The Importance of Sleep | Michael Breus

Foreign. I called in one of the best minds in sleep, Dr. Michael Bruce. Dr. Bruce, come on up. You've been listening. How common, first of all, are sleep disorders? Well, sleep disorders themselves are quite common. What's going on here is actually fairly rare. What is insomnia? Well, that's a great question because it's pretty complicated. And not all insomnia is created equal. There's the I can't fall asleep. There's the I can't stay asleep. There's I wake up too early. There's the insomnia associated with depression, insomnia associated with pain, insomnia associated with anxiety. There's all kinds of different types of insomnia. Sleep deprivation signs can be everything from feeling fatigued. You can have big dark circles under your eyes, you can have bad skin, you can have memory problems, you can have concentration problems, even reaction time problems. Moodiness. Moodiness is definitely a big thing. How about watery eyes or blabritis? There's probably less of a likelihood. Dr. Bruce, there are millions of women, just like the women in our studio today, who are taking melatonin and many of them experiencing the same side effects. Is that true? It is true. It's amazingly true. And all of these ladies here, I mean, I can see some people are almost ready to tear up. They're like, oh, my gosh, that's me that we're talking about up there. How is it that some people, like, fall asleep, like, instantly? I've seen Steadman, literally, I can count a minute and 37 seconds from the time he puts his head on the pillow. I want to go, what is that? People who fall asleep that quickly are actually sleep deprived. Oh, really? Yes. Oh, good. So now you've got. Some people ask me all the time, well, can I catch up on my sleep on the weekends? Right. Well, in all actuality, you probably can't catch up on as much of it as we once thought. This is very disturbing. I know. I'm sorry to say. You can probably catch up about 30, but if you go longer than that, your entire biological clock wants to shift. Have you ever heard of propofol as a treatment for insomnia? I've never heard of that being used before. I can't even think of an extreme case where it would seem like an appropriate use. So you've never prescribed it as a drug to put someone to sleep? No, that's a medication that's used by anesthesiologists and veterinarians. Welcome to my bedroom. Thank you. It's pretty Popular in here. I haven't said that in a long time. Dr. Bruce, what's going on here? She's the textbook case of what we would consider to be something like a sleep related eating disorder. When we walk into a room, we want to have a sleep environment that's conducive to sleep relaxation. There you go. Oh, that feels good. Oh, this is so good. What I can tell you is I've saved more marriages as a sleep specialist than I ever would have as a marital therapist just by getting people back in bed. Feeling better, sleeping better. It's truly amazing. So first of all, thanks everybody for coming today and allowing me to speak to the 25k group. It's really an honor for me and I wanted to let you know that actually I have a lot of canned talks. This is not one of them. I spent about 10 hours creating a talk specifically for people in this room, and here's why. I think we're talking about a very different breed of individual here. And so you guys aren't going to have some of the same sleep problems that a lot of other people do. Although Oprah Winfrey may have some of the same sleep problems as you do, and Dr. Phil and Anderson Cooper and kind of those people. It's pretty amazing what I've learned over the years. And so my goal today is to hopefully be able to answer all kinds of your questions about sleep. Things that you may know about, things that you may not know about. It's going to be pretty interesting. First of all, what is sleep? How much sleep do we really need? Is a question that I get asked all the time. What are some napping strategies for better productivity? Is there such a thing as sleep hacking? And what does that entail? So first of all, let me explain to you how sleep actually works. There are two distinct systems in the brain that help you sleep. One is a drive like hunger. So I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry. I eat something and that hunger begins to dissipate. But you never notice you're only supposed to be hungry. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. That's your circadian rhythm or your biological clock that's working there. If both of these systems are not in sync, that's when you have a sleep disorder. So you can have high, high sleep drive, but if your biological clock isn't there, you don't sleep. How many people in here have ever experienced that situation? Almost everybody. I call that the wired and tired syndrome. You're lying in bed and you're exhausted, but you can't turn off your brain. That's one of the things that's going on. That's one of the things I teach people how to do better. A lot of people know that there are different stages to sleep. You've probably heard about stage one, stage two, rem, things like that. The important thing to know here is I want you to start grouping them a little bit differently than you might have. I want you to think of sleep as light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep. There's some very specific reasons why. Over here to the left, you'll see a hypnogram. What this hypnogram represents is sleep across the night. It's pretty interesting. If we look here, what you'll see is the dark green represents deep sleep, or stages three and four sleep. The lighter green you'll see spread out throughout the night represents REM sleep and the gray represents the light sleep. Okay, here's what the data would suggest is that the deep sleep really does you really physically good. The REM sleep really helps you mentally. And the light stuff is a lot of buffer in between. That's where it starts to get interesting really quickly. So what are sleep stages and how do they really work? Stages 3 and 4 is that wake up and feel great sleep. It's the physically restorative sleep that you're looking for. And if you notice on that hypnogram that I showed you a minute ago, it's front loaded. It's in the beginning of the night. It's at the beginning of the night. Because what we now know is that you need that to literally physically get up. You need that to repair your body for all the insults and injuries that may occur during the day, Whether you've worked out, whether you've gotten in and out of a car, whether you've strained a muscle, whether you've torn something, whatever that happens to occur. Because this can happen on a microscopic level. That's where the repair comes in. That's where your body goes into the body shop, if you will, and the dings are banged out and the scratches are polished up and things like that. We also know this is the largest production of something called growth hormone. Growth hormone works very specifically in the brain and it does a couple of really interesting things, one of which is it actually tells your body how to distribute glycogen, whether it goes to fat or whether it goes to usable energy. Depending upon how much deep sleep you get, that can have a dramatic effect on weight gain. My most recent book, which everybody in here is going to get a copy of at the end of the day. Today is called the Sleep Doctor's Diet. How to lose weight through better sleep. And what it really talks about is how the metabolic process changes with sleep deprivation and the different types of sleep deprivation that can have a dramatic effect on you physically. So tissue regeneration, it even by the way, revitalizes the immune system. Great study. University of Chicago. They went out there and they took kids. They took actually a group of kids and they took a group of folks that are in the 60, 65 range and they gave them flu shots and then they deprived them of sleep. And then they tested them and they exposed them to the flu. And what they found out was that the flu shots were less effective the more sleep deprived. You were very interesting. It was worse with larger age range. If you know anybody or you are 55 up and you get the flu, you're done, okay? You are out for a week and a half to two weeks and it totals you. It's that much worse if you're sleep deprived. REM sleep is not just a great band from Athens, Georgia, which is not too far from where I am. That's where I actually got my PhD. This is actually dream sleep. But it's not the only stage of sleep that you dream in. You can actually dream in any stage of sleep. This is the mentally restorative sleep. This is where you make your mental connections. This is the most important sleep for just about everybody in this room. Don't get me wrong, physical restoration is important. But if you want to be able to strengthen ideas, if you want to be able to have a better memory, if you want to make connections that you've never made before, you cannot, I repeat, you cannot deprive yourself of REM sleep. Remember, REM sleep is backloaded. It's towards the end of the night. So as an example, if you only get five hours of sleep, you may cut off one or two sleep cycles. Average sleep cycle is between an 80 and 120 minutes. So let's give it a 90 minute average sleep cycle. The average person has five of those. When you hit that fourth and fifth sleep cycle, it's almost 35 to 40% REM. That's where your brain moves information from your short term memory to your long term memory. That's where it strengthens those connections. What we now know about memory and how sleep affects memory is startling. What we now know is if you get stimulus during the day, like we're in one of these classes and you've got ideas going Sleeping on it is the best thing you can possibly do because it strengthens those connections and it actually strips away all of the other things that you don't need. So if you were driving here and you saw a billboard or you saw a commercial on TV or things like that, that's all stimulus that's coming into your brain. REM sleep pushes all of the crap out and strengthens all of the good stuff. That's why REM sleep is so important. And when people only get five hours of sleep a night, I know because when they come into my office, I say, do you lose your keys a lot? Do you walk into a room and forget why you're there? Or do you have a hard time finding words during a particular presentation or thought process? That's REM sleep deprivation. And that can be dangerous. Turns out that the sleep rhythm is all based on core body temperature. So as your core body temperature rises and falls throughout the day, that's how your sleep rhythm actually turns on and turns off. So on average, a healthy person's body temperature starts to decrease around 11 o'. Clock. You know what the national average is for bedtime? 10:30. Why is that? Because people get sleepy around 11. When you have that core body temperature drop, it's actually a signal to your brain to release melatonin. Melatonin is that key that starts the engine for sleep. Okay, we're going to talk a lot about melatonin and some of the proper uses and improper uses of melatonin that are out there. But it's very important that you understand that the core body temperature is really what happens here. There's actually a second small dip in core body temperature. It happens between 1 and 3 in the afternoon. You know what else happens between 1 and 3 in the Afternoon? People get tired. Right. That's where the siesta comes from originally. So when you go down to Latin American countries, that's part of the evolutionary process of sleep. It's pretty interesting when you start to talk about the evolution of sleep. Most people think, well, sleep is that thing that I go into the back of that room in the house and it's dark and hopefully it's quiet. And I go in, maybe six, seven, eight hours later I come out and hopefully I feel re energized and generate some good ideas and things like that. Sleep has evolved. Disease evolves, we evolve. Sleep evolves. Sleep today is nothing like sleep was 100 years ago. Sleep today is nothing like sleep was 10 years ago. Do you know what the single biggest disruptor of Sleep was in the last 100, 150 years. You should all know this because you read a paper on it last night, right? Nobody read the paper. Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison, that's correct. The invention of the light bulb turns out to be the single biggest disruptor of sleep that there is. Because we used to be an agricultural society. And what would we do? We would go to bed when the sun went down, and we would wake up when the sun rose. But we didn't actually do that. We actually had two forms of sleep. People would sleep for about seven hours, then they would wake up, they would have a second meal. A lot of people would have sex with their bed partner. They. They would visit with family members, and then they would go back for their second sleep. And then they would wake up with the dawn. And it was an agricultural society. They'd go out and they'd tend to the fields and things like that. Well, with the invention of the light bulb, it all changes because people could work at night. You know what I personally think the second most disruptive invention out there? Overtime. What do people do with overtime? They get paid time and a half or double time. So what do they do? They work longer hours. They still want to spend a lot of time and energy with their family. So what happens? It slowly starts to shrink their sleep. One of the top questions that I get asked is, Michael, can I hack my sleep? Can I get eight hours? In six hours, I'm going to actually show you a way that some people have figured out how to do that. So anybody in here know that they're a morning type of person? By a raise of hands, People better in the mornings. So that's about half of you. How about evening people who are night owls? Night owls on this side. Yeah. Now, it's tough to be both. There's actually, believe it or not, biological influence on whether or not you're a night owl or a morning lark. Okay. It's actually genetically determined, and it has to do with your core body temperature. Here's what we see. So this is core body temperature in Celsius, and these are hours across the evening. So remember that dip I was talking about that happens for the siesta? Some people's core body temperature rises a little earlier. Guess what? They're morning types. Some people's rises a little later. They're night owls. So these are things that are actually biologically determined. And when people come to me and they say, well, Michael, I want to turn myself into a morning person, good luck with that. It's not Going to be as easy as you might think. There are ways to do that that are pretty interesting, and we can talk about that in a minute as well. There is a lot of sleeplessness in the United States today, actually, across the world. This is not a problem just amongst entrepreneurs and people whose minds are going, going, going. Right. Here's what we know. 75% of adults actually have some sort of a sleep problem. 70 million Americans suffer from them. And there's over 88 different sleep disorders. I didn't actually know there were 88 ways you could screw up your sleep, but as it turns out, the there are. And some of them are incredibly bizarre. I've been in practice now for 14 years, and I've actually documented and seen all 88 of these different types of sleep disorders. It's pretty amazing. The most popular, of course, is insomnia. Right. Roughly a third of the population at any given time suffers from some form of insomnia, with 10% of it being chronic. There's roughly 400 million people in the United States. That means there are 40 million people who are having chronic insomnia every evening. It's pretty fascinating. It's the largest single disease state there is. Right. Here's the most interesting part. Almost nobody's sleeper is broken, okay? Unless you have a tumor in a very specific part of the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is right in the dead center of your brain, you have the ability to sleep. You haven't failed at sleep. Every one of my patients that comes to me tells me they think they failed at sleep. They said I used to be a great sleeper. I don't know what happened. Right? I was great when I was younger. Then college hit, then something kind of went astray. And all of a sudden, now I'm not sleeping the way I used to sleep. God, I really miss those days. Michael, can you help me out with that? Actually, yeah, I probably can. Second most popular sleep disorder around right now is sleep apnea. So for those of you who don't know, sleep apnea is a situation where actually your throat collapses at night and you stop breathing in your sleep. Generally speaking, we like our patients to breathe. It's always a good thing. They come back, they pay their bills. It's really good for all of us in the medical field. But what happens is they stop breathing, and then their heart rate slows down because we're trying to conserve the oxygen in the system. Then what happens is the brain says, holy crap, there's no air. And so your heart rate launches to Wake you up. So your heart rate slows down, speeds up, slows down, speeds up all night long. It puts an increased load on your heart in a very particular area. And it causes an enlarged heart, which causes irregular heartbeats, like atrial fibrillation, like increased blood pressure, things of that nature. Right. So if you know somebody who stops breathing in their sleep or you stop breathing in your sleep, this is not just a oh, I wake up and maybe I don't feel so great type of situation. This actually could lead to heart attack, stroke, death. Okay? It happens all the time. When you hear about people who died in their sleep, they died from partially, at least the complications of sleep apnea. So it's pretty amazing what's going on. How much sleep do we really need? That seems to be the biggest question that everybody wants to know. So there's actually very new data to show something pretty interesting. There is what's called a basal sleep. Need an amount of sleep, we think it's seven hours that everybody kind of needs. Where the interesting thing comes in is everybody has a different amount of sleep debt that they can hold onto. Right. So we all have a tolerance for debt, financial debt. Some people are okay with a whole lot of debt. Some people aren't okay with very much debt at all. Same holds true with sleep. Going backwards from your seven hours, how much sleep can you lose or not have and still function at the level you want to be able to function? That's the real question that people are trying to answer and it's been done in a couple of different ways. What is your sleep number, generally speaking? Again, most people have it at about 7. Really interesting data that showed that people that sleep more than 10 hours and people who sleep less than five hours have a double mortality rate. Double. Doesn't go for kids though, doesn't it? No, just adults. Doesn't go for kids. Kids, we actually want them sleeping more than 10 hours on a general basis for sure. I've got an 11 year old and a 12 year old. And like last night, my 12 year old, he went to bed at 8:30, which is unheard of. And he didn't get up until about 7 this morning. So he got a good solid sleep in because he was exhausted. Right. Does that change at 16 or something? It's interesting. What we start to see is it changes in different ways at different times. So my son is 12 and he's kind of right in the throes of puberty. And what we now know is his biological clock is shifting and he wants his Biological clock is making him become a night owl, right? So he wants to stay up until 12 and sleep until 2 the next day, which is classic. We all kind of went through that. Interesting. It happens more in males than it does in females. But what's really crazy is some great studies out of the University of Minneapolis, or Minnesota rather, that showed that when they changed school start times by one hour, kids in their very first period class went up a full letter grade and all they did was change the school start times. Okay. When you're looking at a massive problem with your kids, with kids, you know, with kids that you can affect, with kids making decisions, they're too tired. And the bus schedules actually have a tendency to run the older kids first and the younger kids next, which is the exact opposite of their circadian rhythms. How many people in here have had young kids who are up at 5:30 in the morning, right? They kind of blast out of bed and they're ready to rock and roll. Well, the problem there is we've got a disconnect here that we've got to change and we've got to be able to figure out how to get people to understand that. Also, the more sleep deprived you are, the more your brain tells you that you're awake. And okay, there's a reason for that. It comes down to the fight or flight syndrome. If you're awake, there must be a threat. So your brain then tells you, don't worry about it. You're not tired, watch out for the threat. So the longer you stay awake, the better you think that you're doing. We know that bad sleep equals bad performance. My E seems to have fallen over there. Bad sleep equals bad performance in many different areas. I can show you data that shows that bad sleep decreases sexual function. It causes weight gain, poor decision making, decreased memory, increased stress, poor cognitive function, higher blood pressure, increased pain, and lower reaction time. That doesn't sound particularly good, right? I mean, we'd like to avoid those things out there. Here's the good news. It's not just doom and gloom today. Good sleep actually will reverse almost all of these situations. So as an example, anybody in here knows somebody or currently has a situation, don't raise your hand with pain. A lot of people have low back pain, arthritis, things like that. Great study again. University of Chicago. They took healthy college kids and here's what they did. They put them through pain protocols. Now, this is going to sound a bit sadistic, but it actually is pretty interesting work. They take one of those big drywall buckets and they fill it with ice and water and they have normal, healthy college students dunk their legs into this and they time them to see how long they can take the pain before they yank their legs back out. Then they took the exact same kids, they kept them up for 36 hours and they did the exact same experiment. Kids were pulling their legs out in half the amount of time with the exact same pain stimulus. Pain hurts worse when you're tired. The perception of pain is worse the sleepier you are. Okay? Exact same pain, exact same stimulus. Kids are out as quick as they can. It's amazing where sleep affects in different ways. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about athletes because everybody in this room is an athlete in a certain way, shape or form within their business. You're a superstar, you're a rock star. You're the guy or the gal that's doing it and doing it in an interesting way and getting it done. Okay, now I'm getting calls from major sports teams because that is the new advantage. You know, everybody heard about Moneyball, right, way back when, where they were looking at different ways to increase productivity through their ball players. Now it's becoming sleep. The jets actually, believe it or not, hired sleep specialists to work with their team. There are actually a lot of areas. I'm only going to go over three different areas today where we see a change based on athletes and their sleep. No sleep equals no learning. It's actually sleep after an event, a lesson or a game is the most important sleep that an athlete can get. Here's why. Because remember REM sleep. It solidifies that neuroscience. It actually makes those neurons work together in order for you to remember and learn from your training session. The same will hold true in every single one of your businesses if you are having a training session, whether you're training people who are buying your products or you're training your staff, if they don't have a good night's rest afterwards, if you go way on into the night, till 11:12, one o' clock in the morning, and they're not getting the sleep they need, they're. They're not going to be able to make those memories, to learn from those mistakes, to be able to understand what the next thing is that they're supposed to do, it's pretty impressive. Solidifying knowledge requires both REM and deep sleep. It's not just about REM anymore. It's also about deep sleep. The first aspect which happens during deep sleep is basically a rehearsal. So during deep sleep, your mind is kind of going over what you've learned and stripping out some of the bad stuff. And then REM sleep is moving information from your short term to your long term. And, and that's where it gets really effective. And that's where you can then organize your information and recall it in a way, shape and form that can be advantageous to you. Slower reaction time, that's kind of obvious, right? If I'm tired, I don't really react as well. Pretty interesting. When you take a look at people who've done an all nighter, their reaction time triples. Not in a good way, in a bad way. And so one of the things we're seeing with a lot of athletes is, is that in fact the sleepier they are. So for example, if you're on a major league baseball team and you have, what is it, 162 games a year or something like that, these guys and gals, these guys rather on the road constantly, how are they sleeping, where are they sleeping, how much sleep are they getting? Another big factor when you're in a series. Right now we're in the middle of the world Series, right? So what's happening back to, back to back to back games? Well, if somebody is playing in an area that isn't in their time zone, now you compile jet lag on top of lack of sleep. And now you're trying to tell these people that they've got to perform at the top of their level at the most important game of the season. How is that going to work out for them? It's probably not going to work out as well as they would have imagined. Low testosterone comes from lack of sleep. So what does that mean? Just one week is after sleeping five hours, a man's testosterone level drops as if he's aged 11 years. 11 years. So if I'm going to get five hours of sleep a night, I'm 46 years old, I'm going to have the level of Testosterone of a 57 year old. Nothing against 57 year olds in here, but I'd like my testosterone to stay at age 46 as long as I can keep it there. But testosterone has a massive factor when it comes to athletic performance. But it also has a very big factor in terms of aggression, in terms of connection, in terms of cognition. So when we're starting to think about where is our energy coming from? I know somebody was talking about energy before. Testosterone has a lot to do with it. Testosterone, by the way, is not just a male thing, it's also a female thing. Women have Certain levels of testosterone as well. Believe it or not, estrogen is actually a bigger energy factor than testosterone. We can talk about that too. How does this affect performance in many, many different ways? Sleep deprivation and poor quality sleep affect muscle memory. It affects increase in metabolic process, actually causing an increase in energy expenditure. The amount of calories that you take in when you're sleep deprived. Actually you burn through them in certain ways faster. Why is that bad for an athlete? They run out of fuel in the middle of a game, in the middle of whatever, because they're sleep deprived. Their whole metabolic system isn't working. Well, that's for the elite athlete. Well, we have a marathoner in the room, but I know we may have some other people in here who are interested in. I know Robin was saying he wants to become a better athlete. There's a lot of people in here who are athletes who are interested in this type of thing, who are interested in elite sports. Now let's talk about people who aren't. Let's talk about the metabolic process and what occurs during sleep deprivation. It's pretty amazing. One of the things that happens is your cortisol level jacks up. That means your appetite increases. Your metabolic process slows because it's trying to conserve the amount of resources that you have in your system. High appetite, low metabolism. Two other things happen that are very, very interesting. Your hormone levels change. Ghrelin, which is your go hormone that tells you to go eat, actually increases. Leptin, which is your satiety hormone, or the stop hormone decreases. So when you're sleep deprived, you have a high appetite, you have high hunger, which those are two very different things. You have low satiety and you have low metabolism. It's a recipe for disaster. Food choice also changes, which is pretty amazing. People, when you're tired, what are the types of foods that you go for? Let's go. What are the types of food that you guys eat or gals eat? Doritos. Doritos. Carbs, sugar. What other stuff? Like anybody? I'm a lucky charms guy. Cereal and milk is a big one for me when I'm like, really down. How about anybody else? Ice cream. Ice cream's a big one. And a late night snack. Ice cream too is another one. We can talk about that too. Here's what we know about those food choices. They're actually neurochemically driven. When you eat high carbohydrate, high fat foods, it produces serotonin, which is the antithesis of cortisol. Remember, your cortisol levels are high. When you're sleep deprived, your brain doesn't like it. It wants to calm down. So it actually makes you crave high fat, high carbohydrate foods to lower that cortisol level so that you can actually get some rest. It's not your fault that you want to have ice cream and cereal and all those good things in the middle of the night. You. Your brain is telling you that you're so sleep deprived, it's got to slow down. And that's how your brain does it. It craves those foods again. During REM sleep, the body reaches peak testosterone levels. Less REM equals less testosterone. REM sleep promotes protein synthesis, building muscle mass again for the athletes in the room, and sleep deprivation, low sleep quality, and jet lag are some of the key factors to what happens to these people. Great story. A good friend of mine who's also a sleep specialist works with the Boston Bruins. Anybody in here a hockey fan? Okay, so we got some guys got a big hockey fan back there. All right, so, really interesting situation the night before, and this was in 2011, the night before game seven. I'm sorry, the day before game seven of the 2011 Stanley cup, he got a call from the head trainer at the Bruins. And what was happening was, the day of the game, day seven, they had a scheduled practice for 10:30. And what the sleep specialist said was, cancel the practice. He's like, are you kidding me? Cancel the practice? It's game seven of the Stanley Cup. Like, this is it. We've got to get there. And he's like, uh, that's actually because they were playing in, I think it was Vancouver. So here it was really interesting. That would have been a perfect napping time. They canceled the practice. They let all the players sleep. Guess what happened? They won. Was it due to the sleep specialist and that advice? I can't put my finger on that. But here's what I can tell you. The next year, the Vancouver Canucks hired a sleep specialist. It might have had something to do with the fact that the city was burned down. Well, I'm not saying that there weren't external factors in there, but using this as an example, one of the things we know, especially with, like, elite athletes, I've worked with some Olympians before, and. And here's what we know. We're Talking about a 30% difference in performance at the elite level. You know what a 30% performance difference is at that level? That's being on the podium or to get nowhere near the podium. Okay. That is absolutely the Difference between a gold and not showing up. Okay. So when we're talking about sleep, it has massive, massive effects on athletic performance. But I want to talk about something that has to do with everybody in here, which is travel. So my guess is lots of people in here travel have a lot of different travel issues. Right. I was talking to somebody who said that they're going to Arkansas and then they're going to Dallas, and then they're going to be driving for three hours. Kevin over here. So how does that have an effect on people and what's going on? There are lots of different problems that have to do with travel and sleep. I'm only going to be able to address three in my talk today, but I want you to think about these three. Sleeping on an airplane, jet lag, and sleeping in a hotel. So sleeping in the air. How many people in here can sleep on an airplane? Okay, that's good. All right. When it's flat, right? Well, first of all, you got to pick your seat appropriately. Now, granted, there might be a lot of people in here who are able to sit in the front of the plane, but I will tell you, there's a great website. It's called seatguru.com and it rocks. You can punch in your flight. It will tell you the type of plane that you're going to be flying on. It'll tell you what the best seats are on the plane and what the worst seats are on the plane as far as comfort is concerned. I found this site like 10 years ago, and it has been my godsend because if you don't get upgraded or you haven't bought that first class ticket and you are in that part of the airplane, you want to know what seats are going to be good for you. I also have people bring an onboard sleep kit. What does that mean? Eye shades, earplugs, maybe some music or even a cervical pillow or some type of pillow is absolutely going to be helpful. The biggest deterrents for sleep are light and sound. Interestingly, if you actually stay in the middle of the fuselage, it's actually less turbulent than on the ends. Because where the wings are, the stability of the structure itself actually makes it a smoother area to fly in. What's that in the center? In the center? Right in the center. Right around the wings. Although it can be the noisiest because that's where the engines are. That's where the earplugs come in. By the way, if you're going to get earplugs, you want them noise level rated at 32 or below noise level, rated NLR. The reason for that is it drowns out a tremendous amount of noise. But you can still hear the smoke alarm in your house, so it's good. Fire and sleep don't mix. So one of the things we want. This is a tough crowd. I mean, my jokes are going nowhere. Holy cow. 32 or below or below. Yeah. Is what you're kind of looking for. Low is too low. Well, I let people. I don't like people personally to go below 28, because then you're really not getting a whole lot out of the earplug itself. And most people don't know that you don't actually hear only through your ear. You actually hear through your ear, but also through your jaw, because sound is a matter wave. And so your ear is actually like a funnel and the wave is kind of comes in and then goes into the canal. But you also feel all of those waves across your jaw. And so your brain interprets that vibration in a very specific way. So by putting 32 earplugs in your ear, you will dampen the decibels, but you won't get rid of them altogether. There are some people out there who actually have a little strip that they'll put across their jaw and it will actually help deaden sound even more. So, for example, if you have a lot of. I know, it's crazy, isn't it? If you have a lot of noise in your bedroom or you're in a hotel or something like that, have an earplug. But then you can actually take a washcloth or something like that and put it right here across your face and it will actually make it sound quieter. I'm giving away all my tricks. Joe, this is seat Guru. And so here's what you do is you actually put in your airlines and it'll tell you, good seat, be aware, poor seat. Where there's a power port, where's the galley, where's the lavatory, things like that. It's actually really critical information. I gave it to my admin and when she makes my flight arrangements, she always knows. Plug it into cguru, see what's going on. It's a pretty great site. Jet lag. This can be a major issue, especially for international travel. The big thing to remember here is east is least and west is best. Okay. It's much easier to go from New York to la, because all I'm going to ask your body to do is stay up a little bit later. But if you're going from LA to New York. And I tell you, you gotta go to bed at seven o' clock tonight. That's not an easy task. So direction of travel has a lot to do with it. Flight scheduling has a lot to do with it. You can actually use melatonin and light therapy to reset or realign your biological clock very, very quickly. So I worked with a Saudi Arabian princess who was in LA and had to go to Saudi. And she wanted to be able to get off of her plane and be able to attend the functions that she needed to be able to attend. So I actually created a jet lag schedule for her. This is what I do for a lot of my patients, like Fortune 100 CEOs and people like that who come through the door and they're like, Michael, I gotta go to China, I gotta have three meetings, I gotta get back on an airplane, I gotta come to New York, I gotta go do this there. So when you start to look at the advantages that you can have by being able to sleep appropriately and all of that 24 to 48 hours space, it becomes quite interesting. So with her sleep is in the purple and in the yellow. We used caffeine and light therapy. So what is light therapy? So remember, melatonin is the vampire hormone. It is not produced in the presence of light. It only comes out in darkness. So you can actually use light therapy and you can go on Amazon, there's a light box called the go light or the Go. Yeah, the go light by Phillips. And it has 10,000 lux of light in this itty bitty little thing. But here's what's interesting, is you no longer have to have the amount of lux of light that we once thought. There's been a discovery that there are actually sensors in the eye that actually will pick up on the 420 nanometer wavelength, which is blue light. So you've probably heard about blue light or blue blockers or things like that. That blue light is actually what triggers the pineal gland. So it hits your optic nerve, it bounces around, it goes up into the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which tells the brain, hey, stop producing melatonin. So this light box is all blue light. It's literally like having five of those bullet coffees in a morning. So, for example, if you wake up and you're in a different time zone, or even if you wake up and you're in your current time zone and you're starting to feel sluggish and you're not feeling too good, go outside, get 15 minutes of sunlight, or get One of these light boxes, put it on your Desk, give yourself 20 minutes of exposure to it. It's literally like drinking two or three cups of coffee. It will wake you up and you will feel fantastic. It's called the golight G O L I T E. It's by Philips. I think they're like 150 bucks or so. Can you use your iPad with an app to do that? Well, here's the problem is that these have actually very special LEDs. But an interesting question that I've been asked many times is, do iPads and do phones have an effect on people at night? The thing is, now the answer is yes. We've now discovered that the light that's coming from these devices at night, going into the optic nerve, it tells your brain that it's morning. And that can be an issue. There's actually now something called a sleep shield that you can get. I think it's like six bucks that you can lay, and it's a filter that goes across the iPad and it won't allow this to happen anymore. I actually work with a company now that where I have light bulbs in my bedroom that have filtered out the blue light and light bulbs in my bathroom that have only blue light. So I can read or I can do whatever I want to do at night, and it won't affect my ability to produce melatonin and fall asleep. And then in the morning when I wake up, I can actually turn on these special lights in my bathroom and it helps wake me up. So with the princess, what we did, which was pretty interesting, was here was her flight. So I had her first flight. I had her actually taking melatonin. So on the top you'll see that it was 7pm her time in Germany, which was her first layover, it was 5:00am and in Saudi, it was 6:00am okay, but in a whole the next day. So what we actually had her do was F1 is her first flight, right? So this was her normal sleep schedule. I had her going to bed at midnight, getting up at around 6, and then having the light therapy with caffeine. Then she went a whole day and came back, went to bed at midnight, got up at 5, because I'm starting to push her backwards towards what would be an appropriate sleep schedule. Light therapy, caffeine. Then I have her go take a nap on the airplane. We're going to talk about naps in a second with a little bit of melatonin. Then if you notice, she sleeps for that three and a half to four hours. And then she is up from what would be midnight her time all the way to 2pm the next day. So I built up all the sleep deprivation in her over that course of time so that when she hit Saudi, she took a melatonin. Her biological clock had already started to shift and she was off and running. What you can't see on this slide is at the very end there when the 11 and 12pm Louisiana time, which is really 9 and 10pm Saudi time. She was also using light therapy and caffeine again. So when I called her to say how did it work? She said, I walked off the airplane, I went home, I went to bed, I woke up the next day and I had absolutely no jet lag. So it was pretty amazing when you see these types of situations now, obviously she had a little bit of a different situation because it was her airplane. So she could say when it took off and, and when it left and where it landed and things like that. But I work with people all the time to be able to develop these types of schedules. By the way, the appropriate dosage of melatonin is between a half and 1 milligram. 95% of the melatonin that's commercially available today is in an overdosage format. And I'm not a big fan of melatonin unless we're talking about jet lag. Melatonin is a hormone. Most people don't know that it's a hormone. You wouldn't go to the local health food store and buy testosterone or estrogen. But people are going to the local health food store or vitamins place and what are they doing? They're buying melatonin all the time. And it's anywhere from three to six to 10 times the recommended dosage. Melatonin, by the way, is by prescription only in Europe, which is pretty interesting. And at high dosages it's a contraceptive. Yes, at high dosages, melatonin is a contraceptive. So here's where the real problem comes in. When parents can't get their kids to sleep, they don't want to give them a sleeping pill. So what do they do? They go to the health food store and they give them melatonin. I can't think of anything worse for a young female reproductive system than adding a hormone that can be a contraceptive. We have no idea what the effects are going to be. Long term is only for girls, primarily for girls. But I would tell you, I wouldn't have melatonin used in anybody under the age of 18, period. I wouldn't give it to my son. I'll put it to you that way. How do you choose the right hotel when you get there? Pretty interesting. First of all, are you in the flight? If you're near the airport, are you in a flight path? What is the last flight in or out? Do they have a sleep program? I was fortunate enough to work with Crowne Plaza hotels and I created a sleep advantage program. So we actually had them do different things. We had housekeeping at certain hours, quiet zones. Is there a club or bar that makes noise? Do they have soundproofing? Do they have vacationers or family members around? Can you choose your room? Okay. You want to be able to have that opportunity to be able to choose your room. How do you choose the right room? Couple of things. Face the west because remember the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Avoid elevators, stairs, vending machines, kind of obvious. Corner rooms are always more quiet, always upgrade. Actually have them remove the mini bar. It's very tempting if you can't fall asleep to grab a couple of drinks and help put yourself to sleep or pass out. Really not a great idea. It doesn't affect sleep very well. And you want to actually you can ask for a non smoking room with a double bed if you're staying in one of the older hotels. Most hotels don't switch out their mattresses very often. Double beds, the structural integrity of the mattress actually lasts longer because there's not as much of a dip. When you're lying in a king size bed, the structural integrity of the mattress itself starts to go because there's not any support. But with a double bed, you actually get a better night's rest on a double bed. What's the very best thing to do? Walk up to the desk clerk and say what is the best room in the hotel that is currently available? And hand them a $20 bill. You will instantly know exactly what room because they know. They know exactly what room in the hotel works best. That is a freaking great idea. Just a little because I've done so many things for testing the reward mechanisms for people in environments where they don't get tipped that idea. Everyone here needs to try that. It works like a charm because they have the inside information. That's what you're looking for, right? You're looking for the inside information and they've got it. Let's talk about strategic napping. What are naps and how do they work? A nap with more REM sleep in it actually inspires creativity, heightens perception. A nap with more stage 2 increases motor skills and a nap with more slow wave sleep improves your memory and clears your mind for the nap. Now remember, REM sleep at night is what really helps your memory. But slow wave sleep during the day helps your memory so it can get a little confusing. What is the perfect nap? People ask me this question all the time. Remember, the first 20 minutes of any nap, of any nap is going to be where it's going to be more refreshing. In stage two, a REM nap, which actually occurs in the early part of the day, somewhere between 9 and 11am so if you wake up at 5 and you want to take a nap around 10, you are going to have more of a REM nap, which is going to help with creativity. Once past noon, slow wave sleep will actually occur after stage two because that's how your biological clock works. So an early morning nap you get stage two and rem. In an afternoon nap you get stage two slow wave sleep, then rem. So you may have to lengthen the time of your nap. Napping between 2 and 4 will always give you more slow wave sleep. But the ultimate nap is a 90 minute nap at 1pm because it gives you everything. Now if you don't have 90 minutes to nap, I have a solution for you. My secret weapon is called the napa latte, okay? And it works, and it works really well. Get a 6 ounce cup of drip coffee because it has the highest caffeine content there is, alright? Put an ice cube in it, cool it down, drink the whole thing as quick as you can. Take a 20 minute nap, you will reduce the amount of adenosine, which is what's making you feel sleepy. You'll get that alertness factor. The caffeine kicks in, you are good for four hours, guaranteed. It's called a napa latte. That's a hat and it works like a charm. And by the way, we'll put that, can we put that slide in with. Of course. You know, you think of everyone in this room, all this insanely awesome research and everything. This is where everyone's like, oh, yes, yes, look at that. No. And what happens after four hours? After four hours, it depends on, it depends on your caffeine metabolic rate. So different people will have different amounts of caffeine, but the adenosine will kick back in and you will crash. You can do a second napa latte, but here's the problem. When you start to do that, you're really increasing that sleep debt and you're going to get hit really, really hard. So I would tell you that this is good to do once, not good to do twice. But I've got patients who have done it a couple, three times and they end up on the bad side of it. I've had patients end up not from this, but from caffeine in general where they're drinking so much caffeine during the day. I've had people end up in the ER for caffeine and caffeine withdrawal as well. Heart palpitations, the whole nine. Yeah, yep, exactly. Jump start the brain. So it takes the brain approximately 20 to 25 minutes to begin to metabolize the caffeine so that it has the effect. And that's when it really kicks in nicely. So you get that first 20 minutes of stage two sleep and then the caffeine hits. And I'm telling you something, it's awesome. Michael, do you mind real quickly, although you comment, can you explain to people what happens with coffee, caffeine, what it is doing? Oh, sure. So here's one of the things that's really interesting. When you look at the molecule of caffeine and you look at a molecule called adenosine. So adenosine is something that builds up in your brain, It's a neurochemical. And there are adenosine receptors in your brain. And as the molecule builds up, it goes into these receptors and that's what makes you feel sleepy. Caffeine, if you look at the structure of the molecule, actually is almost identical to adenosine. And so when you add caffeine into the brain, it goes into those receptor sites and it blocks the adenosine. And that's why you don't get sleepy. What data would show is over the course of time, if you have enough caffeine in your system, your brain says, I'm not getting enough adenosine. And it creates more adenosine receptors and more adenosine receptors and more adenosine receptors. That's why caffeine doesn't work as well over the course of time. There's now data to show that if you've been drinking coffee long enough, your brain doesn't function without it. I've had patients who drink a pot to a pot and a half a day. Believe it. It's not an uncommon scenario deal with anybody in the technology world, right? Coders, I mean, we're talking about energy drinks, we're talking about coffee, we're talking about monsters, amps, whatever you want to call it, they've all got some form of caffeine. By the way, there's an Ingredient called guarana that's out there, that's really important. That's really potent caffeine, but it's not labeled that way on all of these drinks. It also gets into these adenosine receptors. And what we see is we see brain function really kind of hitting a whole different level. The last thing I want to talk about is polyphasic sleep. What is this? This is how you can actually get more out of your sleep. I'm not going as far as to recommending it. I'm just going to tell you what the research says and we can talk about it in a second. Before the light bulb, we slept from dusk to dawn in, like I said before, two separate bouts. Now we try to force ourselves into one shortened bout which is roughly 25% slow wave, 25% REM and about 50% SAGE. Two, in Latin American countries, they sleep less at night, six hours at night, with a 20 minute siesta during the day. So what can we learn from that? Can I get my seven in four, four and a half? The answer is you kinda can. So with a siesta you have six core hours and then a 20 minute nap at roughly 1pm Why 1pm? Because that's where the core body temperature dip drops. That's where we get the increase in melatonin. Here's where it gets weird. You can actually do a two nap method where you sleep four and a half hours a night. Remember, every sleep cycle is 90 minutes long. So that's three full sleep cycles from 11 to 3:30. Then you have two naps, one at noon and one at 4. You just shaved 110 minutes off of your total sleep cycle. The three nap method, you have a three hour core, okay? You nap at 7:30 in the morning, 11:30 and 4:30. You just shave 200 minutes off of your core sleep. Okay, so now why would I even bother to present these data, right? Is this a good idea? Is this a bad idea? I can't count the number of people who contact me who say, can I hack my sleep? Can I get four, you know, seven hours worth of sleep in four hours? You can, but here are the issues that happen with this. Number one, you have to stick to this exact schedule. You cannot vary at all. Your core body temperature rhythm is what you're basically messing with at this point. If you don't take your nap at 7:30 for 20 minutes, 11:30 and 4:30, the entire thing goes haywire. Most interesting, there's actually a four nap method and a six nap method where you actually never have a full course sleep. It's called the Uberman schedule. If you've ever heard of that online, it's pretty interesting. So I actually talked to the guy who did it because he contacted me to find out if he could do it or not. Here's what ended up happening is every three hours, he had to take a 20 minute nap and it became extremely limiting. He couldn't go out for dinner and a movie. Right. He couldn't spend time with his friends. He was awake when, when everybody else was asleep. He actually started to become quite depressed because the social interaction really wasn't there for him and it actually increased his likelihood of depression. So when I talk to people about this, there's a couple of caveats. Number one, you can't be probably over than about 35 or 40 years old and get away with a three nap method. Okay. Number two, you can't have any major medical things going on with you because you will absolutely affect your body chemistry and your neurochemistry. And in a way you don't want to, you make medications actually less effective this way. So you have to be pretty healthy, pretty young to be able to withstand something like this. And you can't do it forever. This is something that people could do for maybe six months, maybe a year at the top end. But here's what you end up doing is you could then affect your sleep ability forever. There's a distinct possibility that your brain won't kick back in unless you know how to, to taper and go from there. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to give you 10 things that you want to use have as an effective sleeper, or these are 10 things, I'm sorry, that effective sleepers do. And this is my last slide and I'll open it up for questions. Number one. Stick to a schedule, okay? Get up at the same time, go to bed at the same time. Your body loves regularity, okay? It loves consistency. All right, don't worry. This is all. We're going to send this out in an email to everybody. Don't worry. I mean, you can take pictures if you want. That's fine. Stop working at the same time every day. You've got to take a mental break before you take that physical break. Sleep is not an on, off switch, okay? Sleep is like slowly pulling your foot off the gas and slowly putting your foot on the brake. There's a process that must occur. And I was actually talking with Robin yesterday and he talked to me about a wake up process. And I agree with his theory on this. I believe that when you wake up, there are stages to waking up and there are ways to do that appropriately that can actually help you with your day. Same holds true with sleep. There's a process that I call the power down hour. And I'll teach everybody about that in a minute. Get ready for your next day. Get the stuff done that you need to get done so you're not running around in the morning trying to figure it all out. Have an electronic curfew, turn off the iPad, turn off the cell phone, things like that. There's a caveat, you don't have to turn off the tv. Okay, so let me tell you about my bedroom. In my bedroom, I have a king size bed. Sitting next to me is my 4 pound Chihuahua, my 24 pound French Bulldog, my 6 pound Cat, and my wife. There's a big screen TV right there. I didn't say what she weighed. My wife's about a buck eight soaking wet. She's pretty small. And sometimes my daughter wanders in. So I live in a household of reality. I'm not the guy that's going to say go to bed at 8 o' clock in a pitch dark room with nobody else in there because it doesn't really work. Okay? Nobody has that scenario. And we sleep with the TV on almost all night. My wife cannot turn off her brain at night without the television on. So you know what, almost every television now has an electronic timer. So I set the timer, she falls asleep, the timer keeps going, it clicks off, I'm asleep, and we're done. I've been a six and a half hour sleeper almost my entire life. My wife needs between eight and a half and nine hours. Okay, Everybody has a different sleep need. I can teach people how to figure out what that sleep need is. Eight hours is a myth. I'm telling you that right now. Meditation, prayer and exercise are awesome for sleep, especially right before going to sleep. It helps calm the brain down, it helps elicit serotonin, it helps you get there. Remember, it's not an on off switch. Daily exercise has been shown in multiple studies to improve the overall quality of your sleep. If you want to get better quality sleep, you need to exercise daily. No question about it. Is it an ideal time to do it right before bed? So it depends. Some people when they exercise, they actually get energy from it. Some people when they exercise, mellow out from it. What I found is people who are high anxious or who are type A personalities, not like anybody in this room. Might be that it's better to exercise in the evenings because it actually helps calm you down because of the endorphins and the enkephalins that you can produce. Whereas people who have more of a down or blue type of personality, they're better to exercise in the morning because exercise has a tendency to give them energy. Great to get sunlight every morning. 15 minutes of sunlight resets that circadian clock every single morning. Go outside with your cup of coffee, get 15 minutes of sunlight, hopefully be clothed. God, my jokes are just dead. This is unbelievable. Journaling. Journal what's good in your life. Journal what's bad in your life. Get it off your brain at night before you go to bed. Don't do it as the last thing before bed. Do it about an hour and a half to two hours before you're going to power down. Get it out of your head. Because that's a problem for most of us in this room is keeping our brain going. Hydration. I can't say enough good things about hydration. By the way, you don't need eight glasses of water a day. There's no data to support that. But you do need to maintain hydration because it helps you get into different stages of sleep. And the best thing you can do is read one of my books or listen to one of my speeches. So with that, I will open it up for questions. Thanks.