PNTV: The Sleep Revolution by Arianna Huffington (#390)

Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Philosopher's Notes. TV Today we've got another great book, the Sleep Revolution by Arianna Huffington. The Sleep Revolution Subtitle Transforming youg Life One Night At a Time this is an awesome book. As you may know, Arianna Huffington started the Huffington Post and while she was running that she was so sleep deprived and was working so hard that she literally passed out and banged her head wake up call. That led to her writing a book called Thrive, creating her new business called Thrive, which as the name implies helps people thrive, particularly corporations, employees there, etc. But the most frequently asked question as she discussed how to go about thriving was sleep. How do we optimize our sleep? This book is a phenomenal look at the history of sleep, the science of sleep and what we know works. I highly recommend it. We've talked about sleep quite a bit. We've profiled a number of books. We've got sleep 101. Check it all out at Optimize Me. Optimize Me Sleep. If you had to read one book, I'd say this is the one to read. As always, we've got a philosopher's note with a bunch of my favorite big ideas. Let's look at five of them now. We'll start at the top. The number one thing to remember about sleep is Ariana tells us it's the most underrated, underappreciated health habit out there. The impact of not having optimal sleep and is huge. She walks us through all the different domains in which sleep deprivation leads to unbelievable diminution in the quality of the performance. Whether it's truck drivers or hospital workers or CEOs or whatever, your performance is going to be diminished if you do not optimize your sleep period. I talk about this a lot. My number one self care habit is sleep. When we draw this little. For me, this represents Maslow's hierarchy and us optimizing and expressing the best version of ourselves there at the top. Then this little circle here at the bottom represents our fundamentals. Eating, moving, sleeping. Most of us know nutrition is super important, exercise is important, and we know that sleep is important. But we need to move from theory to practice. As Ariana says, we need to move from awareness to, to action. We've got to make the connection. She makes a very compelling case that sleep is important. But the reality is, you know, it's important. You just need to prioritize it above some of the other things you might be doing that are leading to poorer qualities of sleep and are leading to poorer qualities of your performance. The number one question she says she has asked is okay, well how much sleep do we need to get? She cites all the research that says a minimum of 7 hours of sleep per night. 7 to 9 hours per sleep is what's recommended. Pop quiz, how much sleep did you get last night? Night before that? What's your average hours of sleep and how are you performing at those different levels? Check in, pay attention, prioritize. Let's talk about how. First part of the book again is history and science of why sleep matters, et cetera. And then we talk about the practical goodness. Here's the number one tip. Well, I'll ask you what do you think is the number one tip that Arianna and other sleep experts would advise us to consider engaging or implementing into our life? What would you guys think to be? Well, the short answer is I'll give you a stat and we'll talk about the answer. 71% of people either go to sleep with their phone or sleep next to their phone. So it's like basically right there, 71% of, I believe it's Americans basically sleep with their phones or have it right there at their bedside. So first thing they do when they wake up, it's the last thing to do at night. She says the number one thing we can do is to let there be less light in our lives. The number one culprit for that is our smartphones. Of course there's TVs and computers, etc. But let there be less light, specifically less blue light. If you ask our 6 year old son Emerson why we turn off the lights at night, we have these funny no blue light, orange light bulbs throughout our house. He would tell you, and he could tell you this for the last couple years, the blue light disrupts your melatonin which is going to affect your sleep. So again, we all know this. We need to actually put it into practice. Move from awareness to action, from theory to practice. Some other tips that we talk about in sleep 101 and throughout this series on sleep include that Arianna talks about as well. First rule, turn off your smartphone at least 30 minutes, she says, before you want to go to bed. A lot of other research says an hour. Push it back. Give yourself time, your brain time to settle down, both from the blue light stimulation and also the inputs that rattle around in your brain that science says makes it more difficult for you to takes you longer to fall into deep sleep and then you spend less time in deep sleep when you're blowing yourself up with this digital stimulation so late into the night. So there we go. What else do we want to talk about here? Oh, yeah, temperature. So she gives some other tips. Temperature is one of them. You want to get your temperature right. She recommends, I think 65 degrees. My current favorite is 66 degrees. But you don't want it to be too hot or too cold. That's going to disrupt your sleep patterns. Exercise, we know it does a ton of good. Well, here's another benefit. It helps you sleep better. Again, nothing new there, but we see all these things stacking up. She also talks about caffeine. Again, caffeine's obviously a stimulant. It has a long half life. Therefore, the latest you want to consume caffeine is around 2pm and then another stat that she throws out on the benefits of meditation as it relates to sleep is pretty powerful. She says that those trained, I think it was a Stanford study, six week course in mindfulness meditation fell asleep twice as fast as, as people who did not take that course in mindfulness meditation. So the people who didn't practice meditation, it took them 33 minutes or something like that to fall asleep. Those who meditated 15 minutes, they were able to fall asleep. Why is that? Obviously we want to get good at being able to flip the switch off in our brains so we can relax and fall asleep. Meditation is one of the best tools to kind of strengthen it. Again, each rep you take meditating is like hitting the gym for your mind. Being able to turn off the worry, the anxiety, the rumination, etc. What's interesting is you can do the math on it and you get an immediate ROI. If you fall asleep 15 minutes faster and you meditate it for 15 minutes in the morning, you immediately get an ROI on that falling asleep faster. You get the benefits of feeling more grounded and centered throughout the day and you fall asleep more quickly. Meditation 101, for more on that, third big idea is from a section. $100 billion return right on your sleep investment here. This is from a section on work. So she walks us through different contexts in which we can look at luminaries and exemplars who are actually sleeping well and increasing their performance. The number one case study in the work section, at least for me, was Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos is officially the first guy, wealthiest person on the planet these days. The first person worth over $100 billion. Just checked it out real quick. Googled. How much is Jeff bezos worth? Like 137 or $40 billion or something at this point. $40 billion more or something like that than Bill Gates. Right. The guy is the wealthiest person on the planet. Amazon's worth over a trillion dollars at this stage as I'm recording this. And you know what? He prioritizes sleep. Eight hours a night is what he says he needs to get. He just doesn't feel the same. He doesn't get eight hours of sleep. That's his target. And if a guy who's become the wealthiest person on the planet can prioritize that much of his time for sleep, I think we can consider doing the same again. Wonderful example. She's got a bunch of other business guys that talk about and women that talk about the benefits of sleep and how it just erodes their performance. At eight hours of sleep, they perform at a certain level, seven and a half. At a different level, seven, starting to get a little bit less optimal. Six, five, they're useless. So you need to check in, do an inventory. If you feel so inspired, how do you feel and perform? And those are two important different things. How do you feel energetically, emotionally, psychologically, etc. And how do you perform? The two are going to go together, obviously, but look at how you do and then again, prioritize. You know, you just need to prioritize. Our fourth idea is another great way to look at the importance of sleep. I love sports as a context for peak performance. These athletes are paid to perform at their highest level. They're not going to waste their time on stuff that doesn't work. Right. So she walks us through a ton of different athletes and I find it just awesome how much they prioritize sleep. Get this. Guess what time Tom Brady goes to bed at night? Tom Brady's in his 40s now. Arguably the greatest football player in history, right? Crushing it at the top of his game. In his 40s, what time does he go to sleep? 8:30pm that's awesome. Which actually beats me. I went to bed at 7:15pm last night. It's in the winter now, the days are shorter, but we tuck in our kids and we go to bed. Got up at three, whatever this morning after my eight plus hours of sleep. But we want to prioritize our sleep like an athlete does. Then we have Roger Federer in LeBron James. Roger Federer says 11 to 12 hours a day. That's how much sleep he wants to get and needs to get. Or he says he doesn't feel right and he's likely to get injured. And he prioritizes his sleep so much that when he performs at Wimbledon, he's competing at Wimbledon. He rents two houses, one for him and one for his young family, so that his sleep is not disturbed. Those of us who have kids know the importance of prioritizing that when you want to perform at a high level, then we have LeBron James says the same thing. He shoots for 12 hours of sleep a day when he's training. And then Ariana talks about some of the kind of most seminal research that came out of Stanford, where they worked with the basketball team. They were only getting like six and a half hours of sleep a night. She had them deliberately spend more time in bed. Try to spend 10 hours a day or night in bed. She said, the researcher to the team. They wound up going from six and a half hours of sleep to something like eight and a half hours of sleep a night. And their performance went up on every single metric. They were like 10% better at shooting three pointers at free throws. Their sprint time was reduced by a second. Incredible crazy gains, she says. And I agree this is one of the next frontiers in athletic competitive differentiation and peak performance. Again, the athletes are doing it. We may want to consider doing it ourselves. Final idea here is alarms. This is from a section on Washington D.C. hollywood. What's going on? How is the world changing? Relating to sleep. She shares a story about some hotel out there that rather than have a wake up call to help you get up in the morning, they have a work down call the night before. And the reality is, as we talk about again all the time in the sleep context is your day begins your morning, your optimal morning begins the night before. The most important thing you decide to do really is when you're going to shut down. Shut down complete. For me, it's a digital sunset. Sun goes down, all electronics are off. That's probably my number one most powerful habit I've ever installed in my life because sleep is so important to me and it paces it and it helps me connect with my family. Shutdown complete. Right. Work down alarm goes off. Workday's on, electronics are off. It's all family, all the time. My mind settles down. No more stimulation, both information and blue light photons coming into my brain, right? But that work down alarm is way more powerful and enjoyable than a wake up alarm. So she suggests we set a work down alarm for ourselves and then remember what the word alarm literally means. Open up your dictionary and and it is an anxious awareness of danger. An anxious awareness of danger. That's what the word alarm literally means. And you're waking up to that every morning Right. An anxious awareness of danger. Much cooler to set the alarm. So we go to bed at a reasonable time. We wake up without an alarm, feeling great, knowing we got the amount of sleep that we needed that night and and ready to rock the next day. I haven't used an alarm in years other than on rare travel days. And again, I go to bed super early. I get up super early. No alarm. Consider the work down alarm. Vis a vis your wake up alarm. Remember our athletes? Tom Brady, 8:30pm he's going to bed. We got LeBron, Federer getting their 11:12 hours of sleep. The Stanford basketball players trying to be in bed for 10 hours a night in improving their performance by 10%. We've got Jeff Bezos clearing 100 billion. He's making money not while he sleeps, but because he sleeps, was the way I put it in the note. And then do this. Let there be less light. That is the number one tip that science says will help you improve your sleep. And again, this is the number one most underrated health habit. 40% of us are sleep deprived, minimum 7 hours. Figure out what works for you. You know that it's important and you probably know the thing that you're doing that's most in the way. What is it for you? We all have unique situations, so these are some general ideas. But what do you know? What's the one thing you know you could do starting tonight to get a better night of sleep? Prioritize that and make tomorrow another awesome day. See you.