#1: Have trouble falling/staying asleep? Start here! (#1)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian. I am sitting here preparing for module six on sleep, one of our core fundamentals. Eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, celebrating, prospering. The seven optimized core fundamentals that make up the fundies of module six in our mastery series for our Optimize Coach program. Hanging out here in the office. We are now in the country outside of Austin. Anyway, I just created a video overview for our head coach, Michael to give him some insights into how I'm thinking about the practice exercises. And I was also thinking about. Here we go. 1000 second timer means we get up, do some burpees. Already did. 88 of them so far today. 8 sets of 11. I will spare you the burpees, but I am excited to share with you some thoughts I'm also considering. I'm bringing philosopher's notes TV back. Gonna keep on doing the plus ones of course. And I had the idea this morning of. You know what, it might be fun to do one of these behind the scenes videos. Kind of like the number one insight from the day. It's a super simple casual like this. What's the biggest takeaway that I've gotten for today? Whether it's from a book I'm reading or a class I'm preparing for, whatever. So long Prelude. Here we go. Sleep. This is the class. It's got a lot of different variables, right? Why we Sleep, why we don't sleep. We're going to lean heavily on the science of sleep. Matthew Walker, why we Sleep, the number one book we recommend to our coaches. Check it out, check out the notes, etc. I'll do a PNTV on that soon. Why we don't sleep. We talk about the 10 sleep Kryptonites, the 10 things that get in the way that we need to deal with. Then we talk about the fact that we're well adjusted. Sleepwalking blind zombies. Short story here is when you're sleep deprived, you don't know how sleep deprived you are. Oh, and by the way, the recommended amount of sleep is seven to nine hours of sleep. Two thirds of people get less than eight hours of sleep. If you consistently get less than six to seven hours of sleep, you double your risk of cancer. There you go. Then we have a brief history of light and blue light. Short story here. The sun was the only source of blue light forever. And then over the last whatever few decades and really hyper accelerated with smartphones. Boom. We're Blowing ourselves up at night with blue light. That is unbelievably toxic. We've gone from sleeping 10 hours to, to eight hours to less than seven hours. And as a result, we doubled our risk of cancer. And of course, that's just another pandemic out there. So the number one tip is break some icons, smash some screens, have a digital sunset, have a last input of technology so you can get a good night of sleep. We'll talk about cortisol vis a vis melatonin. Then we're going to say, look, make a decision. Be the iconoclastic hero of your own life. Rather than watching pseudo heroes and being entertained, choose to be actualized. We're going to talk about some true heroes or whatever heroes out there that are prioritizing sleep. Jeff Bezos gets eight hours of sleep. Warren Buffett says he won't trade a good night of sleep for profits. Then you look at LeBron James and other athletes. They get 11 to 12 hours of sleep a night. What are you missing thinking you can get by on five or six hours or even seven hours and perform at a peak level? Then we have curfews. What are the curfews we need to set? Caffeine, exercise, eating, weight, working screens. Then the reason I turned on this video is to talk to you about training tranquility. A lot of people have a hard time falling asleep at night. Why is that? And then they get up in the middle of the night. Boom. Buzzing. Well, if you're blowing yourself up all day every day, good luck flipping the switch and going to sleep. We'll talk more about that in a moment. Then we gotta revisit our identity. Our whole optimized coach program is about helping you create an identity of you at your best. Energy, work, and love wise. Who are you at your best? Right? Energy, work, and love wise? I'm an athlete, I'm a philosopher, and I'm a soulmate to my wife and kids and frankly, to everyone with whom I connect longer chat. So then act like that best version of you right now consistently. Which is, by the way, the number one tip sleep scientists give is have a consistent nighttime ritual. So we'll talk about that. Then we talk about doing the math, knowing that the amount of time you spend in bed is actually not how much you slept. 85% sleep efficiency is actually pretty good. So if you're in bed for eight hours, you may want to pause for a moment because you might not be getting even the minimum seven hours of sleep in that period. If you're in bed for seven hours, you're definitely not getting the recommended seven hours of sleep. So check in on that. Whatever. More on that. Check out the mastery series in the coach program for more. For now, training tranquility. So if you have a tough time falling asleep and then you get up and you're buzzing in the middle of the night, and we got a lot of coaches asking me for coaching on this, there are a couple things going on. My hunch is you are constantly redlining it during the day. You are creating what we call enervated anxiety. Every single time you get a break, a free moment, what do you do? You go check your email, you go check Instagram, you go check something online, you look at your smartphone again, another text message. Well, guess what? If you're constantly in that state of on. And a little bit of cortisol. What's up, chicken? A little bit of cortisol is constantly coursing through your body. You trained anxiety. We need to train tranquility. And the way you do that is you write two different algorithms. Again, longer chat, but the short story, you write two algorithms, one during the day and another at night. And algorithms is a word we use to. We have a whole module in our mastery series to use your willpower wisely to install habits that run on autopilot via algorithms. If this happens, then I will do that. You basically want to set up your entire life with one long string of different algorithms and know how you respond to different situations. It's how a Tesla drives itself. These are just algorithms, right? So we need to be self driving and do the right thing without having to think about it. Right? So anyway, that's one of the big things of our program. But for now, here we go. You can go. Well, I got to give a little more context here. I talk a lot about the fact that in any given moment, you can choose to go forward or you can choose to go backward. You can pay attention to your inner daimon, your inner soul, or your inner demon, which by the way, is the diminutive of your daimon, which is Greek for soul. The Romans called that a genius. Right? Genius, daimon, those are the same words for that inner guide within you. That the best within you and our whole work together is to help you be that best version even more and more consistently. That's not an abstract thing. Moment to moment to moment, you have a choice. Plus one, minus one, plus one, minus one. At the end of the day, if you've got a lot of plus ones, you're Feeling great. You finish the day, you high five the family on the way in the door. It's just a good night too, right? If, on the other hand, you paid attention to the demon too many times, minus one, minus one, minus one. What do you do? Geez, I don't know. What do you do? There's where addictive habits come in. We want to numb ourselves. Whether it's drinking or whatever other excess Internet usage, whatever it is we do, we're angry, we're hostile, etc. Versus joyful, etc. And then, guess what? That's just how it is. Again. All the ancient philosophers tell us if there's a gap between who we're capable of being and who we're actually being. Ah, that's where anxiety, regret, disillusionment, ick exists. Close the gap, close the gap, close the gap. Go plus one. Now, back to our training tranquility theme here. If you feel tempted, let's say you had a great deep work session, whole nother chat there, right? And you're tempted to innervate yourself by, you know, checking, like I said, email, another text, Instagram, whatever, then write a new algorithm. If you feel tempted to do that, then energize, truly recover. We talk a lot about oscillating. You want to be on and then you want to be off. If you're on all day, there's no way at the end of the day you're suddenly going to be good at dropping off, which is why your mind's buzzing at night. You can't fall asleep, and it gets you up, even if you do fall asleep. Right? I'm wired at 2. Why? Because you constantly jacked yourself up. Calm yourself down, Energized, tranquility. Take a few deep breaths, go for a walk, connect with some loved ones, meditate, do whatever it is you do to feel energized, truly recover. And what you did was you trained yourself to be more tranquil rather than to be more enervated and anxious and driven, jacked up, right, with the cortisol, etc. Now, if you do that all day, I promise you, you will have a much easier time falling asleep at night. Now, when you get up at night, we all do, inevitably at times, particularly when we're really going for it, then you run a different algorithm. So that's algorithm number one. If I feel tempted during the day, then to enervate myself, then I will energize. Minus one to plus one. Now, at night, if I get up buzzing or I can't fall Asleep. Then I do what we call a needs work analysis. You go back and you quickly think of, wow, what moments during the day did I oops it? And not run the algorithms. You don't shame yourself, you don't beat yourself up. You just say, oh, okay, I could have done that. In hindsight, at that moment when I went and wasted 5, 10, 15, 25, 30 minutes and I just went all day hard. I could have gone for a walk or I could have meditated or I could have taken a breathing exercise. Whatever it is you do to energize, fine, you need to work it. And then you do not think about whatever your mind's buzzing about. You're not going to solve your Life's problems at 2am or at 11 when you're trying to fall asleep. You want to get a good night of sleep so you can hit that hard the next day. Don't think, not allowed to think. You need to work it. Then you breathe. Next session in our fundies, by the way, is breathing. So I'm going to teach our coaches how to breathe and teach them how to teach their clients how to breathe properly. And I have a certain count that I do every single time I meditate, every single time I take a nap, every single time when I fall asleep, and every single time when I get up in the middle of the night, it's inhaling to 6, holding for 1 and exhaling for 8. Important data in through my nose, down into my belly, back out through my nose, right, six, one, eight. Let's do that right now. Just take a breath. You may not be able to do it quite that way. Let's have a nice light yet deep into our diaphragm. Breath in, hold it briefly, then exhale slightly longer than inhale, which, by the way, is one of the ways to flip your parasympathetic nervous system and relax. I'm going to do it. You can do it if you want. I don't know about you, but if you actually did that, it's always astonishing to me how one breath can just drop you in into a more tranquil state. Now, if you wake up in the middle of the night or can't fall asleep, then whatever needs, work it and you get a bonus meditation in. You don't need to shame yourself again. We're not thinking we're going to learn what we could have done a little bit better. So we get better and we spiral up and we get a little bonus meditation and boom, there you go. We're training our tranquility which will help us not just in our sleep, but in our work and in our love and and in our optimizing so we can be the best version of ourselves and serve heroically. Let's do that today. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that. Number One quick note. If you want to go deeper into Optimize, check us out at Optimize. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, et cetera and 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus optimize plus ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize Coach Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach if you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower.