My Advanced Guide To Better Sleep | Bryan Johnson Podcast

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.

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 could 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, are 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 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 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 and 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 Half like just wanting to put your head down, sideways, 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, that'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 well being, 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? Because 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, the one you put on your fingers. It's looking at it 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. N equals 1. We looked at my deep sleep, 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 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 on 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 or the bag of chips or like whatever your vice is, your likelihood 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, 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's 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. Uh, 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 tried 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 going to probably jump in while you're talking and ask questions. 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. Even 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 it slips in your mind of being this lackadiz 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 sleep. 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'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, 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 version 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 rest, 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 aura 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. You know, 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 high, 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 is 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 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 work day and rest day. But I've built these, 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 good 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 going to 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 loop that it puts them in that it makes it harder for them to get good sleep. I don't know, your thought, your thoughts on that. Has anybody ever expressed that to you or, 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. I, I rolled the dice and deciding 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. So I know these circumstances are going to probably create a troubled environment. And sure enough, it happened. 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 going to 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. In how low your resting heart rate is before sleep, Brian. Like, I think, like, 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 resting 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, during sleep.

I mean, one of the reasons why I talk about this and I, I take your point as a valid one, that when you create a measurement for people, it can create anxiety. You know, it can, 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, 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 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, 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, 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, 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 it in the evening right before bed. So that's, 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, really interesting.

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 the 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 want resting 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 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 really relatively flat, hits like lowest around like midpoint at 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. I say 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. 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 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 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 like, 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. If 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's. 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. 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 your 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 falls under.

That falls under anxiety, stress and rumination.

I'm sorry, Kate. I'm sorry, what was your, what was.

Your comment on moving on? Yeah, yeah, just, we've covered it. So professional sleeper number one, resting heart rate before bed. Oh, yeah, that's right. I want to know how, how to measure resting heart rate.

Okay, that's right. So if you have a wearable, 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 going to take you 30 to 60 minutes to calm your body down. It's very, very hard to accelerate that process. So. 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 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 and which things lower your heart rate. So eat as you start. If you're at bedtime's 10, have your final meal today 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 screenshots. You have to acknowledge you're addicted and you have 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 approximation. Be mindful of certain medications and stimulants like adhd. Medication will also elevate your heart rate. And then don't, if you're gonna 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's, 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 going to increase it. You can, it'll 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, like 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 ch. 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 of the day 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 or pizza is 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, breathwork, 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 starts all of the positive processes. Your body needs to be on a certain rhythm. Four 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'll be social events, there'll be other things. So just try your best. But when you have the ability to do so in 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.