Ben Greenfield’s Exact Sleep Routine Revealed (Biohack Your Sleep Score To 96%+)

All right, we just finished dinner. The family's downstairs doing dishes. I slipped up here to show you some of the top sleep hacks that I've discovered and what my own personal nighttime routine looks like, so you can see what works, what doesn't, and exactly how I sleep like a champ. All right, so we're going to go over 4 basic elements of sleep hygiene today and how I personally apply them. And the first one we take care of before we even go into the bedroom, and that is temperature. Temperature is number one. So I'm going to get the AC on. I'm going to turn it to a nice chilly 65 until I change it. And now the room is going to be cold. My rule is you want it just so cold that it's a little too cold to take your clothes off before you get underneath the covers. Once you get underneath the covers, it's not too bad. I'm going to show you a few other temperature hacks. Here we go. All right, so remember, we're talking about temperature, and And while there are plenty of things that you can do to get your body cool, the foundational principles always apply. Try to finish dinner 2 to 3 hours before bedtime if you can. Try to finish a hard workout 2 to 3 hours before bedtime if you can. With dinner, avoid really spicy, heavy foods and excess alcohol. And if you've broken the rules, there are some hacks. One hack that works really well is a lukewarm shower, right? Not too cold, 'cause that's too stimulating, but not so warm because it's too warming. Lukewarm is the key. The other thing that you can do if you want to look into the world of supplementation is there's a supplement called glycine. About 5 to 6 grams of glycine can actually help to cool the body naturally before you go to sleep if you've done some kind of warming activity. Okay, we're still talking about temperature. Um, I sleep on this bed called a Samina. Now, I've tried a lot of organic and natural mattresses over the years. I settled on this one. Because it's completely natural, non-toxic wool, and it breathes incredibly. Whatever sleep system you choose, it is important that you check out the cooling capabilities of the mattress and sleep system as a whole. This one has a super thin mattress, a super thin mattress topper, and so it's probably the coolest bed that I've ever slept on. Now, I have the metabolism of a freaking sports car, meaning I burn tons of calories even at rest. So I produce a lot of thermal energy. I produce a lot of heat. So even though I have a nice cooling bed, I also have hidden underneath this plant this bad boy. Let me move this plant aside so you can get a closer look. This is called an Orion. Now, the Orion, via a tube that goes underneath my headboard and onto my mattress topper, circulates icy cold water under my body the whole night. My wife doesn't like to sleep as cool as me, so she can set the Orion to cool on her side at whatever temperature she desires. There are other sleep systems that cool the body during a night of sleep. Some act like an air conditioner unit using air, others use water. One of the reasons that I like the Orion is A, it produces a low amount of EMF, and B, it's a quarter of the cost of a lot of the other sleep systems out there, and it cools and it heats and I can set it on a schedule and I can run it in airplane mode. The list of features go on and on, but this is one of my hacks for temperature. All right, so now we got temperature out of the way, we're going to move on to number 2, light. Now, no matter where you're at in the world, you can always have access to a set of blue light blockers and you want to don these whenever the sun sets in whatever area of the world that you happen to be in. They make some with yellow lenses if you happen to be out at night or out at the movies, They make them with red lenses for when you're in a hotel room, walking through a hotel lobby, at a mall, driving with the blurring lights coming at you. Now, I don't typically need to wear these glasses as much at home because I've actually wired up my bedroom to have a lot of red light in it. Now, I'm being filmed right now. There are cameras on. We have light in my bedroom to allow you to see what I'm doing. But for demonstrative purposes, we're going to turn off those lights really quick so you can see what it actually looks like when I light up my bedroom at night. All right, by my bedside I have a red light, okay, that is 100% pure red light, nothing else. Now if I happen to be traveling, obviously I'm not going to travel with light bulbs and change out the light bulbs in my hotel room or Airbnb, but I do travel with this. This is a cheapo little red light headlamp. I can use this to get around a hotel room at night if I forgot this and don't even have the option for this, I always have my blue light blockers. And then if I'm in a hotel, Airbnb, that usually doesn't have a natural red light next to the bed for reading, I can use one of these little lights that'll just clip onto a book or a pad or anything else that I want to light up with red light. And then finally, a couple of other tips when it comes to your lighting scenario is that this is what my phone looks like for demonstrative purposes. Typically before the sun has set in whatever area of the world that I happen to be in. Now, if I triple-click the right button on my phone, you can see that it sucks all the blue light out of the screen. That is not a native built-in function. That's more powerful than the Night OS mode that comes built in. In my book Boundless, I have 3 different ways for Android users and iPhone users to do what I just showed you, or you can Google iPhone red light trick. On my computer, such as my MacBook that I often travel with, even though I'm not in it much at home after dinner, I can either wear blue light blocking glasses like this, or there is a software program, and I have this installed on all of my MacBooks, called Iris. And Iris will naturally shift the screen into sleep mode when the sun sets in whatever area of the world that you happen to be in. Okay, I've got the lights back on in the bedroom just so you can see what I'm doing here. But, uh, a couple of things to do before you get into bed, uh, you can see that we have blackout curtains installed This is a pretty good idea. A lot of hotel rooms nowadays do a decent job with curtains that block out light, and often there is a gap sometimes in between those curtains. One trick that I'll use— let's see if my wife has one in here since I don't use one at home. So we're going to steal this off of one of my wife's set of pants just to show you what's going on here. Uh, if you go into the closet of a hotel room You have these little clippy clippy hangers. You can use this. Let's say I'm in a hotel room and the curtains don't close all the way, and I know there's gonna be a bunch of light coming in the room in the morning, right? And I don't want to wake up right when light's coming in the room in the morning. So what I can do is just basically take one side of the coat hanger and clip it to one side of the curtains and the other side to the other side of the curtains. And that typically keeps 'em closed. You can kind of like make your own blackout curtains. If it's just too light for you in the Airbnb or the hotel room that you happen to be staying at. And then once you are in bed, uh, enter the princess sleep mask. I like the nice soft silky ones. But once you're in bed and the lights are all off, just remember the idea of a sleep mask is not just that it blocks light, but newer research shows that the proprioceptive stimuli, that mild pressure against your eyes, can actually have a calming, parasympathetically activating effect. Which leads me to number 3 of sleep hacking, and that is stress. So I've said for a long time that's not a good idea to do work in bed. It's not a good idea to check into a hotel room and start working on your laptop in bed. It's not a good idea for your body or your brain to associate much of anything except sleep to be something that happens when you're in bed. Now, for example, if you look by my bedside, you're gonna be hard-pressed to find any business-based books, uh, right now. If we can get a close-up, we've got the Words with God prayer journal, Experience Jesus Really, The Big O Book, Use Your Imagination There, but that's the one other thing you can do in bed besides sleep, 2 Weeks to a Younger Brain, Believe, and The Adventure Challenge, which is like a dating book for couples. You can see there's nothing in there like, you know, Facebook Ads 101 or, you know, how to code your website or anything that you would find like super stimulating. I don't want to be thinking about that stuff when I'm in bed. So a few other ways that you can decrease stress when you're asleep. Where— when you sleep. One comes from the realm of supplementation. Yes, shameless plug, I actually am a co-founder and owner in the company Kion, but I eat my own dog food. I take 3 of their sleep capsules before I go to bed at night. When I travel, I actually often throw melatonin and CBD on top of that because I'm often more stressed and outside my time zone when I travel. But this is L-tryptophan, L-theanine, and gamma-aminobutyric acid as PharmaGABA. Super simple, super affordable sleep product. I slam 3 of them, and that helps to wind me down and is one way to modulate stress. Another way to modulate stress is this thing. This is called an Apollo. So the Apollo is basically a wristband that can also be worn on the ankle, and it releases a mild haptic vibratory sensation while you sleep. It has a built-in accelerometer in it which will detect if you wake up. Let's say if you wake up to pee or something like that, and it will start to vibrate again to help you get back to sleep. I'm going to take my phone out of night mode, break my own rules, to show you what the screen for the Apollo looks like. But you can see I've got it right here. I can select anything I want. For example, it was just in social, which would be pre-programmed for like dinner or social event. Typically I'll just put it on good night, I'll have it run for 90 minutes, I'll press play, and then that will play for 90 minutes as I'm falling asleep. But then it will also flip back on, uh, if I happen to get up, say, to use the bathroom during the night. Now, another few things that can help you to manage stress. Um, we've also got, uh, something else that, uh, produces vibrations. This one's called the Sensate. The Sensate also pairs to an app on the phone that will play a 10, 20, or 30-minute relaxation sequence. Well, this is on my chest, so typically you would wear it kind of over your head like this. This is on your chest. Your sternum right here can actually signal to your vagus nerve if there's something vibrating over your sternum. That you're basically shifting into a parasympathetic or relaxing state. So this one I usually use on airplanes, or let's say I wake up at like, let's say like 4:30 and I don't want to get up until 5. I'll just play like one of their half-hour relaxation sessions to get just a little bit of like a catnap on steroids. This one's called the Sensate. This one I use more when I travel, not so much at home. Typically, the Apollo is enough for me when I travel. Now, also related to stress, you may have heard a popular neuroscientist like Dr. Andrew Huberman talk about something called yoga nidra. I have YouTube Premium on my phone, and if I go to my downloaded videos and I scroll down here to my yoga nidra playlist, uh, there's this gal I follow on YouTube called Ali Boothroyd, and she has an album called Middle of the Night. And you can see that I have tracks on here that are like 20 minutes long 30 minutes long, hour and a half, 2 hours, 4 hours, 8 hours. Not something again that I use at home much, but when I'm outside my comfort zone, I'll admit sometimes like I got to be on stage speaking at like, let's say, 9 AM, and I'll wake up at like 3:30 AM and I'm like going through my presentation in my head. So, I will literally put on like a 3-hour Yoga Nidra track and just do what's called non-sleep deep rest until let's say like 6 AM 5:30 AM or whenever I actually want to get out of bed. It's almost like sleep simulating. It's not quite sleep, but I'm a huge fan of yoga nidra, aka non-sleep deep rest. And again, by having these downloaded to my phone, I can keep my phone in airplane mode because that's another great way to increase stress. Turn your phone out of airplane mode when you wake up in the middle of the night and you'll be off to work in no time and have insomnia. All right, so a couple more little tips. Obviously, as a biohacker, I have all these fun tools that I play with. You hear about breathwork often. It's a great way to modulate stress. By breathwork, what I mean is typically an exhale that's longer than your inhale. Some people like 4-7-8 breath—4 count in, 7 count hold, 8 count out. Other people like 4-8 breath. I favor that one because I don't like to hold my breath—4 count in, 8 count out. One form of breathwork that's been getting a lot of attention recently is called coherent breathing or resonance breathing. This is about 5 or so seconds in and 5 seconds out. Interestingly, it tends to be right around 5 to 5.5 seconds for almost everybody on the planet. This thing's kind of cool. This is called an Ohm lamp. This was developed by one of my friends who does a lot of research in HRV. I can remove this stone, and even though you can't feel it because you're watching the video, what this stone is doing in my hand is it's vibrating, but it's also sensing my heart rate variability. Now, the lamp will light up as you breathe in, or as you're supposed to breathe in. Right here I take a breath in, and then right here I take a breath out. And simultaneous to that light, this stone is vibrating in my hands and has a slightly warming sensation. This one's really nice if you wake up in the morning and instead of ripping yourself out of bed, you just want to meditate. Uh, standard, gold standard time on this one would be 3 minutes. It's also kind of nice if you wake up at night and you want to help lull yourself back to sleep. If some of the other tricks that I've showed you don't work. Because I will admit, if you struggle with insomnia or poor sleep, sometimes you need to throw a few noodles at the wall and see what sticks to help you. Now, uh, when I put the stone back on, I can just simply turn this to the right and it will automatically turn off the lamp. And the last thing regarding stress is try to unplug as much as you can in the bedroom. Obviously, I've shown you some cool tools that do require you to have a certain amount of electricity next to the bed, But for example, like, my bedroom is a low EMF zone, meaning I have this— this is like an Ethernet cable, and this is an Ethernet to USB-C adapter. So if I want to have my phone in airplane mode without a cell phone signal, but I still want connectivity to like, I don't know, watch a funny YouTube video at night with my wife, I can plug this in, have my phone in the equivalent of airplane mode from a cell signal standpoint because it's hardwired to Ethernet, and then our Wi-Fi router is off. And we just don't have a lot of electrical signals bouncing around the bedroom at night. So, so far we've talked about light, we've talked about temperature, we've talked about stress. The final and fourth variable that I want to get to before I tell you one potent tip that I haven't brought up elsewhere in this video is sound. Now, a lot of hard-charging, high-achieving entrepreneurs, uh, people like me who can't turn our brain off, people who have what's called a COMT pathway in their genetics that cause them to have difficulty modulating dopamine. They're sentries. They wake up easily at night. Um, happens to a lot of people. And one of the best ways to distract the brain from racing thoughts is sound. Now, not only do I have, as you can see, a trusty set of foam earplugs— because dogs barking, doors slamming, people getting up before me and walking around the house, cats meowing, alarms blaring, you name it, uh, foam earplugs can help out with— but typically foam earplugs are not enough for me. So with my phone in airplane mode by the side of the bed, I will often play one of two different apps. One is pretty low cost, pretty much close to free. It's called SleepStream. SleepStream lets me play white noise. I'll turn this up a little bit so you can hear it. So this is like a white noise that covers up ambient sounds, and it's layered over binaural beats. That I have set on deep sleep mode. The other app that I really like that's more expensive and more of a subscription-based, but, uh, it is incredible, is called NuCalm, N-U-Calm. And the number one track that I play is I go to Mastermind Sleep, and this sleep melody, I have an 8-hour or a 10-hour, and I play this the whole night right by my bedside. And it's kind of passive. It's super relaxing. In my opinion, it beats the pants off white noise. This app is also great for airplanes. And again, if the Yoga Nidra thing or the Sensate doesn't work for you, if you wake up at night, they also have short 20, 30, 40, 50, 70, 100, and 120-minute relaxation sessions that are kind of, as the name implies, like a rescue session for your mind. So sound is another one that you want to think about, probably the simplest of the 4 different sleep elements that I've talked to you about. But you hear about sleep hygiene and you hear about, you know, things like light and temperature, but it's one thing to hear about it and another thing to see brass tacks how it actually works. Now there's one final sleep tip that I want to show you that you may have heard a lot of people talking about, and that is mouth taping. And if you want the bonus on top of mouth taping, nasal strips or nose taping. Now this is one of my favorite companies, Respire, because they actually stick to my my face and don't fall off during the night. If you wear makeup, or if you like me wear fancy pants man product on your face during the day, you will want a dude wipe or a makeup remover or anything else that you can use on your skin at night before you put these on. But basically, wipe my nose, I wipe my mouth. The nose strip is nice if you're congested or if you have allergies, but the nice thing is that if you are forcing yourself to breathe through your nose by using mouth tape, which can solve a ton of sleep problems for a lot of people, uh, who have sleep apnea-esque issues or just poor oxygen delivery during the night. Taping your nose along with your mouth just gives you extra bonus opening up of the nasal cavities and better oxygenation. So that's step 1, and this video is going to get super quiet super soon, and I'm going to stop annoying you with all my sleep tips super soon because step 2— my wife loves this part is the mouth tape. Okay, so the mouth tape, I can simply peel back the layer on the respire. Mm-hmm. All right, this is getting messy, uh, but this is real life, folks. Dude wipes crap on my face. Mouth tape right here so I can actually close out this video for you. That's what you do in the morning, you just take it off. It doesn't hurt, it's not like ripping duct tape off or anything like that. But the mouth tape, the nose tape makes a big difference. Uh, thanks to Respire for helping to sponsor this video that you're watching right now. I hope these tips have helped you out. Remember, temperature, light, stress, and sound, those are the 4 basic elements of sleep hygiene. You tackle those variables, and I guarantee you will solve like 95% of your sleep issues. And if you like this video, feel free to share it with a friend or loved one who you know might have sleep issues themselves. Uh, hit subscribe if you dig this channel. Leave me a comment if you have more questions about sleep. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thank you so much for watching, and sweet dreams.