The Ultimate Sleep Optimization Challenge Day 2

Hey guys, hello, hello, hello! Thank you all for joining me again today. There are so many of you pouring in. Hello, um, I hope you guys all slept really well. Drop your biggest win from day one in the chat right now. What did you notice? What felt different? Did anything surprise you? So let me look at a couple of these. Amazing. All right, well, welcome back to day two. Um, the people who came back for day two are a different breed. You did day one, you woke up, you got outside, you did the breathwork, you dialed in the caffeine, you did that pause for an hour waiting on caffeine. That was the hardest thing for my wife Sage too. Um, and if you did I wanna hear about it. Tell me what worked for you. Today is day 2, and the focus is on the evening. Yesterday we built the morning anchor. We set your cortisol rhythm. We created the biological conditions for melatonin to rise at night. See, what I wanted you guys to realize is you are in charge of your sleep schedule. You're in charge of your sleep calendar, your sleep hygiene. You have so much more control over your sleep than you thought. Today we're gonna make sure that when melatonin rises, Nothing stops it. We're completing the biological circuit. That right there is the power of understanding your biology. You didn't take a pill, you didn't buy anything. You changed your behavior and your body responded. That's what biology does when you work with it instead of against it. Send an emoji if that surprised you. Something so simple could shift how you feel that fast. So many people, so many people think of sleeping as just one thing. You close your eyes, you sleep, you wake up. But what's actually happening inside your brain is one of the most sophisticated biological processes in the entire body. There are 4 stages of sleep. How many hours did you sleep last night? Drop the number in the chat. Be honest about it. So stage 1, the transition stage, is the lightest stage of sleep. Your body is starting to slow down. Brain activity is decreasing. It's easily disrupted at this time. A noise, a light, a vibration just wakes you right back up. Most people who say they can't sleep are spending too much time cycling in and out of stage 1. Their nervous system won't let them progress and drop deeper into sleep. Stage 2 is memory stabilization. Your brain produces sleep spindles. Excuse me, sleep spindles. They're bursts of neural activity where information from your day gets processed and moved into long-term memory. This is also called memory assembly. Assembly. So your heart rate slows down, breathing becomes more regular, body temperature drops another degree, which is why we love the cold room. This is where a good chunk of your night actually happens. Stage 3, this is deep sleep. This is a big one, guys. Your body releases growth hormone. Most of the growth hormone your body produces in an entire day is released in deep sleep. You have this huge bolus spike of growth hormone. If you measured it during the day, you'd see you have 3 little peaks, but the biggest one is at night going into deep sleep. Growth hormone repairs tissue, it rebuilds muscle, it regenerates your immune system. And then there's the glymphatic system. I talk about this all the time. Your brain has its own lymphatic network, like the lymph nodes in your throat. It's called the glymphatic system. It's only fully active during deep sleep. Cerebrospinal fluid is literally pumped through your brain, flushing out metabolic waste products, including amyloid beta plaques, the proteins associated with Alzheimer's disease. Your brain physically washes itself during deep sleep. That is an absolute fact. And then stage 4 is REM sleep, rapid eye movement. This is where emotional processing happens. This is where creativity lives. Your brain integrates the experiences of a of your day into who you are. REM sleep is concentrated in the final third of an 8-hour sleep window. The majority of your REM sleep happens in the last 2 hours of an 8-hour sleep night. Have you ever been woken up 2 hours before your alarm goes off and you've felt that deep sense of grogginess? That means you're in REM sleep. If you sleep 5 hours, you get almost no REM sleep. If you sleep 6 hours, you cut off most of your REM sleep. REM impairment is directly associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease. Sleeping in on weekends does not restore REM sleep. The REM sleep you missed is gone forever. You cannot bank sleep. You cannot make it up. Every short night is a withdrawal from your neurological bank account. I want you to think about it that way. And the debt compounds. If you've been getting less than 7 hours, drop a guilty emoji. Go ahead, tell on yourself. No judgment here. It's a judgment-free zone. Just awareness, guys. I want you to feel like a community. The evening countdown. Okay, that's what we're going to start next. This is where we get tactical. Pull out your PDF guide, that one that you could print for free. Page 8 is Gary's evening routine. Everything I'm about to walk you through is right there. Pick your bedtime in your head right now. Know what time you want to be asleep and count back from there. And by the way, you can even set an alarm to go to bed. Most people set one to wake up, but tonight maybe set one to get into bed 15 minutes before you want to get to sleep. So T-minus 8 hours, that's your last caffeine. Caffeine has a 5 to 7 hour half-life. So bedtime at 10:00 PM, your last caffeine is at 2:00 PM. Bedtime at 11:00 PM, Your last caffeine is at 3 p.m. So once your sleep improves, your neural energy improves. You won't need afternoon caffeine anymore. So T-minus 3 hours, that's your last meal. 2 hours is the absolute cutoff, guys. I try to do 3 hours. Sometimes I creep into that 3 to 2 hour window, but ideally you'll be done eating after or 3 hours before you're going to climb in bed. Protein, fiber, and moderate starch. Keep the carbohydrates within a reasonable limit. Insulin, it's released in response to food. It directly suppresses melatonin. So if you eat a large meal at 9:00 PM and then try to go to sleep at 10:00 PM, I know people that eat right up until bedtime. So many of you are guilty of that too. Your insulin is elevating, your melatonin is being suppressed, and now your sleep onset is being delayed. I want to set you up as well as I can for a good night's sleep. Digestion raises your core body temperature, and it needs to drop to initiate sleep. If I stood you in front of a thermograph, something fascinating would be happening. Thermograph is something that just reads heat in your body. If I stood you in front of a thermograph and you watched what happened if you ate a big carbohydrate meal, let's say you had a basket of bread and a, and a bunch of pasta, and then that got into your gut, you would literally see the blood leaving the brain cooling the brain and heating up your gut. Your gut would glow bright red and orange, showing where all that blood has gone to your gut. So 3 hours, finish eating, let your body transition, guys. Be kind to your body. T-minus 2 to 3 hours, screen cutoff time. I don't mind you listening to podcasts, um, or something like Binaural Beats to help you get into a, a good restful sleep, but let's make sure that we stop stimulating cortisol with blue light 2 to 3 hours before bedtime. The sensitivity of the retina to blue light peaks 2 to 3 hours before bedtime. The worst time to look at a screen is exactly when most people are looking at their screens. I know this is a tough one, but most of that scrolling is just doom scrolling. Blue light hits your retina, your brain, and it says it's daytime. Suppress melatonin. That's the signal that's going on. Screens can suppress melatonin for 2 to 3 hours. So if you can do one thing tonight, make this one the one that you do. T-minus 1 hour, magnesium bisglycinate, 200 to 400 milligrams. If you have other forms of magnesium and you don't have bisglycinate, that's fine. Just take your magnesium 1 hour prior. That form, bisglycinate, specifically crosses the blood-brain barrier very efficiently, and it has one of the highest absorption rate. It modulates something called GABA receptors, gamma-aminobutyric acid. This is your primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. It quiets neural firing. It slows down the squirrels in your head. So many of you reported ruminating at night, going to bed tired, but then your mind waking up. It regulates your HPA axis, which is your hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis. This is also your cortisol system. This is not a sleeping pill, it's a mineral, a mineral that 50 to 70% of Americans are clinically deficient in. So T-minus 15 minutes, post-dinner walk, 10 to 15 minutes outside if possible, through the nose the entire time. [INHALES] [EXHALES] So right after dinner, 15-minute walk. This is gonna drop your, Uh, insulin, and it's also gonna drop your blood sugar. Nasal breathing activates your parasympathetic nervous system. I'm trying to signal to your body that it's safe to go to sleep. The walk clears glucose from your bloodstream, reducing the likelihood of a blood sugar crash at 2:00 AM. 10 minutes, that's it. This is in your PDF guide. Check the evening routine checklist. Okay, now let's talk about the final environment setup for bedtime. Temperature: 65 to 68 degrees. Yes, colder than you think. Light: complete blackout, or invest in one of those $10 to $12 fully cotton— make sure it's organic cotton— eye mask that you can get off of Amazon. Um, phone: out of the bedroom, in another room, or at least 6 to 8 feet from your head. Sound: let's go silence or consistent white noise. No TV, no podcast. Now, the wind-down time when I said you could have podcasts, I don't want the podcast playing while you're in bed. This is the time that you want to tell your brain it's safe to shut down. Remember, your bedroom should be an environment for sleep. So many of you work in your bed. We take phone calls in our bed. We have really intense discussions with our spouse while we're laying in our bed, and our brain starts to identify that location as a place for productivity and activity. I want your brain to see that little square in your bedroom as a place of respite where we don't have to engage, where we don't have to have intense conversations, where we don't actually have to watch scary movies or things on our phone that are actually going to wake us up. Your final 60 minutes before bed determines your entire night, and you have control over this. No arguments, no stressful content, no doom scrolling. Postpone those for the next day. Protect your hour like it's the most important hour day of your life, because biologically it really is. So your PDF guide has the complete sleep environment checklist on page 13. So check every single box tonight if you can. All right, guys, now let's bring in our day 2 guest. I am super, super excited about Dr. Jessica Shepherd. She is a board-certified OB-GYN. We did an amazing podcast together. I hope you've watched the podcast. If not, I'll have my team drop a link. In the notes below so you can go watch this podcast on your own time. She holds an, an M.D. and an MBA. She's a fellow of the American College of Obstetricians, and she's a gynecologist and the founder of Modern Meno and Sanctum Med and Wellness. She is absolutely amazing. You've seen her on Good Morning America, The Today Show, maybe seen her on CNN. She's the author of Generation M, one of the most important books written on menopause. So ladies, listen up if you are in that pre, peri, or menopausal range. That is a book that could change your life. She's here because sleep does not affect men and women the same way, and most of what you've been told about sleep was studied on men. Dr. Shepherd, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the Sleep Challenge.

Absolutely, Gary. It's so awesome to be with you again, and I want everyone who's on here to know exactly who I am and how I can help, which we'll discuss today. I am Dr. Jessica Shepherd, OB-GYN, menopause expert, longevity enthusiast, and I wrote Generation M for women to understand themselves they start to go through midlife, but also when we're thinking about longevity, what does that mean for impact? And we'll talk today a little bit about that.

Thank you so much. All right, so let's start. We just taught everyone about sleep architecture, like deep sleep, REM sleep, the glymphatic system, but most of the research behind those findings was actually done on men. So how does sleep differ for women, and when— what is that? Why has that been overlooked for so long?

Well, I think it's been overlooked because women typically weren't part of research, but there's also a complexity to women that we we truly have to understand, and that is the role of ovarian hormones. And when we think of every aspect of a woman's life, including sleep, the modulation of sleep actually has to do with hormones. So there's a, you know, really good relationship between reproductive hormones such as estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone, but also how it impacts with the brain and what that risk is over transitions of hormone fluctuation in sleep disorders and sleep disruption.

Wow. So, so let's talk a little bit about hormones and sleep. Perimenopause, menopause, monthly cycles. How do hormonal shifts directly disrupt sleep architecture, and what should women know that most doctors aren't telling them?

Yeah, you know, even when we think about sleep physiology and when we look at the two different states, such as rapid eye movement, which is known as our REM sleep, and then our non-REM sleep, this is divided into different stages and what we ideally should be getting. So for example, women actually should be getting about 45 minutes more sleep time and duration than men. But if we look at each part of a woman's life, when we think of hormones, whether that's the menstrual cycle, even during pregnancy, but for what we're talking about today, that midlife transition, there is a lot of changes when we look at the fluctuation of hormones in insomnia, increase in insomnia, decrease in actual REM sleep, and then a lot of sleep or disorganized breathing. right? And that has a lot to do with hot flashes, night sweats, anxiety, rumination, and that is all hormone-based.

You know, it's so funny because, you know, as my wife Sage went through menopause, she used to say to me in the morning, she's like, I feel like I need as much sleep as a toddler. Um, and sometimes when she would sleep longer, sometimes even 2 hours longer, she would feel completely fine. Um, so her, her, during her transition through menopause, I mean, she definitely was benefiting from longer sleep cycles.

Yeah.

So we also talked about the glymphatic system and how the brain washes itself during sleep. So women are at significantly higher risk for Alzheimer's than men. 2/3 of Alzheimer's patients are women. Is there a connection between women's sleep disruption and that increased risk? And what about the brain fog so many women report during perimenopause? Is that related to impaired glymphatic function?

Absolutely. I'm gonna touch on the first point that you brought up, Gary, which was dementia, namely Alzheimer's dementia. So that actually has to do— I love when we talk about science and the correlation between what we see now, what's going on in our lives, namely like 35 through 55, and then later on. So Alzheimer's is not overnight. This happens over the course of what we say 20 years. Now, what we saw in studies, especially when we look at brain function in sleep, is that the more hot flashes and night sweats that a woman has actually can be indicative of her risk of having Alzheimer's in the future. So That's why it's important that if you are having that, not to kind of grin and bear it and being like, I'll be okay, or everyone goes through this, is to really actually address, I have a hot flash or a night sweat. I need to do it because I want to feel better. Can we pause? My light just went out.

That's okay.

So we have good—

there we go. You're back. You look beautiful.

All right. And 3, 2, and 1. And so it is important that you talk to your provider and don't feel like you have to go through this alone because it's not only about discomfort or can I do it or can I not do it? It's actually about later on in life, how that may impact you from a dementia standpoint.

Mm. So for the moms watching, and I know there's a lot of moms watching out there, years of disrupted sleep from pregnancy, newborns, toddler, that is toddlers, that's real. I mean, that's accumulated sleep debt.

"Is that damage permanent, or can a woman rebuild her sleep architecture even after years of fragmented nights?" Oh, I love this question because there is a belief that, you know, kind of like you sleep when you die kind of thing, and that's really not what we want to be saying about sleep. We want to get as much sleep as possible, but you do have the ability to actually change your sleep architecture and work on it, but it has to be a priority, right? Just like anything else in life, when we think of health, a lot of times we don't, contributes sleep to a health benefit. And we really should look at it and prioritize it that way. So when we look at sleep, it should be quality and quantity are very important. And what do we need to do in order to restore that? That's two easy things that you can look at to restore quantity and quality. So if that means that I'm getting up in the middle of the night because I'm having a hot flash, that means maybe I should consider HRT to decrease that because of estrogen depletion. But also progesterone. Progesterone is an important part of sleep as well. And progesterone, as it starts to decrease through midlife, is that this is our relaxing hormone. This really is a hormone that can give us kind of that relaxing stability, which will increase our quality and quantity of sleep. So that's also something that you can consider when we think of an HRT perspective. The other thing is we start to see increase in anxiety and what we call rumination. So mind is racing, can't stop it. That is a big part of sleep architecture. So that means that we actually need to look into our modalities that are going to pull through our mindfulness. So whether that's meditation, whether that's using red light therapy is also a great way to kind of get your brain relaxed before you go to sleep, doing a session before you go to sleep. Sauna is also a good way that you can also get the body ready for sleep and increase your quality and quantity. So there's always a lot of different ways that you can do that. Another way that I like to recommend for my patients as well, has to be sourced really well, is CBD and CBN. CBD and CBN supplements can actually help with sleep architecture.

And does that help just quiet the squirrels, what you're calling rumination? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, we have cannabinoid receptors all over our brain and our body. So especially CBN rather more than CBD is actually kind of more relaxing part of the cannabinoid, uh, plant that can help us with sleep.

Okay, great. You know, we had a board-certified OB-GYN, was my clinic director for years. She even used progesterone in men very successfully. So I don't want it to be just for women anymore. She used progesterone very successfully in men that had sleep disruption too.

Yeah, I actually have a few men that I manage their hormones and optimization, and a few of them are on progesterone.

Yeah, I think we just think of it as like, it's very different than estrogen, guys. This is not, not going to grow your breasts. So let me read some questions, uh, straight from the chat. Okay, uh, the first question, because we got some great questions in, um, I'm 47 and going through perimenopause. I wake up drenched in sweat at 3 AM every night. Is that hormonal or is something else going on with my sleep cycles?

Well, typically I think she kind of nailed it on the head there, is that that is definitely hormonal. When we start to see a decrease in estrogen, there are neurons in the brain that respond to what we call like our body temperature regulator, like the thermostat when you walk in a room. And When we see a decrease in estrogen, that means it's not able to fluctuate that temperature in that thermostat. Therefore, we have hot flashes. So that's a good way to get estrogen back on board, help you with your thermostat.

Yeah, you and I were both, uh, so excited on my podcast, you know, it's right about the time that the FDA pulled the black box warnings from female hormone therapy, and I think liberated millions of women to now consider HRT not directly increasing their risk for breast cancer. So that's another thing I just wanted to —to plug. So the next question was, my sleep completely falls apart the week before my period. Is there any biological reason for that, and can I do anything about it?

Yeah, that's a great question. I wish I could show a graph of really how through the cycle we see that women have more slow-wave sleep during the luteal phase of their cycle, which supports more of a sleep-promoting effect of progesterone. So outside of the luteal phase is where we start to see that kind of disruption between progesterone and deep sleep. So that's another reason why even you mentioned mentioned it before, when we think of progesterone, a lot of women take it cyclically, meaning only a certain time of the actual month. But if we got women to maybe take progesterone throughout the entire phase, we don't have that disruption of the progesterone giving you more sleep.

Okay, so I'm a new mom, my baby is 8 months old, and I haven't slept more than 4 hours straight since she was born.

Am I potentially doing permanent damage to my brain? Yeah, not permanent damage, so that's good.

What I will say is the body is so brilliantly smart that it knows that it is going through this transition, especially when you're taking care of a newborn, that sleep is one of those things that is going to be diminished, deprioritized, and you're not gonna get much. So the body kind of has reserve in order to make sure that you can still function, but it still is our responsibility to make sure that we're looking at every aspect to see why we're not getting sleep and making sure that we're paying attention to that. Now, what I will say is women are notorious for not asking for help when they need it and thinking that they have to do everything themselves, especially in the postpartum phase. I was even like that, like, "I can do everything," and then I was lacking sleep. This is where you need to call in the village, make sure that you're getting the appropriate help that you need so you can sleep. There are people around to help. Your sleep is important, your health is important.

So I think, yes, Dr. Shepherd, you're amazing. I can't wait for everyone to see the podcast. Where can my audience find you and find out more about your work?

Yes, I want everyone to come and see me and ask questions and hopefully generate even more conversation between you and I, Gary. On Instagram @JessicaShepardMD. That's S-H-E-P-H-E-R-D-M-D. And also Modern Meno, which is my community to really help women feel like they're not alone and to get questions answered that sometimes don't have to do all the time with hormones. It's not all about hormones. It's about longevity, exercise, nutrition, all of that you can get at Modern Meno.

Okay, that's great. Everybody go follow Dr. Shepherd. My team is dropping the link in the chat right now so you can follow her, find out more about her. Thank you so much for taking time out of your really busy schedule to hop on and join me to impact so many people. So now I'm going to head back over to the whiteboard. Thank you, Dr. Shepherd. Appreciate you so much. So now I'm going to head over to the whiteboard and we're going to get more into the research.

So we talk a lot about artificial light, particularly blue light that's coming from our screens and devices and our phones. At night and it having a stimulatory effect on us. You know, the reason for this— this was published in the Journal of Information System and Technology Management, and I'll link this study as well— it looked at the impact of modern technology and artificial light on insomnia and specifically explored the role of blue light and screen time. Remember, when a manufacturer of a cell phone is designing a cell phone, they're not going to use wavelengths of light that actually make you sleepy. They're going to use wavelengths of light that are stimulatory. And there are entire rooms full of researchers and PhDs that are studying the way that light impacts the brain and putting certain wavelengths of light by design into these screens so that it creates a stimulatory effect. The same way that food manufacturers, they, they manufacture chemicals that get around our GLP-1 response so that we don't feel full or satiated, so you eat more of this processed food. Or they put sweeteners in there that you begin to crave because they give you a dopamine screen ding. The manufacturer of a lot of technology devices wants you to stay engaged with that technology. One of the ways that they make you stay engaged is to wake you up, is to stimulate you, is to actually maybe improve your focus and your alertness while you're embedded in that screen. So you feel a little off when you're not embedded in that screen. And that's exactly what they looked at, um, with regard to cell phones and how the, the light in those cell phones is directly stimulatory to the areas of the brain that keep us in a wake cycle, not a sleep cycle. So artificial blue light is the kind of light emitted from screens and devices which can also disrupt the body circadian rhythm by suppressing melatonin. And that's a hormone that works to regulate our sleep-wake cycle. I think most of us know that, and it causes sleepiness. So this suppression may also result in the delay of sleep onset. So the, the problem is we get into bed and we think that being on our phone is going to relax us. And even if we're not looking at things like the news or Morse or contact sports or things like that that are stimulatory by the story design, you are still getting the stimulation from this blue light. As opposed to the type of blue light that comes from the sun first thing in the morning. In the first 45 minutes of the day, there's no UVA or UVB light. There's only the blue light from the sun. So you don't get the rays that burn you, but you get the constant-on rays from the sun. One of the reasons why I try to have us gravitate towards natural light. It has no hertz, so in other words, it's not flickering, which you could see if you actually took your video camera and just passed it over your computer screen. You could see the frames starting to change. This light is particularly designed to raise cortisol, to suppress melatonin— exactly what you don't want when you go to sleep— and to stimulate norepinephrine and dopamine, the same neurotransmitters that are stimulated when you get into a cold plunge. Plunge. So you wouldn't do a cold plunge to go to sleep. Sometimes I'll do a 1-minute cold plunge after a sauna to break that catecholamine cycle, but emerging from a long cold plunge and going right into bed would be difficult because the amount of norepinephrine and dopamine— the same kind of effects are coming even though we're tired and we're relaxed. The same type of stimulatory effects are coming into our brain. This is why they talk about the necessity to understand the link between light and insomnia. It's vital for improving sleep quality. You see it on social media, you, you see other influencers and other, other peers of mine talking about this, but you don't really realize how important this is. You know, we're going to try this exercise for, for a week after this sleep challenge where we just follow some of these hygiene practices, including keeping our phone 6 to 8 feet away from our head on the nightstand or in another room or in the desk on the other side of the room. And we're going to try to get off of our screens. Maybe you listen to a podcast or buy earplugs. If you have to watch a television, that's already on the other side of the room. But screen time, we're going to limit for one week and we're going to see the effects of having this non-stimulatory light as we're trying to enter our sleep cycle. Reducing evening blue light exposure can be achieved by turning off devices dimming screens, using blue light blocking glasses, or employing red-orange lighting alternatives, all of which I do in my sleep environment. I love that the study highlighted this. Um, screen activities like social media scrolling and gaming require significant cognitive engagement, and then they go on to talk about the neurotransmitters that are involved in focus and excitement, which are dopamine and norepinephrine. So when you're excited or when you're nervous or when you're highly focused, um, these stay high and inhibit the body's natural relaxing signals such as the melatonin and GABA release that will prepare the brain for sleep. So we're actually destroying our sleep with the hygiene practices like screen time. So those of you that ruminate at night, you lay down to go to bed and you're exhausted, your body tired, but your mind wakes up. Very often this is because your mind is distracted. You get inside of your head and you start having what we call ruminating thoughts. These are usually the small nagging thoughts that drive you crazy. You're not solving world hunger, you're actually just ruminating on insignificant, inconsequential things that could easily wait until the next day. So if you're one of those people, this was actually a study that was published in the Frontiers of Sleep, and the Frontiers of Sleep is a very significant journal. And the reason why I bring this up is because the breathing exercise that I'm going to recommend is the exact same type of breathing exercises that they used in here. It's very simple to do, it will cost you nothing. This has been a game changer for me, both in the morning, first thing when I wake up, I do a very specific type of breathwork. You can start with 3 rounds of 5 deep breaths through the nose, out through a straw, with a breath hold in between. Work your way up to 3 rounds of 30 breaths. But this looked at the effect of breathing exercises on adults' sleep quality and an intervention that works. So I was really excited to see such a, um, a well-revered, uh, publication do a sleep study only using breathwork as the intervention. So this investigates the application of various breathing exercises to enhance sleep quality. Um, the focus, uh, was on articles that utilize deep breathing, what's called diaphragmatic breathing, where you actually pull the air down into the lobes of your lungs and get the air out of the apex of your lungs. Remember, two-thirds of your lung volume is down here in the lower part of your rib cage, and we to actually use our ribs, our intercostals, what's called the auxiliary muscles of respiration, to draw fresh air into the lower lobes of our lungs, filling up two-thirds of our lung volume, rather than breathing very shallowly where we use the apex of our lungs. So they looked at diaphragmatic breathing, mindful breathing— I'm going to explain that in a section, uh, in a second. This is where we actually use a visualization technique to tie into our, our breathwork. It's very simple. Respiratory muscle training and pursed lip pursed-lips breathing, allowing us to explore the potential benefits of these techniques on sleep quality. Now, what's really interesting is they used multiple different types of breathwork. This is why I don't want you to get too hung up on the type of breathwork that you're going to use. Deep breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, mindful breathing, respiratory muscle training, um, diaphragmatic breathing again, pursed-lips breathing, diaphragmatic breathing in combination with pursed lips. Here's the interesting thing. Sleep quality was improved. Sleep quality was improved. Significant improvement in sleep quality. Improved sleep apnea. Effective for improving sleep quality and reducing anxiety. Um, had significant effect on improving sleep quality. So again, let's not get too bogged down into the timing and the exact method, because those of you that ruminate are also the ones that probably have a tendency towards anxiousness, anxiety, OCD. So I don't want you to overthink this. Like, I don't want this to be another stressor when you get into bed. The exact breathwork technique that I use every night that I go to sleep is— if you're one of those people that needs a distraction, um, there's another study I'm going to show you on white noise versus the variable noise coming from radios and TVs. So if you're someone that sleeps with the TV on, you might benefit from binaural beats, which you can download free off of YouTube or Spotify. You may benefit from white noise, which you can play over your phone. 6 feet from your head. So push it out a little bit further away on your nightstand or set it on a desk in the room. So now that we know we're gonna have our phone 6 feet from our head, um, we're gonna have the room cool, we're gonna have the room dark, we've stopped eating 2 hours beforehand, we've stopped drinking 2 hours beforehand, we've done everything we can to create a healthy sleep environment and develop good sleep hygiene. If you're one of those people that ruminates, this could be a game changer for you. So here's the exact breathwork technique that I used, and they used a similar combination of this exact breathwork technique in this study, which is what makes it so powerful and so applicable to, to what I'm about to tell you. So you lay down and you're just going to take a long, slow inhale through your nose like this. You're going to take a pause at the top for about 4 seconds, and then you're going to go out through a straw. Really slow. You don't rush it. You restrict your breathing on the way out. And while you're doing that, you add the mindfulness and the visualization of exactly this. I want you to imagine taking all the thoughts that are in your head, and I want you to breathe those thoughts right into your lungs. So as you breathe in, you pull all of those thoughts into your lungs. You're going to hold those thoughts in your lungs and then you're going to breathe them out. Did I get everything on my grocery list? Did I return that email? Did my belt match my shoes today? Should I use green dishes for my Thanksgiving holiday party? The longer the exhale, the better this works. So regular long inhale through your nose, about a 4-second pause, and a very long exhale. I rarely make it to 10 breaths. So this does a number of things. It calms the autonomic nervous system. It actually switches the state of the nervous system from a state of fight or flight into a state of rest and digest. So breathing exercises represent a promising non-pharmacological intervention for improving sleep quality, offering a natural and accessible alternative to pharmaceutical sleep aids. So the current evidence highlights the significant potential of controlled breathing techniques to enhance sleep by promoting relaxation, reducing stress, and improving respiratory function. This is really, really important. Let me blow that up for you so you can see it. They represent a promising non-pharmacological intervention for improving sleep quality, offering a natural and accessible alternative to pharmaceutical sleep aids. The current evidence highlights the significant potential of controlled breathing techniques to enhance sleep by promoting relaxation, reducing stress, and improving respiratory function. So As we go into sleep, we have to give a signal to our body that it's safe to fall asleep. You often hear me talk about sleep not being about just being tired. Sleep is about your body feeling safe enough to shut off. This is especially true for women. You know, I talk about how 82% of all autoimmune disease is found in females. Autoimmune disease is not selective by sex, it's selective by weakness. And what makes you weak is not feeling safe in your own body, being trapped in a state of fight or flight, or being trapped in what's called a sympathetic state. So all of these things that we have done, these— this sleep hygiene routine that we're trying to architect is to give our body the constant signal that it's safe, it's okay to shut down, and that this is the routine that we do when we go to sleep. Most of us don't even have a sleep routine. If I ask most people what they do to go to sleep, they go, what do you mean? I just lay down in bed, go to sleep. I go, what time do you go to bed? Well, whenever I'm done, you know, my emails and putting the kids to bed. So the consistency in our routine, the consistency in waking up in the morning. And the nice thing about 99% of what I'm telling you is that it's all portable. You can take it anywhere in the world. You've seen me share my WHOOP data when I do intense travel. I did 14 cities in 18 days, maintained 88% and higher sleep scores. This is exactly how I do it. I do it by giving my body the same signals every single night to go to bed and the same exact signals every single morning to wake up. Most of these will cost you absolutely nothing. They're habits. And the more habitual we are, the more we get in tune with our circadian clock, the better we are with our biorhythm, the better your sleep. I promise you, these exercises target key physiological mechanisms such as the regulation of the autonomic nervous system. That's what I was saying, is the system that is regulating things behind the scenes, scenes without you thinking about it. And it can get trapped in this sympathetic state, which is that state of fight or flight, because you're constantly worrying about what did I not do today? What's on my calendar for tomorrow? Did I get the kids to bed in time? You know, did I return all those emails? Did I answer that Instagram post? Those cannot be solved as you're laying there in bed. So what we want to do is we want to literally breathe those thoughts out of our body. And breathwork ties into the autonomic nervous system, makes you feel safe, and not only enhances the duration of sleep, but the quality of sleep. If all I did for you was improve the quality of the hours that you sleep, not lengthened your sleep, improve the quality of the hours, got you a little bit more REM sleep and a little bit more deep sleep. The cumulative effects of that are astounding over time. There are links, and I'm going to talk about those studies too, to amyloid plaquing, to neurofibrillary tangles, the genesis of Alzheimer's, the genesis of early onset cognitive decline. In almost every sleep study ever conducted on the surface of Mother Earth, sleep deprivation directly impairs cognitive function. So sleep is our human superpower. If we develop really good sleep hygiene and we get good deep and good REM sleep, we're accessing the most powerful thing that God gave us to dominate our day. So I find sleep to be one of those, uh, biohacks that I call passive biohacks. So passive biohacks are those things that you spend money on once and then it doesn't add any time to your day. So if you've got a hyperbaric chamber, you'd spend a bunch of money on a hyperbaric chamber, but then you have to find 60 minutes to get in that thing. If you buy a red light bed, you've got to find 20 extra minutes in your day to get in your red light bed. If you have a sauna, you got to find 20-25 minutes a day to get into the sauna. But things like, uh, changing your sleep environment, your mattress, water filtration, um, focusing on the light in your home, air filtration— those are what I put in the category of passive biohacks. They're things that you add to your life that don't actually add time to your life. And I would be remiss if I did not talk about the quality of your sleep environment when we talk about sleep, a place that we're going to spend a third of our lifetime. This was published in Environmental Science and Technology, and this is an interesting article. I would love to highlight this for, for the parents that are out there, because what they looked at were infant mattresses. and they, they looked at sleeping children exposed to things like plasticizers and flame retardants and UV filters just from their mattresses. And if you think about these young little lungs that are brand new in the world and how susceptible they are to things that are volatile organic compounds, it's interesting to know that the vast majority of these were coming from their mattress, their sleep environment. So the research found that children aged each 1 to 4 years of being exposed to elevated levels of what's called semi-volatile organic compounds. I'll explain these in a minute, um, or SVOCs, in their sleeping microenvironment. They detected 21 SVOCs in 4 classes. You don't need to know the classes of those, these, um, ortho-ethylates and all of these different, um, categories of, of toxins, but they found 21 of these semi-volatile organic compounds coming from their mattress. And by just upgrading the infant mattress, you know, where these heavy gases sit down about 4 inches above the mattress, which is right where our face and where an infant's face would be, you know, particularly in infants and children age 0 to 4, they can sleep up to 18 hours a day in their sleeping microenvironment. So the bedding materials, the mattresses, the pillows, these things that they're actually coming in contact with are critical. So these SVOCs, they include plasticizers, stain repellents, and flame retardants. These are frequently found in materials in this sleeping microenvironment. If you look at their correlation to asthma, respiratory issues, eczema, psoriasis, skin rashes, um, uh, constipation um, congestion, extra phlegm, um, closing of the nasal passages. All of these things are the body's response, the immune system's response to these semi-volatile organic compounds. They actually call the immune system to these sites and cause an inflammatory response, a cytokine storm, histamine storm. And so just by passively hacking your sleep environment, sleeping on an organic mattress— and I know that I also I sell an organic mattress. Sounds like a commercial for my organic mattress, but by sleeping on a fully organic mattress, you're not breathing in any of these semi-volatile organic compounds. This is for adults and for children, but it is particularly important for infants. So what they did to conduct this study was they went out and they purchased 16 new children's mattresses consisting of foam and a cover for the mattress. No spring mattresses. These were all foam mattresses. I don't think that infant mattresses have springs. But they purchased them from major North American retailers, both online and in store. They were priced between $50 and $105. So that represented the medium to lower-priced options that are readily available to consumers. So it was a really good test. It used mattresses that are widely available at department stores that were in the price range of most— the disposable income for most Americans. And then they brought these into the lab, and the testing was astounding. So what they found was, it says here, as expected, heat particularly increased the emissions of SVOCs with higher vapor pressures. So in other words, the body heat being down against the mattress actually caused a release of more of these SVOCs. So when they tested the air around the mattress, they had a certain level of these volatile organic compounds. But when you actually had body heat down next to the mattress and moisture, it caused a lot more of these SVOCs to be released. And again, these are flame retardants, polyfluoroalkyls, accelerants, glues, silicones, things that we actually don't want vaporized going into our lungs. You know, if you think about how we take a toxic compound and turn it into a bioweapon, we vaporize it. If you think about how a lot of the most deadly viruses and contagious viruses are spread, they're spread through the respiratory pathway. So our lungs are excellent vehicles, good and bad, to get compounds through our tissues and into our bloodstream. So one of the best ways to get something into the body, directly into the blood, if you don't want to use the digestive route, is to use the respiratory route. But that's not, you know, not a good thing when it comes to these volatile organic compounds. So I just fast-forwarded to the conclusion section of this, um, study because I, I thought it was a, an excellent message. You know, I spend a lot of my time committed to the Maha movement trying to message to the masses about the importance of whole foods and the importance of, you know, exercise and sleep and the right diet and getting a lot of these toxic compounds out of our food supply. They found the same thing, and these regulatory gaps and a lack of manufacturer's oversight cannot be filled by customer choice since labeling is not mandatory. And meaning it is not mandatory for them to disclose what is in these flame retardants. They were able to test it and find it, but it's not like there's going to be a warning label on these mattresses. So the chemicals found in children's mattresses are known to be associated with numerous adverse effects effects such as reproductive, neurological, hormonal, and other health harms. And those health harms are mainly the health harms that come from respiratory inhalation. And the summary of this entire article, um, which I thought was pretty profound, um, was that closer scrutiny and updating of existing regulations and regulatory action are needed. This is going to take years, um, as well as improved oversight by manufacturers to restrict the use of chemicals of concern in young children's mattresses and minimize their early life exposure while they're sleeping. So this is something we need to take into our own hands. I particularly wanted to put this in this, in this sleep challenge because I think it's so important for parents to know that if they only did one thing for their infants and very young children, if you just swapped out that mattress, a third of their life, maybe even more than a third of their life at those ages, you can biohack passively by removing these toxins from their environment.

All right, so let me quickly run you through the top 6 things to focus on when we get off the call today. Okay. Number 1, temperature, 65 to 68°F. Your core body temperature must drop 1 to 2 degrees to initiate good sleep onset. If your room is too warm, your body is fighting against the environment. Okay, so here's your action. Set the thermostat to 65 to 68°F. Fan, open windows, lightweight bedding. Cheapest sleep upgrade that you can make, guys. Cost you next to nothing. Number 2, light. Complete blackout is what you're after. Your eyes, even though your eyelids are closed, they actually detect light. Even dim light suppresses melatonin. So if you have a room where you can't control the light coming in from streetlights or from traffic or from something else, invest in one of those cotton eye mask. They're dirt cheap. You can get them on Amazon. Make sure they're 100% cotton. Blackout curtains, sleep masks, cover every LED indicator. Be like a surgeon going around your room getting rid of the light. The room should be dark enough that you actually can't see your hand in front of your face. Number 3, EMF exposure to radio frequency. Electromagnetic radiation from phones and Wi-Fi does measurably alter EEG sleep architecture. This has been proven over and over again. EMF exposure suppresses melatonin secretion. Your phone is not passive in your bedroom. It's actively working against your sleep biology. So my EMF protocol is phone in a different room at bedtime or 6 to 8 feet minimum from your head. That's a non-negotiable. No charging devices within 6 feet of your head. Please do not charge your phone right on your nightstand without having it on airplane mode and leaving it on your nightstand. You are just electromagnetically radiating yourself throughout the night and you are stimulating your body to wake up. Move your bed away from electrical outlets behind the headboard. And if you can't do that, just simply don't plug anything into the outlets behind your bed. Put your router on a timer. If you can have it go off at 10 p.m., back on at 6 a.m. If you sleep from 11:00 PM to 6:00 AM, change the time to that time. These changes are free or next to free, and they make a big difference. Number 4 is the toxin load. Your mattress may be a source of ongoing chemical exposure. If you were on my sleep— I mean, on my detox challenge, you know, the thousands of us that had polyfluoroalkyls, silicone glues, flame retardants, and accelerants that they find in vape pens and aerosol cans. Showed up in our urine. That's outgassing from your mattress. Conventional mattresses emit semi-volatile organic compounds, plasticizers, and flame retardants. Your body, your body heat actually warms this up and then it will outgas throughout the entire night. Remember, you're going to spend a third of your life on your mattress. You breathe them in for 8 hours every night. So if you're in the market for a new mattress, you want to see GOLS certified organic latex. Or GOTS-certified organic cotton. Do not believe that a natural fabric mattress has not been soaked in flame retardants. It has to have one of those two. So let me tell them to you again. It's a GOTS or G-O-L-S, think goals and GOTS-certified organic cotton. I'm going to shamelessly plug my mattress here for a second. I also make mattresses, mattress toppers. If you've invested a lot in your mattress, and you only want to buy a topper that's fully organic that prevents that outgassing from reaching your body, those are available too. But the next time you go to buy a mattress, please buy an organic certified mattress with one of those ratings on it. Ventilate your bedroom 30 minutes before bed if you're sleeping on one of those mattresses that has, that has memory foam like Tempur-Pedic. Those are pure petroleum and they legitimately outgas for 8 hours during the night. Number 5, sound. Your auditory cortex remains partially active during sleep. The problem isn't sound, it's inconsistent sound. Okay, microarousals fragment your deep sleep. So this is why, you know, obviously a book dropping on the floor or an ambulance going by, sometimes those will just— not sometimes, they will often raise you out of certain phases of sleep back into lighter sleep. So the action is silence is ideal. If it's noisy, put white noise in your, in your bedroom or brown noise so you don't fall asleep to the TV or podcast because switching from a show program to the commercials generally amplifies the sound. That's the things that wake you up at night. It also does not let your brain feel safe because it feels like it's paying attention to something in the room that could be a possible threat. The most important one, your final 60 minutes before bed sets the tone for your entire night. If you spend that time scrolling, arguing with your spouse, watching thriller movies, your nervous system is in sympathetic mode. It does not shift on demand. It needs a ramp. It needs a transition to get into that parasympathetic mode. So here's the tools for the final 60 minutes. Box breathing, 4 seconds in, 4-second hold. 4 seconds out through a straw. 4-second hold. Take the time to do that for 5 or 10 rounds. If you're actually doing it while you're watching this right now, you will feel your nervous system calm down just with the very first box breathing breath. 4 seconds in, 4-second hold, 4-second out, 4-second hold. I like to do these things because they're repeatable, they're portable. You can take them anywhere. You're in control of when when you do them, and we start signaling to our body that it's time to go to sleep. Journaling, um, you can brain dump onto paper, that's an excellent way to do it. Tomorrow's to-do list, um, reading physical print, not a screen. Fiction is ideal. Don't read things that are going to upset you. Don't read political novels. Um, and gratitude. Think of 3 things that you're grateful for. Maybe you're grateful that you joined the sleep challenge. You know, maybe you're grateful that you're actually finally drawing attention to your sleep and you're on your own health journey. Give yourself some grace, okay? You cannot force sleep. You can only create the conditions of safety that allow sleep to happen. That's the whole game. Safety. So here's your day 2 mission. Cut caffeine 8 hours before bed. Finish dinner 3 hours before bed. Take 200 to 400 milligrams of magnesium bisglycinate 1 hour before bedtime. No screens 2 to 3 hours before bed, and definitely no screens in bed. Set your room temperature 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Phone out of the room or 6 to 8 feet from your head, minimum on airplane mode. Remember, when you put it in airplane mode, go separately in and turn off the Bluetooth and your, your data, your data collection. If you have an alarm, the phone will still the alarm will still go off in the morning, 8 feet from your head. Screenshot this slide right now, or better yet, it's all in your PDF guide. Just print it, put it on your fridge. So, mission accepted. I want you to type that if you're going to do this tonight. I want to hold you accountable. So type into the chat, mission accepted, if you're going to do it. Let me see it. I want to see mission accepted, mission accepted, mission accepted. All right, so we've got some, we've got some Healthy volunteers. Um, some of you may, uh, have done everything right and you have not fully transformed yet. That's okay. That's expected. Your body's been in a pattern maybe for years, maybe for some of you even decades. 2 days will move the needle, but full transformation does take longer. So now just commit to this protocol for 4 weeks. 4 weeks of consistent wake times, 4 weeks of consistent morning light. 4 weeks of the evening countdown, 4 weeks of protecting your sleep environment. Your PDF guide has everything that you need. It's free. Print it out. Just follow it daily. At the end of the 4 weeks, you will not recognize your sleep self. I promise you that. And if you're tracking your sleep like I am, you will see noticeable differences in, in your sleep pattern. This is why I started sending you guys my sleep scores leading into the sleep challenge. Now, No, um, you know more about, uh, your sleep now than most people will ever know. You have the science, you have the protocol, you have the PDF guide. But here's the truth: information without support fades. Life gets super busy, old habits creep back, and that's why I built the VIP community. Inside my VIP community, you get monthly live coaching calls directly with me. You get the complete 10-month Becoming the Ultimate Human coaching course. It's all in the VIP for free. Once you're a VIP, you get every protocol I've ever created. Mold detox, heavy metal detox. You get the 24-hour day, 7-day a week, ask Gary anything AI. I want to tell you something about that AI too. I have never let it crawl the web. If you know anything about ChatGPT and other— and some of these other large language models, they will lie to you. They pull from public information, they pull from advertisements, they pull from YouTube short videos. So I didn't want that to happen. I fed it the research on my own. It's read every white paper I've ever written, stage talk, podcast, lecture, interview, all of it. So you get exclusive podcast content and you get member-only discounts on anything that I promote. No contracts, no commitments. You can cancel any time. So VIPs, stay on. We're about to go deep for our VIPs staying on. Thank you so much. This is where it's about to get personal for you. We're walking through the complete sleep tracking guide right now. Live. I'm going to show you exactly how to track your sleep, what numbers to look for, and how to troubleshoot it when something isn't working. This is the stuff you can't get from YouTube videos. This is live, real-time coaching. Let's go.