Do THESE Things to Optimize Your Sleep

So sleep is the fundamental layer of mental and physical health. If there's one thing that we should all be doing is sleeping long enough and deeply enough.

What's the biggest risk then if we're not getting enough sleep? Hey guys, thank you so much for being here. A quick message before we dive in. You may be watching the show but haven't taken a moment to click the subscribe button below. So if you've ever gained value from this show, it would mean so much to me if you click the subscribe button right now. And not only will this allow you to see these messages first. All this great content we have, you're gonna get notified first when it comes out. But the bigger our subscriber base grows, the more people we can impact and the bigger the guests we can get.

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Till you are sleeping long enough and deeply enough, 80% of the nights of your life, you are functioning sub-optimally.

And what's the biggest risk then if we're not getting enough sleep?

Okay, so there are a number of risks to not getting enough sleep. Deficits in learning, deficits in the immune system, reduction in testosterone and estrogen in both men and women, so disruption of hormones, disruption of gut microbiome, increased cancer risk. There are a bunch of things. SeveriTy of those things depends on a lot of other things too. Prior health, other health conditions, context, age, occupation. If you're not getting enough sleep and you're a high-rise construction worker, that's different than if you're an office worker. So we need to sleep enough. Now what's enough sleep? This is an interesting question. Enough sleep has been argued it's six hours, other people it's seven hours, other people it's eight hours. It's basically waking up without an alarm clock. and feeling rested. Insomnia is actually a medical term nowadays, and insomnia is essentially diagnosed as falling asleep during the middle of the day due to lack of sleep at nighttime. But many people who are having trouble sleeping at night are not falling asleep during the middle of the day. They're dealing with grogginess or crankiness or other effects of having fragmented sleep?

What are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep? Is it rumination? Is it traumas that you're holding on to? Is it arguments? Is it self-doubt or insecurities? Is it you nap too much? Is it the foods you ate too late? What would you say are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep?

All of the above. But the the primary one is a failure to turn off your thoughts.

Okay.

And I think that might provide a good anchor point for us to talk about some protocols. Really, a excellent night's sleep begins in the morning. I talked about this on the previous episode, so I won't go into detail, but everyone should get as much bright light in their eyes, ideally from sunlight first thing in the morning, 10 to 30 minutes outside, depending on how bright it is. Eyeglasses or contact lenses are fine. Don't wear sunglasses if you can do it safely. If you wake up before the sun rises, turn on bright lights, then go outside once the sun rises. If you have no access to sunlight, use a daytime simulator or similar, like a ring light, and get that light in your eyes.

Okay.

So that's all of that in a compact form. Caffeine. You can inhibit falling asleep with caffeine. You have to figure out when your threshold is for me, I can drink caffeine up until about three, even four o'clock in the afternoon and sleep like a baby. still sleep well. Yes, it's Matt Walker, our good friend Matt Walker, would say that my sleep isn't as good as it would be.

Had I cut caffeine out earlier.

By like 11 or 12 a.m. Right, and I want to acknowledge, you know, Matt is the Michael Jordan of sleep science, and so I'm not gonna-- you-'re the LeBron James. Well, no, no, and in fair, thank you for the compliment, but no, I'm not, I know a lot of the science and the protocols, but that's Matt's wheelhouse, and so If he says something, it's true. And if I say something and our opinions conflict, it's likely to be something that the data are still emerging or in that case default to Matt being correct because I just out of due respect for his expertise. So caffeine, for some people they can have a two o'clock espresso, 2:00 PM espresso, some people it's 4:00 PM. Some people can drink caffeine at 8:00 PM and fall asleep. But there I would say it's problematic because you're disrupting the architecture of sleep. and the brain waves associated with sleep, the chemicals and so forth. So get that morning light, cut your caffeine off at the time that allows you to fall asleep. That morning light also sets the timer on your melatonin rhythm. So you have this gland in your brain called the pineal gland. That pineal is the source of melatonin. Melatonin makes you sleepy, but it does not keep you asleep. Okay. Melatonin starts to rise in the late evening. and continues into the night and then eventually tapers off. This is naturally occurring melatonin release, not supplemented melatonin release. The fastest way to slam melatonin to the pavement and eliminate it in your system is to look at bright light for, I hate to tell you this, even a few seconds.

So... You mean at night?

At night is typically when melatonin rises. It's when it's released in the bloodstream and when it has this effect of making us sleepy. It does a number of other things too.

You want more melatonin at night, is that right?

You do. And if you wake up in the middle of the night or it's eight o'clock and you decide that you want to go to bed at nine or it's nine o'clock, you want to go to bed at 10, you go into the bathroom and you flip on the.

Bright lights, your melatonin levels just got.

Crushed down to zero. So, having lights on is the worst thing you can do. Yes, and it doesn't matter if it's blue light, red light, purple light, green light, bright lights inhibit melatonin very acutely and therefore you want to avoid exposure to bright lights at night if your goal is to be asleep. So, the simple rule that governs all this stuff is when you want to be alert, get bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight. So that's true in the morning and throughout the day. And when you want to be sleepy or sleep, avoid bright light in your eyes. Now, many home environments don't allow you to have zero lights, and that's not actually necessary. You can just dim the lights in the evening. Ideally, you also avoid overhead lights because the neurons in the eye that trigger this melatonin suppression and so forth. They reside in an area of the eye that views upper visual space. So, you could have desk lamps or and just dim those down. If you're going to work on a screen, dim it way down. Will blue blockers help? Yes, but if the light is bright enough, they're still going to go through. You're still going to inhibit melatonin release.

So, how bad is watching TV at night?

If the TV isn't too bright and it's farther away, farther away, right near your face, Yeah. And maybe you wear blue blockers. I mean, some people take this to the extreme, they wear sunglasses. I think that's a little extreme. Now, candlelight and moonlight, surprisingly, doesn't seem to block melatonin. Now, maybe a really bright moonlit night full moon, the lunacy associated with the full moon might actually be due to a suppression of melatonin and an increase in alertness. So, those are the things as it relates to light.

Yes.

Then, there's this issue of people who have trouble staying asleep. So, they can fall asleep fine, but they wake up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. I happen to do this. If I go to bed around 10:30, I tend to wake up around 3:00 and I use the restroom. Yeah, I tend to drink a lot of fluids and I have to use the restroom. This was true at every age. This is not just some aging related thing. That's fine. I just keep the lights dim and use the bathroom and then you go back to sleep. All back to sleep. Very normal, very healthy. One of the best things I ever did for my sleep was to keep my phone out of the room so that when I wake up at 3 in the morning, I just didn't start scrolling that the newspapers is typically what I read online. Gotcha. And then you're just waking up your brain, not just by the light, but by the content.

And you know.

You're activating it again as opposed to coming back to sleep. Exactly, and sometimes there's a comment and they're like, why is it, you know, your thinking is not very good in the middle of the night. The other thing is you want to keep the room cool, so in order to fall asleep, your body has to undergo a drop in temperature of one to three degrees. There are a couple of ways to accomplish this. One is keeping the room cool. The other is to and that's ideal actually because you can put a hand or a foot out. We actually lose a lot of our heat through what's called our glabrous skin. So the palms of our hands, the bottoms of the feet.

I always put my feet out of the sheets and just let them feel the cool air. That's right.

And that's a great way to cool off your core body temperature. You're probably doing that unconsciously in your sleep as well. if the room were too warm, the only way for you to cool off would be for you to put your hand in a bucket of cold water and generally people don't have that accessible.

And you're gonna go pee if you're doing that too.

Right, exactly. And then of course there are all these products nowadays of, you know, things that cover, yeah, that cool the bed. I'm supposed to try one of these soon. I haven't tried one yet. I tend to just keep the room cool.

Cool, yeah. What do you keep it at?

I keep it around 67-65. That's a little cooler than what I do. I put it at about 67-68. Okay. But I tend to wake up hot in the middle of the night Throw the comforter off and go put some cold water on my face.

Wow.

So don't obsess over waking up too much. And if you do, try and stay away from screens. Or if, you know, some people will read a book in light again.

Yeah.

And then falling back asleep. Some people are waking up at two or three because they are going to bed too late. their melatonin has run out. So imagine that you're naturally somebody who should go to bed early around 9:00, but we all have this ability to push forward and stay awake if we have to. Much easier to stay awake than to force yourself to go to sleep or to be hard to force yourself to go to sleep. So let's say your system, you start releasing melatonin around 9:00 PM, but you stay up until 11:00, then you get into bed, you fall asleep around 11:30, and at 3:00 in the morning you suddenly wake up. well, that's because your melatonin tapered off and there's a wakefulness that's occurring. And so ideally you would start going to bed earlier. Now, there's a lot of discussion out there about so-called chronotypes. So night owls, morning people, people that follow a more typical schedule, typical would be going to sleep somewhere between 10:30 and 11:30, waking up somewhere between 6:30 and 8:00. Then there are the people that like to go to bed at 2:00 a.m., sleep till 10:00, and then there are people that like to go to bed at eight and wake up at four. Huge variation out there. It tends to change across the lifetime. Yeah, your season of life for years.

That's right.

And adolescents and teenagers tend to stay up later and want to sleep in. And there's actually some evidence that they can learn better if they are allowed to use that schedule, but most schools won't adhere to that schedule.

You gotta wake up at six and.

Go to school at eight or whatever. Once you enter adult life, you're generally somebody who's you're gonna have to learn how to go to bed early and wake up early or at least wake up early. Now, naps, you should feel comfortable. The data say naps, you should feel comfortable napping for 90 minutes or less at any point throughout the day, as long as it doesn't interfere with your nighttime sleep. So some people, like me, I love naps, but it doesn't interfere with my nighttime sleep.

It doesn't.

It does not.

So you take a 60-minute nap.

Generally 20 to 45 minutes.

And then you fully fall asleep or you're kind of like awake and just resting.

I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime. I can fall asleep in a gun range.

What?

Can you sleep sitting up to like this?

Oh yeah. Playing a gift. Anywhere. That's a gift. It is, although it could reflect that I'm pushing my system a little too hard. But it is useful at times. It is incredible. It is a gift.

Does he fall asleep right on a plane or?

Anywhere. leaning against a subway station. If I need sleep, I'm going down.

That's incredible.

Yeah. So the other thing is that during sleep, a number of things happen, and we can talk about slow-wave sleep and REM sleep, but one of the most important physiological functions of sleep is to clear out some of the cellular debris that accumulates throughout the day. The cellular debris creates cognitive deficits. It actually may be related to the aggregation of proteins and things that relate to dementia on Alzheimer's. It's the so-called glymphatic system. The lymphatic system is a system of moving through immune cells and clearing out of debris on the body. The glymphatic system is a kind of a equivalent system that exists in the brain that involves so-called glial cells, which are support cells, but also do many things actively. They're not just doing support. The glymphatic system is like a washout of the brain's debris. And that system seems to function best when feet are slightly elevated above the brain. There's some interesting data from University of South Carolina coming out now that show that if you can get your ankles elevated a little bit higher than your chin, that's great. When you're sleeping. While you're sleeping.

What's it do for you?

It increases the glymphatic clearance. And, there's some data that it can improve function of the brain. The studies that are happening now that I'm aware of, I'm in touch with that group, are mainly geared towards people that have had head injuries, so concussion and TBI of various kinds. But they also are seeing interesting effects in typical folks that don't have any traumatic brain injury. So I put a pillow underneath my ankles when I fall asleep and to get a little bit of that elevation. And then during the day, if ever you can't get a nap or you are going to get a nap, Put your ankles up on the couch and lie down on the floor. That itself can get some of the clearance of the glymphatic system.

And that helps you sleep better and.

Helps you just clean out the system. It helps your brain function better when you wake up from sleep. Interesting. That's what the data are starting to show. That's cool. You know, some of the things I described like the light viewing is baked into the neuroscience literature. Hundreds of papers published papers. Some of the things like the glymphatic system is kind of cutting edge. It's on the way, but because the safety margins of raising your ankles are so large, I mean, there's nothing dangerous about that. How long do you need to do.

It for to get the benefits?

Oh, I think these are immediate benefits. Two minutes or 10 minutes? You're doing this the whole night that you're asleep, your ankles are elevated. If you wake up and you happen to kick the pillow out, it's not the end of the world. But the idea is that you don't want to be sleeping with your head above your ankles either. There is some evidence that when people travel on planes and they're sleeping in chairs, that that's not equivalent to the kind of sleep they'd get when interesting. Independent of all the other things that are happening. And, we know this because there are great sleep labs at Stanford School of Medicine, at UPenn, back east and elsewhere where people actually go into a clinic and sleep either upright or at different man tracks. And, they're looking at all this at the level of data.

Okay, so here's one for you. What's the best position to sleep on your back, on your side, on your stomach?

Great question. And it really truly depends. And it probably depends on how hot you run. So I tend to run really warm. A lot of the cooling of the body occurs from the palms and bottoms of the feet, but also from the upper back and scapula because we accumulate what's called brown fat there. It's not the blubbery fat that's under the skin. It's like a furnace. Actually, you can increase the density of brown fat by going into cold water repeatedly. daily for, you know, one to three minutes several times each week. It means your furnace actually burns hotter. It allows you to be in cold temperatures more comfortably. Some really beautiful data just published on this. So I don't like to sleep on my back because I start heating up. Start sweating. That's right. So I tend to sleep on my side. I sleep in that. What is that? It's like soldier position.

Yeah, yeah.

But then again, there are some people that have shoulder issues and then they can't do that. I'm relatively flexible through my shoulders. super flexible, so I can do that. It really depends. Now, of course, if you're sleeping on your stomach, how do you elevate your ankles? You know, it starts becoming a little bit of, you know, we are not just science experiments. And so you have to, you have to assume that you're not going to get everything exactly right. But keeping the room cool, keeping the cool being under a warm enough blanket, but then extending a hand or an ankle out so that you can cool off during the middle of the night, that's going to be good. Keep the room dark, although complete pitch black doesn't seem to be as good as having a little bit of light somewhere in the room. But you don't want a bright blue light or red light anywhere in the room that's going to wake you up. Some people like me have very thin eyelids, exceedingly thin eyelids. Some people have very thick eyelids. So, some people are more bothered by a light in the room than others. It really varies.

So, you have to just tune things.

To your particular environment.

I'm curious about the neuroscience before you go to sleep. How do we set our minds up to... You were saying before about a lot of people, it's hard for them to sleep because they can't shut their mind off. Is there something we should be thinking before we shut it off to set our sleep up for success mentally and then to really build into the next day where we wake up feeling clear minded and without this brain fog where we have more motivation, where we have more energy and excitement towards the next day and then doing that in a pattern every night. Is there any science around that? Is it like listening to a hypnosis?

That could be very helpful.

Which will help you clean out whatever is going on through the day and get clear and ready for the next day but also fall asleep so you're not thinking about it. Is there anything that can help you have better dreams so that you sleep better? What have you found there in the neuroscience?

Yeah, so the So glad you asked this question. There's some really interesting data from a guy named Chuck Charles Zeisler, who is at Harvard Med, and beautiful studies on sleep in humans for many decades, and a really fantastic physician and researcher. And they observed something interesting, which is that about 90 minutes or so before your natural bedtime, there's a spike in alertness. planning and almost anxiety that all people undergo and it's a normal healthy pattern. The idea, and it's a just so story because we don't really know I nor Chuck Zeisler nor anyone else was consulted at the design phase as we say, but we assume this came about because prior to going to sleep we need to shore up everything for safety. We need to lock things down, make sure everything is in its place because we are very vulnerable in sleep. Nowadays, this might manifest as you need to go to bed at 10:30 because you have to get up at 6:00, et cetera. And then right around 8:30 or 9:00, you start finding yourself running around doing various things. Many people worry about that and they think, oh, I'm really stressed because I actually need to go to sleep and here I am wide awake. It tends to subside very quickly. So just the knowledge that that's a normal healthy spike in alertness and activity, I think can help a number of people. I want to make sure I mention that. The other thing is preparing the mind, as you said, turning thoughts off. Turning thoughts off is a skill. We've talked before, gosh, almost a year or more now, about Yoga Nidra, which is there are many, many Yoga Nidra scripts available on YouTube free of cost. The ones I particularly like are the ones by Kamanee Desai, K-A-M-A-N-E-E, I-N-I-D-E-S-A-I. Kamanee Disci. I just really like her voice. I don't know Kamanee, never met her. These are free scripts. They're Yoga Nidra scripts that last about 20 minutes. They involve some breathing, some meditation type stuff. But they teach you to turn your thoughts off, which is really wonderful because a lot of people, they just get stuck in this rumination. Now, is there an ideal protocol prior to sleep? It depends because some people find they have their greatest clarity after the kids are asleep and they're sitting there. So I wouldn't say don't work or do work. You do want to avoid strong stimuli before sleep. So do you really want to watch a politically charged or a violent movie right before sleep? Well, that depends on how triggered you tend to be by politics or violence. Some people aren't triggered, other people are. But that aside, you don't want to go to bed either too hungry or too full because that can inhibit your sleep.

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You can change. There's so much cool stuff that we can do today.

You know, you got meditation, you got.

Journaling, you got, you know, tai chi. You know what I'm saying? There's all this stuff you could do. playing board games. There's that cool, have you played the Heads Up?

Oh yeah, it's great.

Right?

So you've got all these cool things you can do to hang out with your friends, spend time with your significant other. How do we fit it all in? Well, you don't have to do everything. Or you can do each thing in a micro way. But so for me, my current evening routine is number one, just kind of the hallmark thing for me is giving myself some tech-free time. before I go to bed, before I lay my head down. At least 30 minutes. We all can do this. And Harvard researchers have confirmed. I talked about this, and I've pushed this in the culture like the last five years hard. So people have heard this. You know where it came from, all right? I've been really working to get this out here. And we've got them right here, man. We've got the new iPhone.

It's got three cameras.

Sick.

It's fun to play with.

It's amazing, right?

But this device is the greatest deterrent for our sleep quality today.

Yeah, so bad.

And so Harvard researchers confirmed that the light exposure, blue light specifically, and white light that kind of shoot out from our devices that we can't really see if we're sitting here and they've got this light around us, this ambient light. But if you're in a dark room and you see that phone, it's like emanating this bluish, alien light, right? And so what they found was that this light does in fact suppress your melatonin secretion and dramatically increases cortisol. And they got numbers on this. So what they found is that approximately every 30 minutes you're on your device at night, you suppress melatonin. I'm sorry, I said it wrong. Every hour you're on your device at night, you suppress melatonin for 30 minutes.

Oh.

All right.

Every hour you're on your device, you suppress melatonin for 30 minutes. So if you're on your device three hours, melatonin suppressed for 90 minutes.

Wow. Right?

And so again, even though you might be unconscious and go to bed and you're not aware anymore, you're not going through your sleep cycles efficiently. So that's what it's really about is optimizing our sleep cycles. And we do that with the way.

We live our lives.

And so just to go back on.

That point with me just 30 minutes.

At least no fault. At least ideally, we want to see.

More like 60 minutes.

Yeah, I mean then we're like, but this ninja... We get into that place of like, what do I do though?

You read a book, you hang out with your friends, you go to bed.

Some people just aren't trying to hear that man. You know what I mean?

So, that's no phone and no TV.

Yeah.

So, no you can't watch your show or your movie.

Here's a couple of hacks and a lot, I'm sure you've got the blue light blocking glasses. You've got blue light blocking apps for your phone. Like it's built into the iPhone now. You know, and folks who have Android, they have like a night, I'm sorry.

What is it called?

Twilight.

Yeah.

Is another thing.

I believe that's what it's called.

Okay. So there's some things you can do.

Yeah.

So there's things that you can do to kind of reduce that experience. And for many folks, and I know myself included, I definitely do feel like sometimes even it's a neuro neuro association. Just putting, putting the glasses on, excuse me. I would get sleepy, you know what I'm saying? Just by putting the glasses on. Yeah, chilling out. Or we can also, you know, dim the lights around us, you know, maybe even change some bulbs, a couple of bulbs in your house, candlelight, that's sexy.

You know what I'm saying?

So you just change, and we evolve with those kinds of lights in the evening, those tones, right? These kind of warmer colors. And so that's what I do, I give myself a 30-minute curfew, and I really love to just kind of take some time, hang out with my wife, we'll talk, you know, I'll do some reading. This is when I, you know, but we again, like we've got it's a light dimmer.

Yeah.

Lights a little bit dimmer. I'll do at least probably 10 minutes of reading, 20 minutes sometimes, if we're not, you know, spending some time together. You know what I mean? So we have that. And then for me, I love if I get a chance to do a magnesium bath in the evening. So this is a big one, man. So magnesium has been found to be responsible for over 650 biochemical processes in the body, many of them related to relaxation and sleep. All right. So magnesium is needed to like contraction and relaxation of your muscles. So the relaxation response of your muscles, like if somebody's cramping, that kind of thing, magnesium helps a lot. Oh, okay. All right. So, but also it relaxes your nervous system. So it helps to shift over from your sympathetic fight or flight nervous system. Magnesium helps to shift you into the parasympathetic rest and digest part of your nervous system. And so people have been doing this for centuries. Like Epsom salt baths has helped to improve sleep and relax sore muscles, help you to heal faster, all that stuff. It has some credence. Now we got some like supercharged magnesium salts and-- Really?

So you do this almost every night?

No, a couple times a week. You know what I'm saying? Even once a week can be good. What I have also, I have the topical magnesium spray. So I use that almost every night. So I'll just like massage, rub that in. And that's another thing that you could do too, get a massage.

All right.

If you can.

More sleep from your significant other or self massage. You know, there's even acupressure points. And I talk about this in Sleep Smarter because I'm very analytical in how I think. I'm like, ah, you could like touch a point and, you know, but there is some evidence that this, you know, they did this in a clinic, I'm sorry, in a hospital. And so what they did was manipulate this acupressure point and they saw higher levels of melatonin metabolites in their urine by manipulating this pressure point. So it's doing something with melatonin. So, but with massage, you produce endorphins, serotonin, right? So this all helps with that relaxation response I don't know anybody that's ever gotten a massage and like, God, no, it's like, I'm so ready to fight now.

You know what I mean?

Right, right. You just want to chill for another few hours, yeah.

That's it, man. Okay. So if I can, you know, my wife, like, I'll massage her feet or if she wants to massage my feet, that's so great, man, by the way. Or I got like a little tennis ball and I'll just like put that on the floor and rub that around on my feet, you know, bottom of my feet.

So there's another couple things.

And so some of these things are not as consistent. Consistent things for me is, screen curfew, reading, time with my wife, and magnesium. Those are my things.

And no with food at a certain time probably, right?

Yeah, I don't even think about it because I'm nourished and I don't have a hungry brain. So if I eat, you know, we finish eating at, you know, seven or eight, whatever it is, like I feel good, like I don't need to jam any food before bed. But the other thing I do as I'm walking into the bedroom is I turn the thermostat down.

Make it cold.

Yeah.

And we've talked about this before.

69.

Yeah.

That's what I keep it at, man. Every night.

Yeah.

It's so good.

It is, you know, and this is goes back to that evolutionary process, evolutionary biology. We have a natural drop in our core body temperature at night, one to two degrees.

Yeah.

And what the theory is, because again, like a lot of stuff we don't know specifically why, but is that our body uses a lot of energy to try to keep us keep our temperature up. So by bringing that down a little bit, more energy is being dispersed to do things like memory consolidation, like detoxification of your brain via the glymphatic system. Like there's like a changing of the guard that happens in your gut microbiome. Like all this energy is needed to bring you back better.

Yeah, right.

And so if your environment is too hot, no matter where you live on the planet, whether if it's like Chile or It's, you know, Antarctica.

Yeah.

It gets, well, that might not be a good example, but during the daytime and during the nighttime, the temperature is different. The temperature goes down a little bit at night, no matter where you are. And so if you artificially keep it high, your body's gonna kind of be trying to fight to bring itself down. So help it a little bit. Today we do have access, a lot of us, to regulate our thermostat.

Yeah.

At least, you know, like during this time of year here in LA, like you can get down you know, 50s and 60s, like you can just open a window.

Yeah.

You know? And so, yeah, so that's what I do. I turn the thermostat down or turn the heat off if it's been on.

Sure, sure.

Yeah.

Amazing.

So that's your evening routine.

Yeah.

I love it, man.

What else do we need to know about sleep? You know, we've talked about sleep sanctuaries and making sure you have the snake plants and all these other things. Do you still do the snake plant?

I have not got, we just moved, so I haven't gotten my whole thing optimized. Except like we got some blackout curtains because, you know, when you came to my house, like we were out in the woods. Yeah, I mean, dark.

It was dark, dark.

Dark.

You got, you got. It was like, you know, maybe a little moonlight, but that's our bodies, we evolved with that. You know, that's a natural spectrum of light. And the lux is so much less than what's beaming out of your telephone or the sun. But now, you know, kind of, you know, we're like in a neighborhood. So, I got some blackout curtains again. But something else that I think people would be interested in is still the buy-in. Like, why does this matter? Why should I be looking at optimizing my sleep for 2020?

Yes.

You know, like this is a new decade. This could be the best decade of your life.

But it's also with all these opportunities and work harder mentality and be more productive, you're going to get less sleep, less quality sleep, if you have that.

Mentality as well, right?

If you're like, so many opportunities, it's a new decade, let's crush the decade. That type of thinking could make you hurtful in sleep, right?

When you say crush, I immediately thought of Gary V. Of course. And he's like the guy everybody seems like, you know, he's out there just dominating. His thing now that he's out talking about, he gets seven hours of sleep a night. I talked with him maybe four years ago. We're having dinner and this is when this is Beard Gary V. I don't know he did his little moment of beard. Yeah, and so and I was just like inquiring like hey man, so what's with your health practices? Like you're trying to play the long game. You're talking about buying the Jets. How you gonna do that?

If you're dead.

Yeah, if you're dead.

D-E-A-D. Yeah, exactly.

So what he was like, you know, he's hired a trainer to travel with him because he's like he knows himself to keep him accountable on that end and he gets his sleep despite what people think. And so just keep that in mind. The people that you're looking at and the people that even the ones that are saying, you know, sleep is for suckers, I promise they're sleeping. I promise. They gotta be. You can't operate or and also they might not be sleeping enough and they're not reaching their full potential. You know what I mean? So be very careful about that because what you want to do, you don't want to just execute. You want to be the very best version of yourself to to get up and execute. You can accomplish so much more when you feel well.

I think I saw Steve Harvey talk about he, he's mentioned something. He said, I think he said sleep. Sleep is for those who are broke or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Did you see this?

I know what you're talking about.

Yeah.

I think he said something.

I don't know if that was Steve. It might have been him.

Yeah.

He said this recently. Or I saw a video came up about a month. where he's like, sleep is for, for broke people. For broke people or something like that where it's like, you've got to work harder.

Yeah.

Then people, if you want to make money, right?

You've got to spend extra hours and things like that. But, yeah. Again, like, I know a lot of these people who have these messages and even, you know, another really good friend of mine and yours, too, Eric Thomas, right? He's another person, you know, out there.

But what he, and he shared this.

He's like, I wake up at 4:00 a.m. or 5:00 a.m.

But he goes to sleep early.

Like, we've been we've been hanging out.

For a long time.

He's sleeping like 8:00, 8:00 p.m. or something, right? He's knocked out, all right, but he's getting up and grinding, right? He's get when he's up, he's troubled. So, his thing is sleep, get enough sleep, but don't sleep in, don't oversleep, don't be lazy. Yeah, that's the difference. It's not don't sleep, that's killing yourself. And that's you're not showing up as the best you as we kind of gone through today. Is there too much sleep? Absolutely, yeah. and I know that many of us have experienced this where we, maybe we sleep longer than normal and we're tired. We're super tired when we get up and we're like tired for a while. And a big part of that is just kind of even how we're interrupting our sleep cycles, you know?

But that's a, you know, really unique conversation. What is the optimal amount of hours for most people who live busy lives, who are pushing the envelope on work, family, activities, they're doing a lot yeah, they're trying to fill it all on their plate, you know, achieve their goals and do everything. What would be the optimal amount of hours of sleep for those types of people?

I'll tell you right now that eight hours is not enough for some people. For some people, for some people it's six, for some people it's seven, for some people it's nine. It depends, man. It's the answer that nobody wants to hear because you know, these so-called experts are like giving people these cookie cutter answers like, you need to get eight hours of sleep. I think that's wildly negligent to tell people that because you can become neurotic about something that you don't even really need. What it really boils down to, if you're getting eight hours of shitty sleep, for me, I liken sleep minutes to calories. Like today, most people are well aware that it's not just the quantity of calories, it's the quality of those calories. for same thing, it's the quality of those sleep minutes, not just the quantity.

Right?

So you can get, like, if you're looking at, what did I mention earlier?

A chocadillo, right?

Versus Wild Caught Salmon or, you know, Lewis's salad. Is there a name of the salad?

I should call it Lewis's salad. It's a great salad or something. Because it's a custom bowl. It's greatness bowl.

Yes, sir.

The salad of greatness.

Yes.

So, chocodail versus the salad of greatness, it's gonna have wildly different impact on what it does to your metabolism, right? And so the same thing with your sleep minutes. You can be getting like eight hours of chocodail sleep because of your blue light exposure, because of you not tapping into thermal regulation, because you having issues with blood sugar regulation. And listing goes on and on and on. Some of the things we talked about, or you can get an incredible optimized version of that sleep that only takes you six and a half hours where you're going through your sleep cycles efficiently and you're waking up feeling like a beast. The answer is it depends. The quality of your sleep and who you are and what you're doing right now. Because there are times in your life when you know you've had to sleep more. If you're like somebody's training for whatever, your body just needs a little bit more sleep. Maybe you're under a lot of stress, whatever the case might be. it's gonna change. Now we have to honor our bodies. Obviously, I'm a big fan of routine because your body's always looking for routine, but when you're up, life is dynamic, like things are gonna happen. And so I allow myself to change my sleep schedule a little bit, and I try to stay within a nice framework, but if something's going on, like, and I know that I'm stressed, like, man, you know, like, I really need to back off. I need to recover. I don't need to push it down more. And this also just comes with experience.

To.

Sure.

You know what I mean? So that I can wake up recovered and get back on my grind. You know what I mean? And so, but just a little quick thing that I want to share with people, that's like another big buy-in point, is that our sleep quality affects our parents, right? Specifically, you know, are everybody, nobody's waking up like, you know what? I just want to be super ugly today. Like, it's ugly. Possible.

You know what I mean?

I want to scare children. You know what I mean? And. there was this really cool study that was done recently. So this was just in 2017. And the Swedish researchers, and what they did was they had study participants take a picture after a full night of good sleep, and then they had them take a picture after sleep depriving them where they're getting about five hours, five to six hours of sleep for two days. All right. So they sleep deprived them for two days. Take their picture again. There's a mixture of pictures. that these raiders, the people who are raiding all the people's beauty, and what they did was they looked at all the different pictures, and this is looking at what's happening in our brains just again through evolutionary biology. When we see people, we get feedback. And what the scientists were wanting to do was to find out the sleep deprivation caused a hesitance to want to be around somebody. All right? what Raiders found was that when people were sleep deprived, they were deemed to be less attractive, they were deemed to be less healthy, and they also decided, like, I would be less interested in.

Socializing with this person.

Okay. Just in two days of sleep deprivation. And another study by Swedish researchers found that just five days of sleep deprivation, you know, just getting less than six hours of sleep, led to 45 increase. and fine lines and wrinkles in the face. It aged you very quickly. But the good news is it reverses not as quickly.

It rebounds.

Yeah.

It's called beauty sleep. Why don't we talk about this more?

That's true.

You know what I mean? It's called beauty sleep for a reason. There's real rejuvenative magic in this. You know what I mean? And so, looking at how we feel about other people and how we're showing up in the world, like your sleep has a big impact on that.

And tell people about sleep debt. You mentioned this before. If you've gone 25 years of just horrible sleep, can you oversleep for 20 years?

25 years, that's a long time.

A few years, five years, 10 years. If you've been bad in your 20s and you've been partying late nights and you're a promoter and you get horrible sleep every night, can you rebound and put more sleep in that bank debt and recover. And the way that we think about.

Sleep debt, it doesn't work like that. The good news is, again, this kind of goes back to the conversation about telomeres. Once we change our habits and our practices, you can do things to start to reverse that aging process in some aspects, right? By lengthening those telomeres by doing good things for your body, which includes getting more sleep. So you burning the candle at both ends or burning the telomeres at both ends, you can reverse that process. That's the good news.

That's good.

Now, in the context of sleep debt, so if you're just sleep deprived for, you know, just say you're going like months at a time, getting, you know, four whatever hours, your incidence of heart disease is skyrocketing, heart attack, stroke, diabetes, all this stuff is going up, chances are you're not going to make it very far. Some people that, even people listening like, well, I'm fine. You got to be careful about that. Now, that sleep debt is a lot to pay back. If it's like a day or two, maybe three, four days at the most, and you kind of catch up, you know, you know, maybe on the weekend, that can be helpful. But it's still like you're not getting back as much as you're taking out, if that makes sense.

Before the interview continues, if you feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose and not living the life that your future self would be. extremely proud of. I've written a new book called the Greatness Mindset, and I think you're going to love this. Through powerful stories, science-backed strategies, and step-by-step guidance, the Greatness Mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. Make sure to click the link below in the description to get your copy today.

Okay, let's get back to this video. Why is this important? to have a room pitch black so you can't even see your hand.

Awesome.

Yeah.

So again, so that normal sleep cycle, just helping to support that. And your skin has photoreceptors that pick up light.

Even the littlest amount of light.

Yeah.

There was a study I put in the book that the room was otherwise pitch black, but they put just a tiny light behind somebody's knee.

No.

And it was enough. Yes.

Shut up.

It was enough to take them out of their normal stage of sleep.

It'S crazy, right?

It's crazy. And so, because again, we've evolved in darkness. And it's not all light, it's unnatural light. Like moonlight, if you look at the Luxe, and I put a Luxe chart in the book, it's not even a problem, but that unnatural light. And so your skin has photoreceptors that pick up information and basically send it to your brain to secrete more daytime hormones, namely cortisol. All right, so your neighbor's porch light you know, street lights outside, that kind of stuff, this unnatural light. It's been dubbed light pollution now. So getting your room pitch black can keep that stuff out of your room, but also the internal light too. So if you've got an ugly alarm clock staring at you, you know, that kind of stuff, you might want to consider, you know, getting a dimmer shut.

Off or, you know, throwing a blanket over it or something like that. I like that. Okay. That was actually number six. Got it.

So this is number seven.

Let's see.

Train hard, but smart, number seven. What does that mean?

Awesome. Well, I think a lot of people know that a good workout can help you sleep. However, is the difference between going to sleep and passing out, you know, as we've mentioned. So a lot of people, you know, I just, I talk with Rich Roll, and if he doesn't do one of his, you know, he's, like, running for days, you know, if he doesn't do one of his workouts. Like he says his sleep isn't the same. And it's because of his cortisol rhythm, which he's changed. But that's a whole other story. Bottom line is there's a difference number one between going to sleep and passing out. And here's how to do this the right way. So this study done with Appalachian State University, they broke exercise up into three groups. Group A exercised at 7 a.m. in the morning. Group B, 1 p.m. Group C, 7 p.m. at night. Group A spent up to 75% more time in deep anabolic sleep.

Earlier in the morning.

So, early in the morning, if you can get a workout in, it doesn't mean it has to be the time you hit the gym. You can work out in the afternoon. But that initial morning activity is important because going back to our evolutionary biology, it encourages that normal cortisol spike. So, getting up and taking a walk. Yeah, you can do a power walk. You can do four-minute Tabata session.

Do some body weight stuff.

Or you can do your full workout.

Air squats.

Yes.

Stretch, yoga stretching, whatever it may be. You're helping to encourage that normal cortisol spike. First thing in the morning.

Yeah.

First hour or something.

Yeah, exactly.

Interesting. And then what about the full workout? What about if you're like, okay, I'm gonna do my hour workout today.

When should that optimal time be? If you want to do it in the morning, perfect. If it is in the, and there wasn't much benefit to the afternoon as far as sleep is concerned, but in the evening there was some benefit.

But it has to be the early evening.

All right. Because if I do work out in the evening, it's okay. If it's the early evening, so six, seven, you need about four hours. So if your planned bedtime is 11, you need about four hours for your cortisol to get normalized and your core body temperature to come back down, which.

We talked about how important that is. Yeah, because I'll work out and then.

I'll take a cold shower, but I'm still sweating an hour later. Yeah, but cold shower is a great.

Help though to help to lower your body, your core body temperature. It's still the burn, it's just like a big guy, you're still sweating, so that makes sense.

Okay, so four hours after the workout.

You should take before you go to sleep.

Right.

Right. And some people are like hitting, you know, their jiu-jitsu class at like 8 p.m. and then trying to get to sleep at 10.

That's not optimal. Yeah, it's not. But it is good. You still get benefit if you go.

Up till 7 o'clock or four hours before. It's okay. Just try and time it different. You know, a lot of times that we get in issues with this is because we tell ourselves there's not another option. You know, we're infinite beings that have.

Plenty of different ways that we can change things. Gotcha. Okay. I believe that was seven. Okay, so number eight, you smart supplementation. What does that mean?

Ooh, man, this is a great chapter, man. This whole working in a clinic, people would sometimes see me like allopathic treatment, like, what can I take? You know, so I'm having problems with losing weight. What can I take for that? what can I take for my sleep? And that sent me down a path of researching some stuff, and some of the stuff I found wasn't. It didn't feel good. One of the first things in the biggest supplement for sleep is melatonin. We talked about melatonin a lot already. Just because you could buy it at a natural food store doesn't mean that it's okay. Not all melatonin is made equally.

Is that what you're saying?

No, not that. This is a hormone, man. this is a hormone, like you're taking a hormone. And so I cited a study in the book that right now, and there's a lot more being done on this, but right now what's, what's seen clinically is that taking melatonin supplementation decreases the function of your melatonin receptor receptor sites. So they start to down regulate. Basically your body stops being able to use it. No, you can produce it, but your body won't be able to use it.

Oh.

All right. So, like taking creatine where you're like, so much creatine back in the day, and then it stops using it because it's something like overload of creatine or something. Okay.

But, yeah, man. So.

So you shouldn't be taking melatonin, ideally, not.

Not consistently, you know, and this is coming out. Dr. Michael Bruce is somebody I mentioned in the book, board certified sleep specialist and really smart guy, and he's recommended people to back off the. The melatonin. But I say everything has a place, everything has value. if you're changing time zones, if you're wanting to just kind of for short term to help to set your normal sleep cycle, it can be okay. But getting that dependency on it and using too much, the amount that's in a normal just everyday supplement is way too high.

Right.

And your body will start to down regulate and so what do people do? They'll take more. So melatonin is not the way to go. The ideal way is to start with things that are natural first, things that have a storied long lineage of use to the human body. You can start as simple as chamomile tea, can be really helpful. Clinically proven to be effective. Kava kava is another one, that's the national drink of Fiji, which Tony Robbins always come to mind when I think of Fiji. But it's been shown to be a mild sedative as well as valerian. So these are three options. Then we can get into the chemical isolates, which I would do that later, but 5-HTP is effective. L-tryptophan, 5-HTP is a precursor to melatonin. So it gives your body the chance to do a step still and produce it versus you taking the end product and lowering your ability for your body to actually use it.

Gotcha, wow, that's powerful. Okay, so that was number eight, number nine, go easy on the bottle.

What does that mean? So this was one of the funnest chapters of the book and wow, just.

Some of the- I'm assuming you're talking about alcohol.

This is alcohol, yeah, yeah.

What about my late night glass of wine or going out to the bars drinking until I'm passed out.

That's not gonna help me sleep better. So here's what's so interesting is that the research shows that drinking alcohol before bed does in fact help you to fall asleep faster. Hands down, no doubt about it. It passes you out, right? What also has been found is that you're not getting into normal REM sleep in particular. Your sleep stages are broken. This is why you wake up with what's known as a hangover, because it's interrupting your sleep cycles. So you're passed out. you're physiologically sleeping, but your brain isn't doing the right processes. Why not? Right? Alcohol interrupts those processes. So one of the things that I mentioned earlier, and I didn't want to get into it, but adenosine, which we talked about in the book in regards to the caffeine, all right? So adenosine is this end product from your body. It's producing this compound to basically nudge you to go to sleep. And caffeine sits in the receptor sites for adenosine, so you don't really know you're tired, even though you are. alcohol does something similar to that. So it makes you feel tired even though physiologically you might not be ready to go to sleep for some people. So this has a lot to do with it with the impact with the adenosine as far as alcohol is concerned. And so it does work again to put you to sleep but getting good sleep not so much. One of the other things that was fascinating about writing this chapter was looking at how similar sleep deprivation is to being drunk. and actually seeing right there statistical correlation between, and when you see this, man, the National Highway Patrol and all of the deaths that occur every year due to people falling asleep or driving while drowsy is shocking because there isn't an easy test for that, as there is with testing with blood alcohol. And there was a great MythBusters episode that I talk about in the book that actually showed, wow, you can actually be even worse off if you're sleep deprived.

Of course, you can't open your eyes.

Exactly.

Right.

I mean, you know, I'll wake up sometimes and I'll feel like drowsy and sleep deprived. I've never been drunk in my life, so I don't know what the feeling is.

Yeah.

But I think a few nights ago, I woke up, you know, I was coming back from my international trip for two weeks, so I was just waking up at 3 a.m. and it was just all off.

Yeah.

I woke up.

I remember just, like, walking around the.

Room, like, hitting the wall.

And I'm like, man, I feel so drunk. That's what drunk is. You're right. It feels like, man, I don't know what it is, you know? So, like, I'm like, I can only imagine, you know, when you don't have a stable footing and you're just like, where am I? Yeah, that's interesting.

So, yeah, but there are benefits to drinking, especially, like you mentioned, drinking wine, you know, red wine, the resveratrol. There's a lot of great benefits. It's just, how about we go for a happy hour or how about you.

Give yourself the opportunity?

I talk about how it's like four.

Hours before you sleep. Yeah, a couple, even two. Okay. Even two. And drink plenty of water to help your body to essentially flush it out. You know, when you're drinking alcohol, well, you don't know this, but you tend to go pee a lot. Your body's trying to eliminate the poison, you know? And so just encourage that, you know, just by drinking, getting really hydrated and just giving yourself a couple hours before you go to bed.

Gotcha. Okay, cool. So that was number nine. Number 10, let's do early to rise. Be early to rise. Why?

How about let's do the get grounded, since correlation. Let's do it. Get grounded. This was the way your book kicked off, right?

Yeah.

And this is the way that mine wraps up.

I like it.

And it means psychologically, but also physiologically. And, wow, this was some of the most fascinating research that I got to dig into. And I got to talk to Dr. Jeff Spencer, who's. He's not been on your show, right? Yeah, he has.

Yeah.

So.

And he was. he's directly connected to like 40 national championships, Olympic gold medals, Tour de France victories combined, you know, all together with his coaching and his being a team physician for the Tour de France, for example. One of his leverage points and his kind of secret sauce was through utilizing grounding and earthing equipment. And so what is it? So getting grounded basically means getting your body connected with the Earth's surface. And again, me being very analytical, I'm not, you know, I don't like to get too unicorn, you know, but respect to that, there is some of that relevant in the world, but I want to see the science. Like, I want to know how it works. And so the Earth itself is brimming with free electrons. Okay? And so your body is really operating off of this, this interesting. combination of protons and electrons for events to happen. So positive event in your body is an inflammatory event, basically. And you need inflammation to get better, to grow, to develop. Inflammation is actually good, but we don't want it to go too far. Bringing an electron molecule into an inflammatory process because what happens today is people are having too many inflammatory overreactions.

Right?

So this is like autoimmune condition where your body's doing too much. Yes. And bringing an electron in basically neutralizes that inflammatory event. So one of the things that's seen is when you get grounded, and there's so much cool research on this, inflammation goes down. Your parasympathetic nervous system kicks on.

Right?

And so there was a study done, and this was a Journal of Environmental and Public Health, and I cited this one in the book, that found that as soon as you get grounded, instantly your parasympathetic nervous system is turning on and your sympathetic nervous system is turning off. So what are those? Parasympathetic is basically your rest and digest system. Sympathetic is fight or flight. And most of us are chronically in this. It's a binary system. It's either off or on. You're not a little big sympathetic. So getting grounded immediately does that. And why does that work? Human bodies conductive. you know, like, it's not some magic. Right now, you know, if somebody might be listening to podcasts, matter of fact, let's, I'm gonna use a different example. Scary movies, right? One of the worst ways to go out is like you're taking a bath and here comes Freddy Kruger and he throws an electric device in the bathtub.

Yeah, right. That would suck.

It sucks, right? Because we're conductive, we can be electrocuted because we're conductive. We can electrocute each other just with static electricity. You know, happens every day. You're very, very conductive. So that should help to kind of buffer that disconnection of like what's going on. You just can't see the electricity, the electrons coming from the ground, but they're there. So conductive surfaces are mainly like grass, dirt, you know, soil. Concrete is a little bit conductive. Asphalt is not. Bodies of water is why we feel grounded and ideas come in the shower.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, because those pipes are grounded.

Sure.

All right, sand, things like that. So getting your body in touch with those things. And that's why people feel so good when they go to the beach. They feel relaxed, they get better sleep. Some people fall asleep at the beach. Of course, yeah, absolutely. Because your body's actually getting, it's setting the circadian timing is getting back on track. So that's one thing. And also getting grounded, and this was so cool that I saw this, clinically proven. And so let me preface this. So what Dr. Jeff was using was grounding equipment. So this is equipment that basically connects to the grounding prong in your outlets and it's basically like sheets that align with this particular material that sends that energy basically to the human body. And so there's grounding mats, like I think you have one. I got one for a buddy, John Lee Dumas, that he uses all the time. I have a mouse pad, there's grounding sheets, there's all this other cool stuff that basically connects you to the electrons that the earth is eminating. And so by, there was one study that I cited, getting grounded using this equipment, number one, it lowered nighttime cortisol. So they monitored the person all night, the people all night long in the study, lowered nighttime cortisol. All right. And also it helped to normalize cortisol during the daytime. So they're not hyper fight or flight just by getting yourself grounded.

Right.

All right. So super powerful stuff. The inexpensive way to do it, which it helps if you're in California, it's so great to be, I was shoveling snow the day before I came here. But it's easy to get grounded. What other places, depending on the time of year, can be a little bit more difficult. But I encourage you to explore. If it's a little chilly outside and you've got a patch of grass in your backyard, still get out there, roll up your pants and do that. Or you can get yourself some of.

The earthing equipment that I talk about in the book. If someone who has a horrible diet, they eat horrible, they smoke, they drink occasionally, but they get eight hours of sleep versus someone who gets five hours of sleep but works out hard every day, eats perfect clean vegan, whatever the, the perfect clean diet is for them. Don't smoke, don't drink. I wonder who has more susceptibility to diseases and cancers and and poor health and which problems are each case more prone to have. Perfect eating, but not proper half the amount of sleep four or five hours a night, but you're taking care of.