How To Get The Rejuvenating Sleep You Deserve | Michael Breus

Here's the secret that I've discovered is it all matters about when you drink the alcohol. So you could drink alcohol earlier in the day and have it have zero effect on your sleep. Oh, Michael. Day drinking. Is that what you're offering to people? That people should be day drinking? It's St. Patrick's Day. Free martini.

Lunch is back.

So shouldn't we be talking about the booze right now? No, no, no, no. Hold on. So here's what I'm saying is the amount of time just before your eyes close before you go to bed is the most critical time. And so if you can stop drinking alcohol and have a period of time where that's not there, alcohol gets metabolized. For everybody who may or may not know who I am, I just got this wonderful introduction. So, yep, I'm the sleep guy. I have a PhD in clinical psychology. I'm board certified in sleep, the whole thing, doing it for 23 years. So the goal here is to understand sleep. Sleep disorders versus disordered sleep. Okay, so there are sleep disorders, right? Apnea, narcolepsy, in some cases insomnia. But there's also an entire different population of people who have what we call disordered sleep. So what is disordered sleep? You don't quite have a diagnosis, but you go to bed and you come out six, seven, eight hours later, and it's not any better. You still feel tired. You still feel exhausted. It's not an official diagnosis yet, but something is going wrong. You want the quality of your sleep to improve. That's what I've been spending the last five or six years really diving deep, deep, deep into and understanding more. And it turns out that entrepreneurs are some of the worst sleepers ever. Ever. Like, across the boards. Okay, why? Because they're getting their companies together and doing all of those important things, and they've got all of that energy. And many, many times we put sleep to the side, and that can be dangerous. When we see people who unfortunately are burning the candle at both ends and really not actually doing all the things that they need to do from a sleep perspective, it has dramatic effects on their performance. It has dramatic effects on their spirituality. It has dramatic effects on their family life. And I've got a couple of people in and around here that I've actually worked with before. And some of them may chime in and let us know. Some of them may want to stay quiet. That's cool, too. Perfectly fine with that. But at the end of the day, the biggest thing that I think people need to Understand is now is an unprecedented time for sleeplessness. So if you take one thing away from this whole talk today, get your sleep on a schedule. The more scheduled your sleep is, the better your body responds. Like I can't say that enough. It's the number one tip and here's how you do it. Wake up at the same time every single day. Notice I didn't say go to bed at the same time. Wake up at the same time every single day, including the weekends. There was a great study that was just released two weeks ago that looked and finally answered this question. They had 26 people who were sleeping five and a half hours all week long. They were then allowed to sleep eight hours on the weekends. They monitored them for eight weeks. They did reaction time tasks, cognition tasks, memory tasks, all, all the brain stuff, right? Here's what they found. By the end of the six weeks, everyone, every single person had detriments. Every single person. So getting five and a half to six during the week and eight on the weekends does not work.

That's an interesting thing because the thought is that you can bank sleep or you can get up, that it's kind of an average thing. But so you're saying it's better to have the same, to have the consistency of it. And I guess your bedtime is kind of a self regulating thing then if you're tired of bed early or if you're still awake, you're, you're fine.

So and so that's exactly the problem, right, is people, is that there's that variability. Most of us have a wake up time that's kind of set, right? I call it our socially determined wake up time. In my house it's what time does my dog wake up? My dog wakes up around 6:05. Everybody knows this story. I see people laughing, right? Or your cat. The cats are the worst, right? So everybody, everybody knows your dog has got to pee, right? And whenever your dog has to pee, you better get outside, otherwise they're peeing in your bedroom. Right? And so that's one of the or kids, that's the other one, right? Your two year old wanders in and says daddy, time to get up, right? That's what's going on. So we all have these socially determined wake up times. But our bedtimes can be quite variable. So looking at being able to capture that becomes important. Now the next question you should say to me is, well, what time should I wake up?

What time should I wake up?

Thank you Dean, I'm so glad you asked. And so what we've discovered is that everybody has these things called chronotypes. Now you might not have heard of the term, but you've actually heard of, of the concept before by a raise of hands. Has anybody ever been called an early bird or a night owl? Raise your hands, raise your hands. Come on, put it out there. So I'm going to, I want to scroll through and see. Keep your hands raised. If you are a night owl. A night owl. My suspicion is that entrepreneurs have a greater tendency to be night owls because entrepreneur night out, night people have also have a tendency to be super creative. Now that's not to say that early risers are not creative or more productive, but just night owls do have a tendency to really crush it in the evenings. So from a creativity standpoint. So wake up at the same time every single day. The second big problem from a Covid perspective, you're not going to believe this coming out of me. It's movement. People are not moving enough. So remember, sleep is recovery. If you don't do anything to recover from, your body doesn't know what to do. Ok? And so you're going to end up with light, crappy sleep. And you're going to say why is my sleep so light all of the sudden? Right? Because we're not moving. People are stuck at home. They're not even walking to their cars, walking places. Everybody out there needs a 20 minute or so cardio. Now look, you don't have to run a marathon, okay? You don't have to do something super duper strenuous. But what you do have to do is move your butt, okay? And so what I tell people is if you can't get a 25 minute workout in and during the day, I don't care, do five five minute workouts. Don't even have to sweat. All you have to do is move. Once your body gets the signal and your brain gets the signal that you're moving, it tells your brain that it's going to need sleep because of this movement level. Right? And that's going to be important. Yeah. Pretty amazing, right?

That's interesting. I wonder if that can. It's some fun things to really think about what you could do to affect your sleep score or your the way that this works. That's going to be an interesting experiment. I'll tell you like something interesting happened in my house when we went into lockdown a year ago. The first thing that happened is we started sleeping the best ever. Like I mean sleeping because you had nothing, no reason to wake up in the morning you could sleep unfettered, we were sleeping for nine hours, you know, getting some great luxurious kind of sleep. And then it sort of feels like it balanced off. And it's unusual to get even when you have the opportunity to go for nine hours. Now I'm fine.

Exactly.

I wake up like. So we got there.

So I want to just, I want to, I want to double click on that thought if I might dj, because one of the things that we see this is so the pattern that you just described is something that we've seen happen actually in science. And so way back in the 50s when people were trying to determine how much sleep do people actually need, there was a study done at Stanford and the study at Stanford was quite fascinating where they put five or ten people in a, in a self contained area with no lighting, so they didn't know what time of day it was. I mean, there were lights on and bathrooms and all that. And they left them in there. And they had the exact same reaction, Dean, that you did. First night they slept like eight hours, next night nine hours, next night ten hours. Then something kind of happened and it kind of whittled itself back down. What ended up happening was at the end of the study, the participants could not physically sleep longer than 8 hours, plus or minus 13 minutes. This is where the original recommendation we think came from for eight hours of sleep. Here are the problems with why that recommendation is no longer the valid or valuable today. Number one, it was done in the 50s. So when you look at the influence of light, electronics, of politics, of all of the things that are influencing our sleep stress, all of these things, life in the 50s was a piece of cake compared to life right now. And yes, I know there was things, you know, in the six Cuban Missile Crisis, all those kind of historical things, I get it. But at the end of the day, we're under a very different type of stress now. And we're. And I would argue that sleep has evolved over time. Right. And so we're not the same humans that we were in the 50s, which means we're going to have different sleeps that we would have now. That being said, when we start to look at overall amount of sleep, it turns out that it's very personalized. So I'm going to tell you my story, Dean, so that you can understand. So when the pandemic hit, actually I've been doing this for a little while, but I decided I'm a night owl. So I went to. So first of all, if everybody wants to check it out, if you go to chronoquiz.com, that's where I have my sleep animals and you can learn if you're an early bird or a night owl and things like that. Dean's a bear, I'm a bear. Right, that's right.

We're going to, I want to dig into that. We're going to dig into that in a minute.

Yeah, right. But understanding that chronotype, that's where it's going to be interesting. Yes, he is a cuddly bear, Mike. I agree, he is a cuddly bear. But you know, at the end of the, I'm seeing these comments flashing to the side, so it's kind of, it's kind of fun. So, so you know, when you, when you understand your chronotype, then you can actually find your genetically predetermined sleep schedule. This is the secret. This was. The whole reason I wrote the third book was because I wasn't sleeping great. I had several patients that weren't sleeping great. And so what we discovered was is that this early bird, night owl distinction makes a tremendous difference because it's not just sleep that it affects, it affects all of the hormone distribution in your entire body. This is why I wrote a book where I can actually tell people the perfect time of day to have sex. Eat a cheeseburger, ask your boss for a raise, email all of these things. I have real data behind all of it to prove it, but it's all based on your hormonal distribution and it all comes from your chronotype. So if you can, during COVID wake up at your chronotypical wake up time. If there's one thing that you do, this will be the most important thing that you do for your sleep. During COVID waking up at your chronotypical wake up time is incredibly, incredibly important. Right. A few other things that we need to understand is the type of sleep that we're looking for. People say to me all the time like, well, Michael, why is sleep so important during COVID And why is sleep important for my immune function? So I'm going to explain it right now. During stages three and four, what we call deep sleep, also known as beauty sleep, there is the release of something called growth hormone. Growth hormone is incredibly important because one of the things that growth hormone does is it activates the production of killer T cell. If you've ever remember back to your high school biology days, killer T cells are the white blood cells that are produced to fight viral infection. So those are pretty freaking important.

Right about now, right?

Yeah, exactly. Those are pretty important right about now. And so getting good deep stage three, four sleep turns out to be important. Now, before we started this whole discussion, there was person on who was asking about sleep trackers. I've got an aura ring on. Some people have got a wrist tracker on. Right. So how do we utilize these sleep trackers in an effective way during COVID to best understand how we are sleeping? Right. Becomes an interesting question to ask. So I'm going to digress for a second and talk a little bit about trackers, if that's okay.

Yeah, I'd love to hear this about it too. I've got mine and I'm. I'd like to get some insight on what it's tracking, like what the meaning of some of these patterns in mind, which is good.

So you can see that I'm wearing the Oura ring. There are several of them out there. Here's what I would tell you. The Oura ring is the cream of the crap, okay? It's the best of the worst. There's no sleep tracker on the market that's 100% accurate. There just isn't.

I had a Fitbit that was doing the same thing, but this one seemed. This one seems better.

So the reason that this one is a little bit better, Dean, is because the data collection from the form factor of it being a ring makes more sense. And so I can get from a data perspective, I can get temperature, pulse, heart rate, all from a ring. I can't get that from a wrist. The reason I can't get that from a wrist is because it's not tight enough for me to get a pulse that way. And so it doesn't become as valuable information. So the reason that the Oura ring is kind of the best of the worst is because of the form factor of being on a ring and the data that it collects. To be clear, a study was literally published this week looking at the effectiveness of the Oura ring, the Fitbit and a few others. It's really good at telling you if you're asleep, if you're awake sometimes. It's good at telling you if you wake up in the middle of the night. There is not one on the market that is great at measuring sleep stages. Okay? Each sleep stage has different things that it does. And not all of the time do we see that these things are as accurate as they could be. That's actually okay. Listen to what I'm saying. It's okay that we have inaccurate data because we don't Want to look at the absolute data, we want to look at it relative. So, Dean, if we look at your ring data and it says every night that you get 13 minutes of stage three, four sleep. Well, I hope that's not true. But if it's consistently being inaccurate, I don't actually care because whatever the reading is, it's probably okay. But if you got 13 minutes one night, then 407 minutes the next and 86 the next, I want to know what happened there because the relative difference is what's interesting to me. So people should not look at that final number and say, oh, crap, I only got 16 seconds of this kind of sleep. Look at the trend over time and see if it's changing for you. Now I'm getting back to the idea of COVID One of the things that we will see is if you can be consistent over time, you will start to see some of those numbers grow, specifically the ones looking at stage three, four sleep. Now, you just heard me say none of these are very accurate. Why would I still look at that? We still want to see that. It's being that whatever the inaccuracy is, it's consistent. Right. So we still want to see the measurements, but you will maintain a consistent schedule. You will see all of those stages increase in the. In the right areas that you want to see them in. And so, again, from a Covid perspective, you want to get good, deep sleep. What are some of the things that could up your sleep? There's two biggies. Caffeine and alcohol. Now, I'm going to be very clear. I'm not a teetotaler. I like scotch, okay? I just do. I like bourbon. I'm just that guy. I like brown liquor. It's a problem, but I can tell you that it really messes up your sleep. I mean, really messes up your sleep. So when you think about it, the thing that it really destroys is this physical restoration, this stage three, four sleep. And this is where the immune function hits hardest. So I can't really impress upon you enough. Here's the secret that I've discovered is it all matters about when you drink the alcohol. So you could drink alcohol earlier in the day and have it have zero effect on your sleep. Oh, Michael. Day drinking? Is that what you're offering to people, that people should be day drinking? It's St. Patrick's Day. Brie, martini.

Lunch is back.

So shouldn't we be talking about the booze right now? No, no, no, no. Hold on. So here's what I'm Saying is the amount of time just before your eyes close before you go to bed is the most critical time. And so if you can stop drinking alcohol and have a period of time where that's not there, alcohol gets metabolized. The average human metabolizes one alcoholic beverage in one hour. The other thing to remember is alcohol is a diuretic. Makes you pee, so you become dehydrated. Most people don't know this. Sleep, in and of itself is a dehydrative event. You wake up like a raisin. Okay? If you go to bed having had a bunch of beers, right? And then you pee. Because everybody has to go to the bathroom after they've been drinking. Because once you break the seal, you're going and going and going. You go to bed dehydrated. The active sleep is dehydrating. You wake up, right? And you are completely dehydrated and hungover because you drank too much. So what do you do? You grab a cup of coffee. And what is coffee? Coffee is another diuretic. Yeah, right. So you see this pattern? This is why people feel like shit when they drink and go to bed. Okay? So let's fix that. Right? So when we think about kind of understanding how this might work, there's a couple things that you would want to think about. So number one, stop drinking alcohol three hours before bed. Okay? Limit yourself to two drinks. Stop drinking three hours before bed.

All right?

Oh, gosh, Michael, what are you talking about? Limit myself to two drinks? Here's the data. When you get more than two alcoholic beverages in, you, almost doesn't matter what your size is. Although some people size definitely does matter. Right? So if we compared, like Dean to Eunice. Right. They're not going to have the same tolerance levels, of course. But just follow my logic here. Once you hit two alcoholic beverages for under the table. That's what I'm saying. So at the end of the day, what we're thinking here is that it takes the average human one hour to digest one alcoholic beverage, spend one hour. I'm sorry, Drink one glass of water, and then spend one hour before bed. Two glasses of wine. Two glasses of water. Two hours before bed. Once you hit the second glass, women have a tendency to have energy. Men have a tendency to get aggressive. Neither one is good before bed. Right? So don't drink up until you pass out. To be clear, if you drink to the point where you, quote, pass out, you're anesthetizing yourself, you're not sleeping. Okay? There's a really big difference between Putting anesthetic into a human and having them naturally fall asleep. Those are two very, very different scenarios. And when you drink alcohol to put yourself to sleep, you're anesthetizing yourself, not sleeping. So when you wake up in the middle of the night, your brain has no idea what happened, and it thinks it's the time when you started drinking. By the way, this is one of the reasons why if you've drinking really hard one night and you wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, you can't fall back asleep. Yeah, because your brain thinks it's basically back timeframe because you literally close the door on time with alcohol. The other thing that from a Covid perspective, that's going to be super duper important for people, aside from moving every day, keeping their chronotypical schedule, and trying to avoid alcohol too close to bedtime, is sunlight. So it's interesting, many people really haven't taken a tip on this, but in the morning times, many people are having a difficult time waking up. And I'm not talking about long haulers, and I'm not talking about COVID fatigue. I'm talking about it's hard to just kind of brighten our eyes and wake up. And I've been asking everybody to wake up on their chronotypical wake up time. So what am I doing here? I'm asking people also to do two things when they wake up in the morning. Number one, you should have a refillable water bottle next to your bed full of water. And the very first thing you need to do is drink that water. Okay, I'm talking 20 ounces, 25 ounces, whatever you can do to get some water out there. Okay? So it's really important to hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. The second thing, walk over to the window and get some direct sunlight. Michael, why on earth would I need to get some direct sunlight? When sun hits your eyeball, you have special cells in your eye called melanopsin cells. These are melatonin reactive cells. And so when the, when the particular frequency of light hits your eye, it's the frequency of 460 to 480 nanometers, what we call blue light. So if you remember blue light, you hear all about blue light all the time, right? So when that sunlight, blue light hits your eyeball, it sends a signal to your brain to turn off the melatonin faucet. Bye, bye, brain fog. It's awesome. Okay, so grab your water, walk over to the window and get 15 minutes of sunlight. Do me a favor. If you come right out of bed, put on a robe. I'm just saying, I don't know what you sleep in, right? You grabbed your water, you walked to the window. Are you sure your neighbor really wants to see what you sleep in? Throw on a robe, get some sun through a window.

Can you do that? Can you get blue light through a window?

You can, as a matter of fact. Now, there are some windows that have tempered glass and things like that. But honestly, honestly, honestly, sunlight is great. Michael Morrissey, what do you need a robe for? Michael, I'm not sure your neighbor really wants to see you naked out there. And I'm just saying maybe they do. You're a good looking guy, so who knows? So these are the things that I recommend for people to do and absolutely, positively every morning. And there's real science behind all of them. But the other big thing that I wanted to mention from a Covid perspective, and then, Dean, I'm happy to open it up for more questions and things like that, is really understanding the level of stress that we have going on. Okay? So just to take it a little serious for a second here, this is a level of stress that nobody has ever experienced in their lifetimes, right? So it's not just, I'm worried about my health. I'm worried about my entire family. I'm worried about my extended family. I'm worried about the vaccine. I'm worried about catching COVID I'm worried about finances. Like, the level of stress and worry is unique because it is literally catastrophic. It is everywhere for everything. And so our brains aren't really used to handling this much stress. And so guess what happens? We get in bed at night, we finally turn off the television, and all of these thoughts come throwing in, right? And it makes perfect sense, right? Why we think that way is because this is the only time of day where we have these thoughts. And it makes it very difficult for people to be able to fall asleep at night. So when we're thinking through this as an idea, remember, movement and exercise is a form of therapy. This is helpful for us, okay? This is why I'm talking about movement, right? This is critical, critical, critical, right? Don't avoid your sleep. Get your sleep. Sleep will help you with all of these different aspects of your life. Sleep helps with depression. It helps with anxiety. It helps with all of these different things that are going on. Number two, do not isolate, okay? It's super easy as an entrepreneur to get in your head and just start banging through and trying to make Things happen, right? I've done it myself, right. I just kind of, you know, I call it war pathing, right? Is you just kind of get in that mode and you just bang it out. Banging out, banging out. And before you know it, three, five, seven days have gone by, you know, because you're in warpath mode, right? You need to connect. People need to connect. Connection is an incredibly important aspect and it's important for sleep as well, being able to have those social things. Remember, isolation is, is the enemy at this point. Being isolated during COVID makes it incredibly difficult. Now that seems a little strange for me to say because we can't actually physically sometimes get into a room with people. But what we can do is do things like attend lectures, have conversations, reach out to family members. It's critical, critical, critical that we continue to do this. I actually make time in my schedule to call people that are just purely friends only from the standpoint of, number one, I kind of want to check on them, right? Because I don't know if they're okay. We have no idea what's going on in every single of our friends lives right now. There are many people who've got family members in hospitals who are dealing with COVID themselves and things like that. So number one, checking on my friends is something that I like to do. Number two, they check on me and they're like, michael, I haven't heard from you in two weeks. What's going on? How are you? And you know what? That feels really good that somebody out there is thinking about me. And so that's an important aspect to this is this community, right? Because the more isolated we become, the easier it is to get into our own head and to have these problems with insomnia. The other big thing I tell people is don't watch TV falling asleep. That has anything to do with media or politics or death, like Covid statistics or things like watch an old episode of Seinfeld or, you know, comedians, cars and coffee. I love Jerry Seinfeld. And just frickin relax, okay? You do not need data before bed. You do not need to learn something before bed. You should laugh, you should smile, you should enjoy yourself. There is even data to show that optimism before bed. Not only does it make you fall asleep more quickly, it gives you more positive dreams. So I am officially asking everybody on the call tonight to do a gratitude list. Just a simple list before bed. Five things that you are grateful for. You will be surprised at how much better a mood it puts you in and how much better you Sleep, it's an easy task, and it's all for you. We're not taking care of ourselves. We're running around taking care of everybody else. It's time to take care of ourselves.

That's amazing. Like, how I look at. Can I ask you some questions about the. Because a lot of people are using the sleep trackers and you've talked about the stages of sleep and I noticed some patterns, you know, and. But I'm very curious about how much deep sleep is. Is appropriate, the right amount of deep sleep, or how much I've noticed in some mornings. Like, so last night my sleep score was 84 on my.

Oh, that's pretty good.

Okay, so that's good. And I got 1 hour and 10 minutes of deep sleep and 1 hour and 48 minutes of REM sleep.

Wow, that's pretty good. Okay, so generally speaking, if we were to look at a tracker and again, remember, they're not the most accurate in the world, generally speaking, we would see that 50% of the night is made up of about 5% stage one and about 45% stage two sleep. And then another 50% of the night is made UP half, about 23% of deep sleep and then 25% REM sleep. So REM sleep should make up about a quarter of the night. Deep sleep should make up about a quarter of the night. Again, this is a generalization and not something to be like, oh my God, I only got 3% deep sleep.

Light sleep is the one that. Light sleep is that second stage that you're.

Exactly, that's just.

You're there, you're sleeping, but it's.

So here's the deal with sleep.

It's okay if most of the sleep you get is light sleep. It's supposed to be that way.

It's supposed to be that way. So I. Yeah, so a lot of times I talk to people and I would say that light sleep is kind of a filler in between deep sleep and rem. Now, to be honest with you, that's not an accurate statement. There's things that stage two and one do that are very important for the sleep process. But for our general discussion here, you guys don't necessarily need to know what stages one and two do, but stage three, four is the physical restoration and stage REM is the mental restoration. Right. So that's where we move information from our short term memory to our long term memory. That's where all kinds of good things happen. From an entrepreneurial standpoint, our creativity oftentimes comes from our REM sleep, things like that.

When I look at the patterns, it seems like I get my deep sleep sort of early into the process that I go into deep sleep and then get the REM sleep at the end, at the tail end of the night. I wake up now some 54 now, and I've noticed that I'll wake up at 3 o' clock or, you know.

So let's talk about that. So. So one of the most common things that I hear is I go to bed and I wake up somewhere between 2 and 3 o' clock in the morning. Let's talk about what is wrong with the middle of the night. So there are three different major reasons why we see people waking up in the middle of the night. For men, if you have an enlarged prostate, it makes you wake up to go to the bathroom. And so that's a big issue. And so if you are waking up to go to the bathroom at least once in the middle of the night, please talk with your doctor about understanding your PSA levels and understanding if you have an enlarged prostate. That's an important thing. My father was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer. So this is a big issue in our home. That was something that we're certainly looking at. Putting that aside, let's talk about the second biggest thing, which is blood sugar. So this is a very interesting aspect that not a lot of people have really taken into account. So nine times out of ten when I talk to somebody and they say, hey, Michael, I wake up at 2 o' clock or 3 o' clock in the morning and there's actually a very particular time. And it's. They say it's like 2:37, you know, 3:56. It's a very, very particular time that this usually occurs for most people. When I count backwards from that time, I always ask people, when was your last meal? Okay, nine times out of ten they stopped eating about 6:30, 7 o'. Clock. So if you go from 7 o' clock to roughly 3 o' clock in the morning, that's eight hours. I would argue that you're out of fuel. Okay, so here's what happens is when you go to sleep and you stop eating that early on, your blood sugar eventually falls off of a cliff. When it falls off of a cliff, your brain says, holy crap, there's no more blood sugar. So it spikes cortisol and wakes you up.

Right, right.

So that's where the problem.

Do intermittent fasting. Are you trying to stop eating at by 7 o'?

Clock? I know, what do you do?

Or whatever then you go, yeah, so, right.

So what do you do? So I'm an intermittent faster. Okay. And so I, and I've actually written a blog about intermittent fasting and sleep. So if people want to check it out, you should. But when you're looking at this blood sugar issue, here's one of the things that you can do is there's a tea that you can drink before bed. It's called guava leaf tea. Not guava fruit, not guava juice. Guava leaf tea. It's on Amazon. I think you can get it for 10 bucks. Okay. There's at least two studies to show that it actually keeps your blood sugar stable all night long. It's pretty fascinating. Guava leaf tea. Now there's another study that shows that raw honey can do the same thing. A teaspoon, not a tablespoon, a teaspoon of raw honey. Right. Not the kind that you get from the bear. Right. But with the honeycomb in it. Like, you know, like you went to the farmer's market and you get the local honey because you want the raw honey that comes off, not processed. It's got all the particulates in it and things like that. Number one, it helps you with your allergies, but number two, it's hard for your body to digest it and you can actually make it through the night. I have some patients who do the guava leaf tea with the honey and they think that is kind of like the killer, the killer supplement for them. And so that actually worked out quite well from a, from a blood sugar standpoint. To be clear, if you're diabetic or you're keto or you're, or paleo, obviously you can't do the honey part, but you can do the guava leaf tea part. Now I will also tell you that as a wolf chronotype, so I'm a late in the night chronotype, my intermittent fasting is actually delayed. So my intermittent fasting, my feeding time starts at 2 and goes till 10.

Okay.

I'm doing an eight hour feed. Right. And so as a, as a, yes, right before bed, you can take it about 30 minutes before bed. You only want to have one cup of it because you'll have to pee if you have too many cups. So yes, right before bed. The third thing is much more interesting than the first two. The third one has to do with your core body temperature. So what's interesting is when you fall Asleep at around 10:30 at night, your core body temperature goes off a cliff and goes down, down, down and your core body temperature drops by almost a full degree centigrade by the time you're at the base of your core body temperature that's actually quite cold. And so what's interesting is around between 2 and 3 in the morning, there's an uptick in your temperature and your temperature slowly starts to rise because your body's supposed to be waking up because of the sun and things like that. So this time period is a time period where your arousal threshold is particularly low. Very easy to wake up during this particular period of time. Now here's what people do, and this is a problem. They instantly look at the clock, right? So you wake up and you instantly look at the clock. And without meaning to, you do the mental math almost immediately and you say, Holy shit, it's 3:30 in the morning, I gotta get be up at 6. Sleep, sleep, sleep. And you try really hard to sleep. Okay.

Yeah.

So no, I wasn't, I don't have a camera in your bedroom. I just happen to know that this is what.

No, the good news is that's never. I don't, I don't have anything.

Well, I'm glad, I'm glad to hear that. I guarantee you that has happened to several people around and about here. Right. And what you're doing is you're causing autonomic arousal, which makes it impossible to fall asleep. The most important statistic that you're going to hear from me today is in order to enter into a state of unconsciousness, you need a heart rate of 60 or below. 60 or below. So when you wake up in the middle of the night, you got to get your heart rate back down. Because if your heart rate's not down, you're not going to fall asleep. When you look at the clock and you get pissed off, that ain't helping your heart rate.

Right.

I can assure you of that. Right. So here's how I want you to look at it. When you look at the clock, I'm going to do a Michael Koenigsegg re. Rebrand here. Ready? When you look at the clock, instead of saying this sucks, you're going to say this sucks is awesome. I Woke up at 3:30, I got to get up at 6. I got two and a half hours left. I can lie back down and I might be able to get a little bit more rest. You know what? I've got the opportunity. I know if I wake up now, I can do it. Right. Because I've done that before.

Right, exactly.

Right, right. But maybe I can get another cycling here's the second piece of information that's incredibly important that most people don't know. In fact, an hour of rest, two, just lying there awake is equal to, from a rejuvenation standpoint, approximately 15 to 20 minutes of sleep. So if you've got three hours left in the night, if you lie there, even if you're awake, your body is still getting something positive, about an hour or so's worth of rejuvenation. So lie there and chill and relax. And guess what happens when you do that? Your heart rate starts to drop. And your heart rate starts to drop, the natural sleep process takes over and you fall asleep again. Yeah, right. So it's really about changing your attitude in the middle of the night, right? It's flip the script and look at it from a positive viewpoint. So I personally had this problem for a long time. I woke up at literally 2:33, I think it was every night. And I eventually just said to myself, you know what, this is going to be great. I'm just going to lie here and chill out and relax. And now, for example, if I have a bad night of sleep, I just say, well, something's going on in my brain, my body can handle this. I'm going to make sure that I do all the right things that I need to do today. I'm not going to go to bed early. That's the number one problem for people. If you have a bad night's sleep, going to bed early because your circadian rhythm is not ready to sleep and all you do is lie there and get pissed off. How many people of you have climbed into bed and it's 8 o' clock at night and you're exhausted and you know your body wants to sleep, you close your eyes and nothing happens. That's because your circadian rhythm isn't ready to sleep. Keep a consistent bedtime and a consistent wake up time. Even if you have a shitty, shitty, shitty night of sleep. Don't go to bed early. Go to bed at your normal time. Your body will adjust.

What about nodding off while on the couch? And then.

So great question, right? So you're watching the ball game, right? You're watching the ball game, you're hanging out, it's after dinner and you fall asleep on the couch. If you have insomnia, this is about the worst thing that you can do. Okay? Because here's what's happened is when you, you're able to relax and fall asleep in front of the TV on the couch, but you go upstairs, you wash your face you brush your teeth, you get in bed, boom, you're awake. You've now created an association, a pairing, a classically conditioned pair for your brain. Remember Pavlov's dogs? When you ring the bell, you show them the steak. Eventually they salivate. Just when you ring the bell. Yeah. Well, now what you've done is you've kind of told yourself a problem that you could have with sleep. So. Right. You know what I'm saying? Like, you don't want to think of it that way. You want to think of things in a more positive light whenever you possibly can.

I'm lucky.

Yeah.

Because my routine can be I'm going to go, you know, into the bedroom, fall asleep and get in bed in that order. Usually I don't have to wait till I get in the bed. Is that what latency is in your measurements?

So latency is the time it takes you from the moment you close your eyes until you actually fall asleep. That's called your sleep onset latency. And a lot of people look at that number. To be clear, the appropriate amount of time that it should take you to fall asleep is somewhere between 15 and 25 minutes.

Okay. Look at that as a problem. And. But that's interesting. Oh, no. This is. So I got. My latency was 18 minutes, which is bad as almost all the way blue. But sometimes I get zero, which that's why I was joking about that. I fall asleep and get in bed. That sometimes it's. 0. 2 minutes, 3 minutes.

Oh, yeah. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So Carol asked a little bit ago regarding the trackers, I would be interested to know in the electromagnetic influence on your body as you sleep. I put all of the electronics out of my room at night. Would love to know your thoughts.

Thanks. So this is a great question and one that I get more often than you might imagine. Different ones do different things. So the Oura ring, I believe, has a setting where you can turn it on airplane mode. And so there shouldn't be a tremendous amount of EMF exposure at that point. When you look at EMFs in general, there's unfortunately not a tremendous amount of data with EMF and sleep that's been done in any of the peer reviewed journals as of yet. I do believe that people can be EMF sensitive. I've had two patients in my career that were incredibly EMF sensitive. For folks out there who are concerned about EMF sensitivity, number one, you can get a meter to be able to look at all the EMF that's being produced in your bedroom. So things like alarm clocks, cable boxes, anything that's got an electrical signal that runs through it is going to have EMFs. But there's now, believe it or not, paint that you can paint on your walls that's electrically shielded and you can create a Faraday cage in your bedroom if that's something that you wanted to do. There's also these things called grounding pads that you can place underneath your sheets and then there's a wire that goes out the window and is buried into the earth. So that way you are grounded when you sleep. There's a little bit of data to suggest that that could be helpful. I can tell you that in both of my patients who are EMF sensitive, one of them actually did the paint and the other one did the grounding pad and they both found them to be successful. I'm not EMF sensitive, so it's hard for me to evaluate as much of it as I'd like. But that's about the amount I know about that from a tracker standpoint, you shouldn't have a tremendous amount of EMF exposure.

Awesome. Thank you. Evelyn asked, as a Covid survivor still suffering from long term symptoms, even after nine to ten months, my sleep patterns have been destroyed. Anything for someone experiencing that?

So I've been asked this question like a million times this whole week and unfortunately the answer is. We don't know the answer yet. I do have some suggestions, however, that I think could be helpful. Number one, it's really going to be about consistency in terms of your sleep schedule. And so what I'm asking folks with COVID to do is if you can take the Chrono quiz and figure out what your sleep schedule should be. If you can stick on that, it takes about three weeks for your body to lock into it. And that seems to be somewhat helpful for people. The second thing I've seen is, and this is very, very difficult because the fatigue can be excruciating. A lot of people are utilizing caffeine and that caffeine has long term effects on our sleep. And so I know people are trying to give themselves some energy during the day by utilizing caffeine. But if you can keep that caffeine north of 12 o' clock noon, you're going to be in much better shape. For general recommendations, I tell people stop caffeine by 2pm but for folks with COVID and long haul, because everything is moving a lot slower in your system, you really want to, if you can, avoid caffeine after 12 if at all possible. The third thing that's, that's interesting. I don't have any data on it yet, but it's something that you people might want to look into is breathwork. There's some really interesting data coming out of nyu. There's a group of doctors there that have started to look at breathwork and how to strengthen the lungs and strengthen the musculature that's in here. Like this is a respiratory disorder, guys. Like that's really. It sits in your lungs and then you have what's called a cytokine storm and then your lungs basically overreact. And so there is a lot of thoughts and ideas surrounding doing more breath work. I believe that James Nestor is a member or has spoken here before. Is that. Am I correct?

Yeah. Yes.

Yeah. So James has got a great book out called Breath where he did a really interesting expose on looking at breathing and breath work and things like that. So I would argue that that is something that I think we could be, could be extremely helpful with that as well. And then the other big thing is mindset is a big one. And so if you're not practicing meditation or things like that, I think there are some good meditations that could be. That was something that we should look at. But I'm actually right now working on a blog to try to address the difference between Covid long haul fatigue and something like hypersomnia or, you know, sleeplessness or things like that. So I'm digging into it. It's going to take me a little while to get through to that data, but I will, I promise get there and happy to distribute once we do that.

What about pain? I have a trouble falling asleep and staying asleep, getting back to sleep due to the pain. And this came in from Autumn, who's on with.

Okay, so pain is a whole different universe. So I worked in a pain center for three years because people in pain don't sleep. And it turns out that there's several different things that happen with people in pain. So for people who have regular pain on an everyday basis, that's not the thing that seems to bother them because they're used to that pain. It's the spikes in pain or the inability, like a lot of my pain patients, when they were approaching their bed, they, they would have a heightened level of anxiety because they were like, am I going to throw my back out if I try to get in bed or am I going to, you know, like in the middle of the night, if I turn or twist a different way, am I going to go? So number one, there's a level of anxiety with people with pain pre bed. So you need to consider doing something to help with that pre bed anxiety. I'm going to give you a couple of suggestions in just a moment. The second thing that we know as a tendency to happen is that this anxiety, once you finally get settled, can actually increase as well because people start to look at, am I getting enough sleep to help me with my pain? Right? And so just to be clear, sleep and pain do not have a one for one ratio. If you get 10 hours of sleep, it's not going to reduce your pain by X amount. It is, however, going to help with inflammation. And so when we kind of work our way back around and try to understand what's going on from the pain perspective and people with pain, it is appropriate to consider medication for sleep in some instances, depending upon the pain. There's only so much cognitive behavioral therapy that's going to work when you're in excruciating pain every single night. Now, that being said, I'm not a big proponent of prescription drugs. It's just not my favorite thing to have happen. But in our pain patients, there is an opportunity to break the cycle of the insomnia, Place somebody on a sleep medication and then taper them off of it, teach them how to sleep better and start to work that way. I've seen that work quite a few times as well. So working what you gotta find is you gotta find a sleep specialist who is willing to take the time to understand your pain problem and then work with you in doing that. But don't feel as though you're relegated to only medication. There's some significant data looking at cognitive behavioral therapy for pain and sleep, which is also quite interesting. And then the other thing that many people, depending upon what state you're in, is cannabis. Cannabis has got a really good profile for pain from a CBD perspective. But if people want to talk about cannabis for sleep, I'm happy to do that as well. But to be clear, there is not a lot of great data looking at sleep and cannabis as of yet. What we have seen is there's been some preliminary data looking at cbd. And to be clear, the data that I have read and if anybody's got any better data, I'm ready to hear it. You need 180mg, 180 of CBD per night before we see any sleep related effects. That's literally like taking the bottle in most of the CBD that you see offered out there. So if you see CBD and they say this is sleep CBD, look at the dose. Because if the dose is 10 milligrams or 15 milligrams or 25 milligrams, they're wrong. The data would not support it as a CBD only product. Now, if you combine CBD with something called CBN and something called thc, now we have a different product altogether. There is some data to suggest that THC will obviously help you feel relaxed and can lower anxiety before bed, but it can also help you fall asleep more quickly. Now what's interesting about THC is it increases stage three, four sleep. Hold on a second, Michael. You said stage three, four sleep was our physical restoration and that we need to do everything we can to make sure that we have great stage three, four sleep. You are right. That is exactly what I said. Michael, are you honestly saying that smoking pot is going to help me do that? Yes, I am honestly saying that that is exactly what it is going to do. However, there is a caveat. While it gives with the deep sleep, it takes away from the REM sleep and it almost obliterates REM sleep. So when you talk to people who are long term marijuana users, what do they sound like? They sound like stoners. Why? Because their memory is down. Why is their memory down? Because they don't get enough REM sleep. Right. So there's a trade off here. There's always a trade off. Now what I will tell you is I do believe that there are some and I'm happy to work with people. There are some tinctures, there are some vapes, and there are some edibles out there that are moving towards a better formulation. I'll be real honest with you, I'm trying to be the tip of that spear. I'm looking for companies that are interested in really understanding the science behind sleep in cannabis and creating great products. But to be very, very clear, I haven't found one yet. I've reviewed almost everybody that's kind of out there and doing it. And according to my science, the stuff you got that's out there is probably not going to work as well as we would want it to do so but for pain it actually works really well. And so One of the things I talk about with people is looking at amount of cannabis, or like, are you using an edible versus a tincture? Something like that. And we can go down the cannabis path if people are interested. But I don't want to take up the whole talk with cannabis.

So Dr. Jamie Tungate says, what would cause me to wake up hot and sweating in the middle of the night and wake up super cold in the morning?

It's that middle of the night time period you were talking about earlier. But I'll wake up and I'm like super hot and I can't have to take the covers off. And then like, my whole life I've always just woken up super cold in the morning. Got it. And so it's like opposite. So the very first thing I would do is check your thyroid, right? Because if you have like a sick thyroid or something like that, and you have any level of Hashimoto's, you could be, you know, going up and down in the middle of the night and that could be causing some of your thermodyn. So first thing first, I would check that. Second of all, is there. Does it happen at a particular time? Because my guess is right, when your temperature curve drops and starts to go up, that's when you're starting to wake up. Do you notice it's in the two to three o' clock range?

Yeah.

Yep. Just like when you were saying earlier. So. So believe it or not, there's a product on the marketplace that does something kind of cool. It's called the Chili Pad. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this product, but it's a pad that goes underneath your sheet and it can cool or warm you and you can set it on a timer to do just that. And so I've used this with menopausal women and they love it. It's pretty interesting. But that's been something that's been very, very. One of the products that I found that's been really cool. Also, Jamie, there's another thing that could be interesting. There's a new product. It's called an Ebb. Ebb. It's made by a company called Ebb Therapeutics. And it's something that goes across your head. Now, this is actually good for all people. So if people want to listen up, this was a very interesting project that I got a chance to work on. So, going to tell a quick story, Dean. So a friend of mine, Dr. Eric Knofsinger, is very famous sleep researcher and he was an ER doc when he was younger. And when you're an ER doc, you know that if somebody comes in and let's say they crack their head open, we pack their head in ice, right, to slow down the bleeding. Just. The neuroprotective effect of cold is a well known thing in the medical world. So Eric eventually ended up going into sleep research and, and he remembered this neuroprotective effect of cold and he went into specifically research in insomnia, specifically with racing thoughts. The reason I bring this up is my guess is that we've got quite a few people on here. Most people can't turn off their brain at night. And this is exactly what I'm talking about. This symptom of not being able to turn off your brain at night. This is what this researcher was specifically trying to tackle. And he did it with chilling cold. Very interesting. So what he did was he discovered that in this front part of your brain called your frontal cortex, when you're trying to fall asleep and you're ruminating about thinking, this area is incredibly active, incredibly active. Blood flow going, going, going. So what he said was, I remember this neuroprotective effect of cold. And so he created this thing that you wrapped around your head. I mean, it looked ridiculous. Okay. It was insane looking. And then it had this big tube that came down to this thing and there was water and. And you could run water through it. And he would heat or cool the water. It took him three years. He figured out the temperature that works the best to help people fall asleep and stay cool. Because that was the second thing that was interesting is he did this in menopausal women. And menopausal women found that the cold across their forehead throughout the evening actually helped regulate their temperature throughout the night and had a reduction in hot flashes. So, Jamie, I'm thinking that you could be experiencing some type of thermodygulation and, and the cold across your forehead may be helpful in doing something like that. The devices, it's no longer this big thing that you wrap around your head. It's actually a smaller device now. It literally just came out. Full disclosure, I work with the company. That's why I know so much about the product. But I put this on at least a dozen of my patients and it's been pretty miraculous. I personally have used it multiple times because I don't have insomnia, but I like to try all the products myself. And I'll tell you my experience with this one. I was, I sat it on my head and it's got A little remote control and it's a band and you wear this headband all night long and it looks ridiculous. Just to be clear. Okay, you look stupid, but it's got this nice hum to it and these three little patches that go across your forehead and you can set the temperature. And here's what I did was I put it on my head. My wife was definitely making fun of me and I was watching TV and I turned it on and that's the last thing I remember. And I literally woke up the next morning sitting there in my, in my clothes with this thing on, right? Like that's what happened to me. And I'm going to be very honest with you, when I woke up I felt amazing. You know those, you ever get one of those sleeps where it's like, it's like that 15 year old sleep where like you slept and you wake up and you feel fucking great, right? That's how I felt when I wore this fricking thing and I was like, you got to be kidding me. So I didn't wear it the second night, woke up, felt kind of normal. So I put it on the third night, same thing. Great, great, great quality sleep. So while it wasn't designed to give improved quality sleep, it's specifically designed for menopausal women and people who have ruminative thought before bed. This is a product that is very, very interesting. I've got a review on it on my website. So if you head over to my website and check it out, you can learn more about it there and we can put some links and things like that in here if people want to learn more about it. But I got to tell you something, I personally use it. I bought 10 of them and I've given them to multiple friends and to multiple patients. Nobody's returned it ever.

That's interesting.

Cool science.

Cool does help. Like I talk about, you mentioned you get that great sleep. And for me, like my, the last thing I remember was in July 2014, I just come off of being on a little tour. I was in Toronto, London, Amsterdam. Got back to the Four Seasons in Toronto and had two consecutive nights with you know, blackout curtains, comfortable bed, AC on full blast and slept for 13 hours. Like just, you know.

Oh yeah, well, let's talk about jet lag, you know. You know what, Dean? We haven't talked about jet lag. Is it okay if I talk a little bit about that? That's a problem, you know. Yeah, that's a big problem. And you know, we've got a lot of entrepreneurs tend to have a tendency to travel quite a bit. So. You know what? I'm glad you brought that up. I didn't mean to cut you off there, but I'm glad you brought that up. If I. If I can talk a little bit about jet lag, if that's okay. Yeah. Okay, good. So. So I'm gonna tell you a story again. I'm a storyteller, right? It's just how I am.

So perfect.

So, NASA. Yeah. So NASA was having a problem with the space station. Okay? So many people don't know this, but the space station moves around the earth 17,500 miles an hour. Can you believe that? 17,500 miles an hour. That thing is moving quick, okay? But what that means is every 20 to 30 minutes, the sun rises, and then 20 to 30 minutes later, the sun falls for the astronauts. Can you imagine how screwed up their circadian rhythms are up there?

I'm tired.

I'm awake, right? Their light cues are all over the place. It's a fucking mess, okay? And so NASA called my buddy Steve Lockley at Harvard, and they were like, we got people who are sleeping who are not sleeping. And, you know, it's a real problem on the space station if you're tired. Like, if you leave the airlock open, that's not good, right? You know, all of the equipment is really expensive, right? When people are knocking shit over, it's a bad idea up there. So they said, okay, well, what can we do? So Stephen and I actually worked on the project. And Stephen created these specialized lights that we actually sent up there. It took a year, but we sent them up there and we created a timing for these lights. And so what we created were shifts. So just like you would have shifts, for example, in a manufacturing, they created shifts on the space station. So there was a morning shift, a mid shift, and an evening shift. And we assigned astronauts to each one of these shifts so we could actually work with their circadian rhythms and keep them better aligned. It worked out great. But one of the things we discovered while we were doing that is we needed to do three different things. So we ended up using caffeine, napping, melatonin, and light therapy to manipulate their circadian rhythms. Those four things, well, we kind of figured out an algorithm for doing that. So we took that algorithm and we brought it down terrestrially to the Earth and we put it into the Formula one race car team for Mercedes Benz. And we were able to get all of their drivers on point everywhere they go. So if you know anything about Formula One racing, they race all around the world and they have to be unbelievably precise, unbelievably focused, and unbelievably consistent in every single thing that they do or people die. Right. I mean, it's very obvious what happens when bad stuff happens at Formula One. So we were able to figure it out there and then we created an algorithm and now, believe it or not, it's in an app. So my gift to everybody here is if you go to timeshifter.com t I m e s h I f-t e r.com and the code is, I think the code is sleep. Dr. You should get your first two jet lag plans for free. So this is super cool. So you break out the app and you plug in where you are, what your chronotype is and where you're going and what time your flights are, and it will tell. It will give you a plan two days before you leave so that when you arrive, you will arrive on the time of your destination. You will be ready to go in two days. It's amazing. So we did this. So one of my. So I have a lot of kind of, I guess you'd call them celebrity patients. And so I'm working right now, I'm working with a Saudi Arabian princess and she comes from Saudi to Los Angeles and she was having seven or eight days of jet lag. Because to be clear, it for every time zone that you pass, it takes one day for your body to adjust. So if you go from Los Angeles to New York, it would take you two days to adjust. Right now most people can be like, ah, don't worry about it. Also, the direction of the travel turns out to be important. I always tell people, east is least and west is best. Okay? So think about it like this. If you're in New York and you're flying to la, I'm just asking you to stay up later at night, right? Because LA is an earlier time zone. But if you're going from Los Angeles to New York, I'm asking you to go to bed at like 7 o'. Clock. If your normal bedtime is 10, that isn't going to work too well for you, right? So remember, east is least and west is best. If you check out this app, you'll get first two jet lag plans for free. It's pretty amazing. I use it personally all the time when I travel and it's never failed me. And I've traveled to Australia with it, I've traveled to Beijing with it. I'VE traveled to Japan with it, Thailand, literally all over the world. It's pretty cool.

That's awesome. You talk about that, the number of days that it takes. I go to Australia every year and I fly, you know, when you leave, I fly from Dallas to Sydney. And you leave on Saturday night and you arrive at 6am on Monday morning in Sydney. And my strategy has always been to kind of sleep on the plane, but then stay awake and get on Sydney time as soon as possible, like stay up and go to bed at that time. And then a couple of days later, I was going to have dinner with a friend. He was going to come and meet me at my place at an Airbnb place. And at 4:00', clock, he was coming at 6, 4:00, clock I thought, oh, I could take a little nap. I'll take a little nap and then I'll be good all the way through. So I laid down at 4:00'. Clock. The next I opened my eyes was 11:30. And that night, straight through, wake up with all these texts from, from Jesse thinking, where is he? Are you okay? And that was just. It was amazing. But I was. Then, then it was more difficult to get back on the thing because it depended.

Absolutely. Yeah. And so keeping that schedule turns out to be critical. Critical, critical. When we're, when we're moving around and grooving around, you know, in terms of jet lag and things like that, it could, I couldn't be more important. You know, one of the other things, Dean, that people have been asking me about, people always want to know what supplements that I take. Let's address Melatonin, magnesium and Zequil. All right. But if I forget, remind me what I'm supposed to talk about. So Melatonin first. So melatonin. So I'm going to put a caveat on everything I'm about to say because I'm going to give you something at the end. So melatonin and Covid have a very particular relationship that has recently been discovered. But I don't want to. I want to tell you about Melatonin for sleep first, and then I'm going to talk to you about Melatonin for Covid. So when we talk about melatonin for sleep, 95% of melatonin for sleep is in an over dosage format. Okay? 95%. The appropriate dose is somewhere between a half and one and a half milligrams, depending upon you as an adult and your size. Now, people are going to be like, what are you talking about? If between a Half a milligram and one and a half milligrams. Okay? Now where did I come up with this data? So Workman's Data out of MIT shows that with a half a milligram to 1 1/2 milligrams, plasma concentration levels in the brain get to the point where it affects sleep. So 95% of the melatonin is sold in 3 milligrams, 5 milligrams, 10 milligram dosages. That's a fucking problem and I'll tell you why. So when we start to go back, melatonin turns out to be on a hormone. Yes folks, it is a hormone. Now you can't go down to your local GNC and buy testosterone or estrogen, and there's a really damn good reason why you can't. But believe it or not, melatonin should be under that categorization as well, and it's not. So people are liberally taking hormones and putting them into their body. Okay, well, is that really matter, Michael? Is that a big deal? Is that not a big deal? Okay, well, let's talk about it for a second. So number one, melatonin is not appropriate for anyone under the age of 18, okay? I'll tell you why, especially for girls. They are born with all of their eggs, okay? We have no idea how melatonin is going to affect them. Michael, why should melatonin affect their eggs in one way, shape or form or another? Because most people don't know that in Europe melatonin is by prescription only and at large dosages it's used as a contraceptive. Yes, I did say that melatonin is used as a contraceptive. Can you imagine giving a contraceptive to a 8 or 9 year old girl who's having a hard time sleeping? Is that really an appropriate idea or thing to do? I would say no fucking way. Number two, 99% of children have plenty of melatonin in their systems. So it's really not necessary for us to be giving kids melatonin. There is one caveat to this, and that is children who are on the autism spectrum. There is significant data to suggest that between 5 and 7 milligrams, believe it or not, of melatonin can be incredibly helpful for this group of this population of children and young adults. So if you've got somebody who's on the spectrum, melatonin may make some sense. But again, it is a hormone and not something that I like to have in children. Again, when you should take it turns out to be important as well. So if you're taking it with a tablet, most people don't know it takes 90 minutes for the tablet to go all the way down, get digested and then have an effect in your brain. If you use a dropper or a tincture and you can have it sit underneath your tongue, you can take it 30 minutes before bed. But most people are taking too much melatonin and they're taking it at the wrong time. They're taking 5 or 10 milligrams and they're getting weird dreams, because that's the number one sign of an overdosage of melatonin is weird dreams. Right? And they're saying it doesn't work very well because they're not falling asleep immediately. But remember, it takes 90 minutes for it to take an effect. So you should be taking it 90 minutes before bedtime. So if you're going to bed at 11, you would take your melatonin at.

9:30, who would do it? They wake up with a melatonin hangover, a little bit like that.

And that's exactly what happens. So this brings about the question of Zequil. Right? So this is exactly what happened. So when you look at Zequel and actually I met the woman who, who was the marketing person to launch Zeal and I told her a very alarming statistic that she was not very happy with. By the way, for folks out there who don't know, this zeal is primarily made of something called diphenhydramine, which is Benadryl. The data has been very consistent. There is absolutely positively a relationship between frequent use of Benadryl and Alzheimer's and dementia. Did you hear what I said? Alzheimer's and dementia.

Nobody wants that.

Okay, let me say it again. Alzheimer's and dementia. All right? If you're taking Zeal every night, welcome to the party because that's where you're going to end up.

Wow.

Okay. It's not appropriate. When you, when the Benadryl compound was developed, it's an, it's an allergy, it's an antihistamine, and by the way, it's developed for long term use. So what? So long term in terms of the 24 hour cycle, so it's supposed to last for 12 hours. If you take a Benadryl or a zequil at 9 o' clock and it's supposed to last for 12 hours, of course you're going to feel like shit the next morning because that's what the drug is supposed to do. Right? And so when you think about these over the counter things, it's not a great idea in most cases. If you really have a sleep problem, let's identify what it is. Is it falling asleep, is it staying asleep, is it waking up too early? Let's see if there's some behaviors that can be changed before we start ingesting pills, right? Let's look at things like light. Let's look at things like our chronotype. Let's look at things like our supplementation and see how we're doing. Supplementation is the other area I wanted to talk about and that's an important area as well. Magnesium, iron are two of the biggest things that we've got to make sure that are on board for you to get a good night's sleep. Magnesium turns out to be a really big one. And people always ask me all the time, you know, how do you take your magnesium, when do you take your magnesium? What should I take for magnesium? So here's what I'm going to tell you. I wrote a killer blog on magnesium. To be clear, if you type in magnesium and sleep, it usually in Google, it usually pops up within the above the fold. So it's been read a lot. I highly recommend that because it gives dosages of magnesium for anxiety, for sleep, for depression and all sorts of different things. So it's a great primer for all of that. But I'm going to tell you a unique way to get your magnesium. So most people don't know it, but bananas are loaded with magnesium. We call them nature's sleeping pills, believe it or not. But it turns out that the peel has three times the amount of magnesium as the fruit itself. So here's what I want you to do. I created a recipe that I call banana tea. All you do is get an organic banana, wash it off, cut off the tip and the stem, cut it in half, leave the fruit in and the peel on it. No, I'm not going to ask you to eat the peel. Drop it into 3 cups of boiling water and boil it until it turns brown and then drink the water. It's loaded with phytosteroids and things that help you digest magnesium. You will actually absorb the magnesium far quicker and better than you would in a tablet form. It's super easy to digest. If you have any issues with constipation, you won't after taking banana tea, I can assure you. And it's really tastes good. I will tell you this. What's that?

Practically speaking then would you do that in a, in a pan, like a sauce pan, or would you do.

I Would do it. And actually I would do it in like, what you would boil water in. So, like, you could like, I put three cups of water in like a little pan, drop your banana in there, boil it until it turns brown, and then drink the water. Very simple.

Lift it out and drink the water.

Yeah. Some people like to eat the banana, which is fine. The peel is actually much softer at that point.

Your little bit of calories too.

Yeah, exactly.

Three o', clock, wake up probably too, right?

There you go. There you go. So the banana tea works really, really well from a magnesium standpoint. But magnesium is critical for people. Now, I personally take my. I have a tablet form of magnesium that I have to take because I have a cardiac issue. And my doctor wants me to. To make sure that magnesium inside my cardiac tissue is available. So I take my magnesium in the morning time. Most people prefer magnesium at night. And I understand why. There's a powder. It's called calm. Some people really like that. That can be very helpful as well. The second thing that's really big, not on the mineral side, but on the vitamin side, is vitamin D. Almost everybody is deficient in vitamin D, by the way. Almost everybody's deficient in magnesium as well. Um, if you are not taking vitamin D, start taking it, by the way. From a Covid perspective, you need to understand that 95% of the deaths from COVID are in people who have a vitamin D deficiency. 95% of the deaths are in people who have a vitamin D deficiency.

That's interesting.

Okay, go get some vitamin D. Wow. Yeah, I know. The statistic is amazing, right? The number fluctuates based on the death rate, but look it up. It's crazy. So when you start to understand vitamin D. Vitamin D is a circadian pacemaker. It actually helps keep your entire system going. So there's no reason not to take vitamin D. And to be clear, if you think you're deficient in it, you are. I can almost guarantee you that you are deficient in it, because so few people are actually not deficient in it. So if you're looking at vitamin mineral perspective, and you're looking and you're asking me, hey, Michael, what kind of supplements do you take just to get yourself to the par level? It's vitamin D, it's magnesium. Those are two big things that everybody should be taking. Iron is also interesting. Iron is important for women because a lot of women lose iron from their menstrual cycles. And iron has a lot to do with restless leg syndrome and movement. If you have Twitching or leg pain or cramps or things like that at night, iron could be the culprit. It's definitely something that you can ask your physician for a blood test for. There is a very particular type of iron that is involved in something called restless legs syndrome. It's called ferritin. F, E, R, R, I, T, I, N. You have to specifically ask for that blood test from your doctor. And if it's below 60, all you need is a little bit of iron, and we can get rid of those twitchy legs pretty easily. So that part in and of itself is kind of interesting. Wow. So I recently wrote a blog, and we can. We'll. We'll distribute it to the group. So here's something that's interesting that we've discovered. And so with COVID there is inflammation. And with inflammation, we have these things in our system called cytokines. Cytokines send signals, places to say, hey, we need more white blood cells. We need more inflammation coming in. We need to fight this infection here. What's interesting is melatonin turns out to be able to modulate cytokines. This is a fairly recent understanding and discovery, which is fascinating. When people are leaving the hospital, they're being told in many cases to take 5 and 10 milligrams of melatonin at night, which is in and of itself interesting. I can't tell you that we know exactly what's going on yet, but what I can tell you is for people who are suspicious that they may have a melatonin deficiency or they want to be a little bit on the safer side, and they're concerned about COVID Taking 3 milligrams of melatonin 90 minutes before bed is not going to hurt you as long as you are consistent in what you take, and you take the right amount of melatonin from the right sources. I have a friend who makes 100% herbal melatonin. It's called erbatonin, believe it or not, and it's made from seagrass. So many people don't know, but melatonin, when the synthetic melatonin that's produced can be made with a whole host of processes, One of them actually includes cow vomit, believe it or not. Don't feel bad. Premarin is made from pregnant horse urine. Okay, so don't give me a hard time about cow vomit, but at the end of the day, the natural melatonin from Erbatonin, I think is something that you guys will. Sophia loves my jokes. She cracks up at all of my jokes. It's awesome. I want her at every one of my lectures. She's the best.

Right up there in pole position, too.

So now I got it right there. I can see her. It's perfect. It's perfect. So with melatonin and Covid, we do know that there appears to be some type of a modulator. We don't know exactly what it is. It's certainly not going to hurt you. Also, for folks who so I just turned 53 this year. For folks who are in their 50s, what we've discovered is that there is a mild melatonin decline in terms of production. So it is appropriate for folks like my age and older to consider taking melatonin. But remember, this is a circadian pacemaker. So if you're just taking it, don't just pop a pill and see what happens. Right? You take it 90 minutes before bed if it's a pill. You take it 30 minutes before bed if it's a liquid. And you and you consistent time. You don't take it at different times throughout the week. Consistency is the key here. Your entire body will function a million percent better with consistency, I can assure you. There was one question about vitamin D for children. I don't know what the dose is off the top of my head, but yes, both of my children take vitamin D. And there's even data looking at vitamin D. And I believe adhd. And I think that there is a specific type of vitamin D that is used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but I'm not positive on that.

How did dreams play a role in your sleep? I have very vivid dreams every single night. And sometimes I feel restless when I wake up from them. I even find it hard to separate myself from them. On some mornings, I can't tell if I'm awake or not. It's hard to get myself to go to bed.

So dreams are a big deal and I recently learned quite a bit. So number one, a little self promotion here. I did a podcast, my own podcast, and I did it with a dream therapist. This is interesting. Okay. Not a dream interpreter, a dream therapist. Completely different dream interpretation. I'm just going to go on the record. I think it's bs. I've never seen somebody do it well, and I don't know. And I just don't think it works the way it should. If you want to try to interpret your dreams, the only person who can interpret your dreams well is you. Right? You know what it means. That's where the interpretation, I believe, should come from. The therapist was very Very interesting. So here's what she does, is she asks you to write down your dream in as much detail as you can. And then in the therapy session, she creates a safe set and a safe setting, like, creates the mindset, creates the setting, making sure that. Because if the dream was traumatic. Right. That's an issue. Right. And so she has to create the safe space. And then she turns to the person and she says, push play. And they talk about what's happening in the dream for them. Many people get woken up in their dream and the pause button got hit, and that's what happened. And if they just push play, they can get through some of that dream. It's very, very interesting. She also uses the situation and what happens in the dream to understand therapy. So as an example, if you have depression, and depression is surrounding a traumatic event, and there's an aspect of that traumatic event that's in your dream, then she brings that forward in a safe and gentle way and helps you process through that. Dreams are a process of. Of processing emotion as well as distributing data for our brain. Right. So when data is coming in during REM sleep, our brain takes that information, puts it into an organizational substructure inside our head, and finds, like, the right filing cabinet, the right file drawer, and the right file to kind of deposit it into. That's one of the aspects of REM sleep. But another huge aspect is working through our emotions. Right. And so traumatic dreams are an entirely different area of study. Very fascinating, and something that a lot of people really suffer from. Nightmares, in particular, are one thing that I've done a little bit of work on. And There's a researcher, Dr. Barry Krakow, at the University of New Mexico, and he has created a nightmare online, nightmare therapy, that's amazing for people to check out. So I would. And I know Barry myself. He's. He's actually quite good at what he does. But what I thought I would end with is a study that I worked on that was recently published two weeks ago, that I think people, if you're interested in dreams, will find this fascinating. So by a raise of hands, how many people in here have seen the movie inception with Leonardo DiCaprio?

Love that.

Okay, so I'm just scrolling through. We got. Okay. Oh, we got a bunch of people who've seen it. Good. Oh, Fishman's here. Hey, Fish. So here's one of the things that's pretty interesting. So I worked on a project where. So let me back up. Has anybody in here heard of lucid dreaming?

Yeah.

So lucid Dreaming is a situation where in your dream, you actually wake up inside your dream and you realize that you're dreaming. It's pretty cool. You can do all kinds of things. You can fly. You can sleep with a supermodel. You can race a car. You can do all kinds of things. The rules of physics do not apply during your lucid dreaming. Okay, so here's what we did in this experiment is we had created a pair of goggles that somebody could wear, and when they went into dream sleep, we flashed lights at their eyes and they popped into a lucid dream. We could reliably put people into a lucid state. It gets much more interesting. Then we trained those same people before sleep. We had a tone, and we had a scene that was paired with the tone, the first scene. So the first tone was like. I think it was like a B flat or something like that. And we paired it with flying. And so the person would hear the tone, and then they would see flying, and they would hear the tone and they would see the visualization. Flying. We would pair the tone with flying. We did the same. We did the same thing with race car driving, I think it was. And so we taught people, instead of moving their eyes side to side, we taught people how to move their eyes up and down during REM sleep. And when they did that, we sent in the tone and we changed the channel in their head.

Wow.

So whatever they were thinking about or doing, they were flying as soon as they heard the tone. Wow, that was pretty cool. The study was. Yeah, the study was just published two weeks ago. Dr. Ken Paul out of Northwestern University is the one who published the study. We didn't have a lot of data. We only had four or five people that we were able to do it on. And so we found other labs around the world that were doing something similar. And so we put all of the data together and we, you know, showed everybody what we did. But in the near future, I will be able to tap into your dream. So what does that mean? Wow, Good idea. Is that a bad idea? For me, I'm excited about it because I'm very interested in what depression looks like. And I'm very interested in could we get rid of antidepressant medication by just walking into people's heads and fixing what's going on in there and doing therapy inside? Like, that's what I really wanted do.

Yes.

I don't know if we'll get there, but I'm kind of a sci fi guy, so that's kind of one of the Things I'd like to be able to. Wow, wow, wow. I'm going to give you a five step plan. Yeah. Come on. You know I'm ready for this. Step number one is to have one wake up time.

Yes, I was.

So go to everybody go to Chrono. There we go. Chronoquiz.com and figure out what your wake up time needs to be. Yes. Okay. Yes. You're going to put in your email. You're going to get a tremendous amount of value that comes back from it. Don't worry. But I promise you, you're going to dig it. It's super cool. So step number one is to select one wake up time and stick to it, including the weekends. Step number two, stop caffeine by 2pm okay, just stop it. Just stop caffeine by 2pm you're right. Am I doing okay?

Dean, you're doing great.

Two for so stop caffeine by 2pm Remember, caffeine's got a half life of six to eight hours. If you stop at two by 10, most of it should be out of your system. I'm going to digress for just a second. There's got to be at least some people here. And here's what they're saying. Sleep doctor. He doesn't know a damn thing. I can drink a cup of coffee at dinner and go right to bed. See, I'm telling you, lots of people are thinking this. Let me explain why that still occurs. It turns out about six or seven years ago, people discovered that people have caffeine sensitivities. Turns out I've got some patients who can eat a chocolate kiss and not go to bed for two nights. And I got other people who can drink three cups of coffee and fall right to sleep. So the sensitivity is an issue. But here's the other thing that's important to realize. Caffeine is a stimulant. Doesn't matter how sensitive you are to it or not. So even if you can fall asleep, it keeps you out of stage three, four sleep period. Remember, we want stage three four, especially during COVID because that is our physical restoration. Please, please, please stop caffeine by 2pm Step number three has to do with alcohol. And you know, I don't mind drinking, as you, as you all know. But there's a really big difference between going to sleep and passing out. So stop drinking. Step number three is stop drinking three hours before bed. You notice how I'm doing this? Step number one had one time. You have one wake up time. Step number Two, stop at two. Step number three, stop three hours before bed. Step number four has to do with exercise. The best thing that you can possibly do to improve the quality of your sleep is to exercise. Remember we talked a lot about movement and how movement is so important right now. But you can't move too close to bedtime, unfortunately, because it raises core body temperature. And remember, sleep follows the drop of core body temperature. So if you're going to exercise, stop exercise. Four hours before bed. What's that, Dean?

Yeah, I was going to say, how close is too close?

Because that's four hours.

Four hours. Okay.

Okay. I'm very specific in my recommendations before bedtime.

Because then everybody with every chronotype, they can adjust to whatever.

Exactly. Exactly.

Okay.

And then the final step has to do with waking up in the morning. There's three things that I want you to do every morning. You should have. Number one, you should take five deep breaths before you get out of bed. Kickstart your respiratory system. Okay? Just a big three count. Four count in, three, four count out. Just wake up the body. Put your feet on the edge of the bed. Stand up. You should have water bottle next to you. It should be something that's refillable. Right. Should have at least 20 ounces, if not 30 ounces of water in it. Right. Then walk over to the window and get yourself 15 minutes of sunlight. So what we're doing is we're breathing, we're hydrating, and we're getting a tan. All right. Why are we doing this? It's all important. Remember, sleep is a dehydrative event. You are dehydrated. When you wake up, you need to hydrate before you need to caffeinate. The sunlight turns off the melatonin faucet in your head. What's that, Dean?

What if people have a wake up time before the sun?

Great question.

I do not. A lot of our friends are in the 5am Club.

That's absolutely. Oh, and let's talk about the 5am Club for just a second. I think the 5am Club is the stupidest idea I've ever heard in my life. Okay. And I'm gonna explain to you why so. And by the way, I know Hal Elrod very, very well. I'm in his movie the Miracle Morning that just came out. I also know there was a. There was a guy I met actually at Genius Network. He's like the monk that wrote that. Who's the one who does the.

I had told him the same thing. I said it'd be. I think More people would be better off joining the nine hour club if they were to focus on getting nine hours.

Right? So, so take. And I actually told this to Robin. Thank you for reminding me of his name. And so here's the deal. There's only about 25% of the entire population who can wake up at 5am and do it successfully on a regular basis. That's it. Genetically speaking. There's about 15% of early bird chronotypes and we've discovered in the bear chronotype there are some early bears. And so those people can do it. But it is, to be honest, it's, I think it's reckless to tell people that they should wake up at 5am because quite frankly it's harmful to their health. If you are not of that chronotype, it is going to mess you up. I can assure you of that. Like, it's just not a good idea. Now all the things that you would do at 5am, right? Because that's part of the 5am club and that's part of the idea of the miracle morning is we get up and we do things for ourselves, right? We meditate, we journal, we gratitude list all of those things, right? I got no problems with those things. Do them later, okay? You're not awake anyway. If you wake up, if you're a night owl and you force yourself to wake up at 5am, how much good are you really getting out of your 5:00am Club, right? Like I don't get it. So I am giving everybody permission. If you don't want to get up at 5am, don't, OK? It is probably not a good idea anyway. What's that?

You do you.

Well, you do you based on your chronotype. Okay? I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead, you're over here. Do it now. Come on. Thank you. Watch them.