Better Sleep Month Part 1 – You’re an Animal, Says Your Biological Chronotype #589

Bulletproof Radio A State of High Performance.

This is a reworked and upgraded episode of Bulletproof Radio for Sleep Month Sleep we all want a piece of it. Either you're getting some or you're not. I've shared with you all the ways that I hacked my own sleep and how it changed my life and how.

And how I'm up to the point.

Where I can get about two hours of deep sleep and two hours of REM sleep in six hours, which has been really transformative for how I feel, even how I look on the show. I've brought in top sleep experts to share their research and offer up some really solid hacks you can use. And since sleep is one of the things I get asked about the most, I just created a multimedia sleep series as part of Better Sleep Month. Although frankly, every month should be Better Sleep Month. So I've chosen the most compelling and useful interviews from Bulletproof Radio, coolest articles from the blog, and a batch of different videos each week. I'm gonna bring you the best bulletproof tips and tools for sleep that I know how to gather so you can start sleeping better. Get hooked up with Sleep on the blog@blog.bulletproof.com and check out Dave Asprey on Instagram where I post all the good stuff. So listen on, read on and get your own piece of the night. I've reworked this episode of Bulletproof Radio so you can take a walk on the wild side of Michael Bruce's sleep chronotypes. Find out if you're a lion, a bear, a dolphin, or a wolf when you know you can optimize your sleep cycle so you're waking and sleeping at times that are specific to your own biology and maybe doing a few other things at times. Specific like eating or maybe even getting some.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that Today's cool fact of the day is that there's actually a small dog in our guest studio who just interrupted the show. But that was so funny we're leaving that in there. Today's cool fact of the day is that if you've wondered why you feel so bad after an all nighter or after a red eye flight, there are reasons. There are studies that show that screwing with your circadian rhythm or your internal clock upsets the majority of the genes that rely on it to function properly. About 97% of your clock genes affect everything from mood to blood sugar to hormones to body temperature. When these things fall out of Sync. You feel like you got run over by a big truck. We say run over by a Mack truck, but now it actually feels like you're run over by a Tesla truck, even though they're not released yet. When you get run over by a truck, that's the truck you want to hit you just because, like, you know. Anyway. These clock genes are so dependent on circadian rhythm that if you were to live in total darkness, you could develop sleep patterns of 25 hours or more. Unless you got some sunlight or maybe just a subset of sunlight. Maybe ultraviolet, maybe blue light, maybe red light. Who knows? Different lights, different times of day. Huge part of biohacking. Before we get to today's guest, who I am really, really looking forward to chatting with. Today's guest is someone you might have seen on Dr. Oz, and he's a clinical psychologist, a diplomat of the American Board of Sleep Medicine, a fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. He specializes in sleep disorders. He's one of only 163 psychologists in the world to do this kind of stuff. He's written about this stuff for years. Recently he wrote a book that I read. Actually, I stayed up really late reading it, which apparently I'm not supposed to do last night called the Power of When it's none other than Dr. Michael Bruce. Michael.

Hey, how are you, Dave?

I'm doing well. I took my quiz last night in the book just in preparation for our interview. Oh, good. I was up till 4am I had coffee and I used bright blue lights, but not on my eyes. Was that harmful?

Well, you know, it probably wasn't the best idea in the universe. You're looking pretty good right now. If you've been up all night and had blue light shining on you and quite a bit of caffeine in you.

The truth is that I didn't use any caffeine last night, but I did use decaf. Bulletproof, with brain octane in it and unfair advantage. I was up till 3:30 last night working on my mitochondria book.

Oh, good.

And this is my third interview of the day and I'm sitting underneath LED studio lights, which frankly pisses me off. But I'm blocking the worst of the blue with something in these glasses. I don't need corrective vision. These are just here to keep my eyes happy. So I'm feeling okay.

Good. But we like it when you're feeling okay.

Dave, as America's sleep doctor, it's your fault because your book was really good. I can't say I read the whole Thing, But I definitely got the gist of it. And thanks for actually a really well written, impactful book that actually made sense. Tell me about the power of when.

So it was kind of bizarre because I was seeing patients, and I've been seeing patients for 16 years, and I specialize in insomnia, which isn't always the easiest thing in the world to treat. I'm not a big fan of pharmaceuticals, so I'd rather do that with natural supplements or with cognitive behavioral therapy, several different techniques that wouldn't require a pharmaceutical. And I noticed that some of my techniques, which had worked for years, were just not working with my patients. And I kind of couldn't figure out why. So I brought them in and I said, all right, let's kind of figure this out. What could possibly be going on here? And so one of the things we realized was, is that their sleep was actually pretty good. It was just at the wrong time. They were able to sleep six and a half, seven and a half hours, but they either wanted to go to bed too early or wanted to go to bed too late. And socially, that just wasn't working out well for them. So I said to the folks, especially the ones who wanted to stay up later, I said, let's get your boss in here, and let's see if your boss would allow you to go to work a little bit later just to see if your productivity levels would change. Because I had a pretty good suspicion, based on a whole lot of data, that they would. And so we actually ran the experiment with two or three of my patients, and their bosses were thrilled with their levels of productivity because these people were actually sleeping on what was considered to be their chronotype. So many people might not have heard the term chronotype before, but they've probably all heard of the idea of an early bird or a night owl. Those are actually chronotypes. And so what I decided to do was look at could your chronotype affect not just when you wanted to sleep, but literally everything else that's going on in your day? And that was where it got really cool really fast. And so when I started to continue to interview my patients, one of the things they said was, you know, I find there's certain times of day where I'm better at this or I'm better at that. And so when we looked at their hormonal distribution based on their chronotype and the hormones that were necessary to do those activities, I started to be able to match things up. And henceforth came the power of when most self help books tell you what to do or how to do it, they don't tell you when to do it.

It's something that's intuitively obvious to me. I've looked at, there's research and you must know about the research that looks at the distribution of the average length of circadian rhythm. I have a long circadian rhythm. I've never been a morning person, but we've all seen those shaming style blog posts about how the early bird catches the worm and you're lazy if you wake up late. So for two years I trained myself to wake up at 5am and meditate for an hour. You can do it, right?

Yeah.

It didn't make me more productive, it didn't make me happier, it didn't make me a better person, it didn't make me miserable. But it was work. And I am at my most creative. I perform better when I sleep till nine, actually.

So you're probably a wolf. I am a wolf.

And when I read the chapter on that and for people listening when you read this book. And by the way, I'm fully endorsing Michael Bruce's book here, the Power of Win, because it explains that there is no moral failing for waking up late, for waking up early, for being stronger in the afternoon or stronger in the morning. It's not that one's better, they're just different. Just like some people can eat lentils and other people can't. But you should be suspicious of lentils until you know which kind of person you are because they mess with some people. And you should be suspicious of waking up early in the morning because it messes with some people.

Right.

Just like you should be suspicious of sleeping in because it messes with some people.

Exactly.

You got to test it to know.

I always tell people it. You know, you can't mess with Mother Nature. Right. You know, this is genetically predetermined. Like this isn't something that you know, you just have a preference for. It's actually the PER3 gene actually determines your sleep drive. And then your circadian rhythms are genetically predetermined. So when you take those two things and you stick them together, it gets real interesting real quick.

Now, being a wolf chronotype, you just told me that I can't do something like you can't mess with Mother Nature, which immediately makes me say with CRISPR gene editing, couldn't I change my chronotype?

You could actually. And here's the thing that's really interesting is you can mess with it, but we aren't necessarily going to change it. Right? And so I've got people who come to me all the time and they say I'm a wolf. Which for folks out there, if you're not familiar with the terminology, it means you're basically a night owl. And by the way, Dave, I'm a wolf too. So is my wife and so are both of my kids.

All the best people are. I know what you mean.

I think you're right. And it's interesting because using light and caffeine and melatonin, you can actually shift yourself. But you would literally have to do that almost every night or every third night in order for your body to actually stay in that rut, if you will, as opposed to just going with kind of like how you were born and what you should be doing.

One of the things that makes me mad is that salespeople usually wake up in the middle of the night, like around 6am or something. And I used to work as a sales engineer in Silicon Valley. Engineers, disproportionately, I believe, are more wolves. Like there aren't that many early morning engineers. There are some and they're fine. But like there's more of a distribution towards staying up late at night hacking computers, not waking up early to hack.

Nobody does that.

So they would hold these 8am Monday morning sales meetings and I'm like, like, seriously, like why would you do this to people? Apparently salespeople like that stuff. So I started showing up at 8:30, 8:45. Because I'm an engineer, they don't need me to sit there while they go through their quota numbers. Who cares? I'm going to go in and do the actual work that they get paid for. By the way, every sales engineer ever has said those words. And so I find that my boss got in my face about it. He's a sales guy and I'm like, it's not that I'm being disrespectful, it's that I'm really tired. I don't do anything in this meeting. So why are you making me beat myself over the head and shoulders? Like, do you want me to actually like write million dollar proposals or not write million dollar proposals? Because if I'm sleeping at my desk and he didn't believe me, but that's okay. I just showed up late anyway and he didn't fire me, so it all worked out.

But you know what? But your plight is actually one that I hear all the time. I hear from my most creative patients, like my musicians, my artists, my Writers. It was kind of also interesting when we were talking before, you were saying how you didn't want to read as much of my book as you did because you were interested in writing your ninth chapter, which is exactly what a wolf would do in the middle of the night is they would be working on a creative chapter. So it's really. Actually you're very wolfish in many ways.

So what I did. That's different though. And I want to get your take on this, please. I have switched to entirely red LED lighting at night. It looks like I'm either like I'm in a vampire submarine or a whorehouse. I mean seriously, there's no other light. It could be a vampire submarine horror.

As I could be.

But it's kind of funny. I taped over all the blue LEDs a long time ago. That's part of my sleep hack recommendations. Those things are destructive. So when I'm working my monitor is all the way down, I'm running flux at its highest color density or I'll wear glasses if I'm not. And all of the light around me is just pure red LED spectrum. And I don't suffer from circadian disruption when I do that. I can stay up late, but I woke up this morning at 8:45, felt great. Been either with my kids or on a phone call or recording every second of the day without a break except to pee. And I totally feel great. Like you can see like I'm not zombified because I slept. I went to bed at 3:30.

So five hours.

Yeah. What did the red lights do? Was that a good idea? Is that a bad idea? Should everything else be?

It's a great idea, especially for somebody who is a wolf like you. And the thing is is that you actually got up in a reasonable amount of time from what I see with a lot of my WOL type clients, is a lot of them if I can just convince their boss to let them wake up at around 8:30 and get to work by 9:30, 10 o', clock. They are so much better from an energy standpoint. When you're talking about red light, there's a lot of data that's starting to come out now. We know a lot about blue light. That 460 nanometers that hits those melanopsin cells and tells your brain, hey, turn off the melatonin faucet. What's nice about the red light spectrum is actually it does the opposite. It actually helps induce sleep in some people, but also it can help be a relaxant. And so And a lot of my people who are at night when they have a lot of energy and a lot of anxiety, actually that red light has a tendency to calm them down.

Quite a bit when I don't have to perform the next day, like, today's a big recording day for me. What I would. What I prefer to do to really just download the entire book into my head is I start writing at 11pm and I'll write straight through till 7am and I'll have caffeinated bulletproof coffee at 11, which I know is bad, but I'll do that. And I'll do a stack of smart drugs. I'll have lots of brain octane to get the ketones going. And I'm like, I don't even know where I go, but I'm in the zone. And I can pull up 10,000 words that way in a good night. And it just. And they're good words too. So that though, has a recovery period. Like you're going to have to chip in. It's disruptive. When people hear that, most of them say I'm probably manic or something, like there's something wrong with me that I do that. But half the authors that we hung out with at JJ's event, literally when I talk about this, half of the authors are like, oh, yeah, I do my best writing after 11 too, but I think I'm a bad person. How bad of a person am I?

You are not a bad person. I know you might want to be, but I'm here to break it to you that you're not. And it's really interesting because at that event I was talking with a lot of people too, and they were taking the quiz. And so for everybody to know, you can actually take a quiz online to learn what your chronotype is.

In fact, I'm being a little bit rude because I'm focusing on the wolf chronotype, which is about 15% of people, 20% or something like that. This is your own research where you've, you've named these chronotypes. It's actually, at least for my chronotype, I recognize it and I recognize other people in these other ones. So your categories just intuitively make sense. Walk through the categories. Because I just dove in on the wolf thing because I just read your book last night and I'm excited about it. So that's what wolves do. We just jump in and rip meat off things.

Exactly.

Tell me about dolphins, lions and bears and tell people who are listening to characteristics so they might already be able to place themselves in one of these categories before they take the quiz. And the URL for the quiz, what is it?

The URL for the quiz is the powerofwenquiz.com so the title of the book with the word quiz on the end. So thepowerofwenquiz.com and when you go, it's about 35 questions or so. And so let's go through what the different chronotypes are. So many people have heard of the idea of an early bird or a night owl or what we're calling a wolf. So first of all, when you look at the data, the data was really in those two big categories and it didn't cover the insomnia patients that I have, which are dolphins, and then the people in the middle, which I call bears. So first of all, I'm going to back up and say, how did I come up with these categories? Why did I name them what they were? So first of all, I'm not a bird, I'm a mammal. And I didn't relate to being an early bird or a night owl. And so I looked for mammals that were actually in the animal kingdom that had these circadian rhythms themselves so that people could identify with them when they thought about these animals. And also the animals are all actually pretty cool. Lions are people who have a tendency to wake up early in the morning. These are very go getter leadership types of people. They have a medium level sleep drive. They don't have any problems waking up early. But socially they have a tendency to not be able to make it out late. Like if you want to go to dinner and a movie with a lion, you're just going to dinner because they're probably not going to make it through the movie. They're probably going to fall asleep. And these people are oftentimes the people who are very oriented towards a Focus Challenge. They go from A to B to C. Boom, no problem. That's kind of how they are and how they live. Again, they go to bed early, wake up early. That's what I call a lion. In the animal kingdom, lions actually do wake up very early. That's when they have their first kill. So it kind of made a lot of sense. Bears are the majority of the community. So bears make up 50 to 55% of people out there. So don't be surprised if when you take the quiz, there's a high likelihood you could be a bear. Bears are the people that get shit done, okay? Bears are the people in society that actually get things to happen. They Work within the society. They're the people who kind of make things flow. These are people who are great at a party, people who you want to hang out with, people who are really friendly. They may or may not be as focused as a lion might be, but they're certainly kind of this affable, enjoyable character that rises with the sun and kind of goes to bed a little bit out.

So to play that back to you, bears are the bad people who cause my kids school to start at 8:30 in the morning.

So I don't want to call them bad people. However, there's a whole movement about changing school start times. You know, there's a lot of data on that which is pretty interesting. We can talk about that for sure. But no, they're not bad people. But yes, they did come up with those school start times.

I'm a. I know they're not bad people and I have actually. And I hope that some of the parents in my kids school are listening. I have seriously thought about homeschooling my kids because I watch what waking up at the middle of the night. I live very far north, so it's dark in winter too. But waking up very early does to kids and especially it does to parents. And if my kids start school at 9 instead of 8:30, my kids would be happier, healthier kids. I absolutely know that.

So interesting what happened to me. So I live in just outside of Los Angeles and we just moved here about a year ago and our kids have a late start day on Wednesdays, right. And so instead of having those crazy half days that you have throughout the year that drives everybody crazy and people have to figure out what to do with their kids. They just start at about 9:30, 10 o' clock on Wednesdays. Wednesdays was the best day in my house. Every single week I've got two teenagers, I've got a 14 year old and a 13, almost 13 year old. And when they got to sleep that extra hour, hour and a half in, there was no worries in the morning, nobody was yelling at anybody, nobody couldn't find their homework. Everything had gotten done. Like it just went better. Because teenagers are wolves. And that's our next category, right? So you and I are the same category which is a wolf. So wolves are interesting. We're night owls, we're night people, we're very creat. But we're also can be somewhat introverted. There are times where we might find ourselves not wanting to be the life of the party, but more kind of hang back a little bit and kind of observe and see what's going on where some of the most creative people that I've come across, artists, writers, you name it. And that kind of category of people seems to be the wolf.

So if you're listening to this, by now you've got to be going, I'm dying to know what kind of chronotype I am. The quiz is really fast. It's the powerofwinquiz.com and by the way, Michael hasn't paid me anything or anything like that. I just read the book last night. I know Michael. We've known each other for a couple years now. And I am a sleep hacker. So of course I follow sleep doctors. That's just kind of how it works. Tell me a little bit more about dolphins. I don't think you covered them very well.

So dolphins is the last one, and dolphins were the ones that started all this for me. Dolphins are my insomnia patients. These are my people who are the type A personalities, but they're so obsessive compulsive that they don't get nearly the amount of production done that they want. These are the people that are showing up in my office who have tried different sleep medications. And these people, it's really interesting. Their sleep schedule is pretty whacked out. Sometimes they're up, sometimes they're down. And oftentimes what I'm finding is if I can just kind of surround them with some parameters and educate them the right way, we seem to actually do better. They're super intelligent folks, and sometimes that can be to their detriment because they've looked up literally everything there is to know about sleep. And. And they come in and they say, well, I'm doing this and I'm doing this, and I'm taking this herb and that herb, and I'm like, hold on, slow down a second. Let's just figure out what your natural body rhythm is for sleep, and let's work with that.

Now, does it make sense to not hire dolphins because they're all over the place?

It makes sense to hire dolphins for very particular job functions. Like, dolphins are super smart people. And so sometimes if you don't put work parameters around them, if you say, here is the task, I want you to go and do it. Dolphins are great at that. They're good kind of loner type of people. And then. And if you don't give them. If you give them some time parameters, they actually work fairly well with that. But then when you give them that parameter, don't tell them, but you're going to lie to them and it's actually going to be a week later because they're probably going to come to you right at that time parameter and say I'm almost there. But their perfectionistic tendencies are going to want them to do a little bit more. So if you can give them that fudge factor without them knowing, it'll work out pretty well.

I would love to know the chronotype for everyone in my company. Like in fact we may put that on our. Which is cool. Like what if all your co workers knew, like don't mess with this guy in the morning.

Exactly.

That's so cool. So actually I'll roll that out. We're absolutely going to do that. And it's really cool to just have these tools especially for someone who's remote. Like I scheduled an 8am meeting and they're like please don't schedule 8am meetings.

Right. But they don't even want to tell you that. Right? Because you're the boss and you know, even though you probably have an awesome relationship with your people and they can tell you just about anything, everybody's kind of got that fear factor of oh gosh, I don't want to tell my superior not to do something but yet if they knew these guys would be so much more productive for you. If we were scheduling the right things at the right time. Oh my gosh, I'm telling you it would, it would fly.

If you're listening to this right now, you're like, okay, like yet another experiment. But here's the deal. It's like a five minute test, right? And I'm guessing I didn't do the online one. I just checked off the, added the numbers up in the book by the way. You need to make it so that the scoring and the letter and the score don't always match. Because it was pretty clear that you're trying to get a higher number to make me a wolf. It was a little easy to game that test just as a hacker.

Hopefully you didn't try to game it, although your hacking background would make it such that you probably did.

Are you concerned at all about caseomorphin or gluteomorphin? I see so many people who eat milk and then they get tired after they have milk protein specifically.

So what's interesting is I worked on a project and product years ago that was actually trying to identify and isolate the caseins in breast milk because they thought that the breast milk made babies go to sleep faster. And so they actually created a couple of products from it and we found it made people super sleepy.

I tried a product like that a couple years ago. Milk protein derived something or another. I didn't feel a thing from it. But this mean it doesn't work. It just means I didn't feel a thing. Right. Like we're all.

Well, if I was going to, if I was looking at you as a test subject number one, I'd want to know what time of day you took it because of your chronotype.

Yeah, I took it before bed, but.

Yeah, right, but I mean what time did you go to bed?

I can tell my bedtime is on average for the last three and a half years on the same monitoring app. It's exactly 2am like it varies on average but. And I sleep 6 hours and 1 minute per night and that's what I do. And I didn't use, I used to need eight hours. I need six when my biology works well, I need six. When I don't take care of myself, I need eight.

Well, you know what, that's actually a really interesting point that we talk about a little bit in the book, but just in general. One of the things that I talk about to people is eight hours is a myth. Okay?

Hallelujah.

Say that again. Eight hours is a myth. Okay? I'm a board certified sleep specialist. I've been seeing patients for 15 years. I get six and a half hours a night. That's my number. It works for me. It always has. And you know what? I've said it on national television, I've said it everywhere I can. Not everybody needs eight. As a matter of fact, most people don't.

There's a study that I've talked about lots of times on the show and on the blog. 1.2 million people, many years of data. And they showed people who live the longest get six and a half hours of sleep. They live longer than people sleep eight hours a day. I know, right? I think it means that healthy people need less sleep. Is that a reasonable assumption or a reasonable assessment?

Well, here's what I would say is I find that there's at least two, maybe three different categories of people who sleep less. One are anxiety neurotic, people that aren't necessarily healthier. And those anxiety issues actually can peel years off the back end of your life if you don't get them treated. Then I think there's this weird, interesting kind of health groove that people get into. People I know who are daily exercisers, they rarely, rarely get more than six and a half hours sleep. Seven hours is like A vacation for them. And most of the time they actually feel like crap if they do it, which I think is also another really interesting factor that a lot of times if you try to get the, quote, recommended amount of sleep, you feel worse, which seems super counterintuitive to me. The third group of people that kind of get six and a half hours sleep, what ends up happening is they get six and a half and then they're up for a couple hours and then they go take a two and a half to three hour nap. And so I don't know if I would count them in the six and a half hour group just because they're going and getting extra sleep there. So I would say they probably fall into those two categories, one of which I would say is probably very healthy.

What do you think about biphasic sleep? This idea that we used to wake up in the middle of the night.

Have sex or have a meal, speak to people? Yeah. And then you'd have your second sleep. Right. That's what it used to be called. So it's so messed up because from an evolutionary perspective, like, we were doing great, by the way, before the light bulb was invented.

Amen.

You know, like, life was good. There's a great study where they took 20 insomniacs and they took them camping for three weeks. Guess what happened? They all slept fine. I mean, it was truly. They were out in the woods, they had no screens, all they had was a campfire and they were doing like, you know, activities during the day, physical activities during the day, gathering stuff, creating their shelter and their fire and things like that. And literally within two weeks, all of these people did extremely well with their sleep. So the light bulb really messed us all up. And it's kind of ironic because if you look at any of the work of Edison, he thought he didn't value sleep at all. He claimed that the further into the future we get, the less sleep we'll need.

You know, I think Edison had some wisdom there. If I could tomorrow flip a switch so that sleep was entirely optional, it would be an absolute gift. As long as I didn't.

I'm against you on this one.

As long as I didn't have to pay for it. Right. In other words, that's what I'm saying. I don't mean just amping myself up and getting cancer and all the stuff that happens when you don't sleep. I mean that if we could reduce our need for sleep and still perform and perform as well and live as well, there's a lot of time spent on sleep that isn't particularly productive. And you can say, we need that time, we're dreaming or whatever. But, yeah, I'd like to choose whether I spend the time on that without health impacts. Are we gonna get there?

Well, number one, we might. But here's the thing, is if actually you look at sleep architecture, right? So you do the eeg, you do the full polysomnogram, and you look at somebody's brainwaves all night long, the most productive waveforms are stage three four sleep or REM sleep. Stage three. Four is the physically restorative, and REM is the mentally restorative, stages one and two, which makes up 55% of the night.

It's a waste.

It's filler.

All right, I'm clapping, I'm jumping up and down. If I had pom poms, I'm doing them. It's the filler that I don't want. I want that time back. Like, I could play with my kids during that time.

All right, so let me. So. So people ask me this all the time, can you hack your sleep? The answer is you can. There are different schedules that can be done that people have tried historically. And people come to me all the time, and they're like, michael, I want to get my eight in four. Four, right? So can I just sleep for four hours and get what would be considered eight hours of sleep? We're not quite there yet. There are some schedules out there that are interesting. Here's the. There are two big problems that I've found when I've tried this with my patients. And this was under their, you know, insistence, not mine.

This is polyphasic, or.

Yeah, more like a polyphasic type of schedule. Number one, they get super lonely because they're up and nobody else is. And even with the Internet and even if they have friends, you know, in European countries, there's just so many times that you can Skype with somebody, you know, because you're up when literally everybody that you care about is asleep.