E05: Legendary Leader: "The Sleep Doctor"

Thanks for joining us today on Street Smarts with Harvey Mackay, where the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement. And now here's your host, managing partner and co founder of harveymckayacademy.com, cliff Jones.

Hello, everybody. I'm Cliff Jones, managing partner at Harvey Mackay. And with me today is Dr. Michael Bruce, aka the Sleep Doctor. Michael, how are you doing today?

I'm great, Cliff. Thanks for having me on the show.

You're the only sleep doctor I've ever met. I think I could speak and say the same for Harvey. It's a pleasure to have you with us today. The goal of this conversation is really to help our audience, anybody watching or listening to this, to really understand who you are, how you got into your field, what it is you do. And before you do that, let me just read a quick bio so our audience knows who you are from this perspective. So you're a double board certified clinical psychologist and clinical sleep specialist.

Correct.

Only 168 psychologists in the world with these credentials.

Right.

Author of three books, the newest of which we'll talk mostly about. Here is the Power. When I loved it, I figured out I'm a lion, not a dolphin. As I've told you, this is a groundbreaking biohacking book, proving that there is a perfect time to do everything based on your biological chronotype. Early bird versus night owl. Dr. Bruce gives the reader, our readers, his readers, the exact time to check this out. Have sex, run a mile, eat a cheeseburger, buy, sell, ask your boss for a raise, and much more based on over 300 research studies. So this is really the science of sleep?

Sleep, Absolutely.

You're a very popular guy. We had you at Harvey McKay's recent roundtable reunion and you were just a home run for everybody there because you basically showed us why we're so dysfunctional when it comes to sleep. But you're interviewed a lot. You've been in private practice for 18 years, recently located to Los Angeles.

Yep.

And you've done something, 200 plus interviews. Tell us a little bit about your experience in getting into the field of sleep doctor.

So you don't just wake up one day 20 something years ago and say, hey, I want to be a sleep doctor. Right. It doesn't really work that way. The field really wasn't even that big that long ago. So I'll tell you kind of the story. It was rather, as most things are in my life, very serendipitous. So I'm at graduate school getting my Ph.D. in clinical psychology. And I'm doing it in two departments. I'm in the clinical psychology department, but I'm also in the sports psychology department. I'm really interested in helping athletes visualize and learn better and all this kind of stuff. I'm thinking, this is going to be cool. I'm going to be hanging out with athletes. It's going to be awesome. The best residency. So once you finish your PhD, you do a residency program somewhat similar to what an MD does. And the best residency program for the area I was interested in, which was athletes and eating disorders, was of all places, the University of Mississippi Medical center in Jackson, Mississippi. Now didn't bother me. I was at the University of Georgia. I'm originally from Sandy Springs, Georgia. So the south is home to me and not too far from the home of Elvis at that point. So I'm in. Right. But here was the thing is that only the Princetons and the Harvards and the Yales got into this program. This was the top, top, top program. I went to University of Georgia. It was a top 20 school, but it wasn't Harvard, Princeton and Yale. They had a sleep track that was available. I had worked my way through graduate school in the electrophysiology department. I like to take stuff apart and put it back together and understand how signals come out of the body. I'm kind of a geek that way. I sold myself as a sleep guy, figuring once I got there, I would transfer into the sports psychology program. Because what are they going to do, kick me out? I'm already part of the program. I figure I'm going to do an end around. Nothing's going to stop me. So I get there and I start my rotation in sleep, planning to transfer. And by the third day, I absolutely fell in love with clinical sleep medicine. And I knew that was where I wanted to spend the rest of my career. Cliff, I have an opportunity to do something that very few people have the opportunity to do. I help people like that. It's unbelievable how quickly somebody. I can move somebody from a bad sleep position to into a very good sleep situation. And sometimes it's literally 24 hours. I mean, I've treated people that quickly before. And, you know, it's a real gift to have the opportunity to be able to do something like that. And so I've been just really fortunate being able to kind of spread the word. Thanks for having me on your show. And, you know, allowing me to kind of talk to people about the importance of sleep. And so that's really kind of how it all started. Went back and was practicing for about 6, 7 years in Georgia and actually got asked, of all things to do, to work for a company called WebMD. If you're familiar with WebMD. Back in the day, WebMD was called Medscape, and they had these things called message boards. And so I was hired by WebMD to create a message board for sleep. So I answered over 6,000 questions manually typing away on WebMD. A course of across about 15 years of working there with those guys. And I had a great opportunity to be surrounded by really heavy thinkers and people like that. But while I was there, WebMD became quite popular, and all the news stations started to call WebMD to look for experts because it was an easy central place to find medical experts. And so that was kind of how I started to launch my media career. And I've been doing media, gosh ever since, probably 15 years. And it really all started kind of that way. It was just sort of happenstance. And then all of a sudden, there I was.

Well, clearly you're the leader in your field, safe to say. I mean, I haven't. None of us, when you spoke, had ever heard of a sleep doctor. So we thought we knew a little bit about sleep, mainly that we don't sleep enough. A lot of us wear that as kinds of badge of honor. But tell us, what is sleep and how the heck does it work? Because there's a lot of stuff out there.

Yeah, there is. There is. So it's really interesting and it's actually quite so. It turns out that there are two distinct systems in the brain. One is a drive. A lot like hunger, right? So I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry. I eat something, and then that drive begins to dissipate. The same holds true with sleep as you get sleepier and sleepier and sleepier throughout the day. And then over the course of the night, that sleepiness fades away. It turns out this is actually a neurochemical process. So when a cell eats something, something comes out the back end. One of those things is called adenosine. Adenosine works its way through your system and goes to a very specific receptor site in your brain. As it populates and gets more and more, you get sleepier and sleepier and sleepier. For folks out there who are total geeks like me, if you look at the molecular structure of adenosine and the molecular structure of caffeine, they're off by one molecule. Caffeine actually fits quite nicely into that little receptor site and can block that adenosine which is one of the reasons why caffeine makes you stop feeling sleepy. But that's drive. There's a whole separate system called your rhythm, and that's what we're going to talk a lot about today. Also called your circadian rhythm or your chrono rhythm. This has to do with your body's internal biological clock. If you ever notice that you kind of get hungry around breakfast time, around lunchtime, around dinner time, that's your circadian system telling you what to do. Same holds true with sleep. Most people get sleepy somewhere between 10:30 and 11:30 at night. When your circadian system is working well and the drive system is working well, and there's balance, you sleep. But if either one of these is off, that's when you get a sleep disorder, or what I call disordered sleep. There's a difference. A sleep disorder is apnea, narcolepsy, insomnia. Disordered sleep is. I don't know what's going on, but I wake up and I feel like crap. That's a whole different topic, which is actually an area of specialty for me as well. We're going to talk about that a little bit today. But that's really kind of how sleep works, is based off of these two systems. Now, most people out there have had an experience where one of these systems was off. Let's go with a quick example. Have you ever had the situation where you're just dog tired, Cliff? I mean, you're exhausted, and you say to yourself, I'm just going to get in bed early because I'm so tired. I didn't get great sleep last night. Maybe I was out in the garden or working out or whatever. So you get in bed like two hours early, and then one of two things happens. Either you fall asleep for about 45 minutes, then you wake up and you're up for the rest of the night. Or you can't fall asleep. That's because you've got too much drive. That's making you tired. But your rhythm is off because you're going to bed two hours early. That's kind of a situation where we see that imbalance occur in many people's everyday lives. So it's actually pretty pertinent when we think about it. And of course, sleep affects every single thing that we do. As I like to say, everything you do, you do better with a good night's sleep.

Well, you write and talk a lot about the measures of sleep. My measure is, hey, how do I feel when I hit the ground running in the Morning. So I'm sure that's an important measure. But how do we measure sleep?

It's really complicated and it's unfortunate that it is so complicated because here, the way society seems to work is we know what a pound is, we know what a calorie is, we know what a step is. And those things are fairly easy to track. You know, we've got the devices on our wrists, we got, there's rings, there's stuff. You can track just about anything these days. But if I ask you how did you sleep last night? You're not going to say a 46, you're not going to say a 97. But if I ask you how many steps you took yesterday, you say, oh, I hit my mark of 10,000 steps. So it's really hard to metric sleep. That's one of the things that's been a problem. However, for our purposes here, let's talk a little bit about the sleep stages because that's going to be an important factor for later on in our talk. Sleep stages are really interesting. We actually go through all of the stages in a very particular order. We go from wake to stage one to stage two, down into stage three, four back to two, and then on into REM sleep. That little dance maneuver, if you will, takes approximately 90 minutes. It takes the average individual five of those cycles to make it through the night. Five times 90 is around 450 minutes, divided by 60 is seven and a half hours. So the first thing I want to tell everybody is eight hours is a myth, okay? You do not have to get eight hours. I mean, just doing the math, on average is less than eight hours. It's seven and a half hours. If I can, I want to teach everybody a quick experiment to figure out what their bedtime should be is. Everybody has a socially determined wake up time, right? So for me, it's around 6:00 in the morning. 6:30 in the morning. Because that's when my kids got to get up to go to school. So if you count backwards, let's say make the math simple. From 6:30, 7 1/2 hours, 11:00 clock becomes my bedtime. So I tried this experiment. It failed miserably. All right? I went to bed at 11, I woke up at 5:30. I went to bed at 11. The next night I woke up at 5:30 dot Cliff, the only thing I hate more than mornings are morning people, okay? It's the worst. All right? You're all chipper in the morning. I'm not a morning guy. I'm an Evening guy for sure. So I move the bedtime to midnight and lo and behold, boom. I wake up at 6:30 every morning. So if people want to run that experiment of going backwards from their socially determined wake up time by seven and a half hours and see, can you wake up without an alarm, that's going to be critical. I haven't used an alarm in almost 15 years. And by the way, I get up at the same time on the weekends and as I do during the week. And that's one of the most critical components of why I only need six and a half hours. I mean, let's face it, I, I'm the sleep doctor for God's sakes. I should be sleeping 8, 9, 10 hours. My body actually doesn't need that. And I hope everybody out there can figure out for themselves as well.

So how do we use this to our advantage?

There's lots of ways to use this to our advantage. One of the biggest ones I think is now we have a little bit more time in the day, right? And so when you look at how much time you have to access and what you want to do, there's a lot of different things. People always tell me, oh, I don't have time to work out, I don't have time to learn about nutrition, I don't have time to go to Harvey McKay's Academy because it's going to take so much time. No, no, no, no, no. This actually opens up more time in your day than you normally would have had. And when we start to talk about chronotypes and what exact time of day you want to be doing these things in, it becomes even more efficient.

So efficiency is measured. I mean, when people come to you, what are they telling you isn't working? Because I could talk about me, but.

In your work, the number one request I get these days is sleep for peak performance. So Michael, how do I get eight in six, right? Is a question that I get all the time. How do I change what my genetics want me to do? So number one, don't try to fool Mother Nature. Our genetics are what our genetics are. Our bodies will need different amounts of sleep. I'm a six and a half hour person. Somebody out there might be a seven hour and 15 minute person. So I wouldn't say that we want to mess around too much with it. But again, running the experiments and becoming more efficient seems to be one of the biggest topics that I've been getting quite a bit lately. Also, people are interested in napping. So if you can't get all the sleep that you want at night, is it okay to take a nap during the day? When should you do it? What are the procedures for that? Got a whole guide on that as well.

Tell us about getting ready for bed. Is that a big deal?

Absolutely. How important is that? So what we have to remember is sleep is not an on, off switch. It's more like slowly pulling your foot off the gas and slowly putting your foot on the brake. There's a process that needs to occur there. So as an example, if you fall asleep in less than five minutes, that's actually not a good sign. That means you're sleep deprived, right? It should take you a good 15 or 20 minutes to fall asleep if you're going to bed at the right time for you have the right amount of sleep prior to. So when you start to think through some of these ideas, they get pretty compelling.

So let's shift gears for a little bit. Harvey McKay, like you road warriors, you're on the road, traveling, speaking, saving us, right? Talk about sleep and how we get most messed up when we travel.

So there's at least three different areas that we need to think about for sleep and travel. So the first one is getting that point of transportation, right? So getting on an airplane, getting on a train, getting in a car. What are we doing here? If you're on an airplane, one of the first questions people ask me is, what seat do I get for better sleep, right? Well, believe it or not, there's a website for this. It's called seatguru.com and if you plug in your flight information, it will actually bring up a schematic of the plane fuselage itself with red, yellow, and green markings for seats. And it'll tell you, this one's noisy. This one's got more leg room. This one's better for sleep. So one of my favorite, favorite things to do is, and I actually do this almost every flight, is I look up my seat on seat guru, and then I might manipulate it or switch it around. That's number one. Number two, I bring a sleep kit with me. So what's in my sleep kit that I bring with me? A couple of different things. And it doesn't have to be an extensive kit. So I bring eye shades and earplugs just because you never know who's going to be next to you. And sometimes I don't even use the earplugs. I'll use my headphones because I want to be listening to some type of meditation or guided imagery or something like that. I also Bring a pair of socks, because on airplanes these days my feet just get cold and I try to wear something that's not really binding. I'll loosen my belt or maybe I wear sweats on the plane or scrubs or something like that just to really allow myself. Especially for long plane flights. It can be incredibly helpful. The other thing I like to do is I like to try to get a seat towards the window. I'm only 5 9, so I can fit in one of those seats very comfortably. And it's easy because I can put my head against the side of the fuselage and be able to fall asleep. I always bring an extra jacket that I can ball up and use as a pillow. Or sometimes I'll bring a blow up cervical pillow. Now one of the tricks that I've learned a while ago, I don't know if you've ever had this experience, Cliff, but you're on an airplane and. And as you close your eyes and fall asleep, your head just kind of keeps bobbing back and forth.

Oh yeah, I try to meditate. Right.

So here's what you do is take that normal cervical pillow that's around here and rotate it so that the thick part is underneath your chin. Because what ends up happening is it keeps your chin and you don't do this, you just kind of land and then you're fine and it doesn't wake you up. There's not a lot of head bobbing going on. It looks a little ridiculous, but it works really well.

Now we're landing, we get to the hotel. Let's talk about hotels.

So when we look at hotels, there's a lot of different things going on, going on there. So first of all, when you make your reservation for your hotel, nine times out of 10 you're talking to a call center. You're not actually talking to somebody at the property itself. So once you've made your reservation, call the front desk of the property that you're going to be going to a couple of nights before you're going there. Talk to the front desk person who's on the desk at night. There's a couple of reasons that you want to do this. Number one is they know their property better than any call center is going to. And when you get them on the phone, you ask their name, find out who they are, find out if they're going to be working on the night that you're coming in, and then say, hey, I'm going to be exhausted, I'll be traveling. I really need a super quiet room. They'll know what the quietest room is in the hotel by far. Couple of hints, though. If you don't get a chance to call them, higher is better because you don't have as much street noise. You want to be facing west, not east, because the sun rises in the east and you don't want to get that sunlight that zaps you in between your eyes in the morning. Always ask if your neighbors have small children or if there's multiple people in the room next to you because from a noise factor, you don't want to be next to like the Pee wee hockey team because you'll never get any rest. And if you can, ask for a corner room because then you only have one neighbor as opposed to being surrounded by two neighbors, obviously. Try to stay away from the elevators and the ice machines and the vending and things like that if you possibly can. And my favorite thing to do is if I have called ahead and identified somebody who's going to be working on the front desk when I show up. I always make sure that I bring like a five dollar. I have a bunch. I have a stack of them like Starbucks gift cards that I keep in my briefcase and I thank them by giving them a Starbucks gift card, like a $5 or something. You would be shocked at how far $5 will get you at the front desk of a hotel because nobody ever thinks about these people. And let me tell you something, I've gotten upgrades to like the presidential suite off of a $5 Starbucks cart because nobody's using it that night and I'm the only guy who was nice to the front desk. So remember, everybody's a person and we need to all. We're all working together here to make things happen. So that's a recommendation there.

That's a phenomenal one. Sorry, go ahead.

The final one is jet lag, right? So how far are we traveling? What direction are we traveling? And how could that affect our internal biological circadian rhythm? So jet lag. So just so that you know, naturally your body will self adjust one hour per day. Right. And so if you cross three time zones, it'll take your body roughly three days to be able to adjust to something like that. Interestingly, it depends upon the direction of travel. So the way I think of it is east is least and west is best. If you're traveling from New York to Los Angeles, all you're doing is asking your body to stay up a little bit later. That's easy for most people. I mean, if I told you, hey, I need you to stay up until 12:30, 1:00 clock in the morning, your normal bedtime was 10. You could probably do it. The opposite however, is true. When you're traveling east, then you're being asked to put your body to bed earlier, which is not so easy. If I turn to you and your normal bedtime is 10, I say, hey, go to bed at 6:30 tonight. You might be able to take a nap, but that'd be about it. And so it's very different based on travel. I will tell you that there's a new app that came out that I'm playing around with in full transparency. I'm part of that company. It's called Timeshifter. It's really cool. And where it's launching, actually I think it's launching this month. And so it's really interesting because you put in your time, you put in where you are, you put in where you're going. It can even help you pick flights that will give you less jet lag based on your own sleep schedule. And then it'll give you recommendations of what to do on the plane and then once you arrive in your hotel. So it's really pretty awesome. Personally, I use light therapy, melatonin, caffeine and naps to really alter my jet lag. So as an example, sometimes I do trips to Asia, 12, 14 hour flights. So it becomes critical to really understand how to utilize jet lag. It gets a little complicated, but honestly I use light like a cup of coffee to help wake me up and reset my clock. Of course I do use caffeine to help give me some energy during those low points in the day. And I'll use melatonin to help readjust my clock on the other side and help me fall asleep. For melatonin, by the way, people, you want to use a half to one and a half milligrams, no more. That's going to be hard to find because most of it is sold in 3, 5 and 10 milligram dosages. You don't need that much between a half and one and a half milligrams. Taking about 90 minutes before you want to go to bed in your destination is going to be the best.

I'm taking notes because I learn so much every time I get to talk to you. Okay, so I want to talk about your book because I read it a couple of times, I got a chance to write an article about it.

I know, thank you.

That's all over the planet now. Your book and I'm sure they're selling like hotcakes so let's get into chronotypes. Am I saying that?

Yeah. Chronotype or chronotype? Either one.

And you know, you're coming off the whole travel thing. A lot of us are road warriors, not me, but a lot of our guys and women are. So let's talk about that and dive into your book.

Actually, this is a perfect segue because when we travel, and we travel time zones, right, depending upon what our chronotype is, that can have an effect. Now for folks out there, they may not have heard the word chronotype before, but you actually know what it is. If you've ever heard of somebody being called an early bird or a night owl, those are chronotypes. So what I did was I actually discovered a fourth chronotype. So there's early birds, there's people in the middle, there's night owls. And then I added people with insomnia to the mix. Now here's where it got really interesting was I'm not a bird, I'm a mammal. And so I wanted to choose mammalian characteristics that I could identify with. So I actually chose animals from the animal kingdom. And believe it or not, these animals actually have these chronotypes themselves. So early birds are replaced by people that I call lions, which you have identified as yourself, as a lion. Let me tell everybody what a lion is. Lions make up roughly 15% of the population. And these are my coos of a company. These are the people that manage people really well. They get stuff done. They're able to tell people, hey, I need you to do this. They're good at project management. They may not be as good at the finite details or the actual work product itself, but they're really good at managing big projects, getting things done, coordination, things like that. They're also a little bit on the militant side as far as what they like to do. They make a list usually every day, and they go from step one to step two to step three to step four. Very in line. Oftentimes a type A personality again, Go, go, go. These people will wake up at 4:35 o' clock in the morning, no problem, no alarm, hit the ground running type of thing. The problem, however, with being a lion, it sounds great to be a lion, right? Everybody's. And believe it or not, people have lion envy. Cliff. Lion envy is out there, right? It sounds like it's great to be a lion. Socially, it's not so hot. Dinner and a movie is out for lion.

I nailed it. I'm telling you, Michael, that is So I am the worst company after 6:00pm, right.

If I want to hang out with you at 4:30 in the morning, you are on it. But if I want to hang out with you at 8 o' clock at night and go see what's the new movie, Deadpool or Avengers or something like that, you'll never make it through.

I won't.

And so that's the big Achilles heel, if you will, for my lions is yeah, they're super good, high energy focused people in the morning and they are a lot of times my leaders, but socially they're just not up for it at all. In the middle are what I call my bears. Bears make up 4,55% of the population. So quite honestly, being a bear is the best you can be. And I'll explain why the entire world operates on a bear's schedule. A Bear's schedule is 9 to 5, it's waking up at 7, 7:30, going to bed at 10, 10:30, working your hours. You know what society seems to be doing now, what are bears? Bears turn out to be extroverts, they're fairly gregarious, they're out there kind of people. These are the people that actually do the work that the lions manage. More times than not. Bears are super duper social. They love to go out to dinner, they'll be the first person who's buying somebody a drink at the bar, that kind of stuff. Really good group of people and they make up the largest group of people. So they have the fewest problems in terms of trying to discover what's their optimal time for alertness or their optimal time for sleep because their bodies are really in conjunction with society quite nicely. The next chronotype are called the wolves, which is the replacement for the night owls. Now I will be the first person to tell you that I am a wolf and I always have been. I actually have been a wolf ever since I was a teenager, which kind of brings up an interesting point. I've got two teenagers, I have a 16 year old son and a 14 year old daughter. And all teenagers want to stay up late and sleep late, right? And that's exactly what my body wants to do in general as well because I only need about six and a half hours of sleep. I just go to bed at midnight, right? And a lot of people, that's a very late bedtime, but I literally can't close my eyes before midnight. Let me tell you about wolves. We're difficult people, we don't like mornings at all. As I often say to people, the Only thing I hate worse than mornings are morning people because they're so damn chipper like you in the mornings, Cliff. Not that I dislike you, you know, I like you quite a bit.

Thank you.

But wolves are very interesting. We have a tendency to be very creative, but also introverted. I have less of issues with introversion unless I'm in like a social situation. If I'm on stage, I'm the most animated guy around. But if I'm in a social situation, I'm gonna hang back a little, be a little bit more quiet. But we're super creative. All of my wolves are actors, authors, musicians, people who do a lot of people in advertising, people in marketing. A lot of those people are my wolves. Turns out a lot of my entrepreneurs are wolves. Wolves have great vision. We're the people that see huge ideas, but we need lions on our team to help us get those ideas accomplished. So we're oftentimes big picture, big vision people. And if we make a list, we go from step one to step 12 to step seven to step 15, and it makes perfect sense to us. But if a lion was sitting right next to me, it would drive them fricking crazy. Okay. We're also big risk takers and we're big decision makers. We like to be in that whole sort of realm. The biggest problem for us is mornings just suck. We just can't get it together in the mornings. It's very, very difficult. A lot of times wolves are drinking a tremendous amount of caffeine in the morning just to kind of get them to wake up. We also have a tendency to have more medical issues and more mental health issues, more depression and anxiety. Has a tendency to be in the wolf chronotype, as do medical issues, immune system dysfunction, things of that nature. The final chronotype, they make up about another 15%. The final chronotype are dolphins. I chose dolphins for a very particular reason. Most people don't know this, but dolphins actually sleep uni hemispherically. So half of their brain is asleep while the other half is awake and looking for predators. And. And I thought that was kind of a unique representation of people who don't get great sleep, who are my insomniacs. Dolphins are my problem children, generally speaking. And I really wrote the Power of When primarily for people like that, which was pretty interesting group of people to work with. But my dolphins are a lot like my lions. They're type A personality. They're get it done kind of people. They make that list and they follow that list. However, dolphins have Got just enough obsessive compulsive nature to them that their projects are never finished. Nothing is ready to turn in, nothing is good enough. And they kind of get stuck in this spiral of I got to fix it, I got to edit it, I got to fix it, I got to edit it. Whereas if anybody was looking over their shoulder at their work product, they would be like, dude, that's 10 times better than anything I've ever seen. Can you just turn it in already so we can get going? But dolphins aren't like that. They're a little bit higher on the anxious side of things. Most of the time they're insomniacs and they really have somewhat of a difficult time. But also the other thing to note is lions in the animal kingdom actually do wake up before dawn. First kill is before dawn. Bears wake up with the sun and go to sleep with the moon. Wolves are primarily nocturnal hunters, so they're hunting at night. And again, dolphins only swim with half their brain.

One big happy animal kingdom. We're among them all, aren't we?

Exactly.

Okay, so I thought initially reading your book, which is why I dove through it a second time, that I was a dolphin, went deeper, turned out to be the lion. Are there hybrids? And then how do you earlier talking about personality characteristics of these chronotypes, these sleep types. So how does that impact the workplace when we're leading people?

So first of all, to answer your first question, yes, there are hybrids. It's interesting I've discovered, because bears make up 55% of the population, it feels like there are early bears and there are late bears. So there are people who are bears who they like to get up at 6 in the morning, but then they follow all the other bear characteristics, or they like to go to bed at 11:30, 12:00 clock at night, but they follow all the other bear characteristics. So within that there's definitely sort of early bear, late bear. As far as true hybrids, yes, there can be some. But remember something, Cliff, this is all actually based on genetics. So it's something called the PER3 gene. The length of that gene actually determines our sleep drive or the amount that our body needs for sleep, which by the way is different for every person. That's why you can't just say eight hours for everybody. And so I based all this on the genetic componentry of this particular genetic expression called the PER3 gene. And that helps us understand that yes, there can be hybrids, but generally speaking, people should fall into that cat, into one of those four categories. If you're having a hard time figuring out your category. Look at your parents. Remember you're 50% of each one of them. So if you like when I was growing up, if I walked into my parents bedroom at 12:30 at night, they were both wide awake reading a book. Like there was nothing uncommon about that. Same with, when you look at other members of your family, you'll be able to start to see kind of how your family tribe, if you will, kind of fits in. Now a great question that you asked, which is, what do you do with these people at work? So it's been very, very interesting. Right now we see that a lot of people are actually taking the quiz and having all of their employees take the quiz. Once they do that, then we see them categorizing people by their chronotype and then doing meeting schedules by their chronotype, right? So if you've got a group of wolves who would probably be in your advertising, marketing, sort of that creative section of your business, don't have an 8am meeting on Monday morning. Number one, they will hate you and they will never listen to a word you say. Number two, they're all asleep. Their brains don't click on that.

Great point because I'm chomping at the bit to get going. I'm two time zones ahead of people and they're basically going to sleep.

They're asleep, right? Yeah. And here's the biggest frustration is you lay out an awesome plan, very detailed, because you're aligned. I want you to do this, then this, then this, then this. They're not hearing a word you're saying. And so as the lion leader, you need to know what your employees are doing because if you hit them at the right times of day with information, you will get them to become more productive. And we've seen that happen. So understanding who your employees are. Now, if you're not comfortable saying, hey, everybody, take the quiz. Some things you can probably figure out just by asking a couple of quick questions, right? What time do you go to bed? What time do you wake up? Things like that can actually be very helpful or noticing people. If you run an 8 o' clock meeting on Tuesday mornings and maybe a third of people fall asleep, you're probably looking at a bunch of wolves sitting in there, not a bunch of lions, right? And so, hey, be smart. Just because it works on your schedule to have the meeting at 8am Mr. Lion doesn't mean that your employees who are doing the work are going to be ready and able. So figure out what their schedule is and see, see if you can adapt some of that to their schedule. Because there are on times, for example, for a lion that are in the mid afternoon, between 2 and 4 in the afternoon is a great on time. For lions, it's kind of their last energy burst of the day and that's when wolves are hitting their stride. So there's ways that you can manipulate it. And I've worked with some companies and I'm happy to work with more.

It's huge insight from a leadership perspective because if I understand who my people are, you understand who your people are. We can, we can make realistic demands and then work to optimize their learning and behavior. I'm curious, who is my detailed techie guy woman on our team? That's not a lion. Who can I count on to get stuff done? Because I imagine everybody gets stuff done no matter when they sleep. But what's my normal chronotype for that? I guess it's a late night person who's detail oriented.

Yeah. So it's either going to be a late bear, an early wolf. Right. So my late bears are again my get it done people. And some of them can be very, very functional later on in the day. So if you've identified somebody as a bear and then they say, yeah, I don't like to go to bed before 11:30 at night, then the second half of the day, that's the person that you can count on for sure because they're there and they're ready to rock and roll. Wolves are going to. Wolves would be good in that situation. Only if they're super drilled in and super techy kind of people. Right. Which some of them are. But most of them are more artistic, kind of more flamboyant, more creative.

Okay. So I have this habit I've developed by watching my mother in particular learn to meditate. So, right. If I, if I begin hitting a wall, I have this. I can meditate and recharge. You talk about that in your book. Let's talk about that now. If. Is that a healthy habit or are we kidding ourselves?

No, here's the thing is there's a lot of different kinds of naps out there. Are you saying. Wait a second, Michael, we're talking about meditation. We're not talking about.

Yeah, but my meditations, I'm like, I'm not off on occasion and I'm okay with that.

Exactly. Periods of quiescence or quiet are very, very valuable for all of us. And getting our heads centered and becoming mindful and being present turns out to be probably the most productive time that you can possibly have for yourself. And honestly, meditation does that. Meditation is historically known for kind of bringing people to center, bringing people to the present. So I'm a huge fan of meditations. And sometimes I'm having people do meditations during the daytime. So as an example, somebody's like, oh my gosh, I am dragon. You know, it's 1 1:30 in the afternoon, which by the way, biologically speak 3 o'. Clock. Yeah. Between 1 and 3 there's a core body temperature drop and that actually signals your brain to release melatonin. So you're not sleep because you're lazy. You're sleepy because there's a slight melatonin there. So one of the best things that you can do, super secret hack here, is to go outside, get direct sunlight, because remember, sunlight turns off the melatonin faucet in your brain and meditate while you're out there for 10 minutes.

Wow, what a great hack. Because if I do it inside right, the mark is 19, 20 minutes. Magic. If I'm just exhausted, I'm done.

Right. Outdoor meditation and you know, as the, as the seasons allow for it, that'll work. Or just change your environment and someplace with a lot of bright light. Because remember, bright light turns off that melatonin in your brain.

Now how do we catch up? Can we catch up on missed sleep?

Yes and no. So here's the thing is if you do the experiment and you know your body needs, let's say we're taking me for example, my body needs six and a half hours of sleep. If I get five and a half for any extended period of time, it's just not good. Here's what happens when you don't get enough sleep or you become sleep deprived. Your ability to recall new memories drops by almost 40. Reaction time is increased by about 33%. So you're 33% slower, not faster. The more sleep deprived you are from a decision making standpoint, you make riskier decisions, the more sleep deprived you become. So all of these situations kind of beg the idea of getting a good amount of sleep at night, getting the right amount of sleep for you, and not having to try to catch up on the weekends or, or things like that. But let's say you have a bad situation, a flight was canceled, you had to get up early, you had to get on a plane, you had to get somewhere. What do you do? Napping is actually a really good idea in these situations. Strategic napping is what I call it. And I'm going To give everybody another one of my fun little hacks here. I call it the napa latte. All right? And here's what you do, is you get a cup of drip black coffee. It's got the highest caffeine content, no sugar, no chemicals, nothing. Just black coffee. Throw in three ice cubes to cool it down, slug it, drink the whole thing back as quickly as you can, use the ice cubes just to cool it down, then close your eyes and take a 25 minute nap. Remember in the beginning of our talk we talked about adenosine and caffeine. Here's what this does, which is so brilliant, is during the 25 minute nap, it eats through the amount of adenosine that's up there and then the caffeine is waiting, it slips in, you're good for four hours, guaranteed.

So wait, I'm going to. Let me get this straight so I can deploy this later today because I know I'm going to need it. I hit the ground running at 2. It was way too early. My sleep is off. Now I'm hitting the ground too early. 2, 3am Busy brain, lots going on with Ari McKay Academy.

Right?

So. So I don't want to drink caffeine late in the day to power through.

So do it in conjunction with the nap at about between 1 and 3 in the afternoon for you, it might be earlier because you got up so doggone early, but it's just a cup of black coffee, cooled down, plug it, 25 minute nap, I promise you.

Wow. So I'm going to hit the ground running because when I. Sometimes when I'm really tired, I get out of that 20 minute thing, I'm groggy and it takes me a half hour.

Not anymore.

Wow, that's a great suggestion. Now coffee, you know, one day we read it's good thing, next day it's.

Not good coffee Overall, there's nothing wrong with coffee overall. It's all about what are you using it for. So if you're using it for the caffeine to give you a boost, the data is very consistent. Small doses multiple times throughout the day will give you that elevation and performance. Big doses at the beginning of the day just give you the jitters, make your stomach upset, make you have to go to the bathroom, things like that. So people who are pulling down these venti mocha frappa whatevers. No, no, no, no, no. Here's what you want. You want a 6 to 8 ounce cup of coffee. I by the way, tell people you should drink it 90 minutes after you wake up, not right after you wake up. A couple of reasons why. In our breath, as we're breathing at night, we actually breathe out the humidity. We breathe out almost a full liter of water at night, so we wake up dehydrated. If we add caffeine to that dehydration, it gets us more dehydrated. Drink a 12 to 16 ounce bottle of water right when you wake up. Get some sunlight to turn that melatonin faucet off. Then once you've gotten into your day or you're driving to work, or you've gotten there after about 90 minutes of being awake, then have your cup of coffee. Turns out that in order to come out of a state of unconsciousness, you need adrenaline and cortisol and those are very, very high. Right when you wake up. When you add caffeine to that, it doesn't do a whole lot of good. But when the adrenaline and cortisol start to dip, which happens roughly 90 minutes after you wake up, adding caffeine actually lifts those back up and makes it far more effective.

So I hear a lot about people eating, you know, late at night, can't sleep, they're nervous whatever they eat. How does, what do you suggest in terms of great eating habits and hydration that affect sleep quality?

So hydration turns out to be a big, big factor. But you got to be careful. You don't want to be drinking, you know, a gallon of water two hours per before bed because you're going to be waking up and peeing all night long. So kind of thinking through the limits there. Hydration turns out to be super duper important. Oh, and one more thing about coffee is caffeine has a half life of between six and eight hours. So you really should be limiting your coffee by about two or three o'clock in the afternoon. If you can go decaf by then, you're going to be in much better shape, food wise. The data is very, very consistent depending upon what your nutrition goals might be. If your goals are weight loss or maintenance or weight gain, you're going to have different items of food that you're going to want to be taking. And believe it or not, different times of day when you're going to want to be eating. So there was a really interesting study looking at animal data and what they did said was they put these three groups of mice in these cages and they all had access to the same amount of food, same calories of food, same everything. One group free running, they could eat whenever they wanted to. One group only had access during a 12 hour period. The other group only had access during an eight hour period. Here's what ended up happening. Free running, gained weight. Same amount of food, same calories. And by the way, these were genetically identical rodents. The 12 hour group maintained their weight. The 8 hour group lost weight. Same food that gained weight for free running lost it when they were only eating in this eight hour window. I go through this in detail in the book, but there are actually times that are better depending on. So if you're a lion like you, you're going to want to be eating your healthy breakfast probably within about 90 minutes or so of you waking up, right? So that's when you'd have your coffee, things like that. But you know, be having it sort of in there somewhere, maybe a little bit earlier. Whereas if you're a wolf like me, I can't eat breakfast, dude. Like, I can't stomach it. I have a green drink and that's what I can handle because my body and my brain and my metabolism just isn't ready at that time. Whereas for a lion, the fire is burning, for me, it's smoldering. Putting a big meal on top of that just kind of puts the fire out. Understanding your chronotype can also give you some really good insights as to the timing of your food. Now, when we look at food choices, some foods are better than others for sleep. First of all, let me dispel a couple of myths, if I may. People always ask me about turkey. Turkey's got tryptophan in it. It's supposed to make you sleepy. You'd have to eat a 46 pound turkey. Okay. In order to get enough tryptophan.

I wondered about that. I specifically don't eat turkey sandwiches because I think it's going to make me tired.

No, it's not. That is not the case. I'm opening up your window of menu options.

I'm ordering it for lunch today. Hey, I got to ask.

I'm going to shift gears, okay.

Because this is important. I want to make sure we cover it. Benadryl?

Yes.

Booze. Stuff that people do to take the edge off or whatever. How's it hurting or helping in sleep?

Sure, sure, sure. Real quick on the food side of things. Warm milk is another one. You'd have to drink a gallon and a half of milk in order for it to have enough tryptophan. So it's really the process of who was giving you that warm up that gives you those good feelings. That would be helpful. Obviously. Stay away from spicy foods at night because it can give you upset stomach and give you indigestion, which can make you have bad sleep. Now, when we're talking about things like, things to put me to sleep, like Benadryl as an example, all of the PM medications that are out there, that's the PM part, is Benadryl. Okay? Remember, Benadryl is an antihistamine. The compound was built to last for 12 hours. Nobody sleeps for 12 hours. So when you take one of those, there's a very high likelihood that you're going to get a hangover the next day, because that's how the compound was built. Like it's supposed to last that long. You're supposed to feel it the next day. So if you don't like that hungover, groggy feeling, Benadryl is not a great idea. Truthfully, if you need to take Benadryl every night for sleep, there's something else going on. You probably want to speak with your doctor about it. When we're looking at did you also want to go into melatonin and herbal supplements or did you want to talk more about alcohol?

Well, I think you touch on both of them. If you could, that'd be great.

Dr. Absolutely. For alcohol. Remember, there's a really big difference between going to sleep and passing out. And we want to keep that difference very, very far apart. I will tell you that the number one sleep aid in the world is alcohol. More people use alcohol to help them fall asleep than any other. A couple of glasses of wine helps me relax, go to bed, couple of beers, spirits, what have you. Here's the thing is, while alcohol makes you feel sleepy, it actually keeps you out of the stages three and four sleep, which is the physically restorative sleep. Half the reason you get a hangover is because you don't get stage three, four sleep. The other half is because you become dehydrated. So for folks out there who want to have a beverage with dinner or with a meal, which, by the way, I'm a big fan of, I'm a scotch guy, a bourbon guy and a wine person. What I tell people all the time is, first of all, remember the average human body, it takes one hour to digest one alcoholic beverage. So if you have two glasses of wine with dinner and you stop your dinner at 8 by 10 o', clock, it's enough out of your system where you're safe to go to bed. So give yourself one hour per beverage before lights out. So whenever you stop, count the number of beverages and that's how many hours until you should go to sleep?

Excellent.

Talk about melatonin.

Yes.

So remember, melatonin is a hormone. It is not a mineral, it is not a vitamin, it is not an herb. It is a hormone. You wouldn't walk down to the local health food store and say, hey, give me some testosterone or give me some estrogen, right? But yet people are using melatonin all the time. Couple of big problems. It's not regulated by the fda, which means I can make it in my garage and I can sell it at the local health food store. And that's a perfectly legal thing to do. So quality becomes of primary importance. Where is it coming from? How is it being produced? Is it up to pharmaceutical grade standards? That's number one. Whatever melatonin you're at, go to the website and find out how they produce it. If they're not willing to tell you, don't take it. Anybody out there who's worth their weight in anything will tell you the process by which they extract their melatonin. And so that way you can understand if it's safe, all those types of things. So that's step number one. Number two, it turns out that 95% of the melatonin is actually produced in an overdosage format. The appropriate dose, like what we were talking about with jet lag, is between a half and one and a half milligrams. Most of it is sold in three, five and ten milligrams. The only place I've been able to find it in the appropriate dose, like commercially available, oddly enough, is Trader Joe's. If you go to Trader Joe's, they have a chewable melatonin that's in 500 micrograms, which is a half of a milligram. So that's a good place for people to go. Remember, melatonin is not a sleep initiator. Melatonin is a sleep regulator. Remember when we were talking in the very beginning about how sleep works? Melatonin doesn't increase your sleep drive. Melatonin tells your circadian rhythm. Get in sync. So that's the big difference. That's why melatonin is great for jet lag. But unless you have a situation where your circadian rhythm is flip flopped, like you're a shift worker or something like that, melatonin is probably not the best sleep aid for you. Now, there's a couple of caveats here. Number one, if you're over age 55, most people over age 55, we see a deterioration of their melatonin production. So melatonin supplementing at night is probably not a bad idea. Remember, 90 minutes before bedtime, before lights out, because it takes that long for plasma concentration levels to get there. Also, in children on the autism spectrum, there's very interesting data now to show. And at high dosages, like 4 and 5 milligrams, these kids respond very, very well. But by the way, that's the only time I would ever recommend melatonin for children. Most people don't know, but at very high dosages, melatonin is actually a contraceptive. I can't think of anything worse for a young female developing body than to introduce a contraceptive at those young ages. So no melatonin for anybody 18 years or less.

Great suggestion. Okay, we're coming to the top of the hour. I have a hundred other questions just like the rest of us.

I told you that was going to happen.

You're a phenomenal speaker and teacher and what you're doing is really important, especially for those of us. Well, for everybody. So how I talked about. We heard you speak. You're a great speaker. You have any upcoming speaking engagements or events you want to tell our audience about or how do people find out about you?

Sure. Well, so first of all, I'm available. People can book me, no problem. If you wander over to My website, the sleepdoctor.com, there's a whole section on speaking and you can see all that kind of fun stuff. I love doing corporate events and coming in and really teaching people how to increase productivity at work based on sleep at home. It doesn't become too personal. A lot of people say, oh, I don't know if I want to know about my employee's private life. We're not really asking intimacy questions ever. We're really more asking procedural sleep questions and how to help manage that during the day. So one of my big talks these days is sleep for peak performance. That's certainly something that I enjoy doing. Of course, people can learn about me from my books. And if people get an opportunity to take the quiz@thepowerofwenquiz.com you can learn what your chronotype is and hopefully be able to help yourself.

That's phenomenal. And if you're watching this video, we'll have links included in the resource center. Michael Bruce, the sleep doctor. We hope to have you back. Will you come back and visit with.

Us much more as many times as you will allow? I will show back up.

Good, good. Well, thank you for your time today. We appreciate you being with us.

Thanks for having me.

Cliff Talk soon.

Thank you for listening to Street Smarts with Harvey McKay. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you consume your favorite audio. Don't forget to leave a positive rating and review before you sign up for your free membership@harveymckayacademy.com. to learn more about Harvey MacKay, make sure to visit www.harveymckayacademY.com. thanks for listening and we'll be back soon with a new episode.

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