How to sleep better tonight and why it is so important that you do.

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Hello, and welcome back for another episode of thrivetime. I'm Eric Edmeads. I'm your host. And today. Today we're going to talk about one of my favorite and most delicious subjects in the world in history, and that is sleep. We're going to talk about how to sleep better and why it's really important to do that. Stay tuned. All right, so, yes, today we are going to be talking about sleep, and I'm very excited about that because I have heard from a lot of people that sleep is not the easiest thing in the world for them to find right now. And I want to tell you that it is one of the most important things that you could be doing right now. Your immune system is dependent upon it. Even your digestion likes it. Every aspect of your body, your cells like to be repaired by it. So what I wanted to do is find you somebody who could really, really address this issue. And I am super glad today to be able to bring you guys, Dr. Michael Bruce. He is a true sleep expert. He's so committed that I swear he's fallen asleep in some of the meetings. I'm kidding. He's never done that. He's never done that. It's just a bit of a joke. But I'm really excited to have him here because what I want us to walk away with here today is two things. One is a real understanding of how important it is, because it's my belief that one of the reasons we don't get enough sleep sometimes is we just don't get how important it is. And then for those of us who do understand how important it is, sometimes we don't have the very best strategies for making it happen. And so I am really excited today to be able to bring you guys an expert that can help us with both of those things. Michael, it's super big pleasure to have you here on the show. Please say hello to everybody.

Thank you so much, Eric. And it's a true honor to be here on your show today. I'm just excited to spread the good word about good sleep.

It's important. You know, it's really crazy when the whole lockdown thing kind of stops started. And I'm like anybody else. I'm human. I get a little adrenaline here and there. And my sleep wasn't. And then I realized I had my little old iWatch sleep tracker. And I looked at it. It's like, oh, my God, it's disrupted. It's it. So I did the steps. Steps that I knew of. Step that I learned from you and I did the steps and, you know, the next seven nights in a row I had all green and blue rings, which, you know, of course on my sleep app means good things. So can we start with this? That I really do believe that, that the first problem, at least when I've been working with clients, when I've been talking to people, I believe that the first problem that I have really seen with a lot of people is that they kind of know they need sleep, but they don't really understand the importance of it. It's kind of like, you know, people not investing, they don't understand the importance of compound interest. You know, it's like that sort of thing. And I think that if we can get into that, let's talk a little bit about really what happens when. Look, we all know if we completely rob ourselves asleep, horrible things happen to our brain and the CIA can get all kinds of information out of. But I'm talking about the low grade sleep deprivation, when people let stress get in the way. Tell us what's going on there.

Well, so first of all, I want to address one point, which is why do people not realize how important sleep is? So it actually turns out that there's a biological mechanism that teaches our brain when we get tired, to not feel tired. So this comes from way back in caveman days when people would be running through the plains trying to escape a saber toothed tiger. Taking a nap probably wasn't the best thing because you became lunch. So for many people, that feeling of is sleep really important? Is actually, evolutionarily speaking, coming from long ago. When we look at total sleep deprivation, as you correctly talked about, it's devastating, right? I mean, I think the world's record is somebody stayed awake for like 11 days. They were hallucinating by day six, like it was a mess type of thing, right? So when you start to think about that kind of thing, you're like, holy cow, what are people thinking? Here's the thing that's even more interesting is small amounts of sleep deprivation throughout the week and trying to catch up on the weekend turns out to be a terrible plan for a whole host of reasons. Sleep deprivation, depending upon how much of it you have, even losing as little as an hour or an hour and a half to your total sleep need, which by the way, is different for each person. Eight hours is a myth, and we can talk about that just losing an hour every day for four or five days. If we put you in a driving simulator, you'd be legally drunk, right? From a reaction time difference that's changing. I mean, clearly right now, during times of COVID people aren't necessarily out driving around. But think about carpools, think about when all this is over. Sleep deprivation certainly has that effect, but that's only the physiological effects. Let's talk about the emotional effects. Anxiety just starts to go through the roof. And. And during a time like now when you're kind of a little bit sleep deprived and there's all this uncertainty and all these things that are going on, of course anxiety is going to raise up for a lot of people and that's going to be incredibly difficult for them. And guess what? Their anxiety goes up and their sleep goes down. And so it becomes this vicious cycle. And so the good news is, is that everybody listening has the opportunity to break that cycle. Everybody does. There isn't anybody out there who's got a broken sleep sleeper, as I call it. Right, Everybody. All you need is a couple of steps and we're going to go through them today of exactly what you need to do in order to get yourself back sleeping again and have some regularity to your schedule. Because it's that regularity or consistency that's going to improve the sleep quality.

This is so important. And it's like, I don't know, you know, it's funny as a speaker and as a presenter and I've seen you many times in your very engaging stuff. I always kind of joke when people ask me about you. I'm like, well, hang on a second. Now. My goal as a speaker is to. My goal as a speaker is to make sure the audience doesn't fall asleep. But your goal, your goal as a speaker is to get them ultimately to fall asleep. I think that's pretty funny. But let's. So let's just recap. I like sort of allegorical stuff that we can draw relationships from. And so, for example, somebody just loses an hour of sleep a day and now they. They really shouldn't be operating heavy machinery like driving a car. But they also probably shouldn't be, like, primarily responsible for a child or.

Absolutely.

Or running.

So that's where it gets. Right. So that's where it gets really interesting. Right? So when people are sleep deprived, they make riskier decisions across the board. So that's not good, especially during a time like now when a lot of decisions are becoming more and more critical. What we're looking at. So I completely agree with you there. And then let's talk about food choices. Right? Because I know that's something that's near and dear to your heart and your community's heart, right? When you're sleep deprived, what do you reach for? You reach for the crap, okay? You reach for what we used to call the comfort food, right? It's the heavy starches, it's the lots of sugar, it's lots of fat, it's all those things. Here's what's so fascinating. When you become sleep deprived, your cortisol levels raise, okay? And your brain doesn't like that. And when you've got too much cortisol going on in your brain, your brain says, holy crap, I need this to go down. So it says, I want serotonin to help me do this. How do you get serotonin? Eat a friggin Snickers bar, right? Like it's just immediate. And that's part of the problem is we actually crave the stuff that's not good for us when we're sleep deprived, which pulls people completely out of their routine. Not just their sleep routine, but, but their food routine, their exercise routine. Literally all the things that we need to have ourselves function in a good way as humans literally flies out the door.

Wow, okay, so it's a big deal, you know, by the way, one of the things is, you know, is weight loss even. I mean, think about that. Like I know you're aware of it, but this is something we talk with our wildfit clients about all the time, is if weight loss is a goal, cortisol is the enemy of weight loss. In the simplest sense, cortisol indicates that the environment is unsafe. This is not a good time to shed emergency storage energy and water. So if we've got cortisol, we're not going to lose weight. So not only are we breathing our fat out while we're sleeping, but we're also reducing cortisol levels. So this is a big deal. I think everybody's got it. Like sleep is important. It's much more important than most people think it is. I think you've explained that really well. Let's talk about strategies. You know, you know, there's, I mean you, there's all these people with different street. I'll tell you, I'm going to give you my no sleep strategy. I'm going to give it to you here. Here it goes. Mike and I don't do it very often. I don't very often. But my no sleep strategy is like any other procrastination model really. I just procrastinate my sleep. I find myself getting caught up. I've got a massive workshop that I'm teaching mostly for Eastern Europeans coming up this weekend. I have audios I have to do after this stuff. And so suddenly I start thinking, I go, well, I could get it done now and then I'll sleep better. I can get it done now and then I'll sleep better. I can get done and now and sleep better. And I. So I'm lying to myself and I'm procrastinating and the next thing you know, it's 2 o' clock in the morning. And what the truth is for me very clearly is that if I go to sleep at 10 and I get up at 5am, you know, in deference to Robin Sharma at the 5am club, but the work that I can get done from 6 to 8 is infinite, infinitely more powerful. I know some people argue against that because I can be a night owl, but I want to know for you, like, what are the hacks to? First of all, let's start with psychological hacks. We'll get to some of the physical things, but how can we get somebody who's procrastinating their sleep to take action and get to bed?

So there are two different techniques that I like to use to talk to people about procrastination, specifically to sleep. And one of them involves a little bit of a routine. So I'd like to explain it from an algorithmic standpoint. So we know that the average sleep cycle is 90 minutes long and we know the average person has five of those cycles. Five times 90 is 450 minutes, divided by 60 is seven and a half hours. So first of all, eight hours is the myth.

You just say this to them and then they fall asleep. Is that how it goes?

No, no, no, come on. I'm getting there, I'm getting there. So what I want people to do is if you take a socially determined wake up time, so in many cases let's just use a round number like 6:30, right? If you subtract seven and a half hours from 6:30, you get 11:00pm and that becomes your new bedtime. When was the last time somebody told you to go to bed? What were you, like 8, 10 years old? Something like that? This is where the procrastination comes in. You set an alarm on your phone, your watch, whatever, preferably if you've even got one in the bedroom, right, that forces you at your bedtime, or about a half an hour before, to walk in there to turn off the alarm, right? This is a form, this is a tool to remind you. Because part of what happens with procrastination is. It's too easy to just say, oh, I'll do it in 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. But if you have to physically get up, walk into a bedroom, the space reminds you of what you're supposed to be getting ready to do, right? And turn off an alarm. This is one of the best procrastination tools that I've discovered. The second one is to actually have a sleep buddy. Right? So whether you live alone or you live with somebody, being accountable for your sleep and for your health can turn out to be a great opportunity for you. So if you have somebody who can give you a shout and say, hey, dude, it's 30 minutes before bed, I know you're working on your audios, I know you're doing this kind of stuff, I need you to chill out, go to bed. Sometimes that's all it will take in order to have a little bit of accountability for something like that. Because the truth of the matter is, it's so easy to just keep going because you think if I just do one more audio or one more project or one more, I'm going to reach that level where I'm going to feel compelled to be able to say I'm going to go to sleep. To be clear, you're not reaching that level because you wouldn't be doing these at one o' clock in the morning if you are actually going to reach that level. It's just not really in that part of your nature. So that knowing and understanding the numbers can be very, very helpful because then you can line up different anti procrastination techniques along the way.

I know for me, what works really well is I really like the distinction. In fact, we share that. We say this to our welfare clients is alarms are not for waking up to, they're for going to bed to. You know?

Exactly, exactly.

Who wants to start their day by being alarmed? Like, I've never. Oh, I'll alarm you in the morning. Exactly. I haven't used an alarm for years. Years. I will set one and I have a flight to catch or I need to be on stage. But I'm telling you, 95% of the time I wake up before that alarm goes off because I've done these things.

My hack, that's healthy. So people need to understand if you wake up on your own without an alarm, that's healthy because you're waking up to what's called your chronotype, which is super important. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.

No, no, I'm with you. I think I Heard you saying some time ago on stage, like we're the only, we're the only species in the world that consistently interrupts our sleep patterns on purpose. What the hell is that? It's just insane. So I know that my hack, I have a really simple hack, and that is that first thing is that I talk to myself about how valuable those first hours in the morning and I realize I'm going to give up those hours for these hours. And then I realize that's not worth it. But I'll tell you, the other one for me is fiction. Fiction books. Oh yeah, I'm really clear. I cannot read nonfiction because nonfiction activates me and I take down, I want to write and take journal notes. Fiction, though, I put on a good book, I'm listening to it or I'm reading it and I never get past two pages. It's the weirdest thing. Even at 10 o', clock, it's like, it's a simple recipe. But how about this?

Can I address two things that you just said? Because I think they're important. One is intent, right? So you, you very, very. Actually you did a really nice job. You said you explained how you changed your intent for going to sleep. I'm going to go to sleep, I'm going to heal, I'm going to get better, I'm going to be more positive. All of these things are 100% true. Looking forward to sleep as a healing process as opposed to, oh, it's that thing I kind of have to do at the end of the day. I'm kind of annoyed by it. Process is very different. Also, in the middle of the night, a lot of people are waking up in the middle of night and here's what's happening is they're getting upset. They're like, oh crap, I Woke up, it's 3:37 and I got to go back to sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep, you know, and they really try to force themselves to get back to sleep. Right. All that does is cause autonomic arousal, which makes it almost impossible to go back to sleep. But by changing their intent in the middle of the night, it's very, very different. So here's what I'm having my clients do. If you wake up at 3:30, you look at the clock, which by the way, nobody should do, but everybody does. And then they instantly do the mental math and they're like, oh crap. Instead of saying oh crap, here's what you need to say. This is awesome. I get three more hours to heal, I get three more hours to sleep. Whether I fall asleep or I don't fall asleep doesn't matter, because I'm going to lie here, I'm going to chill, and I'm going to rejuvenate myself. But here's the deal. I'm just going to stay positive and be able to get that healing process coming in towards me. When people do that, they literally fall asleep within five or 10 minutes and they end up staying asleep throughout the rest part of the night. So that in and of itself, that intent turns out to be incredibly, incredibly important.

Michael, I love that you say that. I teach that exact principle in Wildfit. Probably it came from you.

I doubt it.

You and I know. It's so distinct, though. It's so clear. Like, I know where I first got the visceral feeling of it was that I obviously am flying a lot. And I noticed that if I woke up and there were still, you know, I noticed that there were still hours left in the plane, I would be okay. Like, I'd be like, oh, awesome, there's three more. And then I'd go back to sleep. And I noticed that at home, if I woke up at 3am Then I would. I would have this.

Ah, that's really interesting.

Yeah. And so then I started doing this new thing where I looked at the. I'll look at the time and. And I look and go, it's. I have three more hours of deliciousness in bed.

Exactly.

Does that changes a whole lot? So I'm really glad you said that. Let's talk about the environment. And I don't. I'm not talking about. I mean, we could talk about the environment, but I'm talking about the sleeping environment.

Right.

You know what, what are some things that we can do to improve our, you know, improve our falling asleep, staying asleep, getting back to sleep, you know, that sort of.

Sure, absolutely. So light is probably the first thing that we need to talk about. So how does light affect us and what does that mean? So light in particular, a particular wavelength of light called blue light, is a light that actually is very, very important because when it hits certain cells in our eyes called melanopsin cells, it turns off the melatonin faucet in our brain. We want the melatonin faucet on at night. We don't want it on in the mornings when we're trying to wake up, but we definitely want it on at night. So lowering the level of blue light, or light in general, is going to be an important thing. One of the things I'm recommending, especially during this particular time of the quarantine is to give yourself a media diet 90 minutes before bed. Right. You really don't need to know how many people died of COVID or how many people got it right before you're falling asleep. Okay? It's just not necessary to have that piece of data right there for you. So I'm asking people. And by the way, your recommendation of a fiction book is one I've been doing for years and years and years. Nonfiction does not work before bed. It's too self exploratory, and especially during times like now. I don't think you need that. I think you kind of need like a good story, you know? Now, you also mentioned listening to books, and I love the idea of people listening to books. Many people will listen to books to help them fall asleep, but they'll keep earbuds in. The only issue with that is if they roll over on their side, it can get in there. They believe it or not, if you Google pillow speakers, they make these little discs called pillow speakers. They're awesome. And you plug it into your recording device and then you stick it in your pillow. Then you're not bothering your bed partner number one, you can listen to whatever you want. And you're out like a light. So when you start to think about what's going on around you, that actually has to do with sound, right? So when you think about your environment, one of my favorite things to do is tell people, think of the five senses and think about how each one of those senses can be impacted by sleep and what in your bedroom could be doing that. So we talked about sight or light. We talked about sound a little bit. But to be fair, you might be sleeping next to somebody who makes some interesting sounds like snoring and grunting and all these different things. In my home, we actually have extra creatures in our bed. Besides me and my wife, we have a French bulldog, a chihuahua, and a cat, all of which are in there with us. So that can make for some interesting times as well. We can talk about, is it okay to sleep with animals in the bed? Believe it or not, some people can't sleep with animals and some people can't sleep without animals in the bed. So we talked about sound. But again, thinking about snoring, that can be a big one. You need to think about weight loss because that can definitely help with snoring. Snoring is actually an early sign of sleep apnea in many cases, which can be a very devastating sleep disorder. So sometimes when you're listening to your bed partner, if you happen to hear them a pause in breathing or a pause in snoring, it might be worth having a doctor check them out. Sight, sound. And then we do touch. So what is touch? There's two really ways to think about touch when you talk about a sleep environment. One is your sleep system, right? So your mattress, your pillow, your sheets, comforter, things like that. And the other is the temperature, the ambient temperature in the room. Most people don't know this, but keeping a cooler room actually makes it seem significantly easier to fall asleep. Now, I gotta be fair, Eric. I have to tell you, I probably saved more marriages as a sleep specialist than I ever would have as a marital therapist. Like, by dealing with the temperature issues that go on in the bedroom. The I like the mattress firm. You know, he likes it soft. Or the he snores, she doesn't like you would be. I mean, honestly, match.com should probably have, like, a thing where they ask each other questions before you end up going on a date. Because, you know, this is, like, serious, serious stuff. But temperature is big. Keep it cool. 65 to 75 degrees, if you can, turns out to be a great temperature. If you go below 65, you'll start to shiver, which will prevent you from going into REM sleep. So you don't really want to get it to be that cold. I mean, I've got some people who are like, I want it to be like a meat locker in my bedroom. They like it so cold. But colder is better. And here's why. Your core body temperature rises, rises, rises. Then about 10:30, it hits a peak, and then it drops. That drop is a signal to your brain to release melatonin. So this is how the melatonin faucet starts, is with cool, cold surroundings. So as part of the environment, I'm always asking people to do that. Now, let's say that your bed partner likes it snuggly warm, and they've got all these comforters and flannel sheets and all this kind of crazy stuff. One of the easiest things that you can do is not wear socks and keep your feet out from under the covers. It turns out. I don't know if you guys have ever had this experience. I certainly have. If you're really warm at night and then all of a sudden you stick your foot outside of the covers and then instantly you cool down, right? It turns out that the skin on the bottom of your feet dissipates heat much more quickly because there's no hair on the bottom of Your feet. So this is one of my funny techniques that I do. So for example, if the one person likes it, really cool. I actually have them usually sleeping naked because extra clothing changes thermoregulatory properties. There's actually a lot of data to show that sleeping naked is really good for sleep in general. I have them, they're naked, they're not wearing socks, and so then their feet are out from under the covers. Meanwhile, the other person may actually have pajamas, socks because they may have thermoregulatory issues and feel too cold.

Plus I have found that when both people sleep naked, it can cause all kinds of sleep interruption. I've found.

Well, yeah, but so let's talk about that. So let's talk about intimacy, right? And so that's actually what one of the best parts about sleeping naked is. You're both kind of like, well, I'm here, you're here, and we're both kind of naked, so why not? And all of a sudden you start to add that extra component to your relationship, which can actually be pretty beneficial. The last two are smell and taste. Smell is aromatherapy. Right. And so is there any data, Michael, on aromatherapy? Actually there is. There's two double blind placebo controlled studies that show that lavender and something called ylang ylang as aromas are very relaxing. Now to be fair, you don't just sniff something and pass out, right? Unless it's ether. Right. Or something like that. What this does is it causes a muscular relaxation response and then that allows the natural sleep process to take over. So by having aromatherapy, it can actually be very beneficial. To be clear, fire and sleep don't mix. So don't use aromatherapy with candles. Use either diffusers or sprays or sachets, little thingies like what we've got. Here's a sachet I've got here, that kind of thing to allow for that aroma to be able to proliferate without obviously there being any danger. And then food is really your wheelhouse for sure. You can help us understand more about what foods are okay to have before bed, what foods you shouldn't have before bed, and things like that. So when you think about the sleep environment, think about the five senses and you can really dial in something pretty cool.

Good deal. That's really solid stuff. I, I, I follow a lot of that. You know, one of, one of the things, here's one of my little travel hacks. You know how when you're on the airplane and they, when you, when you check your bag in and they put the sticker on. And then they put the little stickers on your right. You know what those are really good for? Sticking all over the little LED lights in your hotel room.

Oh, that's a good idea.

That's what I do. I just grab them and stick them on the fire alarm, stick them on the tv, stick them on the thing. And I. Because all those lights, I don't like them. I want to be in the darkest possible room I can. I. I'm with you on the cold air. I learned that as a kid because I grew up in. In Canada, and we did a lot of outdoor activities. And then I. And it is cold and especially outdoors, like, you know, camping and stuff like that. And. And then I was. I found something really fascinating about Kilimanjaro. I've done that seven times. And this doesn't really help at the higher altitude. Sleeping at high altitudes, just different difficult. But it's like. Sleeping at high altitude is just like having sleep apnea all the time. So.

But air quality is tough.

Yeah. But at low altitude, that. What I found is I really like bitingly cold air and a really nice sleeping bag.

Right, Totally.

Something about that. So I. I tend to do that with my bedroom here. Is to keep that quite, quite cold and have a nice duvet and. And be able to regulate my temperature. Exactly like you said, put the feed out the bottom and that kind of stuff. So I'm on board with that. It's really been helpful to me. How about this? When we. In Wildfit, you know, you talked about food. I will add this, that generally speaking, I suggest that people do not eat for two or three hours before they go to bed.

Correct.

The way I often put this to people. And, you know, a lot of times I use anecdotal, you know, kind of examples that are probably not based in science, but I'm interested in your point of view. If I understand this correctly, this is my metaphor. In REM sleep, we do the equivalent that we used to do in our. In our old Windows machines. We rebuild the hard drive, we rebuild the indexes, you know, and, and, and, and we defrag the hard drive, and we, you know, that's REM sleep. We're sorting out the mind, cleansing the mind and assimilating memories.

And so.

And then deep sleep I think of as the physical restorative process, like cellular repair. And of course, am I right in saying that when we go into deep sleep, we basically almost become, like, catatonic? Our bodies don't really move.

So in REM sleep, Our bodies don't move in deep sleep. Our bodies do move, but everything you're saying so far is 100% accurate.

All right, so let's say that, I guess what I'm now after is when we're talking with our Wildfit clients, we get a lot of people asking about napping and we get a lot of people asking about waking up in the night. And I can only speak from this experience, experience that when I've been off to visit with the Bushmen in, in, you know, in East Africa, which I've been doing for 10 years, I've noticed something about them and that is, you know, a couple things is that unless the moon is out, it's dark and they tend to go to bed when it gets dark and then they tend to wake up between about midnight and three and they talk a lot. Like for an hour or two they just chat and then they go back to sleep again. And then they wake up again when it gets light and then they tend to, around about 12 o' clock to 2 o' clock when it's just too hot to be doing anything else, they tend to sleep again. And they seem to be rocking the sleep cycle. And so I, I, I, I wonder how you feel, because I know a lot of people have this like, I got to get my eight hours, I got to get my eight hours. And I swear that half the problem is that limiting belief, because if they have the limiting belief, they need eight and then something happens where they only get six and, and they wake up only having had, you know, then they, then they, then they, they, they give themselves a negative signal and it's like, so talk to. What about those sleep patterns?

Absolutely.

How should we figure out our sleep pattern?

So let's start with me. Okay, so remember the experiment that I talked about earlier where I said take your socially determined wake up time, subtract seven and a half hours and that becomes your new bedtime, right? So I said 6:30 and 11 and 11 becomes your bedtime. So I tried this and it failed miserably. And I'll tell you why. I went to bed at 11 and I woke up at 5:30. Okay, did it a second night. Went to bed at 11, woke up at 5:30. To be clear, I'm not a morning person and the only thing I hate more than mornings are other morning people. They're just too damn chipper. Right. In the mornings I can't stand it. So I had no interest in being up at 5:30 in the morning. So I said, okay, screw It, I'll go to bed at midnight and see what happens. Went to bed at midnight, Woke up at 7. Hmm, that's more along the lines of what I wanted to do. I'm the sleep doctor, Eric, and I'm only sleeping six and a half hours a night. Okay, what's going on here?

Guess what?

My body doesn't need more than six hours a night. People need to just completely disregard the idea of eight hours as a must have. Believe it or not, the National Sleep foundation has now said 7 to 9 as a range actually makes a little bit more sense. So there's a lot more give there. But to be fair, if your sleep is consistent, and I've actually got a five step plan for all of our listeners and viewers that they can follow, if your sleep is consistent, I can actually show you how to shrink that sleep schedule and you actually get higher quality and less quantity, which actually turns out to make your body more efficient, which is exactly what's happening with a lot of the Bushmen that you've been dealing with over the years. Right? And it's fascinating. And by the way, that whole idea of that multiple awakenings throughout a 24 hour period, this is, this is not new, right? I mean obviously they're almost not prehistoric, but they're a very, you know, different type of environment and different type of community than what we are currently living in. And they've been able to adopt it. What happened with us? Well, when we were back in an agrarian society, we people would go to bed when the sun went down, they'd literally wake up in mid, between midnight and 2 o' clock in the morning. They'd have another meal, they might have intimacy with their, with their, their bed partner. They check on the family because everybody lived in a great big house. Then they go back to sleep and then they'd wake up when the sun came up, they'd till the fields, do all those things and in the middle of the day when it got too hot, what would they do? They'd pull over to the side and they'd rest. Let's be honest, people have been doing this in Latin American countries called the siesta for a gazillion years, right? So thinking about sleep as all one time and only one amount, honestly, that is prehistoric thinking. I would argue that that's really not, number one, how our bodies react, but number two, it's really not what our bodies need. And people need to stop with those confining ideas. Everybody's sleep is individual, right? It's just like an exercise routine, it would just be like saying, okay, everybody out there needs to figure out how to bench press 200 pounds. That's what's going to make everybody fit is 200 pound bench press. Well we all know that that's complete horse crap, right? It doesn't work that way. Everybody has different individual diets, has different individual exercise routines. You should have individual sleep, right? And so running this experiment by taking that socially determined wake up time and going backwards, all you're doing is playing around with it. The goal here is to wake up just like you do Eric, without an alarm. So that's what happens with me. I go to bed right around midnight and I swear to you, 6:13, for some reason, every single frickin morning, 6:13, I literally open my eyes and bam. That's what it says on the clock. And I'm getting up and getting the dogs ready. That's what we do at our house. I want people to understand there's a lot of flexibility and a lot of play with this. But don't go crazy. You don't want to shorten it. You want to allow your natural sleep rhythm to evolve and come out and then respect it, follow it. Really get involved with your natural sleep rhythm because literally every other aspect of your life will improve if you do.

I am with you all the way. And I'll tell you one of the things that I really, I think a lot of times people feel like they're going to affect their waking up time by changing their go to sleep time. But I don't think they realize that it's a two way relationship. You can affect your going to sleep time with your waking up time. So I used to be, and I'm talking 25 years ago, I used to be a total snooze button junkie.

It's the worst, dude. It's the worst.

The snooze button and I had an intimate relationship. I have determined intelligence.