A Navy SEAL Physician Reveals How Hard-Charging, High-Achievers Can Fall Asleep Fast

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, your body's raping everything to get enough melatonin to kind of shut your brain and body down for sleep. Decreased serotonin levels lead to mood disorders, obviously. So that's kind of where the depression and mood changes come from. With sleep deficiency and adrenal fatigue. Doctors learn nothing about nutrition, they learn nothing about exercise, they learn nothing about sleep, and they learn nothing about stress mitigation or control. They're like the four pillars of health. So it's no big surprise that your doctor may disagree with health care coaches and health experts like guys like you. He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here, and I've got Dr. Kirk Parsley on the line with me, and he's actually affectionately known as Doc Parsley. That's Doc Parsley. As a matter of fact, as you're listening in, if you want to go check out a quite impressive photograph of the doc or access any of the show notes from today's show, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com DocParsley so Doc Parsley is a former Navy SEAL. He got a medical degree from Bethesda, and that was in 2004. And then he served as an undersea medical officer at the Naval Special warfare group from 2009 to 2013. He did a residency in hyperbarics and diving medicine, which is actually really interesting. I myself just returned from a free diving trip, so I've spent the vast majority of the past 96 hours underwater. So it's actually quite an interesting thing that happens physiologically when you're under for long periods of time. But Doc Parsley is also probably able to kill most of us with his pinky finger because he's a Navy seal, but he's also a total sleep nerd. He knows a ton about sleep. He's been a member of the American Academy of sleep medicine since 2006. He served as the Naval Special Warfare's expert on sleep medicine. After leaving the Navy, he went on to consult for sleep for multiple Corporations and professional athletes and teams, clients including the Navy seals. So he lectures all over the world. As a matter of fact, at the time that you're listening to this, both Doc Parsley and I are going to be down at the Unbeatable Mind Retreat in San Diego speaking down there. But I'm not quite done introing Doc Parsley because he's also a bit of a chemist. His supplement formulations are something that are used to help the world's most elite fighting organization, SEALs. He designed sleep products to compensate for that toxic environment. Guys like the seals, high achievers, hard charging folks, find themselves living in areas of not just high stress, but heavily processed foods, insufficient sleep, fast moving lifestyle. So he actually designs, among other things, sleeping cocktails. He's got one called a sleep cocktail that actually helps these folks sleep better. We're going to talk about that, the ingredients in that and a lot more. When it comes to sleep, sleeping better, melatonin, jet lag, et cetera. If you have ever wanted to get better Z's, this is one that you're going to want to listen into. So, Doc Parsley, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. That was a great intro. I should have recorded that. I'll have it transcribed.

Oh, absolutely. I'll sell it to you after the call.

Sweet.

Package it up. Give myself a nice deep, free, easy.

Installments of 1990 the movie announcer's voice in a world.

Anyways, you know, we've, we, I won't lie, we've talked about sleep a lot on the show before. We've covered like sleep hygiene, right? Like sleeping in a cold and dark room. And we've talked about like bed. And we had a guy who coaches elite soccer players even talk about how right handed players should sleep on their left side, left handed players on their right side, etc.

That's new to me.

Yeah, but I know you know a lot about kind of like the biochemistry and the supplementation side of sleep. And just as kind of a starting off point, one of the things that I wanted to ask you right off the bat, kind of a weird leading question, but I know so many people that take Ambien and Valium, so many athletes that take Ambien and Valium, diazepams, things like that, to help knock them out at night. I personally, just because I was in the ocean for so much the past few days, was using Dramamine and I know that even affected my sleep cycles. What happens to your body when you use pharmaceuticals like this to help you sleep?

Yeah, so I mean that's, yeah, that's the multi billion dollar question. The evils and perils of sleep drugs. Sort of the, the academic anti sleeping drug campaign, which nobody tends to pay attention to is this sort of really big regressive analysis study I think said it shortens your lifespan by like 12 years or 17 years or something if you routinely use sleep drugs. My thought on that is probably the sleep drugs aren't killing you, but it's the insomnia that's leading to you taking the sleep drug that's shortening your life. But I guess the real answer to that is that nobody knows. It depends on whose sleep research you believe when you look at it. Do you believe the independent colleges who some senior, some PhD's thesis was around sleep or do you believe the pharmaceutical industries data on it? But the one thing that is conclusive across everybody's data, no matter whose you choose. Of course I have my preference as to who I'd listen to. But the one thing that is true across all data is that taking any kind of pharmaceutical aid that tricks your body into a sleep like environment will, will distort what we call sleep architecture. And all sleep architecture is what most people have heard of is stages 1, 2, 3 and 4 of sleep and REM sleep. So if you're familiar with a polysomnograph where we put all these electrodes all over your head and put a heart rate monitor on you and a pulse ox and then put you in a bed with an infrared camera and watch you sleep all night with that polysomnograph comes out looking like a complete mess. It's like the Etch A Sketch of a three year old just going crazy on it and that probably just totally dated myself with that. Probably half your Etch A Sketch.

I've seen photographs in the time capsules.

Yeah, yeah. So that's a complete mess. But what we can do with it is we combine all that information and it looks like this very structured little ladder. Some people have seen it with time being on the X axis and the sleep stage is on the Y axis, like this very predictable pattern. You start in stage one, you get on the stage two, you're in this transition, you go into stage three and four, you stay there for a certain amount of time, you climb back up, you do a little bit of rem, you go back down and it's very predictable. If you call that sleep, which is sort of from the physician's standpoint, that's what I have to call sleep. If we call that Sleep, then most sleep drugs are not allowing you to sleep, is the short answer. They aren't maintaining that sleep architecture. They're making you unconscious. They're making you not aware of your environment. But they're not necessarily any different than, say, being knocked unconscious.

So what sleep stage would you be in? If I took Valium, for example, would that just like shove me straight into stage four sleep and I stay there all night, or is it just like a totally different stage now?

So again, all of the sleep drugs affect all of the sleep stages, whether it's affecting whether or not you're actually going to that stage, or whether it's affecting how long you're staying in that stage, or whether it's affecting how solidly you basically are in that stage. So Valium, let's take a couple of sleep categories here, right? So Valium is a category of drugs called benzodiazepines. And what those are, those are drugs that act a lot like gaba, okay? Now your other sleep drugs, like Ambien and Lunesta, those are drugs that look a lot like. Look and act a lot like benzodiazepines. They're just more selective, so they select different GABA receptors. So I'll try not to get, like, too overwhelmingly complex and geeky on this. But basically there's a couple of mechanisms involved in you going to sleep and staying asleep. And one of those mechanism relies heavily on gaba. What that mechanism is doing is it's making your neocortex, right? Like your human brain. The big wrinkly part that we all think about as being our brain. When we think of the human brain, that's the little device in which your body interacts with the world, right? That's taking in all the sensation and making sense of it, and that's allowing you to do all sorts of things with your body. That's that neocortex piece, okay? That actually has to slow down. It has to slow way down. And the chemistry of that has to change very significantly. For all that sleep architecture that we were talking about earlier, for all that to happen and for you to get all the benefits of sleep, which we can talk about kind of what happens if you guys haven't talked about that in your shares before, but in order for that to happen, your neocortex has to change a lot. GABA is the primary driver of that happening. So I think you and I talked about before whether or not you can get GABA through the blood brain barrier and so forth.

GABA is, I actually don't think we have talked about that. But before, you keep going. So basically, you have a neocortex. The neocortex is supposed to be almost like in charge of your sleep architecture as you're sleeping.

No. So what your neocortex is involved in, it's in charge of you interacting with the world.

Okay.

So anytime you perceive light, you perceive sound, you perceive the sensation of touch, or you're thinking about things in the abstract that have to do with your real world. That's what your neocortex is doing. That's what your human brain is doing. And in doing so, it's interacting with the lizard brain, which is like our old brain that every mammal on the planet has. And that part down, that lizard brain is what's actually controlling all the chemistry in a brain and changing all that chemistry in your brain. And actually chemistry in your body is what leads to the sleep architecture. So you have to keep your neocortex from interacting with the environment or you can't go to sleep.

Okay, that makes sense. And the way that you keep your neocortex, your lizard brain, or I guess some people call it the Labrador brain now, right?

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah. Depending on whether you're a reptile or a dog person, the neocortex, to allow that to be shut down, this molecule that you're talking about, this gaba, this GABA has to somehow interact with the neocortex. And what you're saying is that Valium, Ambien, Diazepams, et cetera, keep GABA from interacting the right way with the neocortex?

Yeah. What they do is they trick the neocortex into believing there's a lot of GABA around. So they go and they bind. If you think about molecules and receptors being like a lock in the key, the GABA molecule is the key. The receptor is the keyhole on the lock. Right. Once the key slides into the keyhole and turns, then that cell, that neuron, starts acting differently. So what they've done is they figured out the pharmaceutical industry, and this is how most pharmaceuticals work. And it doesn't matter what you're talking. Like any disease that you're treating with a pill, most pharmaceutical pharmaceuticals work this way, is they trick receptors into believing that this chemical is around. And oftentimes they act very, very differently than the actual molecule. So in the example of Valium or diazepam, that binds to one type of GABA receptor, but it binds a lot, lot, a lot stronger than GABA does.

Right.

And it Changes what that cell is doing to a much higher degree than GABA itself would. And then Lunest and Ambien, those bind a different GABA receptor and they bind a lot stronger. Like 100 to 1. Right. If there's 100 of each molecule, it's 99 times out of 100, you know, the Valium or the, or the Ambien, that's going to bind the receptor over the GABA and they have what we call GABAergic effects. They act like GABA, but usually they act a lot stronger than GABA, a lot more strongly, a lot more intensely, last a lot longer or specifically bind one receptor versus another receptor and not both receptors. And that's what's leading to the distortion of the sleep architecture.

Okay, gotcha. So with gaba, now I know that it's sold like if I go to Walgreens or cvs, I can buy GABA there. And I've seen GABA as an ingredient in a lot of sleep supplements. However, what I have been told and what I have actually told people myself is that based off of the size of gaba, it shouldn't be able to cross your blood brain barrier if you take it in like a supplement. Like, it's only if you have a leaky blood brain barrier that GABA would be able to cross that blood brain barrier and help you to fall asleep. What is the deal with gaba? Do you need to just make it on your own? Are there forms, like molecular forms of GABA that interact with the brain? Or is it just that when you take GABA it's acting on your brain body and not in your brain?

Yes. So you've got it all. So it's.

Don't you love my three part question? Yeah.

Yeah. So you're right. I mean, you know, essentially to some degree, almost everything crosses the blood brain barrier. But GABA is very hard to get across the blood brain barrier. It's a very big molecule and it's polar. And so those two things just don't tend to cross membranes very well. So you do need to make it on your own. And so like an amino acid deficiency can lead to you having problems making it. I'll head back to that in a second. But if you do take GABA and from a supplement store and you take these big doses of it, it's usually pretty grand dose, like a gram of GABA or two grams of gaba, the way that's helping your body sort of relax and slow down, having some benefit and you being able to sleep is by working on your gut neurons. Right. I know you've heard of the gut brain, which is about a tenth of the neurons in the brains or all around your internal organs. And that's affecting what's called your autonomic nervous system, your parasympathetic versus sympathetic. And so your GABA working in your body, it's allowing you to go more parasympathetic, at least below the neck or below the brain. Brain.

So you could take gab, I could go to Walgreens and I could buy Gab, and I could take it, and it's actually going to make my body kind of feel tired, even though it's not necessarily acting on the brain or, say, interacting to shut down the neocortex that you were talking about.

Right, right. So you're doing everything below what we call the supratentorium, which is like the little lining that the brain sits in. You're doing everything below there that GABA ordinarily does when you're sleeping. And all of your biological clocks, the neck, all that stuff's being benefited. Now, remember earlier when I said there's kind of two things going on? One of the things going on in your brain when you're going to sleep is the slowing down of the neocortex, and that's dependent upon gaba. That's what your sleep hygiene is all about. And so when you said that earlier on earlier shows on your podcast, you've talked about various types of sleep hygiene in the cool room and the probably the beds and all these types of things. What all those things are doing is those are all decreasing sensation to your neocortex. And in doing so, it's allowing GABA to be more powerful, the GABA in your brain to be more powerful. But it's the light regulation, which I'm sure you've talked about as well. Blue light entering the eyes and affecting the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or the scn, the master clock of the brain, which actually leads to the production of gaba.

Got it. Okay. So gaba, in terms of endogenous production, like the stuff that you make yourself, that helps your body to shut down, that neocortex you mentioned, you just alluded to pretty quickly that if you have an amino acid deficiency, you wouldn't produce gaba. I want to ask you about some other deficiencies that could cause you to not fall asleep or have insomnia or not get into your deeper sleep cycles. Are there, like, glaringly obvious nutrient deficiencies that you've seen in the research you've done that people have when they can't fall asleep, like big ones.

Yeah. The biggest couple I would say 99% of your audience has probably heard of would be vitamin D3 and magnesium. Those are the low hanging fruit. Those are what almost everybody talks about with insomnia. And the reason for that is because vitamin D3 and magnesium are both involved in the production of melanin. So they're involved as part of the melatonin production pathway. And then of course, magnesium is a mild muscle relaxer which aids in that. Other part we were talking about is relaxing and decreasing sensation to the neocortex. But really I would say any type of nutritional deficiency, whether you're talking about somebody who's maybe very strict vegan and maybe doesn't get enough amino acids, there's literally dozens. I mean, you're talking about three to 400 neurotransmitters in the brain being involved in sleep. So any type of amino acid deficiency, vitamin B, any of the vitamin B deficiencies, which tend to be fairly common. And then interestingly enough, and I actually learned this from, from one of the people who attended the Paleoepax conference.

One of the attendees.

Yeah, one of the attendees. There you go. That's the word I was looking for is a glycine deficiency. And apparently I didn't know this myself, so I just learned about this myself. She sent me some articles. Her name is Dr. Deborah. I know she has a reasonable presence, but yeah, that apparently the only natural source of that is through bone marrow. And so if you get any bone marrow, then you probably have a glycine deficiency.

I've heard the same thing. Well, what I've also heard is that when you have a methionine to glycine imbalance, you get really rich sources of methionine and steak and bacon and the meats that most of us are eating versus traditionally consumed meats like organ meats and bone marrow and bone broth, you create that glycine methionine imbalance. And yeah, I've heard that it can affect physiology. It sounds like the glycine component of that, especially when deficient, can affect sleep.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm pretty sure I'd have to go back and look at the articles that she sent me, but I'm pretty sure it's affecting serotonin production is how it's negatively impacting sleep. But interestingly enough, the vitamin D3 deficiency is really how I started my entire sort of career as being the sleep guy. When I went back to the seal teams as the doctor for the seal teams, I had this great sports medicine background, and I fully expected I was going to go in there and do a bunch of sports medicine. And I was in charge of developing this big sports medicine center and hiring all these experts, and everything was working out great. But the seals were coming in and closing the door and telling me sort of their personal struggles that had nothing to do with orthopedics or sports medicine. And one of the things that almost came up as an aside that I just kind of found curious and so I started asking them all about it was how well they slept and whether or not they used sleep drugs. And, you know, literally, as a. As a doctor, I had zero training. Not a single second of medical school was spent talking about sleep. And none of.

Seriously, like, you guys don't talk about insomnia or anything like that?

Not at all. You probably talk about it in pharma, you know, in your pharmacology class, because they certainly talk about Ambien. It's a very lucrative drug. So I had no training whatsoever on sleep. And this is what people don't realize. Oftentimes one of the big plights of the health crisis or one of the etiologies of the health crisis, I think, is that doctors learn nothing about nutrition, they learn nothing about exercise, they learn nothing about sleep, and they learn nothing about stress mitigation or control, which are like the four pillars of health. So it's no big surprise that your doctor may disagree with, say, healthcare coaches and health experts like guys like you and Rob Wolf and so forth. They say something. People tell that to their doctor. The doctor's like, oh, that's a bunch of BS Malarkey. There's no evidence of that. Take this pill. And that's because that's what we've learned. And so I knew nothing at all about sleep, and I had to go educate myself on sleep.

I'm still just like, I've heard that doctors don't get a lot of nutrition, that they get four weeks or so. I didn't know that. There's no discussion. Literally zero discussion.

Zero discussion.

Wow.

And my medical school curriculum, there is zero discussion on nutrition. Now, we took biochemistry in which we talked about how food is broken down, what are the metabolic pathways that it goes into, but it doesn't. Does it talk anything at all about macronutrients or fuel partitioning and what leads to this and that, and what are the regulators of that? I could have drawn out exactly what happened To a molecule of fat, and where everything ended up molecule by molecule. But the grand scheme of thing, it didn't teach me at all how to teach somebody how to eat or not. So I basically just started with, you know, all these seals telling me all their problems, and basically, they were coming to me sounding like they had metabolic syndrome. I was doing this huge lab set Because I didn't know what to look for. I just said, well, let's look at everything. They were coming back with Low testosterone, low growth hormone, Low insulin sensitivity, High inflammatory markers, Kind of pretty poor lipids, Oftentimes mildly elevated blood pressure. And they're like, 28, 32, 34, and they're in good shape. Right. If they took their shirt off, Everybody would be convinced that they're a total stud. But metabolically, they look like crap.

Through labs, I've seen guys like that before where, yeah, you see them, and they look like incredibly impressive specimens. And you get up close and there's, like, some bags under the eyes, A lot of wrinkles around the eyes and the face, and you just have this hunch that there's something going on underneath the skin. Yeah.

And the big thing going on beneath the skin in these guys Was lack of sleep. And again, I knew nothing about sleep, and I honestly didn't know what association could there be between sleep and all of these lab markers. I'm finding I don't know all these symptoms they're talking about. I didn't know. So I just had to dig out very basic physiology books and start looking at how does sleep happen? What leads to sleep, what. And fears of sleep. What does sleep do? Why are we sleeping? What's supposed to be going on? What's not going on? Then I started learning about sleep drugs. And of course, I was in a great position Because I was the doctor for the SEALs, and this was 2009, when the war was still a much more popular campaign. And I could call up any world expert and say, hey, I'm a doctor for the seals, and I'm really trying to learn about this. Could you talk to me? Could I come study with you? Could I come shadow you for a couple of weeks? Do you have anything I could read? Blah, blah, blah. And so I got a great education really quickly, and the first thing that I learned about was vitamin D3 deficiency being associated with insomnia. I had no idea why, and I just said, okay, well, vitamin D3 is only made through sun exposure to the skin. These guys work at night. They sleep during the day. If they do go out during the day, they're covered from head to toe and body armor and camouflage and helmets and goggles and gloves and like, all right, It's a vitamin D3 deficiency. So give them all vitamin D3 and I'll solve the issue. I'll be the smartest doctor ever. It's all going to work out millions.

Of dollars, easy solution.

Yep. And it didn't work out 100%. So as you may have guessed, you.

Didn'T change the world.

It improved. Guys got, there was some improvement. There was maybe 10% of the guys is like, yeah, it's really significant. Then I learned, oh, guess What? Every vitamin D3 reaction requires magnesium as a co factor. So give everybody magnesium. So I started giving everyone natural calm. And so that's really how, that's really how this sleep product that I produce right now, that's really how this all started, was just literally ingredient by ingredient.

So it started with vitamin D and magnesium.

Yeah. And it started because in my self education I learned about sleep architecture and I learned about hormone production and hormone regulation, immunity, inflammation and sort of physiologic repair occurring during sleep and also mood control and memory and all this other stuff that's going on during sleep. When I started learning about all those and I started learning about that sleep drugs interfere with all of that, all of a sudden it made sense to me that these guys had the testosterone of an 80 year old man. Because if you don't hit stages three and four of sleep, then you're not secreting testosterone. That's where 90% of your testosterone is secreted is during stages three and four of sleep. So if you're not getting there, then you're not producing testosterone. That's when growth hormone is secreted. That's when your immune system is at its highest. That's when you're fighting off disease. That's when you're repairing damaged tendons and ligaments and muscles that you've exercised. All that repair is happening there. And then we know if you take Ambien, even the pharmaceutical industry's data shows that when you take Ambien, you reduce REM sleep by about 80%. Well, REM sleep is where all the neurocognitive benefits of sleep are coming from. That's when your executive function is, or executive functioning is repairing. Your willpower is repairing and restoring. That's where you're forming long term memories out of short term memories. That's where muscle memory is being reinforced. What we call durable memories. All that's happening during REM Sleep. And you're probably working out a lot of psychological issues during REM sleep as well. Most people believe that to be the case. And so I was like, all right, well, these guys, we have to get them off of sleep drugs. Because. Because right now, sleep drugs could explain 90% of what these guys are complaining to me about. But the problem with getting somebody who takes, if, you know, the sealant oil, it's similar to your audience, I'm sure, like your Spartan race and your triathletes and so forth. But the seal mentality, if one is good, two is probably better, three is probably much better, and four is probably excellent. And so they're taking three and four times the recommended dosage of Ambien. They're chasing that down with a couple of cocktails. And then they're getting like three or four hours of sleep and they're going, I'm wide awake. I'm just going to go to the gym and work out really hard and then I'll be sleepy tonight and I'll get a better night's sleep. And they go on for years and years trying to do this, and they're just running off of sheer grit. I said, well, the problem with getting anybody off of any sort of medication and whether or not you want to say they were addicted to it or not, it's kind of a controversial issue. But let's just say that it's something that they're used to using. The problem with getting people off of anything that they're used to using is you have to replace it. And so that's why I started trying to figure out, okay, how can we adjust their diet, how can we adjust their exercise, what supplements can we give them that will improve all this? And that's really how this whole field of work unfolded for me.

So you've got vitamin D and magnesium, obviously, I could go buy that stuff. I could take vitamin D, I could take magnesium. What else, what else are you putting in this cocktail?

So what happened for me was I'll back up a step. My initial. My initial thought on why these guys needed sleep drugs was I thought that because of combat and because of the super competitive nature of being a SEAL and SEAL training, that these guys were all suffering from adrenal fatigue. So that was my initial thought. And so I learned a lot about the adrenal function as well. And then once I started studying sleep, it made sense, because sleep is. Sleep and adrenal function are inextricably linked. In fact, stages three and four of sleep, what we call Deep sleep is exactly the opposite of fight or flight. And fight or flight is maximum adrenal function. And stages three and four of sleep is minimal in adrenal function. But anyways, I digress, but one of the functions of the melatonin production pathway is that ultimately leads to the decrease of adrenal functions. And your adrenals are actually what keeps your body alert and awake. And it affects your brain's alertness to some degree as well. But in order to shut down your sort of awake promoting centers below the neck, you have to produce melatonin. And so as I looked into this, the vitamin D3 made sense to me, the magnesium made sense to me. And then I started thinking about their nutrition and their diet and then and some of the symptoms they're complaining of. And basically it goes like this. You've heard of the we're all about to have Thanksgiving and we're going to eat a bunch of turkey and we're going to feel like taking a nap. And most people know because it's because of some magical chemical in Turkey called tryptothan, which is just an amino acid. And the way it works is tryptophan becomes 5 hydroxytryptophan, and then 5 hydroxytryptophan becomes serotonin, and then serotonin becomes melatonin. Now, in order for 5 hydroxytryptophan to become serotonin, it requires vitamin D3 and magnesium. So you need all of these substrates to get to melatonin. And you need melatonin to kind of start slowing the brain down and start affecting adrenal functions. I just said, let's put all of that stuff in there. So the only thing I couldn't put in there is serotonin. But what happens when you start running into a melatonin deficiency is you strip serotonin, your body starts converting more and more of serotonin into melatonin. And if you're vitamin D3 magnesium deficient, then you're not going to get enough serotonin production either. So now your body's raping everything to get enough melatonin to shut your brain and body down for sleep. Decreased serotonin levels lead to mood disorders, obviously. So that's kind of where the depression and mood changes come from with sleep deficiency and adrenal fatigue, which is kind of a whole different story to talk about. So my sleep cocktail is very simple. It's tryptophan, it's 5 hydroxytryptophan, 5 HTP, it's vitamin D3 and magnesium for reasons we talked about. And then it's a very small dose of melatonin and it's a very small dose of melatonin for a reason. And then as we talked about, GABA does not cross the blood brain barrier very well, but there is a supplement in which you can, in which they've attached a little phenyl ring, a nonpolar ring, that allows this GABA to get across your brain and then bind and act like GABA as opposed to a GABA analog or some GABA trigger.

So you can make GABA cross the blood brain barrier by changing the molecular structure. Right.

And so that's what the PH gaba, and my product is that ph stands for phenol. So it's just like a little phenyl ring attached to a GABA molecule which allows you to get GABA into the body or into the brain. I mean, so that's it. So there's no magic. All it's doing is it's replenishing things that are likely to be infected, deficient in, and it's helping initiate the cascade towards making melatonin. And specifically for, you know, if you've traveled across multiple time zones or if your sleep hygiene wasn't as good as it should have been. You know, this is one way of sort of accelerating what ordinarily should be happening once the sun goes down, pushing your body towards melatonin production. But then it's also just all, it's all nutritional supplements, so it all just washes out of your body. Of course, the vitamin D3 is actually a hormone and not a vitamin. So that's fat soluble and that will actually sequester in your fat. But everything else just essentially gets washed out by your kidneys in a few hours. And there's nothing really in there that's going to last too long, which is one of the reasons that it doesn't have any groggy, grogginess or drugging effect.

Okay. Now melatonin, you include small amounts of that so that you don't become dependent on it. Is that kind of the idea? Or you don't shut down your own endogenous production of melatonin?

Yeah. So the research for whether or not that happens, it's really sort of controversial. That was first, my first exposure to that. And I don't know if he's the first guy who came up with a postulate, but in the book Lights out, they talk about taking exogenous melatonin, shutting down your melatonin production. It makes sense Logically to me that that would happen anytime. Again, melatonin is a hormone. Anytime I give you an exogenous hormone. Your body is a very efficient machine and it only does what it has to do. So if I give you exogenous testosterone, you're your testicles quit making testosterone. Why would they waste their energy and time and resources doing it? It's already there. Right. So why do makes sense that it would happen whether or not it happens? To the degree it happens, I'm not 100% clear on.

So you're kind of just like playing it safe because you don't need that much melatonin to actually make you fall asleep.

Exactly. And that's the key reason for the dosage being so low.

Why is it when you buy melatonin, it's us in what? How much did you say there is in sleep cocktail?

I didn't say because it's under a patent pending. But I can tell you it's a very, very low dose.

So are they just like when you buy a melatonin supplement? Again, not to overdo this analogy, but at Walgreens it's usually a lot of melatonin. Are they just overdoing it to just knock you out or is it just one of those deals where they don't even know, they don't realize that you don't need to that much?

Yeah, I think it's both. I tried really hard to work with supplement production companies that already existed to make this. The only reason this product even exists is because the seals just kept hassling me to go to make it because they were like, I have to go to this store and buy this and I have to go to that store and buy this and I have to buy this in 90 day supply and this is in a 60 day supply and this is a liquid and this is a powder. Just a pain in the ass. Can you just make it into a product? And I was like, yeah, yeah. So I tried to work with supplement companies and it's really just kind of smarmy industry. And I hate to be kind of negative and gossipy like that, but it's just really hard to find people that I trusted that I was willing to work with that were willing to do it with good quality, willing to do property testing on it. It's a tough industry. It really is. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of companies out there that I don't know if they're ignorant or if they are just sort of lackadaisical about it. But they just produce stuff that's like, hey, here's a really inexpensive way to make a magnesium supplement. Unfortunately, the way we made it makes it impossible for you to actually absorb magnesium from it. That happens all the time, like magnesium oxide. You could take 15 grams of magnesium oxide and it's not going to do anything. You're going to excrete 15 grams of magnesium oxide as well, because you can't break it down. Melatonin got really popularized. There was a book called Melatonin Miracle, I think, in the early to mid-80s. And that's kind of when it kind of hit the radar of scientists. And they were like, well, it has this great antioxidant principle, population properties, but it also is involved in sleep. And people had sleep problems even back then. So let's just give people this really big bolus of it. And it would take a long time to sort of describe how excesses of melatonin can influence sleep more than sort of the normal physiological dosages of it. But what undoubtedly happens when you have an excess of anything is that your body quits responding to it. You down regulate receptors. Like we were talking about the GABA receptors being like the keyhole and GABA being the key. Well, that's true for almost anything that affects a cell. It's doing it through a receptor. And so melatonin receptors, if there's just tons of melatonin receptors around or there's tons of melatonin around, your body doesn't need to waste its energy making a bunch of receptors because there's an excess of it. So then you down regulate your receptors. Now, what happens when you don't have that excess around? You don't have enough receptors for your normal production of melatonin to be sufficient. So from the time the sun goes down until the time the sun comes back up in the morning, your brain only produces about 0.3 to 0.6 milligrams of melatonin, somewhere in that range. So even a 1 milligram melatonin capsule is potentially three times what you need.

Yeah. Now, melatonin, if you take a little bit. So one of the things that I've heard people complain about with melatonin, and I've used melatonin before when I'm traveling to combat jet lag, it wears off. It seems like at like 2 or 3am you kind of like wake up. Is that the melatonin wearing off. And by using smaller amounts of melatonin, do you. Do you get rid of that issue?

Right. So that is the melatonin that is the melatonin just essentially being used up. Right. So it's been broken down and that melatonin bolus that you took no longer exists. Which is why I developed the sleep product the way I did, because I put in all the ingredients in there for your body to make melatonin. So hopefully you're going to keep making melatonin. After that little bit of dusting of melatonin that I put in, the product goes away, which is going to literally be just in a couple of hours. So if you use up all that melatonin, hopefully you're going to keep producing melatonin, which is why all the ingredients for that pathway are put in there. And it's why I put it in a drink formulation so that everything would absorb really rapidly and kind of equally so that your brain can have all of the lumber there to do the construction, so to speak. If there's no construction crew there, then you're out of luck, right? I mean, you can have all the lumber you want. If there's something really wrong with the machinery, then that problem is still going to be there. But we're just making sure that everybody has what they need in order to make the melatonin that they do need and to keep making it throughout the night.

Okay, got it. So I've got a few more questions for you here. The first is a lot of folks will wake up at 4am or 5am, right? Kind of like that area where you kind of sort of want to go back to sleep. You could get up and get some work done, but you know, you're going to be tired most of the afternoon. If you do you want to go back to sleep. If you pop some of this stuff like at 4am or 5am and it's got melatonin in it, or this GABA that crosses the blood brain barrier. Are you going to be groggy all morning if you fall back asleep and then you do wake up or even. Or let's say that. Or maybe you don't fall asleep and you decide, well, it. And get up anyways.

Yeah, I counsel people on this all the time. So there's basically three different kinds of insomnia. And what you're talking about is either what we call maintenance or terminal insomnia. So that basically means that you go to sleep fine, but then you wake up a few hours before you want to be up or you wake up in the middle of the night and you can't go back to sleep either way. Maintenance or Terminal insomnia, again, could be the melatonin production pathway, could be other things. Blood glucose is one of the big things that leads to maintenance. Insomnia, which is kind of a whole nutritional pathway we could talk about. But the beauty of this product is that since all it does is. Since all it does is lead to production of melatonin and give you a slight dusting of melatonin, you can overcome this literally just by turning on the lights and going and hopping in the shower. The product won't even be noticeable that you took the product.

Gotcha. Like light exposure, a meal, all those things that jumpstart your day.

Yeah. So all the things you ordinarily do, and if you've ever been so exhausted throughout the day that all you can think about is, as soon as I get off work, I'm going home, I'm crawling in my bed and I'm going to sleep till tomorrow morning. You feel like crap all day. You're so. You're so sleepy. And then one of your friends talks you into going to happy hour, and you go out and you have a couple of cocktails, which is a depressant. CNS depression should make you more tired. And then all of a sudden, you feel really wide awake. Right. You're feeling super alert and you're happy, and it's like, I don't need to go to sleep. And then you stay up for six more hours or whatever. You're overcoming that GABA barrier that was in your brain. Right. So you're stimulating your neocortex enough. Defeats the whole purpose of having the gaba. And that's why you can take this. You could literally take this product right before you wake up, or you could take this product in the middle of the day. And as long as you're being stimulated and your neocortex is being stimulated, you're not going to feel sleepy. And that's what happens most of the time when people can't go to sleep is that their neocortex is spinning with all the things they have to do tomorrow, or all these things they worry about, or there's loud noises around, or there's lights around and there's all this sensory around them that's keeping that GABA from being effective. That same thing happens if you take this product and we put a little bit of GABA in your brain. You turn on some lights, you start working, you start doing your stuff, and it's going to be unnoticeable that it's there.

Got it? Okay. So the other Question I have for you is, and I don't know if. If you're too familiar with the endocannabinoid system or if you've looked into that much, but a lot of folks are also using things, including myself, like cbd, for example, to assist with sleep interaction, interplay with some of these nutrients. Should I not be taking both of those at the same time? Because I literally use CBD almost every night. You've sent me up some boxes of this sleep cocktail. I've been taking it. I like it. And frankly, especially when I've been traveling, because when I travel, I normally take melatonin. I'll grab whatever my cbd, which would be my normal go to, but then I'll stack melatonin on top of that to assist with jet lag and travel. Any interaction or deleterious effect of doing something like that that you're worried about?

No, that's a completely. When you're dealing with cannabinoid receptors, that's a completely different pathway than what we've been talking. It's a lot like if you've ever seen Rob Wolf's nutritional chart, and he's like nutritional digestion and 368 simple steps, and he just has all these billions of lines going to all these different molecules. That's really the way everything that I'm talking about with sleep physiology is so grossly oversimplified. Any neurophysiologist or sleep scientist is like, cringing listening to me talk about this in such a basic format. But there are so many different things going on. Essentially, endorphins, cannabinoid receptors, Even a lot of the satiety, neurotransmitters, These are all affecting that neocortex ability to slow down and quit responding to the environment.

Got it. Okay.

It's doing it from a different way than gaba's doing it. But it's just a GABA like thing.

Okay, interesting. So you can get a double whammy.

Yep.

Nice. Okay, cool. As far as sleep cocktail goes, you said you've gotten a lot of feedback from some of these seals you've given it to. I like it. You know, people send me freaking boatloads of stuff all the time. Shows up at my. Drives my wife crazy because there's just, like, pills all over. Try some of it. I look at the label and throw some of it out. I've tried your stuff and I like it. But I'm curious, have you. I'm just curious about the whole placebo thing. Have you done any Studies or any n equals 1. Sleep labs or anything like that on this stuff?

Yeah. So what I have on this, there's an organization in the Navy, there's a Navy organization called nhrc, Navy Health and Research Center. They're currently doing true clinical trials with this where they're measuring all sorts of things. What we've done while I was in is basically what I was saying was just everything we've talked about today was sort of my postulate as to what was going on with the health and well being of the seals. And it was just nothing more than that. That was Doc Parsley's opinion. And so it wasn't a really popular opinion because it wasn't mainstream medicine, so to speak. It was kind of this lunatic fringe, almost voodoo medicine. And so NHRC has been sort of studying all of my postulates about the problems that this, the measurable problems that seals were having and how that's correlated to sleep and everything so far that I, that I postulated has, fortunately for me, has all turned out to be true. It's all been reinforced by data. Now, whether or not seals are responding to this in a placebo way, I cannot confirm or deny at this point. We don't have that RCT yet to say. Well, it definitely unequivocally has the power to say that this isn't placebo. What I can say, though, is that whether it's placebo or not, out of probably 3 to 400 seals or so that were taking Ambien, that were essentially overdosing on Ambien every night, I have a 100% success rate of getting guys off of sleep aids using this product. So it's very unlikely to be placebo. And the other factors that there's no pharmacological trick here. Right. Again, all I'm doing is bringing lumber to the construction site. And if that leads to you sleeping better, you know, it just. The plausibility of it just reeks, you know, reeks of. You know, it just reeks of the obvious. It's like, okay, well, all we did was bring in these nutrients that are ordinarily there in higher quantities, and we just put them all back in and the guy slept better. And, you know, I have had. I do have seals who have taken multiple sleep studies, and they've used. They've used the sleep product on one sleep study and they've used their Ambien on the other sleep study. And of course, those look completely different, but it would look completely different if they did Ambien and nothing as well. So I don't have that. RCT like this is definitively not placebo, but I think it's extraordinarily unlikely given given the numbers.

Yeah, well, I mean, like I mentioned, you sent me a box. I've been experimenting with it. You sent me a few boxes. So I've actually been taking two at a time sometimes. So do I actually take it Two at a time is kind of dangerous because I'll sleep like nine hours and that's occasionally come back to bite me because I, I'm not a big alarm clock user. Either way though, I like it. And for those of you listening in, we do have a discount on this stuff. You can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Sleepcocktail that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com sleepcocktail if you want to get it, you can get 10% off on it with code GREENFIELD. 10% code is GREENFIELD GREEN filled and try it out, see if you like it. I think it's worth a try again. I've tried a lot of stuff and I like this. And I think probably the main reason that I like it is because I am not a Navy seal. But I do a lot of exercise, do a lot of stuff. I go, go, go. I'm totally unlike my wife who just gets in bed at the end of the day, darn it, and just falls asleep. I can't turn the brain off and this stuff helps me do it. So it's worth checking out. If you have questions or you have comments about some of the things that Doc Parsley and I discussed, you can also go to the shownotes. The shownotes are@BenGreenfieldFitness.com DocParsley Like I mentioned, that's D O C P A R S L E Y can leave your questions there and either the doctor or I will reply to you. And again, you can get the cocktail@bengreenfieldfitness.com Sleepcocktail I know I've talked a lot about different pills and capsules and powders and oils that can help you sleep and a lot of this stuff works. But this stuff seems to work quite well. So check it out. Doc Barsley, thanks for coming on the show and also for inventing a cocktail. An alcohol free cocktail.

Yeah. Unfortunately that name has turned out to be quite controversial and caused quite a few problems. So that name probably will be changing within the next year. The cocktail name actually has it banned from DoD and DoJ computers and a lot of big industries like Google And Microsoft and so forth. They, from their work computers can't get to the site because of the word cocktail being in there. So that's all going to have to change eventually. Yeah. Thanks for having me on the show.

You have to stay away. Don't call it sleep porn or sleep Viagra instead. Those are two other terms I haven't found go over too well. Yeah, I'm sure you'll think of something. Sleep elixir.

Yeah, the sleep elixir.

Yeah, we'll see the hammer, right? Well, we don't want to hammer ourselves unconscious as we learned.

I think what we'll do is just sort of farm that out to somebody who does it for a living as opposed to me kind of hacking my way around. And actually the reason it's named, what it is named is because the seals named it that. They just started saying, they started calling it Doc Parsley's Cocktail. So like, hey, have you taken Doc Parsley's Cocktail? The Parsley cocktail is what it ended up being called. And so I just said, all right, whatever. We'll just call it the Sleep Cocktail. And zero market research and zero experience and ran into some problems. But. But whatever.

Yeah.

It's not what I do. It's not where my training is. I'm not too embarrassed. It works.

Farm it out. I'm sure you'll come up with something. Maybe our listeners will come up with something. Get a, I don't know, a free box of sleep cocktails. There you go.

Somebody sends you one name.

All right, well, cool. Thanks for being so generous with your time and sharing all this stuff with us. It was cool to delve into some stuff about sleep that we haven't talked about before. So until next time, folks. Those of you listening in. BenGreenfieldFitness.com SleepCocktail Check it out. You can use the 10% discount code GREENFIELD, and then leave your show notes Questions over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com DocParsley thanks for listening in and have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice. Sam.