Change Your Body Position To Get Better Sleep with Dr. Peter Martone

Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today kicks off the Better Sleep Month, which is something that happens in May every year. In fact, a better whatever month happens something like 10,000 times a month. And a major percentage of the bills that Congress passes are to make special days. So it may not be that big of a deal. But since sleep hacking is core to what I do, hey, we're going to celebrate it like everyone else. It probably won't be as big as Easter, but I'm okay with that. This is going to be a really fun episode. We've got the collective members live in the studio audience, so there'll be live questions at the end of the show. And the guest today is Dr. Peter Martoni, who's someone who's looked at spine alignment and sleep for. For 20 years and has really deep knowledge about this. I met him several years ago at a Tony Robbins event, used his technology. He makes something called the neck Nest, which is a specially designed pillow for alignment. We're going to talk about why that matters for lymphatic drainage and all this. And he's actually the guy who got me to reconsider. I'm side sleeping. I've been a side sleeper forever. And that's because there are studies that show it's good for you. In fact, sleeping on your right side puts the heart up higher. And there's all sorts of things I've even written about in some of my books. But he was like, dave, let's try this. And to be perfectly honest, there are snoring issues with sleeping on your back, but those are things that you can overcome with other technologies and with some of the stuff we're going to talk about today. But there's a really interesting and clear case around heart rate variability and all sorts of stuff about what you can do to sleep in a way that's going to make you live longer and perform better and maybe even need less hours of sleep. We're going to go deep on that today. And why is he qualified? Well, he spent 20 years looking at this. He's an exercise physiologist, chiropractor, owns Atlantis Chiropractic in Massachusetts. And he's helped a lot of people with sleep and this weird problem that we have from using screens all the time where we sit with our head forward. And if you were to look at me five years ago versus where I am now, my head is not nearly as far forward as it was because that's something that I work on actively, and Peter's the guy who really got me inspired to do that. So you're going to learn why those techniques have been on huge numbers of news outlets. And some stuff about sleep that you've probably never heard before, even from Peter himself, because I'm going to go deep with him. Welcome to this episode, Peter.

Oh, man. Dave, I am so excited. Thank you so much for having me and just to be able to. I'm honored to be able to share my message with so many people. So thank you for the opportunity. I really appreciate it.

Uh, you're. You're most welcome. That's what it's here for. I'm here to learn. And there's a few other people listening in the top hundred. Podcast tends to get a lot of people, but it. It's born out of curiosity and a desire to do stuff better. Like, we all sleep every night. Might as well do a little bit better and just kind of like free money. You know, you get better return on the time you spend on your back or on your side or however you sleep that's worth doing. And I'm excited to hear the questions from the audience here. It's gonna be really fun. One thing I like about you is that you're a professional chiropractor, but you had back pain for 15 years, and you're willing to say that. So you're getting adjusted all the time. Your back still hurts. So it's not like people haven't criticized chiropractors before. They're usually people who have medical licenses and a competitive reason to go after a segment of care that clearly makes a difference. But why did you have pain for 15 years, even though you kind of know a thing or two about the spine?

Well, you know, that's. That's so interesting. It. And I, I, you know, I got add, so I can. I can justify anything away. And I went through so much of my life, like, the. Me getting into the sleep industry as a chiropractor. It's like zigzagged and. And life leaves little. I guess you can say. Life leaves clues. So I remember when I first started thinking about sleep, I was in Australia. I was living in Australia at the time, and I just moved there. And I remember I was. I was sleeping on my back, and. No, I was sleeping on my side. And I woke up, it was a new pillow. I mean, I never. I didn't travel with my pillow at that time. Now I go everywhere with it. And I just remember, oh, my God, this is really Uncomfortable, but heck with it. And I fell asleep. I woke up and I couldn't move the next day, like my neck was killing me. I couldn't turn side to side. So from that time, I'm like, oh, man, this is something about sleep. I slept the wrong way. And I don't know, it's just that point my neck got so bad that I said, holy mackerel, I got to stop looking at sleeping position. And I never did until a couple years later when I woke up and my entire arm was numb. And because I had had a rotator cuff injury that I attributed to rock climbing, because I was an avid rock climber. And I woke up one day and I couldn't feel my entire arm for half the day. And I'm like, I gotta stop this side sleeper. So I started just inadvertently sleeping on my back. Because I always say, if you get. If. If you give me a shoulder problem, I'll give you a side sleeper. Because you can only do this so long before you end up with a problem in your shoulder. So I forced myself to sleep on my back, and it was great for my arm, but I started getting back pain not knowing it inadvertently. And I attributed all my back pain to my mountain biking injuries. And I was going 15 years in practice with back pain. I was helping my patients with pain, and I had back pain myself. And it was like. It was kind of like a contradiction. And then I remember I was in a little bit of a mountain biking accident. And three days later, I moved the wrong way in. My entire leg went numb. I herniated my disc. I couldn't move. I was sitting on the couch and I'm like, hun, you got to take me to the. To the emergency room. She's like, I mean, I said, you got to call the ambulance. She's like, let me just take you. I'm like, I can't move. Like, it was the worst pain I ever had in my life. And then when I was on the emergency room floor and when the paramedics came, they gave me. I'm not a medication person. I'm like, I'll take anything. They gave me like four shots of morphine, and it still didn't work. When we got to the ambulance, when we got to the hospital, the. They asked if I was a drug addict because I had so much morphine that it was. They. I should have been, like, out. And. And it was in so much pain. They gave me Dilaudid. Then I saw purple dinosaurs and my pain went away and I just. And I. Dave, I swear to God, at that moment, it was a really low point in my life because I'm, like, fearing for my practice, fearing that I'll. I'll. I'll never be able to have normal function in my legs. And I said, how did it come to this? How did I have shoulder pain, you know, half of my life? Back pain? Now I herniated a disc, and I'm a chiropractor. And I reviewed 2000x rays, and I found a pattern. The problem wasn't in my lower back. It was in my neck. And it was because I was using my pillow wrong. And that's where. That's where the. The. That's what kind of moved me into the sleep industry. I started to make different designs to fix it.

So I first came across you when I was speaking at a Tony Robbins event, and we connected there, and you showed me the X rays. In fact, I didn't even think. We looked at some of my X rays I had on my phone. And you're like, look, see this? You're one of those. You're one of those people like Neo in the Matrix. And I know a few people like this in the healing industry. At a certain point, you become one with whatever it is, and you see zeros and ones when everyone else just sees, you know, the lady in the red dress, and you look at a neck X ray and. And you see stuff in there that people don't see. And a good radiologist sees whatever. And just different kinds of healers or even, you know, an automotive expert, they look at a car and they see stuff in that car that you can't see, and they know it's been lowered a half inch, and they. They just know because they're able to connect with it. So you have a savant ability with neck X rays. And in that conversation, like, wow, this guy really knows what he's doing. And you convinced me, all right. In fact, you gave me a neck nest. Like, you need to try this. And I used it reliably until I left it in a hotel room, which was a poor decision on mine. I just, you know, I'm like, geez, I can't go back on this. My flight. So I have another one on order. But I noticed substantial changes because I could sleep on my back. I had never been a back sleeper before then and today and probably for the past. Actually, ever since then, I've been a back sleeper 90% of the time. And before that, I was a side sleeper 100% of the time, partly because of the research. Also because I didn't feel good to sleep on my back because my back would hurt. Why is the neck the thing that's making the back hurt?

Oh, my God. This is unbelievable. This is so good. I'm so glad. So I got my. Can I say ass on this, David?

If you want to. It's just a type of animal. It's related to a donkey.

I got my ass handed to me years ago when I. I was invited to give continued education credits to Harvard Medical School. Harvard Medical doctors. And I remember I was. I knew so much about chiropractic. I was so excited about chiropractic, but I was talking a different language. And when they were asking me questions, I was talking more in their realm. And I didn't feel comfortable where I was. So after that, that. That was like. After three years in practice, I started coming up with anchors. These anchors are law, like law that you can't pass go before you collect 200. Like, these are anchors of how the body works. Like gravity. You drop it. It is how it happens. Number one is the writing reflex. What's the writing reflex? That states that your body follows where your eyes go. So your posture adjusts based on head alignment. If I hold my head like this, I lean this way. If I hold my head like this, I lean this way. I don't even have to take an X ray on somebody. I know where they. The position they sleep in. I know what issues they have because of how they hold their head, because the entire body is curving and adapting to the head alignment.

So what issues do I have then?

Remember, we talked about it. But so, because it all goes through the vagus nerve. And we'll talk about the vagus nerve stimulation, which is parasympathetic versus sympathetic, where we go into highway variability. But the two other laws which are critically important, especially for airway, is this Wolf law and Davis's law. So Wolf's law states if you don't use it, you lose it, right? So tissue deposits under. Under. Well, bone deposits under load. So that's why somebody will have osteoporosis in one hip and not in the other hip, because they lean more to one hip. I mean, just makes sense, right? And then Davis's law is all about the tissue. So the tissue deposits in the force of the direction it molds itself in align with the stresses. So when you're looking at somebody sleeping on their side, right, and they're sleeping in their heads like this, and their body's like this, and their Arms like this. And you do that eight hours a day. One third of your life you're going to have people that are walking around like this. You're going to have all of this distorted posture. And then what we're going to go into is if the body, if the function, if the structure equals the function, then, then that's where, that's where chiropractic gave me the understanding is your nervous system controls everything. It's not the muscles, it's the nerve. So if you break down the structure, you affect the central nervous system, then you affect the function of the entire body. And that's where the being a chiropractor putting together with exercise physiology and kinesiology really gave me that understanding on how the biomechanics structure in sleep is all tied in.

So I'll grant that it makes sense. So I realized it's a long time ago. So I use enough highly dense pillows if I sleep on my side that my neck doesn't go sideways. Most pillows are garbage. They're basically full of air. So you put your head on them and suddenly they're a half inch thick. And then, and plus I kind of have big shoulders. I'm not a small person. So I'm always enough pillows to hold my head so it's in alignment. I don't put my arm under my head because that's dumb. So you put it sideways. You put a pillow between your arms so you don't get them smashed. Right. Is it that bad to side sleep? If you're properly bolstered.

That's awesome. I love it. What I want to do is I'm going to challenge you and everybody that's listening. Challenge. I want you to get into the position that you fall asleep in and I want to, I want you to watch a two hour movie in that position.

Interesting. That's a good challenge.

And you may be able to get a half an hour because there's no coincidence that your sleep center and your pain center is right next door to each other. So you are not in control of what you do when you close your eyes. Right. So your body senses little discomfort because of pressure on the shoulder, hands starting to fall asleep. I didn't tell you when my arm went numb, I had a few alcoholic beverages the night before, which diminishes your pain reflex. And then you get that. Then you're sleeping on that arm a lot longer than you normally would. But in a normal situation you have to begin with the end in mind. And we'll be talking about why A neutral sleeping position is so important, but you can't stay in that position because your body will toss out of it.

So if you bolster well, you might get longer. And it's better than not bolstering. But I will say sleeping on your back, if you can do it without your back hurting, without snoring like a machine, that's, that's ideal.

We have tips for that. Yeah, absolutely.

Definitely. I'm going to give a shout out real quick to taping your mouth if you have a problem with snoring. I've been mouth taping for the last couple of years. After the Buteyko guys and James Nestor came on, I sent it out in the Dave Asprey curated box man mouth taping. It's good for your marriage anyway if you're the one taping your mouth. But aside from that, it's hard to snore with that. But when you have the alignment of your neck, right, like when I was used my neck nest before I lost it, I did find just even on the data because I have an app that measures my snoring and there's less snoring from that. But what else can people do to stop snoring?

Well, so the, the big thing about snoring is your airway, right, Is, is being able to open the airway, being able to use your, your tongue effectively. So within our sleep quest, we teach people a bunch of things about airway. So I think what's important is one of the issues with back sleeping, the studies say that it closes down your airway, right, and you can't breathe, which causes some obstructive issues. Well, Dave, the definition of a pillow is a support for your head. That's what we got wrong back in the olden days. One of the reasons I came up with the neck nest was from Crouch and Tiger Hidden Dragon just recently in Milan, that new movie. When they come out of the room from sleeping, they have a block of wood under their neck. They don't support their head. So what supporting your head does is. Is this a support for your head reinforces the wrong curve in your neck. So I was even sleeping on my back. And due to tissue molding in the right direction. Yumi, we'll talk about what happens to the psoas major after this. But when you put a pillow under your head, you're doing this. You're closing down your airway. So when you use a pillow under your head, your airway shuts down when you lay, when you open your bring your neck back you open up your airway. So there are many studies that especially done in the, in the emergency rooms when people are under anesthesia with the angle of the mandible closing down the airway. So they find when the head comes up, it closes down the airway, but the airway opens up as the neck comes back into that neutral position.

Doesn't that mean that sleeping with no pillow, I used to do that years ago when I was testing all sorts of sleepy stuff. I would go with no pillow at all and just lay on my back. But wouldn't that give you good neck alignment?

So sleeping with no pillow is good. It's a tough transition for people because of the labyrinthitis that people will get because the head's back too much. So what I recommend is keeping the head about an inch off of the. I'm gonna unplug this here for a second.

Some people are listening, some people are watching the video. So I'll describe what you're doing.

What happens is when you lie back, see where my neck is in this position? It's about an inch off of the, off of the inch off of the back of the bed. But when you are, when you have your, when you have your neck supported, you're using your head as a weight. Basically the pillow is a fulcrum and you're actually restoring the curve that way.

Got it. And for people who are listening without the video, you lay down, you've got the necknest, which is an unusual looking pillow that's got sort of a tube thing on the front of it. And you lay on it and your head is almost like you're sleeping flat. But it's like someone's kind of gently pulling your neck up as you're sleeping. Not up towards the ceiling, but up towards your ears. And it's a strangely relaxing phenomena. But you wake up and your upper back, your lower back aren't sore from sleeping on your back, which is kind of interesting. So is there actually traction happening or is it just. It feels like that.

No, that is actually what is happening. It's traction. You're traction in your neck. And what happens though, once somebody starts to sleep on their back, they will get sore because the immediate, the reason why you do not have to support your lower back is because it creates an arch in your lower back just by lying flat. But, but if somebody has degeneration or they have scoliosis, or they have back issues at the beginning, when they first start sleeping on the back, they're only going to be able to sleep on the back, one to two hours. And then pain is going to turn them. And that goes back to. How do we keep the airway open? We keep the airway open three different ways. We use the neck nest, putting the head in that angle. We use an elevated sleeping position of 5 to 7 degrees is what the research says. You just sleep slightly elevated. You can do that through a bed. You can do that through a wedge. So there are different things to be able to keep you elevated. And then the last thing, if you don't want to use tape, you. And it's really. It's really an interesting thing where you can take your covers and put them up against the base of your chin and you can keep your mouth shut using your covers. And that does two things that. And you and I both know. With the neck crown, right.

Or the sleep crown. Yeah.

So there's something you can put over your head you can put under your chin. And that creates. Like an ostrich sticking its head in the ground. It creates a sense of safety and security. Because that is what I find is why people don't sleep on their back. Because they feel so exposed to the world.

It's really funny. I mean, if someone just popped into this episode, they'd be like, these guys are nuts. And, you know, you've got a sleep crown on your head, covering your eyes and all this stuff, and you've got a special neck nest underneath there, like pulling your thing up and your covers are holding your chin closed. But I will tell you, all you care about when you're asleep is how effective and efficient is my sleep? Like, am I recovering in less time or recovering more fully in the time I've got? And I was not like this 10 years ago. I'm like, how do I sleep? The least possible sleep is a waste of time. And now it's like, I am going to have to do it, but it's going to. It better count, right? And what you're saying there, that feeling of telling your nervous system that you're safe because you know you're safe. No, it's going to come into your bedroom like there's nothing to worry about. But your body's like, I don't know. I don't even believe you. Because your body has its own awareness. So that I. That picture of an ostrich where there's that kind of gentle weight on the head and then there's support under the neck, and then the spine relaxes. It sure seems to work. And if you measure your data with an aura Ring or something. All right. This is just the continuous improvement of humans figuring out what is the best way to sleep, to get the most sleep in the least amount of time. And I think you've. You studied it pretty deeply, and you're on to. You're onto something good there. What about the surface you're laying on? I mean, I've had people say it should be soft. I mean, I have my own thoughts there, but I want to get your thoughts, and then I'll kind of share my path of figuring out my optimal sleep surface.

Beautiful. So when you get the position correct, the surface is less important, and I'll tell you why. So when, when, when. When we look at how our body was designed, right. We were designed to sleep in a position that distributes our weight over the greatest surface area. That is why some of these studies that, that do these animal studies, and they. And they try to extrapolate them to humans. It doesn't make sense. Your dog is designed to sleep on their side because they distributed their surface area over their weight over the greatest surface area. And. And then we are designed to sleep on our back to distribute our weight over the greatest surface area. And when you're doing that and your body gets used to that, that's that what you're sleeping on really doesn't make as much of a difference. And you're wearing an OURA ring. You would want to. So you want to look at your restlessness, Right. How restless are you sleeping? That tells you, you know, that that'll give you a good. A good amount of data on if you're sleeping in the right position and if the surface is right for you. What I recommend is a nice firm support underneath with a big, thick mattress topper to distribute your surface area, your weight over even a greater surface area, like a down or something like that, If. If you're not allergic.

So you like it kind of mushy?

I do.

Got it. So I tested the mushy stuff, and being that I'm pretty much just a wall of living muscle.

You're a machine. There you go.

No, but I probably weigh more than the average person. Just. I'm six four, and I have relatively dense structures in here. At least that's what the data says. So I'm going to go with that. I found generally more pain and more restlessness on mattresses. So I looked at a few PubMed studies about ancestral sleeping surfaces, and there's pretty clear evidence you want to raise the head of the bed, and I've written about that. In my anti aging books, and that has to do with some circulatory stuff. But I tested everything from, you know, super soft, it moves with you all the way up to basically sleeping on a board. And for me, the highest end would be like a Japanese buckwheat whole bed, which is very, very firm, or closed cell hard neoprene. So I literally sleep on the, like, one inch of the hardest foam you could get. And people like, that's not even a bed. Like, I don't even want to sit on that thing. I'm like, yeah. But my sleep score is always higher when I'm on that. And I'm never in pain, but it took six weeks of suffering after I started doing that before my body adjusted. And the thought there is that when you breathe, if your body moves up and down, you're pumping your lymph. But if you're on a fluffy mattress, when you breathe, it kind of absorbs some of the movement that something in the cells. I don't know if that's real or not, but for me at least, like, put me on a rock versus a sponge and I'll be happier. And I don't know if. Do you have any data on how typical that is, or am I just a weird guy?

No, you're, you. You're both. I'm. I'm not gonna lie to you. That's fantastic. But that you never want to be normal. Look at what normal is. Well, we're not even defined. Yeah. So there, there is. I mean, when you're looking at. All you need to do, like I said, is nice, firm support, which is firm. And I like to give myself some cushion to distribute my, my surface, my weight. But really, when it comes down to it, this, the, the, the best for your actual curves would be a hard surface.

Okay. So you support. As a chiropractor, you'd support a hard surface.

Okay. And it's very difficult for people to do that because beds are becoming more and more comfortable for bad positions. So, you know, you'll hear, oh, your shoulder will fall into the bed and you're contorted. And to get a contorted spine aligned at night, like you said, it's miserable, it's hard.

Got it. So firm is probably better, unless you can't sleep on firm. But I would just say, even if you say you can't sleep on firm, do it for a few weeks and maybe you'll find magic happens. Now, what kind of damage happens to the spine when someone is a side sleeper for decades?

So that is really where, when I reviewed these 2000x rays, what I found was 90% of my patients had a loss of cervical curve. And I had loss in cervical curve. And let me, let me show you what that means. And for those of you that are watching, you might be able to see it. But where my finger's pointing, for those of you that are not looking at it, this is a flat curve. It used to be called military neck. And where you lose the cervical curve in your spine. This other picture is where there's a nice smooth curve. This is an actual representation of a patient that we had that was using the necknest and the flat cervical curve. Remember, the body posture is directly related to head alignment. So what I found was when somebody loses the cervical curve in their neck, like this patient right here, they pick up a scoliosis in their lower back. And you pick up a scoliosis in your lower back because of a muscle. And this is. This wasn't in the literature. I looked everywhere for it. I just. It's something that I need. More research needs to be done on it. But there was a muscle that I was taught in school. It's the only muscle in the human body that attaches directly to a disc. And that was it. I've never heard it before again. And you look it up and it attaches to. Directly to a disc. But why is there a disc attachment of this muscle? It's not, it's. It's by design. But what ended up happening is as the head comes forward, the psoas major muscle, which is the only muscle in the human body that attaches directly to a disc, goes into spasm to take pressure off of the dural tension at the base of the occiput due to that loss of cervical curve from a poor sleeping position and forward head posture stuff that we do.

The psoas is at the base of the spine, but that's trying to adjust the spine because the head's in the wrong position.

Exactly. And the psoas directly attaches to the disc. So I had a disc weakening issue due to a psoas major muscle spasm because my head was coming forward. And that is why I herniated my disc. I started improving my cervical curve in my neck. I started working on my psoas, and I've never had back pain again. And I can sleep on my back, wake up, you can put a glass of water on my chest and I'll wake up and that glass of water will still be on my chest. I don't toss and turn at all.

I do wake up in the same position that I went to sleep in, so it's on my back. So it's definitely doable. But this has been a big change for me. And like I was saying earlier, you know, you're. You're the guy who convinced me to give it a shot. And what I, what I tried to do after I left my necknest in a hotel, I tried like, like rolling up. That's how I started a towel or something back there. But it never worked very well, to be honest. So you've inspired me when I'm like, you know, I got to talk to you about this. You've inspired me. I got to order a few more of those and give them to the kids as well. What I'm hearing from you though, is that, okay, your head isn't very far off the bed, but there's support for the neck, right. So that it gently puts that curve in. But it always felt to me like it was lifting up on my head. Like that traction thing. How is it doing the traction? It didn't really make a lot of sense to me, but I felt like I was kind of kind of stretching it almost.

The, the issue with the. It's not an issue. It's. It's more an education for me. That's why it's so important that I educate my clients or people that use the necknest. The way that it looks like you use a necknest is not how you use the necknest. That's kind of. That's the problem. It's a, It's a product by design. The, the issue is when you first the neck nest you use. You got to use it in two phases. First, the break in phase, which is you use. You put your neck nest flat and your neck goes right over it and your shoulders are slightly on the neck nest at that point, which it is creating an elevated sleeping position slightly, which is not what I want to do. But it's easier for somebody to be in that position before they use the neckness after it's broken in. And once the neckness is broken in, that's when the traction happens. It happens when you angle your neckness and your shoulders are flat on the bed. And for those of you. How many people are going to be watching this on video? Quite a few or is.

It's already hard to predict, but probably a third maybe because of the pandemic. A lot of people listen while they're doing other stuff like exercise. Okay, just walk Walk through with. With words, even if you're doing it on video, and then everybody wins.

So what we're doing is when somebody first uses a neck nest, they lie it flat, and you're correct. Your shoulders are a little elevated and your neck is. Is back. But once a neck nest breaks in, the fill is designed to contour to your neck. So you angle it up slightly, and then the roll goes right under your neck, and that's what creates the traction.

Got it. So it's that thing. I remember you had me lay on the floor in the green room, I think, at the Tony Robbins event, and you were moving it around, showing me how it felt. So that wasn't something I could replicate with a towel. But I would say I went for like a year or two using it before I sadly left it in a hotel and kind of fell out of it. So I feel like I got that curve when I did it. Is this something you use forever? Or if you use it for a long time, are you going to get restored? And then you can be lazy like.

I've been, or remember Davis's law. The tissue molds with the stresses. So it's not once in a while. It is in every. It's, you know, if you eat healthy for a week, does that make you healthy for the rest of your life? No.

Oh, for sure.

Our body health is dependent on a daily rituals. All you need to do, though, and this is very important, you only need to use a neck nest in the position that I'm telling you two to three hours a night to restore your curve. You do not have to use it in that position all night long.

Okay, got it. So essentially, you're getting a bit of a chiropractic treatment because it's aligning things properly. And then if you roll over or something, it's not the end of the world.

Not the end of the world. Absolutely not.

Okay, that's.

That's cool.

How does this stack with angling the mattress? Um, so I. I wrote about that in Superhuman, I think. I think that was the book where I talked about it, because all kinds of reductions in Alzheimer's and better circulation of lymph and cerebral spinal fluid and things like that. So can you use this with an angled bed where you just raise the head of the bed with blocks?

That's what I do. I actually have my bed angled and in the neck nest. The good thing about it is when the. When the neck nest breaks in, I mean, you're looking at something that you're only supporting three Inches from the bed to the base of your neck. And the necknest fill is designed to compress down to just that small amount. So people think that it loses its support. Everybody wants support in this world, and that drives me crazy. Support causes weakness, right? And, and everybody's looking to support something. So when you're, when you look for support in the wrong way, people want support for their head. They want support, you know, in the shoulder. And, and what we want to do is we want something to contour, contour to our spines. Lightly and gently support our neck. And, and then use the head as like a fulcrum over the back of it. So you can use that neck nest in an elevated sleeping position. It's the best. Because if you use a regular pillow, a support for your head in an elevated sleeping position, you are destroying your cervical spine because that exacerbates the forward head angle.

How many inches do you raise the head of your bed?

I raise it about 5 to 7 degrees. So I have one of those little electrical beds.

So how many inches is five to seven degrees going to be?

About six inches.

Six inches? Okay, I do six inches. They said four to six inches. And I said, ah, more must be better because, hey, you know, I'm a guy. That's just how we think.

Then you got to put a velcro suit on so you don't fall off the end of your bed. But that's fine.

No, it is true if you have a very hard mattress and you have a 6 inch riser, that there are certain bedroom activities where gravity may cause you to fall off into the bed. You know, like calisthenics or something. All right, so you want high traction sheets apparently now. Okay, so we talked about the angle of the bed. We talked about the neck nest. To get the cervical spine a little bit of traction. You need at least two hours a night for that. What if after two or three hours of using a neck nest, then you say, all right, I want to sleep on my side? What do people have to change around with their pillows to do that, right?

No, nothing. They can use a neck nest on their side. That's not an issue. Yeah.

Okay. I always have like an extra pillow if I do want to roll over that's next to the bed, I'll grab it just because I feel like that space from my shoulder to my neck is a lot more than an inch. And I, I just never like sleeping with my head tipped to one side. So I'll put, I'll put another pillow.

Under it and you shouldn't be waking up in the middle of the night. It should, you know, you should close your eyes and wake up and it's morning.

That's what everyone who doesn't have kids.

I have kids, I swear.

Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night. Yeah, I generally sleep through the night. That's a good point. All right, let's talk about heart rate variability. You've done a lot of work with that. And for listeners who are new to the show, heart rate variability is one of the primary things you look at as a biohacker, and it's a change in the spacing between your heartbeats, and it says how recovered or how stressed your body is. And you can measure it with an aura ring. You can train it, and there's tons of stuff on my website about it because it's something you can consciously control and something that stress unconsciously controls. So when you wake up and you've had high heart rate variability means you recovered well. And if you had low heart rate variability, you didn't recover well. What have you learned about sleep position and heart rate variability?

So think, you know, I think what we do is we talk about. When I talk about sleep, and it real. Really, why do people want to sleep more? It's just like plugging in your iPhone, right? You. You want more performance. Think about having 30% more performance in bed. You know, 30% more performance in your relationships, in your love life. 30% more performance at work. Being able to produce when you wake up and your partner has energy and you're drained because you didn't sleep well. It's. It's affecting your life. Sleep affects everything in order. Like, I'm a big. Like, my main purpose in life is to live your potential is to show people how to live and express their potential. So we were looking at heart rate variability, and heart rate variability is. You're correct. It shows you how ready you are for the day. So you have two different types of nervous systems. You have sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. When the sympathetic nervous system is at play, your heart rate becomes more regular. When the parasympathetic nervous system is at play, there's more variability in your heart rate. Kind of counterintuitive to what you think. So you can look at heart rate variability and say, if I have heart rate variability, and let's say, let's just call it 100. And we know that people don't typically get to 100, but let's say you have a heart rate variability of 100. Well, when you have a heart rate variability that's 30% less, you wake up drained, unproductive, not feeling well. Changing just your sleeping position and nothing else in life will improve your heart re variability by 30%.

And that is a very solid data point. Anyone who's listened for a while understands that that means you recover better if you change your sleeping position. So this is kind of geeky, nerdy stuff. Like really it matters that much. Like I have a nice bed, whatever. Look, you tweak your pillow, tweak the angle of your bed, do whatever it takes to sleep better. Um, but if you're saying just changing this is basically the neck nest, just supporting the neck the way it does that is enough to cause that big of a change. What about. So there's average heart rate variability all night and then there's peak. Um, does it matter when the peak is? Does it matter how big the peak versus average is?

Well, oh my God, this is so variable, Dave. And it does because we have energy spikes right in our. So adrenal energy spikes and typically in general, let's just average it out. Your energy spikes are going to be, you know, follow your body core temperature, right? So they'll be at like midnight and let's say noon. So you want to be in deep sleep before your energy spike. So you want to be in deep sleep before midnight. So what I tell my clients is every hour of sleep you get before midnight is worth two hours of sleep after midnight. So if you want to, I don't, I don't promote this, but be able to perform with less sleep. The earlier you go to bed, the more likely you are going to be to be able to do that because most people are fatter and in the whole ayurvedic world and you're going to, you want to be in deep sleep where you get your maximum healing during sleep at midnight.

About 15% of people though have a later circadian rhythm, according to Michael Bruce, who's been on the show a couple times. So I'm one of those. I, I tend to go to bed later, although I've changed that with the stuff and fastest way move my circadian window up. So I'm going to bed around 10:30 ish, which has never happened in my entire life until I mixed light timing and food timing in the right way. But like last night was an interesting night. So I use a device that I sent out and samples in the last, the last Dave asprey curated box. Daveasprey box.com Guys, if you don't know about that thing, I've been doing it for eight years to kind of send cool stuff out. And this is a PEMF device, but it generally helps to raise my head HRV. So I peaked at 101 last night.

What time? What time?

That was right after I went to sleep. Like great, let me look at this really quick. I'm looking at my aura ring score now. So I love being able to do like personal biohacking questions from experts. Actually. There it is. Let's see. So within, oh, within 20 minutes of going to sleep good, I peaked at 100. My average was 53. So it's like, it's high at the beginning and it slowly goes down over the course of the night.

What time did you go to bed.

Last night was pretty unusual. I went to sleep at 12:52am yeah.

So you're going to bed close to your energy spike. So your body is going right into that energy spike to try to get in. What time was your deep sleep? It should have been shortly right after you went to bed.

I had a small bout of deep sleep at the same time and then I had a bunch of deep sleep between like 2 and 4. So I, it wasn't a fantastic night of sleep, to be honest. I only slept 5 hours cause I had to wake up early to drop the kids off. But I was doing cool research and when I get into research mode, my brain does that and I don't mind. But what I found is that if I sleep five or six hours, my average heart rate variability is higher. If I sleep seven hours or seven and a half hours, my average always drops. So it's sort of like compressed sleep equals higher heart rate variability to recover in the time you've got. But I don't. No one's ever been able to answer whether that's normal, whether I'm a freak. Have you seen that in the data you've looked at?

Yeah, so let's, let's, let's dive into that. It does, it always depends on the activity a couple of days before. So when you. So, so I don't get great deep sleep every night. And so here's the thing, and I'm still working on this. I've looked at thousands, you know, you know, so many different days of data and I'm looking at every aspect of these. I geek out in data. I love it. I don't believe you need deep sleep every night. Holy crap.

That's kind of surprising.

I know, I know. It's I believe deep sleep every night is due to some sort of dysfunction. I'm looking into this, that this is. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Hear me out. Okay?

You're starting to sound a little crazy here.

No, I know, I know, I know. So if I exercise, and I exercise a lot and my body requires a lot of recovery, my deep sleep will go to an hour and a half. If I'm really recovered and I'm really well rested and I don't exercise and I'm keeping my daily rituals pretty stable, I won't get a lot of deep sleep that night. I'll only get a half an hour of deep sleep. So my deep sleep varies with. Based on the activity I do 24, 48 hours earlier.

And this is why people who overtrain always need way more sleep because they're trying to make up for it. So I'm looking at my numbers. This is just from last night. And this is less sleep than normally get. So five hours and one minute of sleep. But I got an hour and two minutes of REM and an hour and three minutes of deep sleep, and I feel perfectly fine. And that's more than a lot of people get in seven or eight hours. But normally I get closer to an hour and a half to two hours of each of those. But it's that, you know, I always notice this. If it's a really short night's sleep, my heart rate variability is stupidly high. And if it's a long night's sleep, even if I feel great in the morning, my average is much lower. And it sounds like that may be just a function of how tired you were when you went to bed.

Maybe it's a function of how tired you were when you went to bed. It's also a function of, like, what I would need to do is I would need to accept you into my sleep platform, look at all of your data and see if it's how consistent it is. Because just like that, the body works like this. You eat a salad Today and then McDonald's every other day. That salad doesn't mean that much. So I need to see. I take your word for it. I love it. I love it, I love it. But I would need to extrapolate a lot of data in order to come up with that analysis.

Got it. Well, I'm interested. I'm going to ask my friends at Aura as well, I guess. I'm an advisor, investor. It's an easy thing to do. So I'm going to have to find this out because it's possible that you could just have higher recovery in shorter periods of time because your body knows you need it. Or maybe I'm a freak. Those are both possibilities.

And what's your core temperature? How. What? In those days, core temperature plays a big role in how, how quick you recover too.

Body temperature was 0.6 degrees below whatever they're looking at, so it was relatively low. So I actually was a good night's sleep, woke up fully refreshed, did my morning practice, you know, everything's good, drop the kids off at school and whatever. So I wouldn't say five hours a night is enough on average, but six and a half is at least according to my research. One thing, you're listening to this. I always ask guests who talk about something they've made for for a discount for listeners. If you go to necknest.com Dave it's about 67% off the full boat of all this stuff that, that he has, which is like the sleep package and the, the neck nest pillow and all that kind of stuff. So a meaningful discount there and lots of cool stuff. So you want to play around with your sleep. This is a good way to do it. And I have used this pretty extensively and I would say it is worth your attention, especially if you have back pain when you sleep. I don't have back pain when I sleep anymore. It's highly unusual. But if I sleep in a weird position, I would. I just don't sleep in a weird position. I am a back sleeper. Even though the studies that talk about putting the heart up higher are interesting, I think that's accounted for when you raise the height of your bed. So if we're talking about the full stack and I want you to poke holes in my stack computer. Um, so I take all the supplements, you know, the, the things I've talked about. Supplement wise. We won't worry about that. There's plenty of blog posts on my site about that. But I, I ideally would be using my neck nest. It just hasn't arrived yet. But this is what I did until I left it in a hotel. So you put it under your neck. You're getting some traction. I sleep on my back. Right. I've got a weighted blanket, one of the blue weighted blankets. I've got the sleep crown. I've got a bite guard in so you don't grind your teeth. It keeps your jaw aligned. I've got my mouth taped closed and sometimes I'll use little nasal expander rings, which I don't always do, but so I do that and I'm laying on my back and I've got my arms kind of opened up, so my shoulders are open a little bit. And I sleep, like, so well. I mean, stupidly well compared to any time I ever have in my entire life. Right. But I look probably like some kind of sarcophagus thing. I don't really know what am I doing right or wrong there. Oh, my bed is elevated 6 inches at the head. I think I mentioned that, but, well.

So as far as I would see, weight is good because weight feels like protection. I think what a lot of. One of the key things that I find with my. My patients. Clients is I would ask the question, how do you regulate your body core temperature? Because core temperature is significantly important when it. Look, when you come to deep sleep and quality of sleep, and it sounds like you're doing a great job. The recommendations that are currently out there, I believe are wrong. And I look at them as being wrong coming from an allostatic place. So if the. You know, so the body wants to. The body only really cares about the core. It doesn't care about your arms and your legs. Your arms and your legs can drop down to whatever temperature it wants to be, but your core needs to stay at 98 degrees, actually, in order to get a deep sleep. It drops 2 degrees. So I believe that people should use covers just to cover their torso and have their arms and their legs exposed as radiators. I do not recommend, like, some people putting socks on and you keeping your hands warm, because that's the extremity. Your body temperature regulates out your hands and your feet. And that all comes to something that's called allostatic load. So the reason why people get sick is because. Or they get worn down is because of energy drains. And so one of the hierarchies is body core temperature. So your body will drain all resources in order to keep the body core temperature warm. It'll suppress immune system, it'll suppress reproductive system. It goes into a sympathetic state. So when your body core temperature is not protected like your sleep is, it throws people into dysfunction and you can actually wake up and use more energy because your body's trying to fight to stay warm. And so what we do is we cool out the hands and the feet.

So there's some pretty good research. I mean, I think I was the first guy to talk about the Chili sleep system many years ago, before they came out with a new one, which I love it.

Yep.

Okay, so you love that. So I actually have one of those. I Don't use it every night, but I do. I have an eight sleep mattress that has some built in cooling as well. And I use that sometimes, by the way. I actually have like a sleep lab up here. Like literally I have a separate bedroom with weird stuff in it to test what works for sleeping. Because like I'm a nerd and I'm a professional biohacker. So I do find that cooling the mattress really helps. But that's going to lower my core temperature. That's kind of flies in the face of what you're saying.

No. So you need to lower your core temperature. Right. But your body heat. So it's a, this is a really interesting dance that we've been playing with. I like the chili pad because your core temperature follows the circadian rhythm. So you can set your chili pad to raise in lower throughout the night to be able to match that circadian rhythm.

Okay. You're not just cooling?

No. You want to cool in warm. Right. And then it all depends on because listen, I love exercise. I exercise so much the other night I almost threw up. But I got horrible sleep that night because when you exercise, you're stimulating your metabolism. I chilled out with my chili pad, so that helps me get better sleep. But we have to understand that temperature regulation is super important. So if you're looking at a winter night where you're keeping your room really, really, really cold and you have the ability for your body to temperature regulate out your hands and your arms, you don't need cooling because your body is controlling that temperature. So you have to take room temperature, how much food you ate, how much you exercise. So it's a dance. And that's everything that we teach in the sleep quest.

Very, very cool. That makes a lot of sense. And of course you can open a window and cool things down. And that's actually something I did last night as well because we have tons of frogs outside right now. So I'm like, I'll listen to the frogs and I go to sleep. So it was really cold when I woke up. So maybe, maybe that helped me get 101 on my heart rate variability. But it's, it's intriguing. These are all things people can play with. And when people get a neck nest, I know that you're, you're giving them your whole course and all, and all the different sleeping stuff, which is totally worth paying attention to. So I, I appreciate your, your level of sleep nerdiness because we, we definitely both think about the same kinds of weird things you can do. And there's a noticeable difference from having that traction. And I, I absolutely noticed after it took about three months of using the neck nest, after you first gave it to me at that event where I, I noticed I was like, my chest was out more, my. My head was further back. And you don't want kyphosis when your head comes forward. One thing we haven't talked about is lymphatic drainage. Kind of walk me through what happens with lymphatic drainage and neck angle or back angle and things like that.

So there's lymphatic drainage and there's glymphatic drainage. One of the things is when we talk about, or when people talk about sleeping position, glymphatic drainage is this. Your brain and your neural tissue needs to detoxify, and it does so at night. And there's this flow of cerebral spinal fluid that occurs. There's an influx and then there's an outflux of flow. So when you go horizontal, every. Your joints don't get blood supply, so they swell. So there's a swelling that occurs at night. And it's thought that swelling occurs more effortlessly when you're sleeping on your side. And that's based on a research study. And people challenge me on that all the time because I talk about back sleeping and then people talk about no, but the research says that glymphatic drainage happens more efficiently on your side. And I know that glymphatic drainage is critically important. The cervical alignment and the cervical spine alignment is critically important in the glymphatic drainage. So I had to go find this research article, and I'm going to put up a picture for you. Dave, tell me if these two spines do you think might react differently? Here it comes. Okay, so the spine on the left is the one that the research study was done on.

That would be our right. Because it looks like a politician, as far as I can tell.

Yeah.

Oh, no, that's a rat.

That's a rat. And the spine on the other side is a human spine. So when you look at the cervical spine here, it's curved. When you look at the cervical spine in the rat, it's reversed. So in the study that everybody's placing like all of this information on. Oh, no, side sleeping is better. It's based on a rat. And in the study it says special statement. This is based on a rodent. Were extrapolating that side posture sleeping is better in humans also. And then I looked at every. Everybody started quoting it, saying side sleep and side sleep and side sleep, it just doesn't make sense to me because I'm like, lymphatic drainage happens most efficiently. It swells at night. And when you walk and you get mobile, that's when the flow happens. And it's critically important that your cervical curve, you maintain a healthy cervical curve that decrease dural pressure and allow that alignment of that cervical curve to be able to allow for that drainage to come out of the brain and down through the csf. So that is my. That. So when we talk about glymphatic drainage and lymph drainage, when you're looking at just drainage as the issue, that's one thing. But when you're looking at. That's the researcher looking at the wrong data, looking at the wrong variables. The most important variable about sleeping is reversing the damage effect of the modern day lifestyle. Being on a computer all day, being texting all day, our spines are getting destroyed, our sleep scores are getting destroyed because we're tossing and turning all night long. You can fix your spine while you sleep, get 30% better sleep scores by just changing your position, and you can virtually eliminate neck and back pain by doing it while you sleep. It's just, it's, it's, it's, it's crazy to me that we are a side sleeping culture and I am trying to do my part to create the happiest, healthiest, most well rested people on earth by teaching them how to sleep in a different position.

Very well said. And it's one of those things, it's something that doesn't take any more time than what you already do. You just get more benefits. And those are the most powerful, most powerful biohacks that you can possibly have. You ready for a couple audience questions?

Absolutely. I love it. Let's do it.

All right, let's bring Holly up.

I was just wondering with the neck nest, I've always fought with pillows to get it to put under the neck.

So I could balance the weight. So I loved you describing the counterweight aspect of it. But is there any data or research.

You'Ve done with what the neck nest.

Might do for relieving TMJ symptoms?

Without a doubt. So I had a maxilingologist, I don't know the maxiologist, the people that work on the mouth in the TMJ on a podcast that we will be releasing. It's a sleep podcast. And the entire episode was about the tmj. Because what she did, which I thought was brilliant, is she related? It's the only person that has ever thrown Out Wolf's. I mean, Davis's, Wolf's Law back at me, she's like, you know, due to Wolf's Law, the bone, the bone, the tissue aligns based on the stresses that it's under. So when you sleep on your side, you're breaking down the maxilla, and you're causing temporomandibular dysfunction because of side sleeping. So when you, when you sleep on. And we have a lot of people, we have thousands of people now in a neckness, and, and we do a weekly call. And what I like is that we've gotten so much, so many more testimonials, not just on. On improved sleep, but they're saying, you know, my, my wrinkles on my face aren't happening as much, and my TMJ is doing better. My headaches are gone. And that is all because of sleeping with proper alignment. So, yes, to answer your question, it will help by. Take by. By removing dural pressure at the base of the occiput. Those muscles come over and attach to the TMJ on the backside. So it does. I'm working with dentists now. It does release the tension in the tmj.

Very cool. That's a. That's a solid answer. All right. I. I would just say fixing TMJ is one of the most important things you can do to live a long time. And it's very, very old. Episode of Bulletproof Radio with Dwight Jennings. I talked about that. I spent a couple years with, you know, bite alignment adjustments and all that stuff to get rid of lifelong tmj. It actually changes the shape of your jaw. And interestingly, James Nestor, when he came on, talked about doing something similar. You know, just realigning the jaw. So I'm not talking about breaking the jaw or surgery. I'm talking about just over the course of a year or two, designing the jaw so it affects your nervous system in the right way. And since the jaw and the vagal nerve are so intimately connected via the trigeminal nerve, it's no wonder if your jaw is tweaked, you're going to have stress in the vagal nerve, which controls stress even in the gut, throughout the body. And if you have a misalignment of your spine, it's going to affect your vagal nerve, which affects your gut, affects pain receptors throughout the body and all. So in an ideal world, you get rid of the TMJ and you sleep in a good position, or you get your adjustments, you do what it takes so that your spine works properly and you have way less pain and strangely better sleep, better digestion, less inflammatory response. Like these are fundamental things to performing well. So I, I love that you asked that question, Holly. Thank you. Anyone else from the collective want to ask a question of Dr. Peter Martoni? Raise your hand now or forever hold your peace. Let's see if someone types a question. I think we're good with questions. Everyone's just looking at me like deer in the headlights. Except for Bonnie. She doesn't look like a deer.

And then one thing too, in closing, just to allow people. You got to watch your food intake, right? And how much food you eat before you go to bed, that's significantly important. You gotta, because the byproduct of food is heat. And remember, you got to protect your body core temperature so the body will detox at night. It raises your temperature. Body metabolism metabolize food at night raises your body's core temperature. Exercise at night raises your body core temperature. So you know, some, some hints or things to do to be able to improve your sleep. Cut your food out at least four hours before you go to bed. Now if you, if you want to eat something light so your blood sugar level doesn't drop so good, you can do that. But just watch your food intake.

That's cool. So I would just say five hours before bed, don't eat. If you really want to be maximal for that, at least three hours. There's so much good data about that and fastest way I went pretty deep on that. And so yeah, eating right before bed, it doesn't, I'm going to say it probably doesn't matter if you have a neck nest. If you eat right before bed, you're probably not going to get a good night's sleep. You'll probably be better with a neckness, but it's still not going to be good. And that midnight snack is so incredibly, incredibly harmful. Well, thank you for sharing all of this sleep wisdom. We already mentioned the code, but necknest.com Dave, you've got a pretty massive offer there. And guys, whether you're with Upgrade Collective, thanks Holly for your question. Or whether you're listening wherever and however you like to listen, start paying attention to your sleep. You do it every night. And if you do it a little bit better, whether it's via technology, like the stuff we just talked about, whether it's via adjusting your pillow, whether it's via sleeping in a different position or temperature of your room, color of your lights. So many of the biohacks I've talked about end up revolving around sleep. I did not believe this 15 years ago. I'm like, could I just not sleep now? I'm like, can I get just amazing sleep? I don't want that much of it, but I want it to be really good. And if you just start tweaking on that, your overall stress goes down and your performance goes up. So it's one of the cheapest and easiest biohacks you could ever do. Sleep, sleep, sleep. I will see you guys on the next episode. And, Peter, thank you again for your deep knowledge.

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.