#87: How to Sleep Better, Starting Today | Matteo Franceschetti

In, in health, there are the 3 pillars. And so try to focus on each of the 3, right? Nutrition, workout, and sleep. Find the basics and nail those. Keep it simple, be consistent, and sleep 7 to 9 hours, right? Start from the basics. Don't go too crazy, right? Don't look into vitamins if you still eat junk food every single day, right? I think sleep is a foundational part of your performance. And so treat sleep— we call it sleep fitness. So have the same mindset for sleep as you have for the daily training. So put the hours, put the hours to sleep, and you will see that reflected in your biometrics, in your energy, and in your performance.

Today's guest, Matteo Franceschetti, has been at the forefront of revolutionizing how we think about sleep and and the impact of health and performance. In this conversation, we discuss practical tips for improving your sleep and also insights on using sleep as a competitive advantage in both sports and life. Matteo is the CEO and co-founder of Eight Sleep, an innovative sleep technology company, and he has a deep understanding on the topic of sleep. This is something I'm personally very excited about because it can make such a difference your performance as an athlete. Today's episode is brought to you by LMNT. If you're an endurance athlete like me, you understand that proper hydration is absolutely key for your performance. That's why I want to tell you about LMNT. This is my go-to electrolyte drink mix that has been a game changer for my training and racing. LMNT is packed with the perfect ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium, which are all essential for staying hydrated and maintaining peak performance. Whether you're out on a long run, hitting the trails, or prepping for a race, LMNT can help prevent cramping, it reduces fatigue, and it keeps your energy levels high. One of the best parts: it has zero sugar, no artificial ingredients, and it actually tastes amazing. Orange is my favorite flavor, but they have a variety of different flavors to pick from. Many members in the Personal Best Running Coaching program have noticed a significant difference after using LMNT as well. If you would like to order a free sample pack with any order of Elementee, the link for this is drinkelementee.com/flow. Hope you enjoy my conversation with Matteo. Matteo, welcome to the Extra Mile Show. I'm very glad that you were able to join here today.

Thank you for having me. Super excited.

Yes, for sure. And we're going to talk, take a deep dive in the topic of sleep today because sleep comes up so many times where we're talking about optimizing our performance but optimizing our overall health. So I want to start out, you, you've made a mention recently where you talk about sleep as a competitive advantage, not just in your actual training but also in professional and personal life. Can you explain that a little bit further?

Well, I think health is based on 3 pillars. One is sleep, one is nutrition, and one is fitness. Sleep actually comes first. And the simple reason is if you sleep only 2 hours, then you will start craving junk food and it's unlikely that you will want to train or that you will be able to train at your peak performance. And so while there are 3 legs that really support the concept of health, one of the 3, which is sleep, is the first one.

And that part alone, like you mentioned it briefly, but if your sleep is poor, you start to crave junk foods.

Yeah.

Explain this a little bit more because I don't think everyone understands the difference between like your, your cravings and how your sleep being off impacts that.

Yeah, this is a great question. I mean, there are a lot of second-order effects that are a derivative of your sleep quality. And one of them, those are hormonal. There is a hormonal impact and there are other biometrical impacts, uh, in your own body. And one of those that is well proven is that when you are sleep deprived, you will start craving junk food. You will start craving potentially sugar and other ways to substantially energize yourself and to make up for the lack of sleep. And so may, if you really wanna stick with a, a good and healthy diet, one of the first things you should fix is your sleep because that will help you to achieve that goal.

Spot on. I wanna mention an example of one athlete that I've come across over the years. Like, we have a running coaching program. It's called the Personal Best Program, and we have members in 60 countries across the globe. We have multiple Zoom calls a week, and we have these topics of like, hey, I'm not improving in this or this area in my training. And so sometimes people go out and they train at a certain heart rate. At a track and they look at what is that pace at that heart rate. So let's say someone goes out at a heart rate of 140 beats a minute and might be running a 10-minute mile. Gradually over time, as you're improving in your running, you should start seeing that one, oh, that 10-minute mile come down and become like a 9:30-minute mile or a 9-minute mile. Sometimes though, we start seeing people who are like training for an extended period of time and they're either plateauing, not improving at all, or are they going backwards? One of the first questions that I often ask is, how much sleep are you really getting on a consistent basis? And we have literally had it where I've told someone like, yeah, 5 to 6 hours a night of sleep consistently while you're training 8 or 10 hours a week. You can put in all that training, but if the sleep is not there— this person started aiming for 7 to 8 hours of sleep.. And all of a sudden, within literally a 4-week period of time, that plateau that had been happening for months and months and months, all of a sudden, more than a minute improvement in math pace. And so I thought this was so absolutely eye-opening. And I was wondering, do you have any, like, I'm sure you do, but any examples from athletes of what you're seeing firsthand of some of these direct impacts of improvements in sleep?

I can also tell you a bit more about my own impact, right? I travel a lot for work, so Usually in the summer is when I travel the most to Europe. And so I was in Europe for almost a month this year for work. And what happens to me is I go to sleep much later because I try to stay up and work with the US while I'm there.

Right.

So in the morning I have meetings in Europe and then I stay up literally until 1 or 2 AM. Just to make sure that I can cover until 6, 7 PM East Coast. My biometrics before going to Europe were the peak, meaning the best biometrics I ever had in my life because I train a lot in Q1, Q2. Uh, and just after a couple of weeks in Europe, my heart rate at rest went up 20% and my HRV dropped somewhere between 20 and 25%. I came back to the US, I went back on a regular, no regiment, a sleep regimen. And now my HRV is at peak, but HR at rest is still taking time to recover. And substantially in a couple of weeks, I screwed up all the work that I did on my, my HR at rest in the first 5 months of the year when I was training a lot and it went to the lowest level I ever had in my life. Um, and now it's probably 15% higher than that lowest point. Is trending in the right direction, but substantially in 2 weeks, you can ruin the work of 5 months, and then it's gonna take you another 5 months to go back to peak performance.

That is wild. Yeah. And I think a lot of people, whether it's overtraining, burned out, chronic stress, all of these things can, can be directly tied into lack of sleep, even if it happens for, for just a short period of time over there. Yeah. What are some of the sports that you're doing? I read you're doing racing cars, playing tennis, practicing kickboxing. What are some of the sports that you're into these these days?

Yeah, the one I'm playing the most is, is a derivative of tennis that is called padel. Padel, padel, how you want to say it. I'm crazy for padel. I used to be a tennis player when I was young, and so now I literally play every day. And so I train at least an hour and a half a day, sometimes 3 hours. It depends if I play very early in the morning and sometimes later in, in the day, which, by the way, we should talk about that because So there is this tournament on Thursday night and it starts at 8 and it ends, I mean, it depends how far along you go, but around 11, 11:30, and that destroys my sleep, like completely destroys my sleep. So then I have adrenaline in the body. I have heart rate accelerated. My body temperature is completely different. I don't fall asleep until 1:00 AM. Then I wake up the The following morning, try to wake up at the usual time, somewhere around 6:00, 6:30. I'm devastated mentally because I didn't sleep. And then I receive all the notification from our product, the SleepPod, that my heart rate took longer than usual to drop.

There's a lot to uncover over here. So you're really into padel. Like, we are really into pickleball over here. I grew up playing tennis myself too. We played every day growing tennis for multiple hours a day. Then moving to the US, and then my wife got really into pickleball a few years ago, and now I got really into it as well. So we're, we're playing, we joined like a racquet club over here, we play multiple times a week for like hours and hours. So it's funny how pickleball seems to be really big over here and padel is gaining some momentum, but it seems in Europe it's really more padel.

And yeah, yeah, it's been particularly in Spain, right? They're crazy.

Yeah.

Um, or another thing I noticed is, so usually I'm on a keto diet, but I cheat on Friday night. And I cheat with pizza. And so on Friday night I have pizza. Every morning on Saturday I receive my notification that my heart rate was higher than usual and my HRV was lower than usual. And so also what you eat has such a massive impact on the quality of your sleep. Usually what I see in the notification on Saturday, maybe there was an acceleration, negative acceleration of 5 to 8%. In my heart rate. So heart rate at rest was 5-8% higher than usual. And usually you— I can lose up to 10% HRV and I don't drink alcohol. Then if you want to talk about alcohol, that is another massive problem.

That's a whole nother chapter. Yeah. What I have experienced every Tuesday night, I run with several friends. It's kind of our, like a dad group over here. And so 6:00, we start to run and then we jump in the sauna over here, we jump in the ice bath and we grab dinner. Which is kind of a late, later than normal workout for me. And even the dinner, we don't eat until 8, 8:30, like come home by the time. And so yeah, just the impact of evening exercise, especially if it's high intensity, and then like the later eating than usual, it's a combination of things. Like maybe we can start out by just talking about the overall high-level sleep protocol that's optimal. Like what are some of the things that you want to be aiming for to optimize your sleep?

Yeah. I mean, the first two that are very, very basic is how much do you sleep, right? It needs to be 7 to 9 hours and being consistent. You need to go to sleep at the same time and wake up at the same time.

And that is why— what sort of variable, like how much above or below? Is that 20 minutes? Is that an hour?

Like, yeah, I would say 30 minutes plus minus 30 minutes is optimal. If you're within an hour, It's still fine. But imagine that every hour, it's almost like a different time zone for your body. That is why you don't really want to set it to an hour, definitely not above an hour. So the magic is probably within 30 minutes. And that is why you and I, we struggle when you go running with your friends and everything is delayed because for your body, it's not that your body knows that that is Wednesday night and you're having fun with your friends. For your body, it's like if you just flew from the East Coast to the West Coast and everything is happening X hours later, but the circadian cycle, your body temperature, they're not set up for that. And so the body's confused and it's trying to readjust. So consistency is key. Go to sleep at the same time. Usually the recommended time is somewhere around 10:00 PM. Then everyone is different. There are different chronotypes. And so it's more important that you stick with your usual more than what is recommended. So these are the basics. If you start there, then after that, I would say what is the most important things is your bedroom. Your bedroom should be considered like a cave. And so it needs to be really dark, it needs to be really quiet, and temperature needs to be the right temperature. So many times you just hear people say, oh, you should sleep at 68 degrees the whole night. That is wrong, right? And the reason is your body temperature changes. And so you don't want to be always at 68 degrees. And actually, there is plenty of medical evidence that you need a different temperature for the different sleep stages. And so in deep sleep, you need a cold temperature, while instead in REM, you need a neutral temperature. So it's not cold or it's not hot. And so the ability to adjust this temperature, now there are certain devices like our device Eight Sleep, the COVID that can help you to fine-tune the temperature part of the night.

Yeah, because the one part— and we'll definitely talk more about like temperature control tools and a lot of different things you can do to optimize sleep further. The issue that I think quite a few people have is if like I live in the neighborhood over here, if I open my windows, like, yes, the temperature becomes cooler throughout the night and starts warming up again at some point. But just the noise from the outside, if we're talking about we want to cancel out noise, but we also want to have the temperature be in a certain way inside of our, inside of our house. Before we talk about temperature-controlled mats as one of the examples, what about nutrition, caffeine? Talk to me a little bit more about that.

Yeah. So caffeine, I usually stop drinking caffeine 8 hours before bed. As a ballpark, then you can cut it. It's somewhere between 4 and 8 hours. If you want to be on a conservative side, you take 8 hours. If you want to be a bit slightly more aggressive because you really want to boost your daily performance, at least 4 hours before you should stop. Alcohol, you should stop at least a couple of hours before. The number of drinks you have has a massive impact. So less obviously is better. Zero is the best, but if you just have a couple of drinks and you go to bed, you might see a 20% negative impact on your sleep quality. So that is what you should assume. And so you want to be between 0 and 20, and that depends on the number of drinks and how much time you left in between the last drink and your bed. What we see is carbs sometimes they help you feel sleepy, but they also tend to have a negative impact on your sleep quality. And so yeah, you might have, I don't know, a pasta or a pizza and you might feel sleepy, but in reality, the sleep quality will not be optimized. In general, any heavy meal will have a negative impact on your sleep performance. And for sleep performance means again, heart rate at rest, HRV, and then the key sleep stages like REM and deep. Those are the biggest things for, I would say, nutrition. Yeah.

And then I think one of the only other key ones that often comes up is like light and temperature, meaning like at some point, like naturally as the evening or as it gets later in the day, our melatonin levels get up, which typically make us sleepy. If it is super bright out, if we're looking at tablets or phone screens, or if we have all of the bright lights on in the house, like some of that process gets it's delayed and we do not feel sleepy yet. We're kind of cutting into that. Anything else around the topic of light at all?

So, I mean, for light, what I usually do is the lights at my house, they start converting to orange a couple of hours before I go to bed. So if you buy Philips Hue or any equivalent brand of lights where you can adjust the colors, that is helpful.

And it goes automatic, or do you have to do anything for that?

You can set it and there is a schedule. And so at around 8:00 PM, they start switching to orange, 7:30. I usually go to bed somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00, somewhere in that range. And so before going to bed, you want to be in a slightly darker environment. As you were saying, you don't want a lot of light. And so your body starts developing melatonin. Then what you also, what I have found working incredibly well about temperature before bed is if you could do a, an ice bath and a sauna, that thermal shock for me, it works like insanely well. It's incredible. And so in my case, what I try to do is a sauna, 20 minutes, and then an ice bath. And if you want, you do a second round. If you don't have a sauna and an ice bath, what you can try to do is just to do a cold and hot shower. Or other things that are usually recommended is to do a hot bath a couple of hours before going to bed. But to me, the most effective thing is the thermal shock, hot and cold.

What should you end on? Should you end on hot or cold? And how far ideal before bedtime should you do that?

Yeah, so in my case, I really like to finish with the cold. Um, after a sauna, right? So first you do the hot, which is for a longer period of time. Usually the cold could be just 3 minutes, somewhere between 3 and 5. Um, and so I like to finish with the cold. I think you can do it even right before. I think you wanna iterate, but anywhere between 2 hours before and right before, it's your preference. Peter Attia talks about the fact that he does it right before going to bed and it works well for him. Sometimes I do 2 hours before bed and then, or right before dinner, then I have dinner and then I relax a bit and then I go to sleep.

Yeah, I recently, like, I've had an ice bath for about 10 years and it was only about 4 weeks ago that I changed to one of the plunge ice baths. And that one, as much as the temperature goes down to like 37, like I've been using it in like the mid-40s to mid-50s, and it has that jet stream on it. So now the water is actually flowing inside of it. Yeah. And that's like a whole nother level again from like sitting in an ice bath where it sits still. But yeah, just that protocol alone, what you're talking about there of like sitting in the sauna for a bit, going in the cold, whether that's a cold shower or whether that's an ice bath, and just the overall like calming effect that it has on the body. Yes. Yeah. So right on. How about blue light blocking glasses?

Yeah. So here I'm a bit of a contrarian, meaning I'm not the kind of guy who says— who's so against the phone, for example. The thing I pay attention to is the mental stimulation. That is always what I tell people, right? You can be on your phone if you're chatting with your best friend on WhatsApp and have talking about memories of when you guys were kids and having fun. That's completely fine, right? Because it puts your mind in the right mood. If you're fighting with a coworker, uh, right before bed on Slack or by email, it could even be 5 seconds, but then your mind starts racing and your sleep is screwed. Right. And so to me, it's less about the phone, uh, using or not the phone is what you are doing on the phone and the kind of what that is triggering. In your body, right? It's triggering dopamine, it's triggering, not making you anxious, or it's actually relaxing you and putting you in a state of gratefulness.

Yeah, it does. Like, or even listening to an evening story or like an evening meditation or some music. It's different than where you're checking Basecamp or Slack, for sure.

Yeah. Like, for example, in my case, a lot of people talk about reading. And for some of them it works. But in my case, I always read business books and I read them because then it makes me think about my business. And so what I realize is I can't read before going to bed, otherwise my brain is just start thinking about, okay, how can I apply this lesson to aid sleep? And so I stop reading before bed. So it's very personal. There are no one fits all rules.

You and I are wired very similar because it's literally the same thing. When I read business books, my mind goes like, oh yeah, this is the, the, the, But then like sometimes I started going more towards like even some of the health optimization books. I'm like, oh yeah, this is, this is a protocol that's interesting.

Yeah.

So that's, that's fascinating. So, so tell me a little bit more because about 2 years ago I initially got introduced to Eight Sleep and I ended up buying one of the mattresses. And this was for me literally looking at all of the different things that I can do in my life to optimize sleep and making it a top priority. And at that point, I'd already been doing cold exposure, I've been doing sauna, I'd been like trying to look at consistent bedtime routine, caffeine, the alcohol cut out, all of those things. Yet still, I felt there was a lot of opportunity for improvement. One of the main ones being what we were talking about earlier of like our temperature changes throughout the night. And like the different ways that we can optimize our sleeping environment, even from a mattress perspective or from a cooling perspective throughout the night. So maybe you can explain a little bit more about what it is that you've developed over the years. First of all, why you developed it and what you have developed, because it can make an absolute— it has made a huge difference in my life. And I know like Peter Attia, Dr. Andrew Huberman. I keep seeing multiple people are using your product, so would love to hear more there.

So let's start from what it is, what it does, and why it works. So it is a mattress cover. The hero product is a mattress cover that can be installed onto any mattress, right? And it's a thin cover, it's a thin pad, so it completely disappears. And it does two things for you. First, it tracks everything about your sleep. So there are sensors embedded in this cover. You don't feel them, you don't see them, but they track everything about your sleep stages, sleep quality, heart rate, respiration, HRV. And then based on all these biometrics, we heat and cool your body multiple times during the night to maximize your sleep. Then the question from some of the people that are listening, they will say, okay, why do I care? And so there is plenty of medical evidence that temperature is the biggest factor impacting your sleep quality unless you have major sleep disorders, right? So for normal people, with decent or kind of directionally decent sleep, the most impactful factor for their sleep is temperature. What is proven in— and there is clinical evidence— is you have a circadian cycle, which is your biological clock, and your temperature changes during the night. As soon as you fall asleep, your body temperature drops, it goes down, and then a couple of hours before you wake up is when it starts rising again. So imagine that if you were now living 2,000 years ago in a cave, what would happen in the cave, right? In the middle of the night, it gets really cold because there is no sun. And then the sun starts coming out, the light starts coming out. And then as you wake up, the temperature in the cave and in the forest starts rising. So your body does exactly that. What we do at Eight Sleep is we are not reinventing the wheel. We just help your body to do what it's supposed to do. And it might just not happening because of our current lifestyle. And so you can set different temperature settings and we help you drop the temperature immediately in the first part of the night and then rise it again later. There is a nuance here that what has been discovered is in different sleep stages, you need a different temperature as well. And so when you are in deep, you need a very cold temperature and in REM, you need a neutral. And your sleep cycle is 90 minutes. So every 90 minutes you repeat the same sleep cycle. And so you start with light sleep, then you get in deep REM, wake up, light, deep, and REM, and so on. And so you need a device that can adjust these temperatures multiple times during the night while also playing the whole night, the game where you want a colder environment in the first part and a warmer environment in the second part of the night.

What have you seen from outside third-party studies when they end up looking at the direct impact. Like, I've personally noticed an impact, as in I sleep in it, I've had a noticeable difference in like heart rate variability, quality of sleep. Literally the other day I installed something in my house and my breakers broke, and I didn't realize that my Eight Sleep was not plugged in. And sure enough, my sleep was much different than it usually was. Like, I didn't realize how much of a difference it made until that unexpectedly happened. It's one thing when you're traveling, but then your travel, your whole sleep environment is different too, right? But now it was literally same sleep environment, same blackout curtains that I've already have, same like everything except for that. And it made a noticeable difference. So what is it that you guys have seen from your third-party research?

So what we have seen in clinical studies, and we also published some papers about that, is that we can give you up to 20% better sleep. Slightly above that, 22%, 23%. Then the interesting thing is now that we have hundreds of thousands of customers, a lot of them, they have other wearables. And so they can compare their data through their wearable before and after the pod. And so there is plenty of public reviews on Twitter and in general on the internet where people say, look, these were my metrics before and after Eight Sleep, and this is tracked by an independent wearable. And then we have our own validation. And so every morning you receive a report of what we call Autopilot, which is our intelligence that adjusts things in real time for you. And we tell you based on our data how much we improve your sleep. And now what's happening is from top entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, they all sleep on our product, but also top athletes from Formula 1 drivers like Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc to top tennis player, CrossFit champion Justin Madeiros, NFL and NBA players, golf players, all of them, they sleep on the product.

So this is kind of the interesting part. When you have a large data set like this, you can start drawing conclusions out of that. Just like how Strava, like the athletes platform, can draw a lot of data from that. Like some running watch companies can start drawing a lot of conclusions out of their data. What are some of these trends that you're seeing or what are some of the common mistakes that you're even seeing among some of your users? Is it like an inconsistent bedtime? Is that the number one or is it not sleeping enough? Like what, like what are some of these high-level ones there?

Yeah, I would say those are usually the two biggest and the most impactful. And then after that, there is alcohol and a late and heavy meal. Right? So you have these two buckets. Pit zero is just they don't sleep enough or they're very inconsistent, which then confuses your body because the body doesn't know if you're in the East Coast or on the West Coast, right? Is this time zone concept. And second is alcohol is a massive, has a massive impact on your sleep quality and meals as well. Those are really the big things that make the biggest difference across everyone. And I, sorry, the third bucket is mind racing. So a lot of our customers know that they can't slow down before bed. And so that is why we started exploring certain supplements that we are validating with our data that they help you to calm down before going to bed.

That is a fascinating one. That's like a whole nother topic. Like I've seen certain things about and I've experimented with some of it as well. So yeah, what are your thoughts on naps? How to take an optimal nap that can actually benefit you? Or should people not nap at all?

I'm one of the biggest supporters of naps in the world and in two dimensions. One, I think is the biggest performance enhancer that you can take during the day, just nap. And I call it the nappuccino. And I don't know if you know about the nappuccino, but I can tell you more about that.

That's so Italian.

Yeah. And, and now I'll explain what that is. But the second thing is I also think naps are the maximum expression of luxury. If you have the mental state of being able to take a nap in the middle of the day, that to me is the pinnacle of well-being because It's not just about having the time, which is already a massive challenge if you work and you have a busy life, but to have the mental state to be able to fall asleep like at 1:00 PM or 2:00 PM for 30 minutes. But tell me how— I'll tell you how to approach it. So you want the naps to be very short, and for very short is 20 to 30 minutes. You don't want to get into deep REM. This should be just a brief moment for your brain to relax and reduce the amount of adenosine you have in the brain. And so the nappuccino is that you take coffee, an espresso, right before taking the nap. And the reason is it takes around 30 minutes for the coffee to kick in. And so by that time, you should wake up. And so by that time, you have reduced the adenosine with the nap plus the coffee is kicking in. And at that point, you're a superhero.

Here's one other thought about that though. Is I for a while started making it a point, like, of waking up relatively early, getting blocks of work done. And by the time 12 o'clock came around, I already felt like I'd worked for 7 or 8 hours. And it almost felt like I had so much in my mind that I just had to digest all these thoughts. And instead of sitting down to meditate, my brain was so full of thoughts that I would almost call it meta-thinking, where I would try to nap, but very often I wouldn't be able to fall asleep. Sleep, but even just laying on my mattress for 15, 20, up to 30 minutes and just letting my mind wander and reorganizing thoughts. And sometimes I might fall asleep, but most of the time I wouldn't even fall asleep. Still, you come out of it and you feel like it's a 2.0 version. You have your second morning routine. It's really like another day ahead of you again.

So, and there are all the practices now of an SDR, not to sleep, Depressed, right? And Andrew Huberman is a big supporter, which is society. You know what you're saying? Anytime that you give this rest to the brain in the middle of the day through one of these techniques, is that is how you can reduce the adenosine level and in general recharge and prime clarity.

So why is it then that you think so many people still struggle with maintaining consistent high-quality sleep even when they prioritize it?

Well, we call it sleep fitness at Eight Sleep, right? And so we think of sleep in the same way you think of working out or going to the gym. You need to put serious effort. And there are always two examples that they make. The first one is that going to bed and to sleep is the equivalent of going to take a flight from New York to Rome every single day. Right. And so before going to take that intercontinental flight, you put some effort, you prepare. Right? And so you should have the same attitude with your sleep because even if you don't realize it, it's a long period of time that every day is dedicated to this activity. And so you need to make sure to get to be in the right state of mind. The second example I give to people is I don't have kids yet, but I have a bunch of friends that just had babies. And when you look at them as parents, they are very meticulous. About the sleep routine of their babies, right? There is, you know, they do the bath at the right temperature and then they put the PJ and then they play a little bit. And then at that time, they're always the same time of the day, they put them to bed. Right. And so if as human beings, it's so important to have a routine when we are babies, there is no first principle reason why it should be different when we are adults. We just believe that we become, you know, these strong human beings 30, 40 years later. But the reality is the the biology is exactly the same. And so in the same way we approach sleep for babies, we should have the same attitude for how we approach sleep for ourselves.

What does your sleep routine look like these days?

I usually go to bed around 9:30 to 10. I usually eat around 7:30. At least the 1 hour before going to bed, I try to do things that don't really trigger my mind to race. I turn lights off or no kind of dark-ish at least 1 hour before going to bed. My bedroom is fairly cold, so around 70 degrees, which for most of the people might be too warm, but for me it's cold. A lot of people sleep in the US somewhere between 65 and 68. Whatever works for you. Obviously there is my, my Eight Sleep device that is optimized. I put earplugs, so I don't wanna hear any noise. My bedroom is pitch dark. Sometimes, particularly during the weekend, a couple of hours before going to bed, I do the sauna and the ice bath. That helps me a lot. Or I also like to do a hot shower or a hot bath. Before going to bed every night. That happens literally every night. One of the two, the sauna and the cold plunge, is if I have time, usually more during the weekend. And then I usually sleep between 8 and 9 hours. I try to sleep at least 8 and a half, 9. Yeah, that's my routine.

Wow. That's a, that's a solid amount of sleep over there. And so once again, making it Even though you're a busy CEO, travel a lot, have a lot going on, you still try to make it a top priority because you know your output in other areas of life, it's, it's going to benefit from it. What, what is for, for athletes training like 5 hours a week, 8 hours a week, 10+ hours a week, what is their sleep hours or time in bed that they should be aiming for?

Definitely between 8 and 9 hours. And I think even to reduce the risk of injury, the more they sleep, the better. I would also recommend if they just had maybe not a very long training to consider a nap immediately after just to help their body to rest and heal. But the biggest thing, particularly for physical workouts. The sleep is so important in the first part of the night for deep sleep because deep sleep is the part of the sleep that is dedicated to physical recovery while instead REM is more mental. And so you just need to give time to your body to repair its own tissues and make sure that everything is properly healed. Is healing in the proper way.

You hear that, people? 8 to 9 hours of sleep a night. And so for some people, they might say, hey, I've been sleeping consistently 6, 7 hours a night. I simply will be looking, staring at the ceiling. How would you go about trying to increase your time sleeping? Is that— of course, we're talking about sleep hygiene and even just blocking out your windows for making sure it's pitch black dark in there. But Is it for a while just trying to aim to go to bed a little bit earlier, or is it like— I'm just trying to figure out because I literally hear that part. People are almost so wired in a certain sleep pattern that they have a hard time initially getting out of it. And then once they learn to truly relax, like over time, they can get to that 8 or 9 hours of sleep.

Well, first I would do a bunch of research and read more about what is called CBT-I, which is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, if that is what they experience. The number one thing you don't want to happen is that you spend a lot of time in bed not sleeping because your brain will start creating a correlation between being in bed and not being asleep. And maybe also this sense of anxiety because you want to fall asleep, but you're unable to fall asleep. And so when you go to bed, that creates immediately an unconscious anxiety in your your body. So if you talk to any sleep doctor, the number one thing they will tell you is if you have problems to sleep or to stay asleep, whenever you are up or you wake up, don't stay in bed. Just go in the living room. Don't associate the bedroom and the bed with being awake. Uh, that is number one thing. Then if you have problems to fall asleep is usually at the beginning, they actually compress the amount of sleep to try to make you more tired. So by the time you go to sleep the following night or the following nights, you will immediately fall asleep because you're so tired that your body wants sleep. The other thing you wanna pay attention is if you're not a heavy sleeper or someone who can sleep really well, maybe you want to avoid things like napping, right? You want to avoid anything that can negatively impact the amount of sleep you might need. And more than anything, particularly for your audience, right? All of them, they're already athletes. They already have the mindset to work out a certain amount of hours every week. You need to think of sleep as a part of your workout. Same mindset, right? If you're running a marathon and every day you need to run X minutes, X hours to be ready to run the marathon properly, you need to think that sleep is part of that routine, is part of your workout, and you need this amount of hours to then be able to perform. You're not lazy, you're training. And that training is a passive training where you help your body to actively recover.

I can't emphasize that part enough. And I think in particular, once we start paying close attention to what are some of the signals when we're realizing earlier this week at a, at a presentation about the topic of overtraining and chronic, chronic stress and burnout and whatnot. And one of the main things we're just going through, what are the signs of it? Like the whole irritability. Yes. Like increased chance of injuries. Like all of these different things. Like once you start noticing something is off, like realizing that some of this you have in control, but it's you prioritizing, like making this a top priority even over like working out. Even if that means like, hey, maybe you're not able to train 8 hours a week and just cut back that training to 5 hours a week. And sleep 3 hours longer. And like just those differences, get to a rest, like health first, and then the running performance will come.

So yeah, I agree.

Absolutely. What about the gender differences between men and women? Are there different needs for men and women? Obviously, like, like I sleep much warmer, like my body temperature seems to be warmer than my wife. She, like when I told her, hey, we're gonna buy one of the sleep mattresses. And she's like, yeah, but I don't want to sleep really cold. I'm like, no, you can set it for different temperatures on one side of the bed versus the other. Talk to me about that part. What have you noticed from your end?

The biggest by far is temperature, which is the other reason why when you hear people say, oh, you should put your bedroom at 68 degrees or whatever, right? It doesn't work because if you sleep with a partner of a different gender, their needs, their, their body fat, their, their circadian cycle, everything is so different. And that is why we decided to create two different sides in the bed. And so you can have your own temperature performance and your partner can have their own temperature performance. That is the biggest, I would say 70% of couples, they struggle and they fight around temperature needs. Particularly for women, they tend to have extremities that are way get colder. Like the feet. And so sometimes they go to sleep with the socks, or sometimes they wanna go to sleep with a sweatshirt and they take it off later, or they put an extra blanket. Well, instead we are gonna fix that problem. So that is the biggest one. Um, the rest is very personal. It changes based on age and gender. Like menopause is another big deal. They have hot flashes, for example. Pregnancy is another massive deal. And also, uh, when women, they have their own period.

Yeah. So much more complex. So much more complex than men from that perspective.

Yeah. And it changes so often. Right. So every, every night or every couple of weeks they have different needs.

Yeah. And so even that changes right there. Yep. That is interesting. What about, have you noticed any other benefits outside of optimal training performance optimal? Like, I think even the part of like earlier, the one that stands out to me, if I have a poor night's sleep, I wake up in the morning and I feel hungry. And that normally doesn't happen. As in, like, in what sort of way does your metabolism get impacted by even that part?

Yeah, so there's not a lot of science yet. It's something we are working on. And we want to, we're now particularly through tags, we want to collect different type of information. But the amount of sleep and the time of the wake up and the quality of the sleep you got has a second order effect on both again, your nutrition and your fitness, right? The type of endurance you will be able to endure, how much energy, the mood, the mental, even just the mental state, right? How positive or negative you you are about other circumstances, everything depends on how rested you are.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What excites you about like this movement that's happening right now, as in more and more people becoming aware of sleep, more and more people becoming aware of optimizing health? What are some of the things like there's obviously a lot of buzz and talk about AI, Like, how are you looking to the future over here for, for your company, for the industry at a bigger whole over here?

Well, I think there is this trend about sleep optimization and sleep becoming relevant that is so important. And I think if you go back 20, 30 years ago, the first thing was about first fitness and then finally nutrition. And now it's finally the time of sleep. 20 years ago, it was cool for some entrepreneurs to say that they were sleeping only 3, 4 hours a night because they were not the tough guys. Well, instead now it just— I say sleep deprivation is the new smoking. And so that makes sleep such a relevant topic. Sleeping longer now is not seen like a sin anymore, but like, like someone who's taking care of themselves. And so that plays in our favor. The second thing is sleep is very fragmented. So a lot of certain companies cover only certain areas, which makes no sense to me. Like a mattress company, they just do mattresses. Then there are, there are pharma companies and then there are supplements companies and then there are wearable companies. Or instead, as a user, I want one single brand that they take care of all my sleep. And actually what they do is they don't sell me just dumb foam, but they actually improve my sleep. And so that is the whole focus of Eight Sleep. Everything we do is designed to improve your sleep performance. So then you can be in a better mood and have a happier and longer and healthier life that you can spend training, working, or just with your loved ones.

If you would have to give any advice to your younger self, like what— like you've learned a lot of things over the years. Like what were some of the things that you would advise yourself, whether that is health optimization-wise or even business-wise? Very curious because looking from the outside in, like massive congrats to all of the success that you guys have had. Like this is your third startup, you've, you've launched and sold multiple startups. I've seen the updates, you guys have raised $150 million over the years for this current company, you're in the fast track, track right now of your career. Like, what are some of the things, some lessons that you wish you would have known earlier?

Well, many, so it depends how much time we have. I would say one basic thing that applies to both my health and business life is keep things simple, right? Even when you wanna start taking care of your nutrition, keep things simple about what you eat for sleep. Keep it simple, be consistent and sleep 7 to 9 hours, right? Start from the basics. Don't go too crazy, right? Don't look into vitamins if you still eat junk food every single day, right? Optimize the basics. And this applies both business, uh, and personal life. Um, you know that, uh, in, in health there are the three pillars, and so try to focus on each of the three, right? Nutrition, workout, and sleep. Uh, find the basics and nail those. In business, it's the same concept. So keep things simple and, um, always try to put yourself in the, in the shoes of, um, of customers. And you Your product can be a vitamin or it can be a painkiller, and the success of your business and how big it will become is strictly connected to that. Because if you are a painkiller, the chances of success and the chances that you can charge enough to then run a business are much higher than if you are a vitamin. Because if you are a vitamin, after a bit, people might stop using you. And so try to find a real pain and a real need, maybe something you experience for yourself, fix it, and just delight people, and success will come.

So well said. I have one more important question before we do. Where can people find out more about you and about Eight Sleep?

Yeah, on eightsleep.com. Eight like the number, just spelled out. So e-i-g-h-t-sleep.com. And there they can find our hero product, which is the Pod. And again, it's a cover that you can install on any mattress and it will improve your sleep by 20%.

Right on. And you're very active on Twitter as well. I see you tweeting on a daily basis over there. What's your Twitter handle again?

Yeah, my last name is complicated because it's Franceschetti. So it's @mfranceschetti. But substantially, M is the initial of my name and then my last name.

I'll make sure to link that in the show notes as well. Just in closing over here, there's a lot of listeners over here that are endurance athletes looking to improve from beginners to advanced runners looking to become stronger, healthier, happier athletes. Do you have any closing thoughts, any additional advice that you would like to share?

I think sleep is a foundational part of your performance. And so treat sleep we call it sleep fitness. So have the same mindset for sleep as you have for the daily training. So put the hours, put the hours to sleep, and you will see that reflected in your biometrics, in your energy, and in your performance.

Great. So well said, Matteo. Thank you very much for sharing all of your insights. And of course, looking forward to following the rest of your journey over here. And maybe one day when we, we cross paths, we can either play some padel or some pickleball.

Please, I would love— I, I like pickleball too, so let's play that, uh, whenever we can.

Perfect, sounds good. Thanks so much, have a good one. Bye now. Thank you for tuning in. What was your favorite lesson, takeaway, or quote from this episode? Please let us know in the comments on YouTube, and actually becomes a really good library of different takeaways from people people. So it almost becomes like a summary that you can read there. If you would like to receive my weekly newsletter, uh, where I share a lot of different insights, different running tips, some of the latest things that I'm up to, check out extramileist.com/subscribe. And this way you also never miss the drop of a new video or a new podcast. All right, have fun out there on your runs. Bye now.