2-Day Sleep Challenge with Gary Brecka | The Ultimate Human | Day 1

Hey, guys.

All right.

I see people coming in. I do see some familiar faces. Yeah, I'm excited about this sleep challenge, guys. You know, I know that a lot of you guys have gotten your woops and been and been participating already. A lot of you guys have already been beating me on your sleep score. So congratulations. Like sometimes I get 97% sleep and I think I'm killing it. And then somebody comes in with 100% sleep score and 97% recovery. Love to see that. So I had a lot of questions about our evergreen challenges. So if you missed our water fasting challenge or if you missed the 10,000 step challenge or the breath work challenge, you know you can download those guides for free. They're always absolutely free. Just go to theultimatehuman.com and download it. You can do it on your own. Do it with your family. I was actually traveling in the Middle east and I ran into a group of 115, 116 people that said they all worked at the same company and they said they download the guides afterwards because the times don't work for them and they just do them on their own. So that's great. So if you guys are interested in three day water fasts or breathwork challenges or any of the challenges that we've done in the past, like the 10,000 step challenge, then by all means, those are always free. You can go to theultimatehuman.com and you can download those. I also got a lot of questions about swag gear that's also available now on our website. So you can support the ultimate human, you know, all over the place if you start posting about it. I'll find a way to, to reward you guys. I know we have some awesome giveaways too. I'm going to start incorporating more giveaways into these challenges. You know everybody that shared the image of our sleep challenge on their social media and their Instagram story and tag me. We've got a record of all of you guys and you know, the gifts just get better and better. Five of you guys are going to win the 10x sleep formula. Five of you guys are going to win the optimum sleep assist by Body Health. One lucky person's getting 12 free months of whoop. And one lucky person is getting the $3,000 plus eight sleep cooling mattress which, which I do use. So I hope that you guys, I hope whoever wins that is, is watching right now. So today we also have a, a physician coming on board in about 15 minutes whose sole research has been in sleep and One of the things we're going to do over the next two days is we're going to start talking about really healthy, good sleep hygiene. Like, what is a good sleep routine for most people? And then, number two, we're going to try to break you guys down into what is helping you sleep and what is keeping you from sleeping. Because genetically, we are predisposed to having a waking mind at night. So those of you that have done that gene test and know that you have the COMPT gene mutation, I'm going to talk about some of the solutions for that. Whether you've done the test or not, you probably will know by just the way that I describe your sleep. A lot of you guys are not getting good sleep scores, not because you're not tired, but because your mind is awake. And if you fall into that category, you're definitely going to want to pay attention. Tomorrow, by the way, is all about technology. I know many of you, I never want people to feel like they're forced to buy an OURA ring or a WHOOP or a sleep aid or some other kind of sleep tracking device. So I'm going to try to provide as much value for you guys as well. But those of you that do track your sleep, either with an OURA ring or a WHOOP or a Fitbit or even your Apple watch, we're going to go deep into the metrics, the technological metrics of heart rate variability. How you can improve heart rate variability. What does it really mean? You know, what is the measure of heart rate variability? Why is it so important? Why is it a measure of readiness for the next day? How does it impact your recovery? How does it impact something called strain, which is your ability to take on new physical challenges? And then how can you improve your heart rate variability? A lot of you guys have already noticed that when your sleep is good, very often it's good because your heart rate variability goes up. So in broad terms, heart rate variability is the time between beats of your heart. You might think that if you saw your pulse rate, right, Your, your heart rate at 60 beats a minute, we know, we naturally would think that means that my heart is beating once every second, right? So if there's 60 seconds in a minute and my heart beats, you know, 60 times in a minute, that my heart's actually beating once a minute. That's actually not true. It may be 0.4 seconds in the first second, it might be 0.7 seconds after that. It might be 1.5 seconds, it might be 2 seconds, it might be 0.3 seconds. So the distance between heartbeats is what's known as heart rate variability. And the reason that this is a measure of readiness and actually a measure of how prepared you are to take on additional strain, and it's also a measure of conditioning, is because we want our heart to be adaptive. We want it to instantly respond to small adaptive needs. So even when you change positions at night, as soon as you begin to change positions, how quickly does your heart adapt to that new required strain? If you got up to take a walk, if you actually went from a walk to a light jog, from a light jog, you know, to a, to a fast paced jog, into a sprint, how quickly would your heart adjust? And the variability, the speed at which your heart is able to adjust to new tasks, new positions and new stress that's put on the heart is a good measure of, of your physical fitness. And one of the things that we can focus on for improving our overall physical fitness is our heart rate variability. Also remember that heart rate variability is, is very personalized. This is why I think that you should measure your own heart rate variability and talk about ways to improve your baseline heart rate variability. Do not compare yourself necessarily to other people. There are also genetic components to heart rate variability. Even when I was a competitive triathlete, you know, my heart rate variability was in the 60s. My son is a, is a very competitive athlete and his heart rate variability is always over 100. So don't necessarily compare your HRV to other people's HRV as a measure of how well you're doing. Compare it to your own baseline and how well you're improving your own baseline hrv. So remember, this is the heart rate variability. The higher the number, the better in general. But we should develop a baseline for ourselves and we should look at things that actually improve our own heart rate variability, which is essentially a measure of the adaptive, the adaptiveness of our own heart to new tasks. Wow. Still tons.

Of.

We can't hear you.

Gary.

Gary, we can't hear you.

Hey, Gary, we can't hear you, buddy.

No sound.

Gary can't hear you.

All of these different, all of these different wearables, we have tons of ways now to measure what's making. The reason why I like the wearables is not because I want you to get crazy about, you know, psycho focusing on all of these different metrics like sleep and recovery and strain and heart rate variability and respiratory rate. It's because you can actually start to track what works and what doesn't for you. Sleep is such a highly individualized component of our 24 hour cycle that once we find the secrets that work for us, we can apply those and we can measure their outcomes. So tomorrow is our big day on technology. The founder of whoop, who is just an amazing guy, Will Ahmed, he and his wife were over at dinner this past weekend. We shot a podcast which is going to air. When is that going to air? On Tuesday. Okay, so it's going to air this coming Tuesday. Oh, okay. Eight Sleep is airing this Tuesday and Whoop is going to air on the 17th. Those are two must see podcast guys. You know, they've dedicated their entire lives to these technologies that improve sleep and performance and, and they, they divulge a lot of those secrets on the podcast. But, you know, he's built a 3.6 billion dollar company. One of the things that I like about what they've done is they've consolidated voluminous amounts of data. You know, they don't actually take you as a natural person and process your personal data, but what they do is they take your, your WHOOP data and they consolidate this data and they actually look at what are the biggest things that impact sleep, what are the biggest things that impact recovery, what are the biggest things that impact heart rate variability? And they can actually, they throw those tips and tricks your way. In fact, when I, when I asked on the podcast the other day, and I don't want to give the whole thing away, but I asked Will Ahmed, the founder of whoop, I said, with all of the big data that you have, and I'm a big data person, I came from the mortality space. With all of the big data you have, what was the one variable? If you had to pick one thing that impacted sleep more than any other metric, what would it be? And he very quickly said, consistency, Consistency in bedtime. So you may actually want to write that down. It's amazing what circadian creatures, human beings are and how tied to the circadian cycle that our, our biorhythm, that we really are. The same time getting into bed and roughly the same waking up in the mornings had a huge impact, if not one of the most demonstrative impacts on this large pool of data. And the second was alcohol, nearly 96 or 97%. He'll give us the number tomorrow of people that drank alcohol prior to bed. On the nights that they actually drank alcohol prior to sleeping, they had significant, you know, degradation in their, in their sleep scores. I know years ago, my wife and I used to be the two glasses of wine before bed, people. I know some of you guys are half a bottle of wine before bed, but trust me when I tell you it's wrecking your sleep. Remember, alcohol converts to something called acetyl aldehyde, and it's the acetyl aldehyde that really makes you acidic. Causes inflammatory conditions, especially in the brain. It inhibits our. Our ability for the glymphatic system. The lymphatic system that's in the br. Eliminates waste and helps you repair and detoxify the brain. And it also processes throughout the night, turns into sugar. And so while you're sleeping, your blood sugar is actually rising. It's really hard to get into a deep sleep, REM state sleep or deep sleep while your blood sugar is rising. So we have. Is Dr. Martone queued up and ready to roll? All right, awesome. So, guys, this is a real treat. You know, I'm going to bring Dr. Martone into. Into the conversation. Someone who's dedicated a large part of his adult lifetime to sleep. He's going to bring a structural component to sleep. He's actually written books on this. You know, he. I'm. I'm a fan of his friend of mine, Dr. Martone. Hey, welcome to. Oh, I love that. Sleep tight.

Welcome.

Welcome to our live zoom and our sleep challenge, brother.

All right. Hey, guys. Thank you. Can you hear me? Gary, can you hear me?

Can you hear you? Yep, I can hear you just fine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, fantastic. Thank you for having me.

You know what would be helpful, I think, because we're just getting going, would be for you to talk a little bit about the stages of sleep, the importance of sleep, good sleep hygiene, a good sleep routine, and then we can talk about sleep from a structural standpoint, which is kind of your core competency, but just in general, a little discussion about deep sleep versus REM sleep versus light sleep. I've had a lot of questions about that from whoop wearers, from our oura ring wearers, and then also from folks that are actually tracking this on their Apple watches. And then, of course, I want to just give you the floor to talk about good sleep hygiene.

All right, great. Thank you so much. Yeah, so I think the easiest way I like to talk about sleep. Like, you're like, we're fifth graders, right? Because there's just so many books out there, and I think it's just so complicated. So when we. When we break down sleep, sleep's broken down into different. Like, different stages. So you have deep sleep, and you have the different variables and your body needs to go through these sleep cycles. That's why, like you said, alcohol is so damaging, because it just drops you into a comatose sleep state. And you don't get into the first third of your sleep cycle, which is deep sleep. Deep sleep is where the body repairs and recharges. And then you have something called REM sleep, which is where the mind recharges and repairs. So when you, when you're thinking about the stages of sleep, we want to be able to get into deep sleep within the first third of our sleep cycle. And it's extremely important to be in deep sleep before midnight. Right? Just like you were talking about earlier. You want your body's tied into the circadian rhythm. And a lot of times close to that midnight, there's an energy spike in metabolism, I mean, in your adrenal glands. And if you're not in deep sleep by that energy spike, a lot of times people hit a second wind and then you're not getting that deep restorative sleep. So deep sleep, your deepest sleep, is typically within the first third of your sleep cycle. And then towards the end of your sleep is REM sleep. And those are really the, the big ones that people need to be able to maximize and get right in order for that heart rate variability to really balance out.

And then, you know, I was actually pretty surprised when I started tracking my own sleep and then when I started talking to the WOOP founder that, you know, deep sleep is the first phase of our sleep. And, and then, and then we go into rem and one of the things that we need to get into deep sleep, and this is where we start coming into some of the tips and tricks that everybody can use. And, and then I'm going to get highly individualized for you guys as well, is that, you know, our body temperature actually needs to cool down in order for us to actually enter the first phase of deep sleep. There's a couple of things that are happening in the first phase of deep sleep. Number one, our largest circadian pulse of growth hormone, even in older ages, happens in this, in this phase of sleep, we have three phases of. We have three pulses of natural growth hormone from our pituitary gland throughout the day. We have a morning pulse, we have an afternoon pulse, and then we have a large bolus pulse at night. Those of you that are taking peptides or have ever taken a peptide, especially a growth hormone peptide, I happen to be a big fan of those. You always take that peptide two hours after a meal, and at night, right before bed and why do we do that? Because we're trying to time that big growth hormone spike. And you think about why would the body release the majority of its growth hormone early in the sleep cycle at night? Well, because this is the repair phase for the body, right? I mean, this is. We don't actually build muscle in the gym. We don't improve our VO2 max in the gym. We don't get conditioned when we're in the gym. We get conditioned when we recover. We build muscle through recovery. We build, we build our physical fitness in our VO2 max as the body is recovering, not when it's being hormetically stressed. So the stresses we put on it during the day are actually repaired at night. And that's why sleep is so important. I think it is the greatest biohack in the world. If you do nothing other than just focus on improving just your sleep and you didn't change anything else. And I'm not encouraging not to do that about your diet, about your lifestyle, about your exercise program, you would see a demonstrative change in your life. So understanding that that sleep cycle begins with deep sleep and that deep restorative sleep and REM sleep are critical to bio optimization, especially when we talk about the body repairing itself and then the brain repairing itself and eliminating waste, detoxifying and regenerating, you start to really realize that sleep is so important. So first tip is we need to be consistent about our time going to bed. In fact, if you look at the sleep scores that I've been posting this past several weeks, in almost every instance, actually every instance where I added sleep score above 95%, my 95, my 97s, and the several hundred percent sleep scores that I got, I was actually in bed my targeted time, which is by 10:30pm in every single one of those cases. If I was off on my time zone and actually went to bed after my midnight time on the east coast, even if I was traveling on the, on the west coast of the country, then my best sleep scores were in the 80s. I could still do a good job, but I really couldn't hit the highest of my sleep scores. So I want to turn it back to you to talk about not just the stages of sleep, but I want you to talk about some of your work in sleep, how you've improved sleep, because some people may have a structural anomaly, which I would love for him to speak to. First of all, I love the fact that you're actually wearing pajamas.

You're really committed.

Yeah. So talk a little bit about the, you know, structural anomalies that might be complicating sleep. How pain affects sleep.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So, and then there's a question, whoop versus or you just have to stay consistent with whatever you're using in the actual metrics.

No dog in that fight.

Yeah. And then so we talk about getting way better sleep. It's basically awakening the full potential of a well rested aligned you. You see people, when you think about sleep, really, you're spending eight hours or nine hours a night just lying there doing nothing. So sleep in itself, unless you're really working to maximize, it's like almost like a waste of time. So people don't buy sleep, they buy who they're becoming because of good sleep. And one of the issues within the, I think in the whole space is people talk about recharge of the body, which is super important, re energizing the body, which is super important. But part of the triune, which people fail to recognize is the realignment that your body is looking for at night when you're sleeping. You see, when you're sleeping, there's three things at play. There's the conscious brain, there's a subconscious brain, and then there's the body, the conscious brain, it wants sleep. It's the thing that gets in the way. The subconscious brain wants safety and the body wants alignment. But when you're thinking about how we put ourselves to sleep in these contorted positions, what's actually happening is the conscious brain thinks that it's comfortable, but it's not. The average person will toss and turn 20 to 40 times a night because of pain. The pain centers in the sleep centers are right next door to each other. And when the body is in these distorted contorted positions, you're setting yourself up for failure. So when the first thing that we talk about, when we talk about reversing the triune, first thing you want to do is start with alignment of the body and mind. Then that position is unsafe for the subconscious brain. So we can create safety by creating pressure on your chest, wearing sleep masks, putting, you know, pressure on your forehead like an ostrich sticking its head in the ground. And then we need to teach you how to get out of your own head. Because I'm going to tell you, most of the problem that people have is I can't. Because the pain, if the pain of change is less than the perceived reward, you're just going to end up with the same what we call pdr, progressive degenerative reality. It's not even where you are. It's where you're going to end up in 10 years, five years of dysfunction because your structure is breaking down while you sleep.

So what can they do about that? I mean, I know you, you got a sleep pillow, but like what are some good sleep hygiene techniques? You know, I was actually, I've been deep down the science rabbit holes of, of sleep lately. I actually read quite a bit about sleeping on your back versus sleeping on your stomach and having your head turned and your trachea extended. I also read that even sleeping on your left hand side is better than sleeping on your right side because actually the pressure of your liver is a very, very heavy organ. And sleeping on your left side, the liver, this big basketball sized organ actually moves over against your diaphragm and puts additional pressure on your lungs. So when you're in a low respiratory state, it's actually better for you to sleep on your right side. You actually get more air into the lobes of your lungs. This is a physiological thing than you do by sleeping on your left. So those of you guys that are side sleepers, there is some real empirical evidence that sleeping on your right side is better than sleeping on your left side. You know, where do you fall in terms of sleep posture?

So when you're looking at. So basically we have to have anchors. Anchors are law. Things that cannot change are not refutable. There's a lot of the body called the writing reflex. It states that body posture adjusts to head position.

So when you body posture adjusts the head position. Okay, yes.

So if I take my head and I lean it to the right, the hip's going to shift over to keep the eyes level. If I have forward head posture, the, the psoas major is going to constrict to level off the eyes. So, so the body is trying to, to adapt to head position. So what my suggestion is for people, even if you're a side sleeper, if you're, if you're a stomach sleeper, back sleeper, it doesn't matter. We call a corrective sleeping position. You want to put your body into a neutral sleeping position where the neck is supported and the weight of your head is off of the back of the pillow, causing distraction. Because like you said, the body needs stress in order to change. And if you support anything in the body, you're going to make it weaker. So if you, you want to have your head off of the back of a pillow and I'll show you that in a second, and then you want to be able to have your Hands and your feet down by your side. All the lifestyle habit is to fall asleep like that. Because now you're putting your body into a position where you're reversing the damage of that modern day lifestyle of being on a computer all day long and texting all day long. Because as that head comes forward, the research says that you compress the vagus nerve. And if you compress the integrity of the vagus nerve, you're throwing off heart rate variability. So what we see in our studies is that just by changing the way you fall asleep, we call it the 10 minute sleep ritual, you are only in control. Right? Sleep is a matter of not control, is letting go. Unconscious brain wants to be in control, but in order to fall asleep you got to let go. So you need to let go in the right position so that you give the body the best chance of success. Then you're going to improve the cervical curve in that neck and improve heart rate variability by up to 30, 30% by just changing the way you start out.

Holy cow. So, so then the position for falling asleep then is because obviously we're not controlling the position when once we're asleep, right? I mean we might roll onto our sides. My, my wife can't help herself. She rolls onto her stomach the worst thing ever because she's, she has an L5S1 fusion. And so she increases that lordotic curve and she lays on her side, she.

She needs pressure, protection and goes back.

To her, goes back to her back. So in terms of sleep posture, how do we fall asleep in the best sleep?

We're going to show you right here. Can you see the little bed behind me? Yeah. Right. So what is important right now? I have a neck nest. But you can use, it has to be a really, really, really soft pillow. And then you're going to want to take it and you can angle it. Then you put it under your neck. And the key is not to have the head supported. The head should be about a quarter of an inch to a half an inch off of the bed. And then what you're doing is you're in, in a sense creating this position where the weights, the weight of the head is basically hanging out there in space. And that distractive force will gently stretch a curve back into your neck. You do it for 10 minutes or you fall asleep like that, it'll be an hour, then it'll be two hours. Because the body will change what you do on a ritualistic basis. So as you do something ritualistically, you're a product of Your habits, you're going to notice transformation not just in your sleep patterns. You'll stop tossing and turning. You could put a glass of water in my chest and it will still be there when I wake up. But I have to put, I have to put a pillow on my head. I got to put a pillow on my forehead. I put a pillow on the side of my face. So I trick my subconscious brain to believe that I'm sleeping on my side. So there, there are different things that you can do to create safety. So you start with alignment, create the safety. Then we teach you how to get out of your own head.

So there's some questions about the pillow. They can either use the pillow that you have and where do they get that? Or they can find a really soft pillow. But, but the whole point is to leave the back of the head actually suspended.

Yeah, they can go to necknest.com and use Gary10. You'll, they'll, they'll get a discount there. But yeah. So the neck nest is specifically designed to not support your head. That is so important. You can't support your head and support the neck at the same time because you just continue to reinforce the same patterns. So what you want to do is you want to support the neck and then let the head lightly distract. A stress is a force that causes change. So when you use that distractive force over a period of time, your body will transform. And more importantly, like I herniated my disc. That's why I know so much about.

This herniated disc in your neck?

In my lower back. And I reviewed 3000x rays and found through the writing reflex due to forward head posture. I picked up a psoas major muscle spasm which compensate which is the reaction to the forward head posture. And that psoas is the only muscle in the human body that attaches directly to a disc. So anybody that has disc issues more than likely has a lost cervical curve. They have digestion issues, they have immune system issues and they have hormonal imbalances. It's all connected through loss of loss of curve due to post sleeping position.

Wow. I, I, I, I, I don't think that we should just gloss through that. I want to pause there for a second. So people that have other, because I'm always looking for the, you know, other impacts that, that, I mean, I'm going to go through my exact sleep routine and, and, and how I'm getting, you know, regular 95 to 100 sleep scores, but it's not going to work for everybody. Because I have, I, I have a different mental state, for example, than my wife. My wife is actually a night out. My wife has a waking mind at night. I know, lay down to go to sleep at night and your mind wakes up. And I'm going to tell you what we can do about that because once we get these other ancillary things out of the way, then we can really focus on the, on the individual sleep hygiene. And I have an enormous number of followers that are always, because they actually want me to do a low back pain challenge, but that are actually dealing with lower back pain. So I know you're not speaking to a small audience right now. When you're speaking to people that actually have back pain, that's either keeping them awake or that they don't know if they can do anything about. So let's go back to that for a second. How the corrected posture in your cervical spine may actually help alleviate back pain. Because my wife has an L5 S1 fusion. So I know a lot of people are dealing with back pain and they think that it's just something they need to deal with. And we've never thought about sleep as being a part of our solution to back pain. We're just trying to sleep without pain, not use sleep to actually correct the pain. Can you go back to that for a second?

That's the transformation. So I am a little bit different. I didn't enter the sleep space to help people sleep better. I entered the sleep space because I had to fix my own disc herniation. And I did it at night when I was in bed. So I use the bed to correct structural misalignments. So, so I'm a kinesiologist, I'm an exercise physiologist and had been a chiropractor at that point for 20 years. And when I was looking at, when I looked at these X rays, it was right in front of me. As we lose this curve in the neck, you pick up a hip misalignment. So when somebody has lower back issues in their chronic, you can go back in their history and find out when that cervical neck was damaged in. Normally it was when they were a child. And if there was damage when they were a child, they're going to have digestion histories as a child of digestion issues, hormonal imbalances, because it's all translates through that vagus nerve when you have that forward head, that forward cervical curve. So now we're looking at the psoas major muscle spasm. How do you fix it?

Well, by the way, is one of those deep muscles inside. You can't see it. You can't really touch it. Right. Well, if you do touch it, it's.

Not, it's really, it's right through here. So it's right down here. It attaches to L4, L5, and L3 discs. So it has, it has insertion points. Now, the issue is when you lose that cervical curve in your neck, you're going to lean forward. Most of these, most people have forward posture and they're constricted in this forward plane. So when they get on a wobble board and they start working on balance, they're always going to fall backwards. And that's one of the issues with putting you in the sleep position, because when you fall asleep on your back, a lot of times the feedback. I mean, we've done the work with tens of thousands of people, and they feel like they're falling backwards because we're so constricted in the forward plane. And you're reacting with all this twisting in the hips, which eventually down the road, the progressive, degenerative reality is disc problems. So you can look at the neck X ray and you can predict how long it's going to take for that disc to become an issue.

So, so, so, so the takeaway from this, you know, for, for tonight's sleep, because we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna start putting together good sleep hygiene and habits. Is there those people that actually have back pain, they're both people that actually know that they have some anterior head carriage, which a lot of people have. And I forget what the physics are, but somebody explained it to me one time. I, yeah, I also went to chiropractic college. I went to national college in chiropractic. So I have a lot of spinal anatomy experience. When you, when you just took a bowling ball and held it against your chest, you know, the, the weight distribution for every inch away from your, your chest is not linear. It's actually very parabolic. It's what, it's two to one.

So for every. So basically, for every inch your head comes forward, it's 20 extra pounds of pressure between your shoulder blades.

That. That's exactly it. That's. That's. I, I didn't remember the ratio, but I knew that it was a parabolic ratio. So, you know, 1 inch increased the force by 20 times. A lot of us are 2 inches or 3 inches forward, and so all that strain is going on a thoracic spine, which means that then going down to our Lumbar spine, which means it's then going to our hips. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's kind of fascinating to start to think about sleep as something that could actually correct our posture.

So due to Davis's law, tissue remolds based on the stresses applied. So a lot of people that have issues within like let's say sinuses and they, they having breathing issues, you put, you put a pillow against the side of somebody's face and you keep it there for eight hours a night. You're going to press in the maxillary sinuses, you're going to distort jaws. So think about being able to put a pillow underneath your neck and lie like that. You're going to be able to open up so much nerve flow and we see so many, so much dysfunction just melt away when you get, when you start with positioning and you don't start with comfort.

And like, what kind of time frame does this take? So somebody that's actually suffering from low back pain, or someone like my wife that has an L5S1 fusion or somebody that knows that, I mean, you know, those of you that are out there with some anterior head carriage, you know, your spouse can tell you, you know, my, my, my, my parents both have that condition. I think a lot of elderly have that position where their head comes forward. But it actually starts very, very early in life. My daughter's 25 years old. She has something called Ehlers Danlos, which is a connective tissue disorder which makes your tissues hyper, hyper flexible. And, and she had this huge dowager's hump, you know, that big, that hump at the top of the thoracic spine. And since she's gotten that corrected, I mean, her entire life has improved tremendously. So tonight you would suggest for those people that fall into that category, either getting a neck nest pillow or, or taking a really, really soft pillow, rolling it up, putting it up behind the ears and leaving the back of the head off.

Here's what the problem is going to be in, in you had you started with this, Gary. And it really such an important point. I really don't think we should gloss over it. How people sleep is really dependent on their mental state. Right? So you know, you, we categorize people as a gorilla, an armadillo or an ostrich. The gorilla can, the gorilla can sleep anywhere, right? It just doesn't count.

Now you're just insulting my followers.

So the gorilla, just super confident, it's like, can sleep anywhere. It can do anything.

I think I'm a gorilla.

You are, but that's fine. But most people are not like that. Most people have like in a subconscious level. Remember the subconscious brain is what's sleeping. So. So at a subconscious level, people curl up in a ball because they're an armadillo. Right? They got that they need that protection of safety with in a ball. And then go even further than that. You could be the ostrich where you just need to stick your head into a garage and stick your head against the pillow because you people admitting that.

They'Re armadillos and ostriches.

So. Or you're a gorilla dillo. You know, you can kind of be midway between the three.

Yeah, it's 20, 24. You can be a gorilla dillo.

Dillo. You can, whatever you identify with, you're good. So, so how you. You have to put the subconscious to sleep. So when you are sleeping in this position, I saw one that said that I will snore and I'm going to get to that. You need to use pressure on your chest and pressure on your forehead. That's the first thing you need to do. Remember, the goal is not to think about the whole night because you're only in control basically with how you fall asleep is to just fall asleep in this position and let whatever happens happens.

That's.

And when that person that snores, one thing is, is you snore when you sleep on your back. Because most of the time the pillows under your head closing down the airway. When you sleep with a neck nest or pillow under your neck, you open up that airway. Then it's just a matter of keeping the mouth closed. You can do that with pillows underneath your chin, you know, tucked under there, keeping that mouth closed. You can use mouth tape. You know, there are different ways to manage it. But the, even if you do snore, just fall asleep in that position for an hour and then go to your side.

Okay, I want to talk about something, some of the tricks that I use before we talk about some of the technology that I use. Because again, I want to, I want this to be as inexpensive and as non invasive as possible. You know, when, when you really delve into the sleep research, like the things that really, really impact sleep, aside from things like structural anomalies, I would say arguably the top five are the following. And, and I, and I've talked to the world's leading sleep experts. We're going to have two of them on here again tomorrow. I think they're going to reiterate this is that minor amounts of light cause dramatic changes in our sleep cycle. And this is actually well documented in the literature. The we are very photovoltaic beings and it does not take much light to excite our, you know, receptors in our eye that actually, you know, release cortisol and you know, awaking hormone. And you know, we have melatonin, we have cortisol that sort of work in opposition to one another. So things that you could do tonight that you might not be doing already that are going to cost you absolutely zero. Number one, darken your room. Like actually spend some time preparing your room as a sanctuary for sleep. You know, you're going to spend a third of your life sleeping. You might as well plan for it to be effective. And so darkening the room, the number of candle watts that it actually takes in light passing through your eyes to actually, to start your waking cycle is pretty, pretty astounding. So number one, you know, let's talk about like room preparation. And you know what I do? You know, you're in my bedroom right now, you little freaks. So what I do is I actually will I only shut my drapes, but I actually have those, you know, those little clips that you use to close, like potato chip bags. I have two of those and I actually clip them onto my, and I travel with these too for hotels. You can throw these little, you know, these big clips into your bag. You know, women kind of wear them on sometimes to hold their hair up. And you can actually clip the drape shut so you actually have no light coming in the drapes. These two little boxes that you see behind me right there and the one on the other side. Those, those boxes, all they're doing is covering my light switches because I have a lighting control there that controls my drapes and my overhead lights. And at night it has a, it has a light on it. If you notice I don't have an alarm clock on my nightstand, I will put my phone on the nightstand, but I actually turn it onto airplane mode and I laid on the nightstand at night. So actually getting electronics away from you 6 foot radius is about what most, most EMF experts recommend. So you create a six foot bubble around yourself, not having things plugged in or charging within six feet of your head that you'll notice that lamp actually plugs in on the opposite side of the wall. So even though I don't run it at night, the plug is actually further away from my head. I also cool the room down to about 68 degrees Fahrenheit. You know, the you know, a nice cool room allowing you to get into that first phase of sleep. Tomorrow, when we talk about eight Sleep, the, the eight Sleep founder is going to talk about the circadian sleep studies that they did on the body needing to be cool during that first stage of sleep, which is deep sleep and actually slightly warming up going into, into REM sleep. And again, there's a lot of data to support this. So without spending a dime other than maybe incre your air conditioning bill, we can cool the room down, we can darken the room down. I also use red light bulbs. Mine are from EMR Tech, but you could get them at Home Depot. These are little cheap things that you can do to turn your, your bedroom into a sanctuary and really develop a good, a good sleep routine. So actually preparing your, your bedroom to be like a hospitable place for sleep. And then of course, you know, incorporating some of Dr. Martone's, you know, tips about actually having your, your head suspended and not actually fully supported. I think those are phenomenal ideas, especially for those of you that suffer from back pain. You know, I've been very blessed not to have back pain in my life, but I live with someone who struggles with it all the time. She's actually been helped quite a bit. My wife Sage from Dr. Martone. So what other sleep tips would you have for people? I, by the way, also use a very soft sleep mask. I found that using the eye mask that had like heavy Velcro or the eye mask that had very, very thin straps, those actually would give me headaches and they actually were too tight on my head. I use a really, I use a cotton one. I'll get it for you. But I use a fat cotton one and I block out every ounce of light. I sleep in absolute darkness and that helps me a lot with my sleep and, and, and, and wake cycles. This is a really soft one. Yeah, this is just a cotton one. This is actually not the one I've been using lately. It's in my, in my bag. I spent the night in Naples last night. So I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll tell you which one I use. I think it's about six bucks on Amazon. But I never, ever, ever travel without it. And then there's some modalities that I use too, which we'll get into later. What other, what other tricks and would you have for developing good sleep hygiene?

I love it. I, so I love the idea of a sleep mask because then if there are light leaks, just pressure against your eyes either the game changer with sleep is being able to stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system because. Parasympathetic. Go ahead. Your parasympathetic nervous system is what puts you to sleep. So just pressure against your eyes is critical. Now there is a huge thing with body temperature. Now body temperature is critical to be able to get to deep sleep. And you want to be, you want your body temperature to cool, you want your heart rate to come down and your respiratory rate to come down. So those are the vitals you want to be able to monitor in the. Well, you don't have to monitor them, but the way to bring your body's core temperature down is slow your breathing down. So if you slow your breathing down, your heart rate's going to follow and then your core temperature is going to drop. Now this is really big for me. It is so important to cool your room. But sleep with your hands in, your feet out of the covers because your body works on something that's called allostatic load. Allostatic load means it will shut down all non necessary organs and functions to be able to stay alive in one of the allostatic loads that is at the top of the pyramid is body core temperature. So here's the balance between where I think that, that sleep experts get wrong. They understand what's good for sleep, but they fail to recognize what's good for the overall health of the body. You don't want the body fighting to stay warm all night long because that will stress immunity. That will stress, it will, it will suppress that, that, that parasympathetic nervous system. So you want to cool the body's core temperature to a certain time and then naturally that core temperature needs to rise. And you want to do that naturally. Naturally. So you want your hands in your feet, out of the covers so that body can temperature regulate. And then the last tip I would tell you is you can't. The conscious brain needs to be in control. But you can't think yourself to sleep. You have to remember yourself to sleep. So if you focus on a memory that happened two days ago, I focus on a golf course and I walk around the 18 holes and I think about every shot that happened two days ago. And once I put myself to sleep on that memory, I put myself to sleep on the same memory. And you'll get to sleep way quicker if you, if you put yourself to sleep on a memory first in every time you wake up in the middle of the night or you put yourself to sleep, think about the same memory don't think about what you have to do today or tomorrow, but remember what you did the other day. You'll go to sleep and you'll stay asleep.

I love that. I found that. I found a brand new one. It's Cicerone. Is, is S Y S R O I N S Y S R O y N and I like this one because the Velcro is not against your head. It's really, really soft. And it actually can even go over your ears. I take this thing on the plane. I travel with it all the time. It's like, I don't know, it's about six or eight bucks. So when you put this thing on, you just put it loosely around the head and then it actually has a component that comes down over your nose and, and this blocks every ounce of light that's. That's coming in. I mean, I know a lot of you have night lights, you have, you have fire alarms, you have, you have nightlights, you got fire alarms, you got all kinds of alarm clocks, you got all kinds of light in your room. You'd be shocked how little the candle wattage coming out of those lights is required passing through your eyelids to keep you in awakened state. And we haven't even talked about screen time yet. So absolute darkness is, is another sleep hack. I have always found that my sleep scores are considerably better when I use a sleep mask. This is not something that I ever wanted to use, but now that I'm using it, I can't, I really can't get a great night's sleep without it. This is one of my favorites because it's really, really soft. As you can see, it's like a puffy cotton material. I've also used mouth tape. I was using hostage tape for a while. I'm actually developing my own. If you want to get on the schedule for it when it's ready, you can actually sign up and preorder it on the ultimate human.com website. The reason why I decided to develop my own was I was really concerned about the kinds of silicones they were using over the mouth because you got a lot of mucus membranes right here. And if you're using adhesives that have, you know, chemical compounds in them, that is a straight access to the bloodstream. So the last thing that I wanted to do was use a silicone adhesive over my mouth to force me to nasal breathe at night. If that was just going to have a silicone adhesive on it. I'm not, I'm not saying that hostage tape has a one that has a silicone adhesive that's, that's bad for you. But I'm definitely deep down the rabbit hole of exploring that right now. And in the next few weeks I'll have a mouth tape out that has a silicone adhesive on it that is non comedogenic and non toxic. So you can actually sleep soundly knowing that you're not. If you're a mouth breather, that's another thing that actually impairs sleep. You'll stop snoring when you use a mouth tape. And I find that, that actually of all the things that I do to improve hrv the nights that I actually use mouth tape, I find that my HRV is improved. So dark room, cold room, sleep masks, suspending your head off the back of the pillow. These are all sleep hacks that you can use. Getting your electronics about a six foot radius is what most EM experts would recommend in terms of EMF frequency disrupting sleep. You can still bring your phone onto your nightstand, just turn it on airplane mode when you go to sleep at night. And the last thing is your screen times. And there's two ways to avoid screen time. You know, there's a really interesting acronym. I wanted to give this to guys, to you guys before we, before we go into the VIP chat. And this is, this is something called the sleep rule. I didn't develop it but, but it's an excellent place to start to develop really, really good sleep hygiene. One of the most disruptive things to deep sleep, which is that first phase of sleep. Again, the WHOOP founder and the, and this and the eight Sleep founder are both going to talk about. This is our digestive cycle. You know, when I travel, people wondered how, how did you do nine cities in 11 days? Or how did you. Or 11 cities. Yeah, I did nine cities in 11 days. And, and if you guys have been following me, which most of you do, you saw that some of those were on opposite sides of the world. I went from Saudi Arabia to Dubai. I had a layover in Dubai. I went from Dubai to New York. I changed planes in New York. I went from New York to Salt Lake City. I landed in Salt Lake City after traveling for 32 hours. And I said I've got 8, 000 people at an event in the morning. I've not only got to be on my game, but I'm going to hack my sleep score. Tonight I'm in a hotel room. I'm sleeping in this bed for the first time. So what did I have at my disposal to actually make sure that I got into a deep sleep. And if you were following me around that time, the next morning I posted a 100% sleep score and 97% recovery. So I felt amazing the next day. So what I did was I took a, I took a hot shower and then before I got out of the shower, I turned as a cold as it would go and I spent about 30 or 45 seconds in the cold water. I didn't spend a prolonged period of time in the cold water. I spent a relatively short time in the cold water. I dried off, I went in. I actually turned my phone onto airplane mode, put it on the desk. I actually unplugged all the hotel nonsense that was plugged in on both sides of the bed. I unplugged everything. They had a really bright alarm clock that was blue. I used a sleep mask. I travel with a PEMF mat. Again, I don't want to make this an expensive exercise for you guys, but I actually do use a PMF mat. Not only in my own bed, you can see it on my nightstand there, but I actually travel with this thing. It makes such a difference in my sleep wake cycle and me waking up in an alkaline state. So I used a pulse electromagnetic field map. I put on my, my eye mask and then I did a breathing technique that I've updated my breath work technique from what's called box breathing, which is a 4 second inhale followed by a 4 second hold, followed by a 4 second exhale followed by a 4 second hold to another method that's also called natural Xanax. And what this does is it helps bring you into a parasympathetic state. And I actually breathe in through my nose for six seconds and I pause and I breathe out through a straw, an imaginary straw in my mouth for six seconds. And I literally do not stop doing this until I fall asleep. One of the little visualization techniques that I use too, guys, is I'll breathe in through my nose, I'll pause and I'll breathe out through straw. What I'm imagining when I do that, and I know this is going to sound a little strange, but I'm imagining myself pulling all the thoughts in my head down into my lungs. And then I imagine myself literally breathing those thoughts right out of my body. Because as you can imagine coming after, you know, 32 hours of travel, I woke up on one side of the world, I went to bed in another side of the world. I had 8,000 people waiting for me in a Stadium the next day. I could have started thinking about that speech and I would have started to raise my cortisol levels. I would have started raising what's called catecholamines, fight or flight neurotransmitters. Not to a full fight or flight state, but into awakened state. I'm going to tell you how you can combat some of that. So what I did was I laid down, I put the sleep mask on, I put the room as cold as it would go. I unplugged everything. I did a nice warm, long, prolonged, warm shower, got it pretty hot, relaxed all my muscles, got myself cold at the very end, and I went right over and got in bed. I did not get on my screen. I laid down, put my eye mask on, and I started this 6x and breath technique. This has worked wonders for me. It actually works on flights too. And I took a six second nasal breath in, took a pause, and I breathed out through an imaginary straw. And what I did was I pulled all the thoughts out of my head into my lungs and I breathed those thoughts out of my body and I breathed all the thoughts out of my head into my lungs and I breathe those thoughts out of my body. And I got into this. I don't know how many breaths I did, but I was out. And the next morning I woke up with 100% sleep score. And then just because I know we only have five more minutes until we go over to the Q and A with our, with our VIPs. And I want to make sure that I give plenty of value to those of you that signed up for this and are not VIPs. If you're not a VIP, now's the time to do it. You know, you get your first month for free. It's $47 a month. I try to get deeply interactive with you guys. So we're actually going to switch over to VIPs in five minutes. Before we go, I wanted to talk about sleep supplements, ones that I use, ones that I've researched and what the data says about sleep supplements. First of all, what's that? Somebody just broke through. So I want to talk about sleep supplements for a second. I'm not a big fan of sleep medications. I'm not a big fan of tranquilitics, Zolipedum nitrate, Diazepam, Xanax, any number of things. Lunesta, Ambien, anything that creates a dependency, a reliance, what's called a tachyphylactic response, which is a desensitization response or something that borrows from your Future, right? We don't want to exchange something today. And occasionally, yes, you can use sleep medication when you travel to adjust to a new time zone. But when we get reliant on tranquilitics and sleep medications, you'll find if you track your sleep that you actually are not sleeping as deeply and getting enough restorative, deep sleep and REM sleep. So I like to use things called metabolites. Metabolites are things the body recognizes. We can recognize them, we can break them down and we can get rid of them. I like to use this in supplementation. I like to use this when we are talking about hormone balance peptides, things like this I'm a big fan of because the body recognized them. It doesn't build a tolerance, doesn't build a desensitization, doesn't borrow from your future. And so a couple that I like are, I have a formula that I came up with myself. It's a 10x, it's called 10x Health Sleep. This does have melatonin. It's magnesium, theanine and melatonin. Some of you do not do well with melatonin. You probably already know who you are. People actually are prone to nightmares and if they have healthy levels of melatonin and you start adding melatonin on top of that, especially high doses of melatonin, you can create a dependency, but you can also actually disrupt your sleep. So there's two sleep formulas that contain melatonin. One is by Body Health, the same one that makes the perfect aminos. One is by 10x health. This is one that I formulated. Both of these work well for me. When I'm sleeping on the road, I have no issues using melatonin on temporary cases. But again, long term use of melatonin, there is some research that indicates it can create a dependency. So short term use is fine. Another one that I like, I actually don't really have an affiliation with is one from Bio Optimizers. It's called Magnesium Breakthrough. It's actually seven different types of magnesium. I'll tell you who does really, really well on this. Those of you that do not have regular bowel movements. If you're not waking up in the morning and having nobody wants to talk about bowel movements in the morning, but I do. And you're not having a regular bowel movement within 30 to 60 minutes of waking up, then you're probably not toxifying the way that your body could or should. This for me and everyone else that I've ever suggested it to not only induces a good night's sleep. It's got some seven forms of magnesium and some other proprietary adaptogens. But almost without fail, you wake up and within the first 60 minutes, you're having a bowel movement in the morning. You shouldn't need coffee or nicotine or exercise or other stimulants to actually have your gut motility working first thing in the morning. This is not only good for your sleep hygiene, but it's really, really good for detoxification pathways, waste elimination, to keep contents from putrefying in the gut. It's good for those of you that have gut disruption. So magnesium is also, if you're one of those people that actually falls asleep but has a hard time staying asleep, I think that magnesium is something you ought to really, really think about. Magnesium breakthrough has seven of those components in it, so those are some of my favorites. Before you start to go to Diazepam, Zolipedonitrates, you know, Xanaxes and what have you. So I hope this first hour has been super helpful. We're going to switch over to the VIP section so we can open it up to questions. Doc, you're going to transfer with me and take a few questions, right?

Absolutely. Yeah.

I know everybody's going to want to know where they get the snazzy pajamas, but the rest of you guys, I'll see you guys tomorrow on the sleep challenge at 3 o'. Clock. And for the VIPs stay on. We're going to move over to the VIP and we're going to open it up for some, some really interactive questions for the rest of you guys, I'll see you tomorrow, three o' clock on the sleep challenge.

All right.

Bang. VIPs Rubrekas, here we go. I love you guys. We're going to open it up to.