 or something. There's quite a few, yeah.

What's your plan?

I don't know. I. I don't have a plan. Like, admittedly, there is no plan because, like, as I mentioned earlier, it doesn't make sense to watch it at 11am and I'm not sure that I'm ready to trash my sleep for it. So I don't know, maybe. Maybe it's Saturday.

Oh, that's a good idea.

I guess. Saturday, 5pm Like a 4 to 5. Yeah. Like, special time slot, followed by like.

Two hours of meditation to try to get my right.

Good podcast. Good luck. And then, Mike, keep us posted on your pit watching episodes. How you go.

All right.