Sleep Transformation: How To Get The Rejuvenating Sleep You Deserve Featuring Dr. Michael Breus and Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing Episode #394

The biggest thing that I've noticed that people are not doing. And 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.

If you're currently not sleeping well, are struggling with insomnia, or looking for ways to maximize your sleep time, this is the episode for you. If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com we have a lot of people joining us from all over the world. Welcome everyone. I'm delighted to introduce Dean's guest. So I'm going to do a little introduction of Michael J. Bruce, Ph.D. now. He's a double board certified clinical psychologist and clinical sleep specialist. He is one of only 168 psychologists in the entire world to have taken and passed the sleep medicine boards without going to Medical School.

Wow.

Dr. Bruce is the author of three books with the newest book the Power of Win, which is a groundbreaking biohacking book proving that there's a perfect time to do everything based on your biological chronotype. For example, early bird or night owl, Dr. Bruce gives the reader the exact time. Listen to this. The exact time to have sex, to run a mile, to eat a cheeseburger, to buy, sell, ask your boss for a raise, and much more. Based on over 200 research studies, he is an expert resource for most major publications. He's doing more than 300 interviews per year, including on Oprah, Dr. Oz, the Doctors, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and so forth. Dr. Bruce has been in private practice for 23 years and recently relocated to and was named the top sleep doctor of Los Angeles by Reader's Digest. So everyone please welcome Dean Jackson along with Dr. Michael Bruce.

Wow. With all that, I can't wait to hear what you have to say.

Perfect. So 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 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. I'm 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. Okay, we're in the middle of a fricking pandemic and everybody is sleeping poorly. And that's not a generalization we're looking at now. Roughly 70 something percent of people are reporting sleep related difficulties. Since the lockdown started approximately a year ago, we've seen an increase in stimulant use. So caffeine is off the charts. I think the last thing I saw was a 43% increase in stimulant use and alcohol use wasn't too far behind. And the biggest thing that I've noticed that people are not doing. And 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. 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 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, okay? 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, 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 in our bedtime. 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? When your 2 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. Okay, so my suspicion, that's not a night owl. We don't have everybody's picture up, so it's hard to tell. 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. Okay? 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. Ok? And so what I tell people is if you can't get a 25 minute workout in during the day, I don't care. Do five 5 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, it's 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 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 where, with no lighting, so they didn't know what time of day it was. I mean, there were lights on in 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 eight hours, plus or minus 13 minutes. Yeah, 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 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. I want to dig into that. We're going to double dig into that for sure 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 you know, when you, when you understand your chronotype, then you can actually find your, 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 bir 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's 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.

Okay, I didn't get that part because I haven't dug in as much to I just found out I'm a bear. So what is the chronotypical wake up for a bear? Yeah.

Right. So great question. So everybody that takes the quiz gets an email from me and I teach you the time to go to bed, the time to wake up, when to drink caffeine, when to drink alcohol, and when to exercise. Because those are four things that I'm teaching people without even having to get the book. So that way people can kind of figure it out and do those things. So I'm going to answer your question in just a second, Dean, I promise. So 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 cells. 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 a 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 that.

Yeah.

Because I'm curious about it too. I've got mine and I'm. I'd like to get some insight on the. What it's tracking. Like what the meaning of some of these.

Absolutely.

Patterns in mind, which is good.

So the. 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. All right? There's no sleep tracker on the market that's 100% accurate. There just isn't better than the Fitbit.

I had a Fitbit that was doing the same thing, but this one I'd seem to. 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 fuck 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. 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 closed 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. Ok. Limit yourself to two drinks and stop drinking three hours before bed. 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 and you almost doesn't matter what your size is. Although some people's 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 under the table. That's what I'm saying. So at the end of the day, what we're. 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 pass out, 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're 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 asle sleep.

Yeah.

Because your brain thinks it's basically back time frame 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.

Can you do it 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 Morris. Say, 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 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, open it up for more questions and things like that, is, you know, 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. And it makes perfect sense. Why we think that way, right? 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, and you just banging 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 and 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 and 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's 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 tonight to do a gratitude list. Just 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 is an easy task and it is all for you. We are not taking care of ourselves. We are running around taking care of everybody else. And it's time to take care of ourselves.

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.

So 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%.

You know, sleep is the one that light sleep is that second stage that you're exactly about. 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. 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.

Yeah.

So number one is I have a blog that addresses this very question. The three most common things, reasons that you wake up in the middle of the night, what to do about them. But I'm going to explain it here, by the way, if you're looking for blogs or things like that for me, if you go to the sleep doctor dot com, that's me. Head over to the blogs, there's all kinds of cool stuff there. But 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. The first one is primarily for men, and that's if you have an enlarged prostate, you wake up in the middle of the night, go to the bathroom. So we will talk about melatonin and Zequil in a minute. 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 2:00 clock or 3:00 clock in the morning, there's actually a very particular time. And 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, 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. 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 paleo, obviously you can't do the honey part, but you can do the guava leak 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 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 that's never. I don't, I don't have anything.

Well, I'm glad, I'm glad to hear that happen to you. I guarantee you that's good. 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 rebrand here. Ready? When you look at the clock, instead of saying, this sucks, you're going to say, this 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 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. When 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 am 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 is going on in my brain, my body can handle this. I am going to make sure that I do all the right things that I need to do today. I am not going to go to bed early. That is 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 have you 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. 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'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. 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 it's not the I don't have to wait in the bed. And that's right. 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 fall, actually fall asleep. That's called your sleep onset latency. And that's the. 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. If you look at that as a problem. 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 zero. Two minutes, three minutes. So let me do a rapid fire checklist of the best sleep tonight that the best sleep tonight starts with. We're gonna.

I got a five step plan. You want to do a five step plan for everybody?

Okay, you do that. It'd be better. Your idea would be better than mine.

Well, I don't know about that. But you're, you're the creative one. I'm just the doctor.

I was trying to draw it out of you but you just volunteered it right away.

I'm going to give you a five step plan. Come on. You know I'm ready for this. Step number one is to have one wake up time.

Yes, I was going to say.

So go to everybody go to Chrono quiz. There we go. Chronoquiz.com and figure out what your wake up time needs to be. Ok. 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 Am I doing okay? Dean?

You're doing great. Two for two.

Okay, good. So stop caffeine by 2pm we remember caffeine's got a half life of six to eight hours. If you stop at two by ten, 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 am 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 recommendation.

Four hours 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 a 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?

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, 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. So I'm giving everybody permission. If you don't want to get up at 5am, don't. Okay? It's probably not a good idea anyway. What's that? You do you. Well, you do you based on your chronotype? Yeah.

Wow.

Absolutely, Michael.

So awesome. I think this is great. So I think everybody should go and do your chronotype. So thankful to have you in our world here and for you to come with us, Michael. Thank you so much. Again.

Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing subscribe today@ilovemarketing.com subscribe if you'd like access to the show, notes or resources to help you take action on what was discussed, please visit ilovemarketing.com 394.