POOR SLEEP Is Killing You! - DO THIS To Optimize It TODAY! | Lewis Howes

I wouldn't have huge protein before bed, and I don't want to have anything that's going to raise my blood sugar before bed. Our bodies want to be very cold at night, so anything you do that opposes that leads to you eat a.

Healthy meal, let's say an hour before bed. I'm talking about grains and lean meat and healthy stuff. Or if you eat pizza an hour before bed, are they both going to impact your ability to sleep better or is the quality of the food before you go to bed matter?

Yeah, that's a, that's a really good question. The short answer is, yeah, it does matter. So probably the two things that would have the greatest determination would be the simplicity or glycemic, the simplicity of the carbohydrates or the glycemic load, because that's going to impact the sort of glycemic roller coaster you go on at night and then probably the amount of protein because that has a greater contribution to what's called the thermogenic effect of food. So the thermog effect is how much does your body temperature actually rise to digest the food? Our bodies want to be very cold at night, so anything you do that opposes that leads to lousy sleep.

So what foods help you sleep better that keep you colder? What are those foods? Whether it's an hour before or three hours before?

Yeah, honestly, it's like almost anything you're going to eat is going to come with something that's going to slightly raise your temperature. So I just generally say try to not eat too much before bed. And I go out of my way to avoid the two things that I think are worse. So I just say I wouldn't have huge protein before bed and I don't want to have anything that's going to raise my blood sugar before bed. So, you know, I'd have an avocado before bed. I'd have, you know, something that's like, you know, I just generally don't eat before bed.

The body really rewards you in terms of if you wait or if you don't eat right before bed, is it going to sleep better, sleep deeper, be cooler and therefore helpful, help you have more energy the next day if you don't eat before.

Ben?

Yeah, and this is, at least for me, been most easy to exhibit, and I think many of my patients would agree during periods of fasting. So fasting is kind of a funky state because you're altering so many other things in the physiology. But one of the things that happens, especially by about the second Day of a water only fast is you really are seeing the impacts of what deep sleep can look like in a state that is totally absent food. And it's. It's very interesting because you're competing with two forces. One that's keeping you awake and one that's helping you sleep a lot deeper. The one that's keeping you awake is cortisol. You have more of it. You have more stress hormones when you're fasting. Because that's the thing from a prehistoric standpoint, that would have been going on, right? Fasting would trigger a signal that says, go get more food. Right?

Be alert, be focused, Be alert.

Go get food. We don't want to die. And so that's kind of keeping you awake. But the flip side of that is the total absence of nutrient is allowing you to get into this amazing sleep. And your body temperature is really going down because your body's turning down its metabolism. So I actually find fasting sleep to be some of the most amazing physiology because I'm watching this plummeting temperature, rising heart rate variability, falling heart rate, all of these really valuable things, but a little bit of rising cortisol, that can lead to shorter sleep times. But I still feel quite rejuvenated by sleep.

If you're a kid and you're eating a lot of junk food, you're not sleep, you're staying up late because you're, whatever, playing video games all night. But you've got all this energy all day and you're active. Is there a negative for in your early ages, teens, early 20s, through lacking sleep, eating poorly, or is there a way to recover in your 20s from the damage you've done in a year before 20?

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, certainly you can break it down into sort of the behavioral habit side, and you can talk about it through the physiologic lens. The good news is, before the age of 20 or 30, we are pretty remarkably resilient. I mean, you're an athlete, so you can relate. How old are you now, Louis? You're near 37.

37.

So you might not have fully appreciate. I'm 47, so I'm a full decade older than you. And when I think about 17 to 27, to 37 to 47, I can really talk about those decades through the lens of resilience. Like at 17, you could shoot me, and I think I'd still get up the next day. Like, you just couldn't. Right? You're Superman. Yeah, you're absolutely Superman. And I Don't know. I feel like the first observation of not being Superman for me kind of kicked in about 42ish about five years ago was the first time I was like, oh, so this is what people talk about, right? Like you can't just go out and crush it every minute of every day. And I think that's just one lens, which is through the lens of exercise. But the same is true of physiology, right? Like, or I'll give you another example, many of my patients have observed this. I've observed this. Like, I was never a big drinker in college, but certainly there were enough occasions in med school or college where I'd go out and drink far more than anyone should. And yet somehow the next day I could like get up at six in the morning and go and do whatever I need to do. Like I remember one night actually being out drinking until 3 in the morning. I mean, having so much to drink, it was ridiculous. And somehow getting up at six in that morning to do a hundred mile bike ride.

Oh my gosh, man.

Probably still partially drunk, but felt fine by about like two hours into the ride. Today, if I had three glasses of wine, like the headache I'm going to have the next day is going to last me till the middle of the day.

Is that because your body was able to assimilate the glucose into the muscles and it used it for its, to its advantage then and now it's like it takes over.

It's a very good question. I really, I mean I could, I could sort of, you know, speculate on what it is, but I, I just think there's an over. So there's this thing called homeostasis, right? Which is one of the hallmarks of youth and it's one of the hallmarks of aging. And you know, it's the ability to, or it's our lack of homeostasis. We lose this ability to get the body back into the zone of optimal performance. So everything about the human body is very particular. For example, take ph, which is the amount of acidity in our body. We're so highly regulated. Like our body really needs to be at a ph of 7.4. So 7 would kill you and 7.6 or 7.7 would kill you. And this is a scale that goes from 0 to 14 to put that in perspective. Okay, so tiny perturbations will kill you. How good is our body at staying in that amazing temperature? Right? You go much below about 94, you're dead. You go much above about 104, you're dead. How good are we at staying in that range? Oh, I mean good. I mean we generally stay within a 1.5 degree band. So this homeostasis thing is amazing. It gets weaker and weaker as we get older and so your ability to tolerate bad food, bad sleep, sedentary behavior, more stress, all those things, it just gets weaker and weaker and weaker and I think it declines non linearly. So again, what you experience is a decline between 30 and 40. Eh, it's bad. 40 to 50? Yeah, that's worse. 50 to 60, you can fall off a cliff.

Is there a way to reverse this?

I don't think we know. I think you can definitely slow the progression of it. And you know what, I would say you probably can reverse it. Right. So just as you can clearly reverse diabetes, diabetes is a glucose homeostasis problem and it's clearly reversible, you know, so there are probably some variants of this that are harder to reverse than others. But no, I think we can reverse this process. But it gets harder, you know, it gets harder as time goes on and it gets harder the further you are into, you know, sort of the physiologic trap.

What are you doing to reverse it now that you've been experiencing this kind of not maybe a cliff but a dip over the last five years for yourself, how are you thinking about it?

Well, I sort of had a change of heart five years ago. So actually six years ago, 2014. So I sort of hung up my bike, which at that. So at that point I'd switched from swimming to cycling as sort of my main sport. But I, you know, at that point a couple of things had happened. So one, I had become very familiar with a lot of emerging research on excessive cardiovascular training, which again is a rich man's problem.

Ultramarathons, ultra biking, ultra swimming, hiking.

That's. That's right, that's right. So I'd be again. And it's the same sort of curve, right, where as exercise, dose of exercise goes up, mortality comes down. But it has this little bit of a J where once you start to get into hyper amounts of exercise, especially over the age of 40, you're actually driving an increase in mortality now again, really? Yes.

Does that mean like running a marathon once a year or is it running a marathon every week?

Yeah, great, great point. Running a marathon once a year probably not increasing your mortality at all. But you know, running 40, 50 miles a week probably is, especially at that age. Now again, this gets to your point about resilience. Someone in their 20s doing that doesn't seem to have any impact on mortality. It really only seems to be an issue if you continue. In fact, I did an interview with a cardiologist, James o', Keefe, on my podcast who is the world's expert on this. And it was actually James's work six years ago because I heard him speak at a conference 10 years ago, we became friends. It's one of those things, I'm sure you've experienced this where you hear something and you don't want it to be true. So you basically come up with all the reasons you're going to poke holes in it until you find the, you.

Find the evidence the other way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And eventually it became very difficult to ignore that this hyper amount of exercise was counterproductive. So that's one piece of the change six years ago.

The second, it's probably bad that I just committed to doing the marathon next year yesterday.

That's all right though, you'll be fine. I just think don't do one a month. And then I think the second thing was I realized it was sort of funny, but I realized like my prime was so far behind me that I needed to think about like what, what was, what was I doing this in service of? Right. Like, and not that I needed anyone other than myself to do these things because I'm very self motivated. So I don't like. But just as a joke, one day I asked my wife, I said, hey, do you know what my PR is for 20k?

Like bike, run or swim?

Yeah, bike on a, on a 20k bike on the time trial. And I was like, this is my wife, she hears me talk about this stuff all the time. I have spreadsheets and models and data and I analyze my power data every single day. And I'm trying to break the record for San Diego. Like I'm really so switched onto this. She'll probably get it within a minute. She'll guess what my PR is within a minute. She was off by 20 minutes, meaning she wasn't even in the zip code. So I was like, huh, that's funny. Like it's like literally the most important person in my life. Couldn't care less about this. And what I realized was, you know, I need to start thinking about a different sport, which is the sport of longevity. So what does it mean to be a kick ass 100 year old? And so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction, called the Centenarian Olympics. So how do you train to kick ass at a hundred should you get there. And of course everywhere along the way. So that now dominates my landscape of training, which means I don't, you know, care about how fast I can, you know, ride a 40 kilometer time trial because that doesn't quite fit into what a centenarian needs to be able to do.

What is your mindset going into a 40 mile bike then or some type of experience? Is it more the joy of it?

So, so I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't train. No, my training is very specific, but now it is fundamentally organized around four pillars. Um, so the pillars being stability strength, mitochondrial or aerobic efficiency and anaerobic performance. And so each of those then has a super layered detail approach. And, and I still ride my bike four hours a week, so it's a fraction of what I used to do. And it's now very much geared to a certain energy system and a type of training.

What was the fourth one?

Stability strength, mitochondria and mitochondrial efficiency or aerobic efficiency. And then the fourth and final one is anaerobic performance.

So you focus on those four metrics now on a day to day basis?

Yeah, yeah, those, those four pillars sort of make up the training program which is then in service of something that I invite every patient to define for themselves, which is because you will have a different set of variables for me potentially. But my Centenarian Olympics has 18 events in it. I want to be able to pull myself out of a pool where there's a one foot gap between the water and the curb, like lift myself up. I want to be able to hop over a three foot fence. I want to be able to walk three miles in an hour. I want to be able to carry two 10 pound bags up four flights of stairs. I want to be able to goblet squat 30 pounds because that's about the weight of a kid. I want to be able to get up off the floor without using my hands so I could rattle off all of my 18 things and you would say, Peter, those seem really easy. And you'd be right as a 37 year old stud. But the point is, as a 6.

Year old, a lot of them aren't easy.

Most 60 year olds couldn't do this if their life depended on it. And I have yet to meet but maybe one person in their 80s or 90s who can. And so that's the aspiration, is to get to that level in your 80s or 90s. How do you work that backwards to inform Your training in your 60s, in your 50s, and in your 40s, and it's actually very hard.

And as I'm getting into, you know, I'm three years away from 40. What should someone in my age range be thinking about when they're, you know, I'm healthy, I feel good. You know, maybe if somebody aches and pains here and there when I'm training hard or something, but for the most part I feel amazing. What should I be thinking about moving forward so that I continue to feel amazing and have the ability to do these things?

So I think it's never too late to at least become familiar with what these ideas mean. And it doesn't mean that you have to go whole hog and devote yourself to this. Like, I've obviously made a very conscious choice that I don't go to swim meets, I don't go to bike races. Like, I don't train for those things anymore. And a big part of that is just time. There are only 168 hours in a week. And I have a very clear set of priorities. And I'm willing to set aside 10 to 12 hours a week for exercise, which by many people's standards is still quite a lot. But probably by the standards that you exercise, and certainly by the standards that I used to exercise, I've never exercised so little in my life. So I have to be very efficient with every one of those minutes. And that means I'm laser focused on the four principles of that. In your case, I think it comes down to saying, okay, how much time do you want to devote to the long game? How much time do you want to devote to the short game? Another way to think about this would be investing. If you're looking at an investment portfolio, you might say, how much do I want to put both time and money? So the actual capital I set aside, but also the amount of time I spend deliberating over it into my retirement account versus how much do I want to invest as a day trader for short term gains, for money that I'm going to be using in the near term that's maybe even supplementing my income today. You could have totally different strategies for that, and that's totally fine. So I'm just in the category where I'm only thinking about long term permanent capital. That's the first question is you have to decide how do you want to do that? And it might be that you say, Peter, at 37, I just want to focus on running a marathon. I've always wanted to do an ironman. So I'm going to go and do that, and I want to climb Mount Everest. And that's going to require, like, you might have a whole bunch of these bucket list things. And truthfully, I would say do them now because it's only going to get.

Harder because you're not going to be able to do it later. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I don't think you're going to want to do it later, so get those things out of the way.

Yeah. So I think, firstly, in response to the general question, sleep is probably the single most effective thing that you can do to reset both your brain, but also your body. Health, of course, as well. And I don't say that flippantly against the notions of diet and exercise, of course, both of those are fundamentally critical. But if I were to take you, Louis, and I were to deprive you of sleep for 24 hours, deprive you of food for 24 hours, or deprive you of even water or exercise for 24 hours, and then I were to map the brain and body impairment that you would suffer after each one of those four, hands down by a country mile, a lack of sleep will implode your brain and body far more significantly. The only one I would probably lose out on is oxygen. At that point, I'll give it up. You know, sleep will take the silver medal. Oxygen definitely gets the gold. But thereafter, sleep seems to be paramount.

Over sleep, food and water. Sleep is the most important thing.

I would. Yeah. You know, I used to say that sleep was the third pillar of good health alongside diet and exercise. But I think the evidence has suggested that I was utterly wrong, that sleep, in fact, is the foundation on which those two other things sit. And you can do wonderful things in those two mains domains, but if you're not getting sufficient sleep, those things tend to be far more futile as a consequence.

And so what is sufficient sleep then?

So right now we Recommend Somewhere between 7 to 9 hours for the average adult. Once we know that you go below seven hours of sleep, we can start to measure objective impairments in your brain and your body. And in fact, the number of people who can survive on less than six hours of sleep without showing any impairment, rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population, is.

Zero without any impairment. What does that mean?

So if I can measure lots of different operations of your brain, let's say your cognition, your attention, your learning and memory, also your moods and your emotions and your anxiety, or downstairs in the body, I can measure aspects of your cardiovascular system or your blood pressure. Or I could measure your immune system or your metabolic system, how it's regulating your blood sugar and your glucose. I can measure this sort of pinwheel, this kaleidoscope of health metrics on Lewis Howes. And then I can see when I keep dialing you back with less and less sleep, at what point do I see at least one of those things demonstrating a breaking point? And it's very rare for us to be able to find any individual who can go below six hours of sleep and not show some kind of impairment. And a great, even frightening demonstration of this study took a group of perfectly healthy individuals and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week. And then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hour night of sleep.

And what happened.

And there were two critical findings. The first was that a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity caused by that one week of short sleep. And that's, you know, in some ways I think about this, Louis, because it's, it's reality. We know that almost a third of the population is trying to survive on six hours of sleep or less. So it's, it's not just, you know, total sleep deprivation, which doesn't happen very frequently. This is a common occurrence. What I found most interesting was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity. The other half were decreased. Now, those genes that were suppressed were genes associated with your immune system, so you became immune compromised or immune deficient. Those genes that were increased in their activity or what we call overexpressed were genes associated with the promotion of tumors, genes that were associated with cardiovascular disease and stress, and genes that were associated with long term chronic inflammation within the body. And I, I make that point just because, you know, many people, I think, have this concern about things such as genetically modified embryos or even genetically modified food, but when we don't get sufficient sleep, we are unwittingly performing a genetic manipulation on ourselves. You know, if we don't let our kids get the sleep that they need, then we're inflicting a similar genetic engineering experiment on them as well.

Wow, this is crazy. So what if you've been sleeping less than six hours a night for years? What is that saying to your genes? And is there a way to recover the gene damage and reverse and go back to a healthy genes, healthy body, healthy life?

So firstly, we know that short sleep duration, so using that sweet spot, and we can speak about oversleeping or excess sleep, because that, I think that's an interesting part that hasn't been so spoken about too much. But using that recommended CDC amount of seven to nine hours of sleep, there is a simple fact, firstly across the lifespan, which is the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. That short sleep predicts all cause mortality. But then we can dig a little bit deeper and start to sort of ask, you know, exactly what is going on? Why is there such mortality risk caused by insufficient sleep? And what we know is that a lack of sleep and typically getting certainly less than six hours of sleep is associated with a high risk of cardiovascular disease, high risk of diabetes, high risk of stroke, high risk of dementia. And I would love to double click on that and go into the Alzheimer's disease risk because that now evidence is very, very strong. And then downstairs in the body we know that there is links between a lack of sleep and certain forms of cancer after. If I were to take you and limit you to let's say four or five hours of sleep for one week, your blood sugar levels would be so disrupted that your doctor would classify you as being pre diabetic.

Oh my goodness.

So that's not a lifetime, that's just one week. And there's an even more interesting experiment that I speak, I think speaks to the subtlety of this because there is the largest sleep study that's ever been conducted and it happens actually to around 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year. And it's called daylight savings time now in the spring when we lose just one hour of sleep opportunity. Firstly, what we've seen is that there seems to be a 24% increase in relative heart attack risk the next day, which stuns me. And what's fascinating in the fall, in the autumn when we gain an hour of sleep, the there's a 21% reduction in heart attacks. So it's bi directional. And that's just one hour of sleep. And you see there was some great recent data, you see a very similar profile regarding that daylight saving shift for road traffic accidents on our streets.

I've heard about this.

Tragically, suicide rates as well. And then even more recently what we discovered is that during that springtime shift when you lose an hour of sleep, the sentencing of federal judges is significantly harsher because their mood and their emotion is that much worse because of that one hour of lost sleep that they dole out harsher sentences. So you know, we can walk, you know, you can ask the question, what about a lifetime? We don't even have to ask about a lifetime of short sleep. We can ask about these really, you know, one week of short sleep or even one night of one hour of lost sleep. And I think that's how fragile our brains and our bodies are to this thing called a lack of sleep. And you could then ask, well, you know, why are we so sensitive? Because I can go without food for 24 hours and I can go without water for 24 hours. You know, I'm still not too bad. I'm in fairly decent shape. Why is sleep the exception to that rule? And the answer seems to be this. Human beings are the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good reason.

Why is that?

And it was such a unique thing. And what that means is that mother Nature through the course of evolution, because no other species does this without real need for survival. And I can speak about some of the exceptions, but human beings are strange like this. In other words, Mother Nature hasn't have to face the challenge of coming up with a solution called sleep deprivation, because she's never faced it in the course of evolution. And so there is no safety net in place here. And that's why we think human beings implode so quickly and thoroughly, mentally, cognitively and physically caused by insufficient sleep.

And why do you think, why is the. Why are the majority of people bad at getting good sleep? Is it. What is it we're distracted? Is it we think we need to be doing more? Is we're stressed and worried about the past and the future? Is it, you know what, we just want to work harder? What is the main cause of why we get poor sleep?

It's such a fundamental question, and in some ways it's all of the above. Plus, so I think the first, and I've thought about this a great deal, why are we suffering this global sleep loss epidemic that we're under right now? I think the first thing is that unfortunately sleep has an image problem that, you know, the PR agent for sleep should be fired because we associate sufficient sleep with this concept of being lazy, of being slothful. And that's a terrible disservice to this thing called sleep. And it is very different to things like diet and exercise. You know, I think a lot of people like to virtue signal with, you know, what they eat. And they certainly are very proud to tell you, you know, I work out five times a week. I'm in the gym at this time of morning and, you know, all of which I think are great and to be applauded and Supported. But we have the very opposite. We have this almost, you know, well, we, we don't some. Some niches of society have this sleep machismo attitude. You know, this kind of you can sleep when you're dead mentality, which, by the way, based on the evidence, is mortally unwise. Yeah. It will lead to both a shorter life and a life that is significantly less healthy. So I think the first thing is we need to change our cultural appreciation of sleep from something that is a waste of time to something that, in fact, is an incredible investment. It is probably the very best and the most freely available democratic and painless health insurance policy that I could ever imagine. I think the next thing is the way that we work in society. We are working for longer hours. And before the pandemic, people were commuting increasingly longer hours, amounts of time. What that meant was that people were leaving the house earlier, they were arriving home later, and no one wants to shortchange time with family or Netflix or whatever is your poison. And so the one thing that has become squeezed like vice grips in the middle of the night is this thing called a sufficient bout of slumber. But then there are plenty of people who give themselves the opportunity to get enough sleep, but they can't obtain it. And that is where things such as insomnia or sleep disorders, things like snoring come into play and you touch up. And I know that you've spoken and I'm so grateful for what you've done. Regarding discussions of mental health, we know that one of the principal roadblocks to getting this thing called a good night of sleep is.

Is anxiety, stress, worry, anxiety, regret, all those things.

Yep.

Resentment, holding on to all that stuff.

It is. That is toxic to sleep. You're absolutely right. And in fact, anxiety and physiological stress is our principal model for the explanation of insomnia right now. It's not the only cause, but it seems to be one of the principal causes. And in modern society, it's become so easy. And I'm not finger wagging, I suffer. You know, I'm just as guilty. We are constantly on reception, but rarely do we do reflection. And unfortunately, the time when most of us do reflection is when we turn off the light and our head hits the pillow. And that's the last time.

That's the worst time.

Oh, you know, because I don't know about you, Louis, but, you know, at night in the dark, thoughts are not the same thing. You know, concerns become twice as big or you 10x the size of concerns. I start to worry I ruminate, I catastrophize. Yet in the light of day, those things seem very different. And so we can speak about sleep tips perhaps later on. But certainly getting right with your emotions and your anxiety is key to good sleep. And that's one of the things that prevents sleep. I also think that there is an issue at the public health level. You know, we've had in many first world nations wonderful government mandates regarding health, regarding drink, driving, regarding, you know, safe sex, regarding drugs and alcohol and even food, and even inactivity and sitting. And when was the last time you heard of a first world nation provide a public health message and memorandum regarding sleep?

Never.

And I don't remember one either. So from every level at, you know, at a public health global, you know, government level, down to a workplace level, you know, we lord the airport warrior who's flown through four different time zones in the past three days. They were on email at 2 and then they're back in the office at 6. You know, we, so we need to.

We celebrated those people.

We did. You know, and the funny thing, by the way, is that after about 20 hours of being awake straight, you are as cognitively impaired as you would be if you were legally drunk. Now, I would never, you know, as a CEO, say I have got this fantastic team of people, they're drunk all of the time. But we do say I've got this fantastic group of people. They just are at it all hours. They are dedicated, they're always working. You know, they spend minimal time sleeping. They're just all out. They love this project. But we've got this strange mentality. And then I think it comes down to, you know, even within schools, we've got this incessant model of early school start times.

And super early, isn't it?

It's, it's incredible.

We gotta be there, what, 6:30 or 7 or something, right?

7, 7:30. And that data is actually very powerful. What we found is that when we delay school start times, first academic grades increase.

Wow.

Truancy rates decrease, psychological and psychiatric issues decrease. But then what we also discovered is that the life expectancy of students increased. And you may be thinking, well, hang on a sec, you know, how do you, how do you measure that? And the leading cause of death in teenagers 16 to 18 is actually not suicide. That second, it's road traffic accidents.

Really.

And here sleep matters enormously. And I'll give you one example. It was in Teton county in Wyoming. They delayed their school start times from 7:30 in the morning tonight to 8:55, by the way, what are we doing? Trying to educate our children. At 7:30 in the morning, I can't think.

Yeah, I mean I remember being in school and being. Every day was hard for me. Every day I was tired, every day I was hard to focus or I'd be irritable or wanted to like, you know, jittery or something, but it was like so hard to focus. And then you're at lunchtime and then I eat and I'm tired again afterwards and you want me to focus and pay attention at a desk. It's like it doesn't work like that for me especially no sleep or very.

Well for any, any, you know, sort of developing brain. It doesn't work like that. And for some people to make a 7:30am start time, school buses will begin leaving at 6:00 or 5:30 in the morning. That means that some kids are having to wake up at 5, 5, 15. This is lunacy. And what we've understood from the academic grades. And I'll come back to the car accidents in a second. When sleep is abundant, minds flourish. And when it's not, they don't. And what we've discovered with the road traffic accident in Teton county, when they made that shift, the only thing more remarkable than the extra one hour of sleep that those kids reported getting was the reduction in car crashes. The following year there was a 70% drop in vehicle accidents.

Wow.

And to put that in context, you know, the advent of ABS technology, anti lock brake systems that dropped accident rates by 20 to 25% and it was deemed a revolution. Here is the simple fact of getting enough sleep that will drop accident rates by 70%. So, you know, I need to get off my soapbox. But what I would say is this. I think if our goal as educators is to educate and not risk lives in the process, then we are failing our children in the most spectacular manner with this incessant model of early school start times.

Is anyone listening to this, that you've been speaking about this too? And they're actually adopting this new model, whether it be work time or school time or just, you know, integrating this. Do you know systems that are integrating this?

There have been some and I think I, I've tried to do this in the education domain. I've tried to do this within medicine because the way that we train residents is, is almost inhumane. Actually, it's, it's not almost, it absolutely is inhumane. And the statistics there are stunning as well. And then I've tried to do it in the workplace too, because I do a lot of speaking events at sort of Fortune 500 companies. And at first I think I took the wrong approach where I was really speaking a little bit more about sort of the compassionate approach, you know, why it's good and kind for people to gift them more sleep. Because I see sleep as a biological necessity. And if it's a biological necessity, then I think it's a civil necessity. And if it's a civil necessity, sleep is a civil right. But what I would say is that that wasn't particularly well received. You know, I'd go into business companies and say, you're employed employees, you know, they're desperate for more sleep, they will be happier and healthier. Or I would speak about medicine and I would speak about, you know, what it was doing to the patients and the harm and it would fall on deaf ears. What I then realized is that if you're going to change large organizations, you have to speak in their currency, which is money. Money.

Yeah, yeah, you need to.

And then I would describe the medical malpractice lawsuits that would come and the cost savings within medicine firstly. And then administration started to change their tune. Because before that, you know, there was almost this old boys network in medicine where we went through residency and it's almost a hazing. And despite armed with incredible data to the contrary, I think the mentality 10 years ago when I started trying to do that was my mind's made up, don't confuse me with the evidence.

Crazy.

Why?

It's because they went through that themselves and so they want to pay it back or something.

I think so. I think there was some of that.

I went through hell. So everyone else has to go through hell.

Yeah, right. It's a rite of passage. You know, if you are tough enough, you'll make it through. It's kind of like boot camp, which I don't think we need to do anymore. And then within business, you could describe, you know, the Rand Corporation did an independent survey a couple of years ago and what they found was that insufficient sleep will cost most nations about 2% of their GDP of their gross domestic product. So here in the US that number was $411 billion of lost productivity due to insufficient sleep. In Japan, it was $130 billion. My home country, the UK was over $50 billion. So if I could solve the sleep loss crisis within the workplace, I could almost double the budget for education in the US or I could half the health care deficit. So one, you speak about money, then people start to listen. So that's how I've tried to communicate, but. And I don't think I'm a. I don't think I'm a particularly good communicator. And I've been sometimes bull in a china shop, as I probably have been for the first however long we've been talking. But it's just because I'm so, you know, I'm just desperately passionate about this thing called sleep. And some years ago, before I started trying to, I wrote a book and then I've been doing podcasts. Sleep was the neglected stepsister in the health conversation of today. It was a second citizen. And I was so sad to see the disease, the sickness, the harm, the lack of productivity, the impact on education that a lack of sleep was.

Having your thoughts about sleep and how you frame this, some of the research and the science that you studied around this and what we should be thinking about around sleep.

Sure.

So sleep is the fundamental layer of mental and physical health. If there's one thing that we should all be doing is working toward sleeping long enough and deeply enough 80% of the time.

Okay.

I think that 80% is a good goal because things happen.

Yeah.

You're going to travel, kids happen.

The weekend you're going out or whatever.

Yeah. Until you are sleeping long enough and deeply enough, 80% of the nights of your life, you are functioning suboptimally.

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. The severity of those things depends on a lot of other things too. Prior health, other health conditions, context, age, occupation, you know, if you're not getting enough sleep and you're a high rise construction worker, 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. 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 your nap too much? Is it the foods you ate too late? Like, what would you say are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep?

All of the above, but the primary one is a failure to turn off your thoughts. 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. 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 and still sleep.

Well, yes.

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 12am Right. And, and I, I want to acknowledge, you know, Matt is the Michael Jordan of sleep science. And so I'm not going to.

You're the LeBron James.

Well, no, no. And in fair, thank you for the compliment, but. 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, you know, for some people they can have a 2 o' clock espresso, 2pm espresso. Some people it's 4pm Some people can drink caffeine at 8pm 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.

You want more melatonin at night is right. Right.

You do. And if you wake up in the middle of the night or it's 8 o' clock and you decide you want to go to bed at 9, or it's 9 o', clock, you want to go to bed at 10, and you go into the bathroom and you flip on the bright lights, your melatonin levels just got crushed down.

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, 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 asleep, 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 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 still going to go through. You're still Going to inhibit melatonin.

So how bad is watching TV at night?

If the TV isn't too bright and it's farther away.

Yeah.

And you're. And maybe you wear blue blockers.

Yeah.

And.

Or I mean some people are. Go 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 can. You know, 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 or 3 in the morning. I happen to do this if I go to bed around 10:30, I tend to wake up around 3 and I use the restroom. Yeah, I tend to drink a lot of fluids and I have to use the restroom. This is 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.

Fall 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 three in the morning, I just didn't start scrolling the newspapers is typically what I would 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 going 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 of in temperature of 1 to 3 degrees. There are a couple 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 then you're going to 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 cover 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.

Yeah. And 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, like throw the comforter off and go put some cold water on my face. 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, dim light again and then falling back asleep. Some people are waking up at 2 or 3 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 nine. 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. Very hard to force yourself to go to sleep. So let's say your system, you start releasing melatonin around 9pm but you stay up until 11, then you get into bed, you fall asleep around 11:30 and at 3 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 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. Then there are the people that like to go to bed at 2am, sleep till 10 and then there are people that like to go to bed at 8 and wake up at 4. 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, to use that schedule. But most schools won't adhere to that schedule.

You got to wake up at 6 and go to school at 8 or whatever.

Yeah.

Once you enter adult life, you're generally somebody who's going to 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.

Does not.

So you take a 60 minute nap.

Generally 20 to 45 minutes, and then.

You, you fully fall asleep or you're kind of like awake and just resting.

Yeah, I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime. I can fall asleep at a gun range. Yeah, it's what it's in.

Can you sleep sitting up to like this?

Oh yeah.

That's 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.

Incredible.

You can fall asleep right on a.

Plane or anywhere, leaning against a. Oh my God, in 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, 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 and 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 from 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 ankle's elevated a little bit higher than your chin, that's great. So 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 that itself can get some of the clearance of the glymphatic.

And that helps you sleep better. It 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. 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 they're lying flat.

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 angles. 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?

Ah, 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 but bottoms of the feet, but also from the upper back and scapulae 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 for 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. But then again there's some people that have shoulder issues and then they can't do that. I'm relatively flexible through my shoulders, not 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? It starts becoming a little bit. We are not just science experiments. And so 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 could 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.

Right.

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 like 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 glad you asked this question. There's some really interesting data from a guy named Chuck Charles Zeisler, who is at Harvard Med. He's done beautiful studies on sleep in humans for many decades and a really fantastic physician and researcher. 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, you know, lock things down, make sure everything's in its place. Because we are very vulnerable in sleep nowadays. This might manifest as, you know, you need to go to bed at 10:30 because you have to get up at 6, et cetera. And then right around 8:30 or 9, 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, 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. And we 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 ago about yoga nidra.

Yes.

Which is. There are many, many Yoga nidra scripts available on YouTube free of cost. The ones I particularly like are the ones by Kamini Desai. K A M I N I D E S A I Kamini Desai. I just really like her voice. I don't know. Kamini. 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 know, you do want to avoid strong stimuli before sleep. So do you really want to watch, you know, politically charged or 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, you know, that aside, you don't want to go to bed either too hungry or too full because that can inhibit your sleep.

Got nine pieces of primal advice for athletes, but I think a lot of entrepreneurs could live this way too and still, like, be better entrepreneurs, be more productive, have better relationships, be sharper, all these different things.

I think everything you do to be a better athlete makes you a better entrepreneur.

Absolutely. Absolutely. But you talk about adequate sleep and this is something I've been talking about a lot lately on my podcast and bringing out different sleep experts. But why just emphasize, is sleep important for you?

I mean, sleep is when the body renews and regenerates, repairs itself. It's when a lot of the neural networking happens to overlook sleep and to think, well, you know, I can sleep when I'm dead. Well, you know, that just is so. Such faulty logic.

Yeah.

It's so critical and so important. I try to get eight hours a night myself. If I get less than six, for some reason, I feel it, I know it. I try to make up for it. I try not to let that happen. I try, I try not to schedule late nights because I wake up at the same time pretty much every morning. So if I.

6Am Wake up or.

Yeah, 6:30. 6am 6:30. But if I were to go to bed at 1, I'd still wake up at my normal time. So I have to really force myself to not force myself because I'm tired at the end of the day and I, and I have this whole wind down process. So my wife and I will, we'll watch some, we'll do some television after dinner we'll catch up on, we'll do some, some binge watching, catching up of whatever the latest series was. But around 10 we'll break. I have a pool in my backyard and a Jacuzzi. So I go into the pools unheated. So in the wintertime it might be in the 50s. I'll walk into the pool and hang out there for a couple of minutes and get really, really cold, but not to the point of shivering.

Just.

It's kind of a process in and of itself. Then I'll get in the Jacuzzi. So my wife and I'll hang out in the Jacuzzi. We'll just recap what the day's events were. It's very. We turn off all the lights in the house. We have a fire pit out there. So there's a real sort of a primal cave, caveman kind of thing to that. Then I'll just finish off with another minute in the cold and we can towel off and go up to bed. And I sleep like a baby as a result of that. Wow. So that's that cold therapy. Yeah, the hot cold therapy. And that's kind of how I wind my day down and that prepares me to sleep. Brings my body temperature down, which is, you know, they say that you're. That you should have your lower body temperature to sleep better. We keep the room around 67.

Yes.

We have blackout curtains. So it's a real cool sleeping environment, you know?

Yes. I always like to keep it cold.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. And so if you do like a cold shower before bed, you think that's a good thing?

I think it's a good thing. Yeah.

It'll help you sleep better?

I think so. Try it. I mean, you can't hurt.

Okay. You talk about stress and rest, balance. What does that mean?

Well, you know, you. There are certain stresses in your life that are unavoidable. Work stress, commuting stress, sometimes training, waiting.

In the lobby for 45 minutes. Stress. Sorry.

Well, I'm more stressed about the traffic coming from. You never know what it's going to be. It could be, you know, I planned for two hours, I got here in an hour and. Or I got here in less than an hour.

Right.

So.

Good.

Yeah. But so you have these stresses and some of them are imagined. Even though your brain thinks they're real, they don't exist. You know that our stress mechanisms in the body, where they evolved to handle true life or death situations, you know, a tiger bearing down upon you, an infection that's gonna, that's gonna kill you, a broken leg that may, you know, whatever, have its impact on you. Not, you know, am I gonna miss my kids rehearsal or am I gonna be late for work or whatever. That's. Those, those cause stress, but they're not life threatening. And yet we. The brain sees them as life threatening. So the message here is that you sort of have to identify stresses and then appropriately orchestrate certain rest and recovery. Now, we talked about this before the show, that meditation is a form of rest and recovery, but just taking. Maybe if you need a nap, you can do that. But certainly that, that goes back to the whole sleep thing being, being. Being critical. But the other part of rest is recognizing if you're an athlete, recognizing when it's just inappropriate to go out and train just because your schedule says I have to go do six miles today. You know, if you wait, if you wake up that day and you feel like crap, and you. And the metrics, you know, the heart rate variability is wrong, or you're just not feeling good, then you're better off taking that day off than plowing through it and being able to write in your logbook. Yeah, I got through the workout. Felt like crap, but I got through the workout.

I was just rested that day.

Just rested. Yeah.

Gotcha. Okay. The third thing you talk about is personalized schedule. And inconsistency is the key.

So in primal endurance, we go back to that philosophy that the body, you know, is a very sort of temperamental. It's in temperamental states, back and forth. Sometimes you're in a state of energy and health, and sometimes you're not. And you can't really plan on when those states are going to be. So you have to be willing to listen to the cues. And for that reason, we say inconsistency is the key to consistent racing if you're an athlete. So it's. It's when you feel good, you can go hard. When you don't feel good, back off, take time off. We use the term periodicity, so you can periodize your training so that there's. There are tranches of training days a week at a time where you're really going deep, deep, hard, hard. And then you might take a week off or take it real easy and back off. You can break those further up into quarterly annual segments, always with the idea that some days are going to be good, some days are going to be bad. You're going to trend toward wanting to build, to ratchet up over time, but you're okay kind of not doing stuff as hard. And so it doesn't become this linear kind of progress. It becomes more of a fractal thing that trends toward improvement.

Gotcha. The next thing you talk about is aerobic emphasis. Train slow to race fast. What does that mean?

Yeah, so this is the toughest one for current endurance athletes to really grok. And that is a lot of athletes, and I was certainly one for 20 years. You basically go out and you train to hurt. So you run or you ride or you swim at a heart rate that's, you know, 75 to 90% of your max heart rate. And you see how long you can hold that. Right. And so you're training to hurt. And it's. And it's. And it hurts. You know, it does hurt you, but you feel tough as a result of it. And the. But the problem is you're not really training the body to become more efficient. You're just training yourself to hurt. So when we talk about efficiency in racing, we go back to the original premise about glucose and glycogen being sort of this determining factor in muscle tissue. When you run out of glycogen, you sort of hit the wall. So how do you manage glycogen? Well, one way would be to eat a lot of carbohydrates and drink a lot of gels during the race. The other would be to become so good at burning fat that you never really tap into that glycogen.

Interesting.

So we train you to become so good at burning fat. Now that's the 80% that we talked about with the diet. But the other part of that for the endurance athlete is if you train at a low enough heart rate that you are, it's typically it's 180 minus your age. So let's just say you are 40 years old. So 180 minus 40 is 140. So that's going to be your maximum heart rate. You're never in your training, you're not going to go above that. You set your watch, you set your heart monitor to give you a signal as soon as you get above 140. Now you, you start out and you at that 140, maybe you can only run 13 minute miles even though you're capable of running 7 minute miles at 175 beats a minute or whatever.

Right.

But now what we're doing is we're measuring how good you are at burning fat. And we know that at that, at that number 180 minus your age, that's the highest rate that you could put oxygen through your system and know that you're burning mostly fat. And we know that because that's the pace at which you could close your mouth and breathe through your nose and get plenty of oxygen. Or that's the pace at which you could be with a training partner and talk without losing your breath. Once you start losing your having to catch up or having to get winded, we know that you're going into burning, you're building up lactic acid, you're not burning fat, you're not burning fat, or you're burning less fat and starting to burn more sugar. So we want to, we want you to be at the highest end of your, of your fat burning without tapping into your sort of glycolytic abilities. And we know that number to be generally around 180 minus your age. So now the idea is you go out and you train and the first day you go out, you run a 13 minute miles and that's as fast as you can go without the heart rate, you know, bumping up over 140. Well, you're not very good at burning fat. You might be good at burning sugar. Like I say, you might be able to run 7 minute miles or 6 minute miles, but over time, if you stay at that high heart, that maximum heart rate of which is low, much lower than you're used to, you find yourself running 12 minute miles and then 11 minute miles and then 10 30s and 10 and 9 30s. And what it means is even though the heart rate hasn't changed, you're still putting the same amount of oxygen through. Now you're burning more fat. So you're becoming more efficient at burning fat. So that when you do decide to ramp up and throw in the interval training and the weight stuff that we have you do in the gym now, you're starting from a baseline of being a much better fat burner than everyone else around you.

So just so I wrap my head around this, is your heart rate dictating how much fat you can burn Based on how?

Dr. No. So your heart rate is dictating how much oxygen you're putting through your system. And it's because it's delivering oxygen to the muscles. And the muscles are using oxygen to burn fat. They don't, they can burn glycogen or glucose with oxygen, but they also burn without, without oxygen. So, you know, like you could run a hundred meter sprint with your nose plugged and you, there's no oxygen involved. Yeah, you'd still want to breathe, you'd want to breathe at the end of it, but, and you'd have to breathe to recover, to recycle, but you don't need that oxygen to burn that full amount. So when we train the body to become more efficient at burning fat, and by the way, the heart, it's interesting, the heart, we're not training the heart to be stronger. The heart's already pretty strong, so the heart doesn't get stronger. The heart doesn't have a pr, right? You know what I mean? It does, it does what it does. But what happens is you become more efficient with the materials that the heart gives you. So if the heart is pumping oxygen x amount of oxygen and you're not good at burning fat, you can't do anything with that oxygen. But the better you are at burning fat, the more you can use that Oxygen and burn the fat in the mitochondria and avoid having to go into that glycogen storage situation. Okay, Right. So it's, it's really about training you to become more efficient at burning fat. Not forever, but it's certainly through the base building phase. And that's, that's a, just a huge hurdle for a lot of endurance athletes to overcome because they go, wait a minute, I can, I can already run seven minute miles. Why am I, why am I dropping down to 13s? But invariably and across the board we see as if they stick to this for weeks at a time, they become more and more efficient. So now we know that, that now you're running 7:30, 7 minute, 30 second miles and you're burning, you're getting 92% of your, your energy from fat. So that when you do decide to run those six minute miles, now you're, you're starting from having burned more fat and you don't have to use as much glycogen.

Interesting.

To get there.

Interesting. Okay, cool. Structured intensity. What does this mean?

It means partly means you've got to go into the gym and do some, some heavy lifting.

Yes.

But not a lot. Okay.

This, if you want to be an endurance athlete.

Yeah, if you want, even, if you, even if you want to be an endurance athlete. One thing that athletes used to avoid like the plague was the gym. They would, or if they went, they would do, you know, 50 repetitions of a lightweight because they're thinking, well, you know, I'm doing, when I'm running a marathon, I'm running, you know, 3,000 repetitions of leg turnover. So why don't I simulate that in the.

But you're saying lifting some weights is going to be key to your endurance as well.

So what happens in any long endurance contest, in addition to running out of fuel, is you run out, your power decreases because you haven't trained the power. An example would be you've got three hills to climb in a bike race. The first one you go up with 100% of your power. The second one, even though you have energy, your muscle fibers are, they've been exhausted and they haven't trained to sustain your power. So now you go up the second hill at 82% of your max power power and you might go up the third hill at 65% of your max power. Well, if we could train those muscle fibers deeper and deeper to sustain power for those, for those efforts that require actual power, we can, we can maybe go up that first hill at 100 and go up that hill, second hill at 100 and that third hill at 95. Right. So we do this work in the gym where you load muscle fibers up with fairly heavy weights. It's typically 80% of your one rep max. We do sequential repetitions with, with sequential rest in between. So it's not like you do three sets of five and you stop. It's like you do three repetitions, rest 10 seconds, three repetitions, rest 10 seconds', two repetitions, rest 10 seconds, rest 20 seconds, and until you can't finish one good rep and then the workout's over. So it's not. You just did one set, and it might have. Might have comprised 200 repetitions, but that maximally loaded the fibers deeper and deeper and gave you this ability to sustain power.

Gotcha. And the next thing you talk about is lifestyle practices. What do you mean by that?

Well, so now we talk about everything else but the training. So if you're, you know, it's, it's spending time with your family, it's playing, Playing games with your, you know, playing Frisbee with your dog, playing ultimate with your. With your. With your friends. It's, you know, it's all of the other things that make life enjoyable that as an endurance athlete, I know I used to go, well, I can't. I can't afford to do that. I might get injured or I might, you know, I can't, like, I can't go skiing because I might twist and twist a knee. Well, if you do the training right and you spend that time in the gym, you're less likely to twist a knee skiing than if you were, you know, than if you were just going to the slopes without having done any training at all.

Sure, sure.

Right. So we, we want people to have a full life because training for endurance contests should be preparation for an undertaking that you would not want to encounter on a daily basis. You know, you want to wake up in the morning and go, you, I got that 10k today. I gotta go clean out my GI tract. I'm so nervous, you know, but you want to, you want to be that nervous because you want to put it all on the line that day. What we're saying is don't put it all on the line every day in your training. Have fun, you know, do the, do the right sort of training that builds this. This beast, that when you get to the race, you're going to enjoy it, you're going to have fun, you're going to perform probably better than if you'd done the old Paradigm of training.

Right.

But you'll have lived a life in the interim. I mean I so many of my, you know, ex triathlete marathon buddies, you know, couldn't have a relationship. It was just, you know, imagine they.

Put all their energy in this one thing.

Yeah. I mean they, you know, it's like the wife says, can't you stay home and cuddle, you know, Saturday morning? And the husband goes, no, I got a hundred mile ride I got to do.

Yeah.

You know, and then I'm going to go, you know, run after that and then I'm going to take a nap because I'm going to feel like crap because I did so much. So we try to look at the life in general and say, well, an awesome life includes participating in these events.

Participating in life and doing well.

But it also includes participating in life. Yeah, yeah. So not to the exclusion of all of everything else, what feedback would you.

Give an entrepreneur listening or someone with a busy schedule about how to live this lifestyle? You know, they want to be a primal athlete in their daily life, but they also want to run a business and they're spending a lot of time and energy into this one thing.

Thing.

Maybe their entrepreneurial life is like this marathon life that we're talking about where they put all their energy into this one thing and they're not doing anything else. What would you suggest? You're doing it, you've got the healthy lifestyle and you're running a multi million dollar business, multiple of them. You know, what would you suggest to them?

So you know, there are ways to have it all, but you can't be like the best endurance athlete in the world and a really successful entrepreneur. So you got to choose how much of the endurance athlete you want to be. I would suggest that, that for me the best choice was I want to, I want to toe the starting line with, with the least amount of training possible to still kick 90% of the field's ass. Right. So I, for me the goal is almost how little can I get away with to get the maximum, to get the maximum result without having to go okay, because, because if it's going to take, you know, 20% of the effort to get 80% of the result, I'm not willing to put in the other 80% to win the thing anymore or, and maybe I won't even win the thing because maybe I'll have overtrained. So now you're back to the, to the entrepreneur slash endurance athlete. Get a stand up desk and a tread desk. So I have a tread Treadmill. Every one of my employees has a treadmill at their, really? Yeah, at their, at their work. And they, I don't force them to use it so they can, but they can, they, they request it, I give it to them. So you could put in eight miles walking easily. And no one on the phone or even on the Skype will know that you're walking.

Yes.

You know, because you can make it uphill, whatever, take lots of, take frequent breaks and you know, drop and do some push ups or some air squats. What I do is I like to, I like to go for a paddle and I'll bring a recording device on a stand up paddle board and I'll, if I get my great ideas when I'm paddling. So I'll just record my ideas. Right.

Or I don't fall in.

Well, it's a plastic bag. I couldn't, by the way, I almost never fall in. I typically will paddle for an hour and a half. I'll step on, get wet up to my calves and step off. But the other thing is hiking. So if you want to do some serious hiking, bring a headset in your phone, make, make business calls while you're hiking. I got a friend who's basically a billionaire and that's where he makes most of his business calls. He does two hours of hiking a day. Nobody knows he's hiking, that he's hiking.

Wow.

Okay, awesome.

And then, so the, so the grunt work you do in the gym takes almost no time. It's not that you have to spend an hour in the gym doing any of this stuff. Like I said, that maximum sustained power workout I just described is basically a short warm up, maybe 10 minutes of doing it and then you're done. And if you could do it two days later or three days later, you didn't do it hard enough. Right. So we want you to take a week to recover from that, from that specific work. Doesn't mean you can't go walk the next day or do anything else the next day. But you just wouldn't want to repeat, you know, a heavy leg day the next day.

Right, exactly.

So it's how you, this is the sort of orchestrated structural components to this thing where you, when you put it all together, you can have it all. You can be an effective, efficient entrepreneur and you can compete against all of those other guys who are, you know, claiming they're going to kick your ass in the 10k or the Spartan race or whatever it is.

I love that. And we talked about the diet already, but the Last thing is proper recovery. So how much you know is when do you know you're over training?

Well, so there, there are all sorts of metrics. I mean, you just wake up in the morning and if you haven't slept well and you're, you know, you're sore, then you're probably over training.

If you're, should we not feel that soreness at all?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's, it's appropriate to feel. You can feel it on a day to day basis, but not on a week to week basis. So you can feel sore after a workout, you know, today, yesterday or two days ago. But I think if you're still feeling sore for days on end, then you're probably linking together too many hard workouts or you might have, you might have overreached on one of your workouts. So that's one indicator. We have a metric that we use called heart rate variability hrv and you can buy these apps that measure the time between heart rate beats. And you'd think that you'd want to see a metronomic beat, like an exact amount of time spaced between each heartbeat. But it turns out that that's an indication of overtraining, that in fact the heart, we want the heart to be beating almost in demand to whatever is being called upon in, in real time. So there might be a 0.8 second skip and then a 1.1 second skip and then a 1.2 and then a point 8 and then a point 9. And that's heart rate variability.

Get more sunlight during the day. Get more sunlight during the day. So tell me about why is it important to have sunlight?

Awesome. Yes. So the first thing to understand is that serotonin, Right. Serotonin is neurotransmitter and it's supposed to be like a feel good kind of compound. This is why so many antidepressant medications, they're serotonin reuptake inhibitors to help keep serotonin active in your system longer. Here's what's so cool is that serotonin gets converted into melatonin. And we already talked about how important this is.

That's the anti cancer, it's a precursor to that.

Right. And so exposure to sunlight boosts your serotonin immediately, but also exposure to sunlight helps to set your cortisol rhythm. So cortisol, it's been getting a pretty bad name in the media lately because it's like glorified stress hormone. We've got like 50 hormones and cortisol is the only Bad guy now. But cortisol is incredibly important and valuable. It's just when it's out of balance, it can become a problem. And so sunlight is clinically proven. I cited one of the studies in the book to help to normalize your cortisol rhythm, right? So it helps to keep your cortisol lower in the evening if you get sunlight during the day, which will elevate your cortisol.

Okay.

And cortisol and melatonin have basically an inverse relationship. So when cortisol's high, melatonin's low.

Right.

When melatonin's high, cortisol's low. So it helps to get that on track again. And it's. It's not like rocket science, you know, like, we know that sunlight is valuable to human health, but we've been dissuaded in the media because of, you know, photo aging of the skin and skin cancer, things like that. And I actually talk about in the book and kind of demystify some of that because then we get into conversation about UVA and UVB and all this stuff. But bottom line, make sure you're getting some exposure to sunlight every day. It's going to help you sleep better at night. And this can also be through your photoreceptors, so through your eyes as well. And just getting light in the room, natural sunlight, you know, every day. And that's going to help to kind of set your circadian.

What if in Chicago in the winter, and there's no sunlight for St. Louis, and there's no sunlight for three months?

Check this out. So, and I do recommend and I share some hacks, right? There are light boxes that are used clinically to help to address things like seasonal affective disorder. Right? There are earbuds that shoot light through your ear canal, right? There's visors you can wear, and they're clinically proven to be effective.

Sunbathing in a tanning salon or.

No, that actually does work if it's.

The right bulb, the right light.

So you need more uvb, actually. And really, depending on where you are in the world, pretty much the United States States, period, is not getting UVB at certain times of the year. All right? So we want to be proactive with this, but understand, it's not just the exposure on your skin is what I'm talking about. Your skin has photoreceptors that pick up light, but just the exposure in your. In your room. All right? So making sure you have. Have an office with windows, access to windows. There was another study done this is crazy, because some people work in, like, a cubicle. Dungeon.

Dungeon, yeah.

You know? And what they found was that office workers who are not exposed to windows actually got 173% less exposure to natural light, and they ended up sleeping 46 minutes less every night as a result of that. And they saw this correlation, which was so interesting, and they reported more physical ailments, less energy, and also a higher propensity towards diseases.

Wow.

Right? So this is super important. And even getting some exposure to sunlight on an overcast day is, like, 50 times more valuable than any fancy light you can get exposed to. But those things are great hacks, for sure. There's so many things there, of course.

Okay. That was the first one. The second one. Avoid screens before bedtime. And I think this is probably something that a lot of us are at a fault with.

I know. You're kissing that phone good night.

Yeah.

You know, I always tell myself, like, okay, shutting it off by a certain time and, like, not having it in the room and all these other things, but it's a challenge, man. It's definitely a challenge.

Here's why, dude. Like, this is in with this book. I was able to dissect that because I knew that that would be the. The toughest one of the 21 strategies. This one is the toughest because we're addicted. We are, in fact, addicted. Here's why. Here's what's happening. So there's this interesting compound called dopamine, right? And it was once thought that dopamine was related to pleasure, but it's not.

It's.

Dopamine is all about seeking. It's driving you to seek, Right? And so the ins. The Internet is perfect for this because there's infinite seeking. Instagram is perfect for this because you're continuously going, and just there's more to see. But every time you find, you get a little hit from your opioid system. So it's like a slow drip of drugs.

Yeah.

I seek, I find, I seek, I find. And you get looped in. And it's very difficult to break that pattern.

Yeah.

And everybody's had this happen where you're like, I'm gonna check my Instagram for a minute. I'll check Twitter for a minute. And then it's 30 minutes later, an hour later, and you're still scrolling. This is what's going on. Like, our brain is hardwired to get addicted to stuff like this. And these awesome social media apps know how to manipulate our mind and to take advantage of that. So this is a call to take your brain back. I'm not saying I love this stuff. I absolutely love it. But it has a place and it's being more aware. Now that you're aware, you can catch yourself.

Yes.

And break the pattern. So here's why it's an issue at night in particular. So there was a study done at Risler Polytechnic that found that just two hours of your device usage before bed was enough to suppress melatonin secretion. All right, so again, wow. You can pass out just being on it two hours before, you know, like that span. And so you can go to sleep or pass out, but that doesn't mean you're getting that rejuvenative sleep. So this is why a lot of people are sleeping eight hours, but they're still tired when they wake up in the morning, lethargic because melatonin is to supposed suppressed because they're on their device right before bed. And it's this blue spectrum of light that's shooting out, kind of pouring into your optical sensor.

What if you can stop that? That spectrum is there?

Yes.

Shades there. Screen protectors, Is there glasses?

There's all of those things.

So now is that okay then? If you have the hack on it, it's a hack. It's not the optimal, but it's the better than.

Yes. So absolutely everybody today can get flux. F F Lux. Sorry, F Lux, which basically cools off your screen, you know, pulls off that.

Do you have that?

Troublesome. Of course. So I've got on my.

You know, to see what it looks like. Or is it just like. Just a film that's like goes over the top?

Yeah. So it. It's a cool app. It does this automatically.

It's an app?

Yeah.

So you just download it on your phone.

I gotta get this.

Yeah. And it does this automatically based on your time zone.

Oh, wow.

And the time of year, all that stuff.

Amazing.

So it pulls out that most troublesome spectrum of light. And so Harvard researchers found that it's not just light exposure. It's the color and it's the luminance, it's the strength of the light, you know, so green light was like three times less impactful to your sleep than blue light in their studies.

Wow.

So cool stuff like that. So flux, you can get the blue blocking glasses, basically. They're like sunglasses with the orange tint. Yeah, I do.

Yeah.

I've got to watch TV or something. Yeah. You know, like, if you're gonna stay up late and watch a movie a little bit later, you Know, but the whole thing is to not make that a habit because these are, of course, you know, these are hacks. But the best thing is, and this is so important especially for, for, for our audiences, you know, who are really about taking their life to the next level and they're missing out on this key component, which is you have to find something that's of greater or equal value to the device so people, you know, actually connect to real people.

Book, you know, something like that. Yeah.

You know, playing games with your, with your kids, talking to your family, have sex. You know, there's other things that you can do.

You have to sleep well.

Yeah, I talk about that in the book too. But you have to find something that fills you up because that addiction is so strong. And that's really the best tool, which is to avoid the screens in the first place.

Yeah. Okay, that's number two. Number three, have a caffeine curfew. So what time? I mean, here's the thing. I feel like I don't have that much caffeine and I almost never drink coffee. Except for about a month ago, I started doing some intermittent fasting testing. And so I'll have bulletproof in the morning. Yeah, it's like, what time is it? It's almost 2 o'. Clock. I still haven't eaten today. But before, you know, if I'd have like a cappuccino after dinner or something, it would never affect me. Like, I never felt like, oh, I'm wired now. Like I could always fall asleep. But I'm assuming that it still does something to my brain or my body, even in my system, not allow me to fully rest. So what is the optimal time to. How many hours before you sleep? Should we not have any of kind caffeine?

Got it. And by the way, the hours before with the screen time, 60 to 90 minutes. That's all I recommend. So with the caffeine thing, you just said it perfectly. You can definitely go to sleep, but your nervous system can still be active because caffeine has something called. Yeah, it has a half life of about eight hours. So if you have 200 milligrams of caffeine, eight hours later, 100 is still active in your system.

Wow.

And so this can keep you out of normal stages of REM sleep and deep sleep. All right, so you, you can be physiologically laying down and think that you're getting eight hours sleep. And so this study that was done, they gave people caffeine right before bed, three hours before bed and six hours before bed. And they found that even six hours out was enough to have noticeable. And they use, like, monitoring systems, you know, measuring their brain waves to find out that, whoa, their sleep is actually getting interrupted because of the caffeine. And then there was the subjective. So there's the objective and subjective parts of this test. And people thought, like, hey, I got enough sleep. Like, I feel great. But in actuality, their body was lacking that rejuvenative sleep. And what that does is you have this false sense of being well rested, and you automatically unknowingly start using more caffeine at some point during the day because you're going to have more daytime sleepiness. All right, so. And that creates that whole vicious circle with caffeine to keep you going.

Sure. Okay, so how many hours before I recommend.

And I'm a fan of caffeine.

Right.

Just do it in the morning. Do it in the early part of the day. It depends on how sensitive you are before. Way too. Yeah, before noon would be ideal. You know, but some people are hypersensitive to caffeine. Everybody's metabolism is different. Some people might need to lay off of it completely. But that's a whole nother. Whole nother book. How to. How to make sure.

Sure, sure. Okay, so no caffeine. Afternoon. This is my fourth one that I see here that I like. This is one of my favorites that I was doing that I needed before I learned about this power and importance of sleep. And that's be cool. I remember growing up in Ohio, my dad. We did not have air conditioning in our house. And my dad was just like, well, I don't want to spend the money on this. And it's only two months in the summer where you got to deal with it. But St. Louis is the same as Ohio.

Yes.

And, man, it was miserable speaking my language. I couldn't wear sheets or anything. I'd just be laying there sweating with the fan on, and my dad would make me turn the fan down because he didn't want me to get whatever. I don't know. So it was just misery. And I couldn't sleep. I'm up all night, and I wish my dad would have read this book then so you'd understand the importance of being cool. But what is it? What does it mean to be cool? What's the optimal coolness that you should be in? Or does it matter?

Yeah, absolutely, man. And my story is very similar with yours. My bedroom was upstairs at the top.

Of the freaking house.

You know, heat rises, coolness drops. So this is why Our basements are tend to be cooler.

Yeah.

Upstairs I would literally see those heat waves.

Oh my gosh.

Walk up there, 100 degree St. Louis weather. And so I would spray myself with a water bottle and then lay there butt naked and hope my brother doesn't come in the room, you know, when I'm trying to sleep. But yeah, man, it's not good sleep.

No.

And so this is really simple. You know, your body goes through a process of something called thermoregulation. And it does this every night. And we'll just say around 9pm average. It does this process to lower your core body temperature to create the ideal environment for deep sleep. Sleep.

Yeah.

All right. Your body cools you off to sleep better. Right. So you want to support it and not work against it. So here some simple tips. And it's going to sound a little frosty to some people, but ideally your room temperature is going to be, and this is according to research, what experts say, 62 degrees to 68 degrees.

Wow.

For sleeping. All right. And some people like two. No way. Like my wife is actually, she's from Kenya, so hot climate. No, she's not having that. So I find a happy medium.

You know, you're at the top. You're at 68, 69.

Like 69. You know, but. And also, you know, our friend Kelly Starrett, Dr. Kelly Starrett, he had a pretty big struggle with this, with being too hot. And he got it cold in the room, but it still was enough. And he didn't want his wife to suffer. So he got something called a chili pad, which basically sits on your side of the bed. And he's like, he swears by it.

Underneath the mattress or underneath.

Right on top of the mattress? Yeah.

Underneath the sheet.

Exactly.

But it just keeps you cool underneath you.

It's been a game changer for him, you know, so just cooling your body temperature, even just 1 degree difference is huge. It's huge.

It's huge.

Okay, cool. So be cool at night. Doesn't mean you, you can still, you can still wrap yourself.

Yeah.

Blanket the room. Cool.

Yeah.

Gotcha. I like that. Okay, so that was number four. Number five. Let's do is get to bed at the right time. So why, why is it important to be at the right time?

Yeah.

Should we be at the right same time every night? And what is that optimal time?

Good, good question, man. So timing your sleep is like timing an investment. If you invest a lot at the wrong time, you're gonna get pain. But if you invest even a little bit at the right time, you get some big rewards. And so according to research, our quote, money times sleep is between 10pm and 2am and why that is is this is when you're gonna get your greatest increase of melatonin, which is gonna help you to go through your normal sleep cycle and the greatest secretion of things like human growth hormone as well. So more recovery, more anabolic growth and.

Development between 10 and 2am that's right, yeah. Is when you should be going to sleep or that's when you get, that's optimal sleep.

Right. If you can get some sleep in that window. And some, some experts say that it's like twice as much value per hour.

Right.

So, so if you go to bed at 9, 39, 45 and you're, you know, asleep in that window that whole time, that's the optimal time.

People will notice this when they tend to get to bed a little bit earlier. They're just like, wow, I slept really great.

Right.

You know, I see your face, you're like, yeah, when that happens. But it rarely happens, you know, and so that's the kind of money time window. But it's not, again, it's not about being perfect. If this doesn't fit your lifestyle stack, the other conditions do the other things, you know, because the timing does matter because your body's wired up to work with nature.

Yeah.

You know, and only recently can we basically manufacture a second daytime, you know, and our systems, our, our genes are expecting a night cycle for us to get cozy, to get sleep, but we can throw on the, you know, do the laptop lap dance all night long today, you know, watch YouTube videos and Netflix and be on our social media. But our genes are not different from our ancestors Even, you know, 100 years ago, let alone thousands.

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 perfect clean diet is for them. Don't smoke, don't drink. I wonder who has more susceptibility to diseases and cancers 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 physically, you're taking care of spiritually and nutrition versus you sleep perfect. Maybe you won't be able to sleep perfect if you're eating that bad, but you sleep eight hours a night, nine hours a night, but you're eating horrible who has it worse off.

So firstly, I think you should be a sleep scientist, because it's a fantastic question, it's a great study and it's an incredibly complex but important study to do. The first answer is that no one has actually done that type of experiment. We've done a, we've done a diluted version, a kind of, you know, diet, a light version of it, which is we look at sleep and we ask what is it in terms of the mortality risk and the health consequence risk when you're not getting sufficient sleep? And then we take all of those other factors that you've described, smoking history, diet history, mental health history, etc. Etc. And we add those as additional factors into the analysis and, and we absorb them and control for them so that we can say, independent of those things or in spite or in the face of those things, sleep still carries a significant vote in determining your mortality, your rate, your date of expiration, as it were. So that's the only evidence that we have right now where you can at least control for those. But we haven't done what you're describing, which is the much more elegant, smart thing to do, which is, you know, can we put them sort of almost in a, a Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Challenge, kind of Dr. Pepper challenge phase and see which one wins out, you know, diet, exercise or sleep, when those two other things are held constant, but you manipulate one of those, then hold the other two constant and manipulate one of lovely experiment, love to do it, it's not been done, so we don't know.

What would your hypothesis be?

My suspicion is that sleep will still probably carry a larger influence than those two other factors. Now, there's a lot of assumptions I'm making there, but I'll give you another quick example, A study done back in the 1980s which will probably never be repeated because of the moral and ethical issues. They took a group of rats and what they found after sleep depriving the rats was that rats will die as quickly from sleep deprivation as they will from food deprivation. So sleep is that essential. Those rats were dying usually within 20 days. So sleep seems to have a deathly consequence to it. What was also fascinating, however, is that they then, and maybe I'll back up a little bit, human beings and most mammalian species will have two main types of sleep, what we call non rapid eye movement sleep or non REM sleep, and rapid eye movement sleep or dream sleep. And what they found was that total sleep deprivation will absolutely kill a rat if you just selectively deprive the rat of either deep non REM sleep or REM sleep or dream sleep. They found that the rats would still die of either one of those two. So both of those types of sleep are essential. But rats were dying almost as quickly from dream sleep deprivation as they would from total deprivation. Well, they died within about 40 days, whilst the rats who were deprived of deep non REM sleep, they died after about 60 days. So, you know, we can almost then, not that I would wish to pit the different types of sleep head to head and ask which is more important now I should say, what? All stages of sleep are critical. That's probably the one of the biggest messages that we've learned. Different types of sleep do different things for your brain and your body at different times of night. All of them are important. But it seems as though if you want to ask the question of death risk, dream sleep may be more important than deep sleep on the consequence basis of how quickly you die. But you need all of them. Bad things happen when you don't get any one of them.

Gotcha. Can you talk about dreams and the importance of dreams?

Yeah, we've done quite a lot of work in this area and the belief maybe 20 or 30 years ago was that dreams were just an epiphenomenon, they were just a byproduct of. And so the analogy would be, you know, think of the light bulbs that I think I can see behind you in that lovely background. You know, when you, when you create this apparatus called a light bulb to produce this thing called light, in the same way that the brain has been created to produce this thing called dream sleep, called REM sleep, when you create light in that way with the light bulb, you also produce this thing called he heat. It was never the purpose of the light bulb, it's just what happens when you create light in that way. And the belief was the same thing for dreaming, that when you create this thing called REM sleep, which serves lots of different functions, one of the conscious spin offs, one of the byproducts is this thing called dreaming. And that never made sense to me for the simple reason which is this, when we are dreaming, it is more consciously, energetically demanding than not dreaming, is my assumption from a brain based perspective. And any time mother nature burns the most valuable unit in your body, which is called an ATP molecule, an energy molecule, then it usually has some evolutionary advantage to it. In other words, if dreaming is metabolically more active and you could have REM sleep without dreaming, but she still added dreaming atop of REM sleep, then it must serve some benefit. And we've now discovered that it serves at least two vital functions, really. The first is that dream sleep provides a form of almost overnight therapy, that dream sleep is emotional first aid.

Interesting.

And it's during dream sleep at night that your brain takes those difficult, emotionally charged experiences, sometimes even traumatic memories. And it acts like a nocturnal soothing balm. And it just takes the sharp edges off those painful, difficult experiences so that you come back the next day and you feel better about those experiences. And in that way, it's not time that heals all wounds, it's time during dream sleep that provides emotional convalescence, as it were. And it's not just dream sleep, it's also even what you dream about, not just that you dream. In other words, I'm talking about your dream content being important because there was a study done several years ago and they looked at people going through a really tough time, a traumatic experience, such as a really painful and bitter divorce. And at the time when that was happening, they were recording their dreams. And then they tracked those individuals for a year and one year later, about half of them had clinical resolution to their depression and the other half did not. And then they went back and they separated the dreams of those two different groups. And what they found is that those people who were dreaming, but not dreaming about the emotional events themselves, they didn't get clinical resolution one year later. Those people who were dreaming but dreaming of the event, they got the clinical resolution. So in other words, dreaming is necessary, but it's not sufficient. You need to be dreaming of what those events are to process those.

How do we influence. How do we influence dreaming what we want to dream and not nightmares?

That's right. Yeah. Well, this moves us into the territory of what we call lucid dreaming.

Yes.

And for most people, lucid dreaming from within my field, within the scientific field, is actually a more simple definition. It's simply the moment that you become aware that you're dreaming, that you're in a dream whilst you're dreaming. Correct.

Does that exert more energy when having the dream? Creates. Exerts more energy. If you're conscious and aware while dreaming, is that another level of energy that.

You'Re exerting, like you need to be a sleep scientist? This is absolutely.

That's why I've got you on here.

You don't need me, actually. So the answer is. Is in part yes. But what we've. So for most people, though, lucid dreaming really means not only I'm aware that I'm dreaming, but now I can control what I'm dreaming about.

Do you often have lucid dreaming?

Do we often, as a, as a group, individually? No. I personally, I've only experienced lucid dreaming probably, you know, six or seven times. And it's great when it happens. But right now we know based on the population statistics, about 80% of the population does not lucid dream. 20% of the population does lucid dream. Which then brings us on or back to your astute question, which is, can we control our dreams and is that a good thing to gain lucidity and to gain control and to give over the driving seat to me, the individual, rather than to Mother Nature's blueprint that she's worked out. And I can play both sides of the, the theory equation here. On one side, I would say if lucid dreaming was so beneficial to you as a human being, as an organism, then many more people would be natural lucid dreamers than there are now. That would just. There's. That statistic would be reversed if anything.

Well, I mean, if sleeping an extra couple hours a night is more beneficial, which it is, then more people would also be sleeping more anymore.

Well, that's, that's the hard part is that with lucid dreaming, it's very difficult to control. But to choose not to sleep, that's unfortunately very easy to control.

A lot of. A lot of. A lot of people think it's difficult.

Well, we'll come back to it. I mean, there's really two separate things with insufficient sleep. There is you either not giving yourself the opportunity to sleep or society not giving you the opportunity to sleep despite you being able to sleep, sleep very well.

Right, Right.

Versus you giving yourself plenty of opportunity to sleep. But just because you have a sleep disorder or you have sleep issues, you cannot generate the sleep. So the difference is opportunity is present, but you can't create the sleep versus you can create the sleep, but you don't have the opportunity to do so. And those two things are quite different. But from the lucid dreaming perspective, I could come back and argue the other side, which is to say my assumption there, the belief that Mother Nature would have had us all doing it if it was good makes the wrong conclusion that we've stopped evolving. In other words, what if that 20% of the hominid population who are lucid dreaming is the next wave of evolution? They are the superhumans who will come next and succeed. People like me who aren't natural lucid dreamers. So I can play both sides of it.

Interesting. Is there a way to Train your mind and body in order to lucid dream more.

There have been some attempts. So there's a scientist called Stephen LaBerge who actually has an institute of lucidity and he's got different courses and classes. How effective they are, it's a little bit unclear. And there are some simple techniques where you can, firstly, before you go to bed at night and it sounds hokey and strange, is just repeat like a mantra to yourself, I am going to try and become conscious in my dream. I'm going to try and become conscious. And then you can do virtual reality testing in the dream and you can do this when you're awake. So right now, you know, I am looking at my laptop and, you know, if it's a physical entity and I'm in the real world and I'm awake, if I were to tap my screen, I can feel it physically. And you can go around and keep reminding yourself, you know, I can go over to the light switch and turn it on, turn it off. Do I have voluntary control of what's going on in my environment? Because often you don't have in your dreams. And then by doing that in your waking day, you can try to train yourself to do that during your sleeping dreaming life. And at that point when you flick the light switch and it doesn't change anything, or you tap the screen of your laptop and your hand goes completely through it, then you think, oh, hang on a second, this isn't waking, you know, this is close. Clearly a dream. So there's different ways that you can test the reality of waking life versus dreaming life and adopt that mindset. The other thing is just to simply start trying to remember your dreams some more. So in the morning when you wake up, that's the first step towards a path of lucidity. Don't jump out of bed and sort of just close your eyes and try and remember your dream. Instead, wake up and then keep your eyes closed and don't try to write the dream down, don't try to dictate it, just rehearse the dream. Because dreams have this funny nature to them where as soon as we wake up, they almost evaporate so quickly from our brain.

And so if, yeah, yeah, if you don't feel it right, then in moments or minutes, it's going to be gone.

It's going to be gone. So just wait there and try to crystallize it. Try to set the, the dream in amber by sort of, you know, going over it and rehearsing it, rehearsing it in your Mind, build that picture, build the memory, ingrain the memory and then pick up your pad of paper and your pencil next to you on the bedside and write it down. And gradually, as you start to remember your more of your dreams, there is some evidence that that can also increase the probability of lucidity. But in truth, I'm not really an. I don't know anyone who's truly an expert in being able to, you know, increase the frequency with which you can lucid dream. From a scientific perspective, there's lots of people out there who claim, you know, I've got this course that you can do and. But the science doesn't support it that well. But the science now has proven without a shadow of a doubt, by the way, that there is a thing called lucid dreaming. We used to think it was a charlatan science, that it wasn't real. And we can go into the details as how you prove it, but it has been proven lots of different ways.

Yeah, and what is the. Do we have any research on what lucid dreaming is, does for healing the body or hurting the body or the brain?

We haven't found evidence that it either hurts or helps. Right now all we have is evidence understanding what happens when you become lucid as a dreamer. And this comes back to what you were asking about, which is, is there an additional, additional metabolic consequence of going into lucid dreaming? One of the fascinating things when we go into dream sleep. Well, there are many, but I'll give you just two. The first is that when you go into dream sleep, your brain paralyzes your body. You are utterly incarcerated in physical lockdown. And the reason is very simple. Your brain paralyzes your body so the mind can dream safely so that you don't act out your dreams, so you.

Don'T go move your body and.

Yeah, correct. And so what we know is that the mechanisms that control REM sleep and non REM sleep start deep down within the brain. In fact, in the brainstem. So if you were to take a pear, a fruit like a pear, and you were to turn it upside down, it's that sort of, you know, thin end and the stem of the purr, that's your brainstem. It's there where the principal battle for non REM and REM sleep plays out across the night to create the 90 minute cycle of non REM to REM sleep in humans. But as it's expressed upstairs into your brain during REM sleep, which activates lots of brain areas but also deactivates them, there's A separate signal sent south of your neck, right down into your spinal cord, which paralyzes what we call the alpha motor neurons, which is all of your voluntary skeletal muscles. Now that fortunately means that your involuntary muscles, things like your heart and your inspiration, don't worry, they keep going, otherwise we would have been popped out the gene pool together very quickly. But your voluntary muscles, those are paralyzed. The second interesting feature coming back to lucid dreaming though, is that many parts of your brain, when you dream, light up. The visual areas at the back of the brain, the motor strip areas across the top of the brain, the emotional centers and the memory centers, all of these things light up. And some of them in fact are up to 30% more active when you're in dream sleep than when you're awake, which in some ways is fascinating. But the one part of your brain that goes in the opposite direction is something called your prefrontal cortex. And this is sort of, you know, it's like the, like the CEO of the brain. It's very good at making high level, top down executive control decisions and communication. That part of the brain, as we go into dream sleep, is actively inhibited. So your rational, logical brain is shut down and all of these emotional and memory centers light up. No wonder dreams are bizarre, illogical, hyper associative, filled with memories, filled with visual aspects, often have kinesthetic aspects to them. But what we've realized is that the difference between dreaming and lucid dreaming is that that prefrontal cortex part of the brain actually comes back online as we become lucid. In other words, as we gain volitional control over what we dream, the prefrontal cortex seems to be coming back online, gifting you that volition to do what you wish in your dreams.

I've had, I don't know, maybe a handful of times where I've had this dream where I wake up, my eyes are still asleep, but I'm awake. And then I open my eyes, but I feel paralyzed and I feel like I'm screaming, yet nothing's coming out and I can't move my arms and I'm like, am I paralyzed? And then eventually like something comes out of my mouth and I can move, but it always feels very weird. It's like paralysis. I don't know if that's.

And what it, what it's called is sleep paralysis. It's a very well known thing. And normally what happens to all of us as were so REM sleep and non REM sleep, as I said, will go in this 90 minute cycle. But what's interesting is that in the first half of the night, that's when you get most of your deep non REM sleep. And you don't get very much REM sleep in the second half of the night. That's when the seesaw balance shifts. And now you get much more of your dream sleep in those last few hours especially. And normally, as we're waking up out of sleep and therefore typically REM sleep and therefore typically dreaming, the brain has this beautiful synchrony, this lockstep of increasing consciousness into wakefulness and increasing release of that brain body paralysis. So that as you are regaining waking mental life, your body is released from its full physical lockdown, from physical incarceration. However, there are times when one leads too far in front of the other and it's called sleep paralysis. And you've experienced it. I've experienced it too. Can often happen when we're under levels of high stress or we're typically sleep deprived. And at that point you become a pseudo aware. You're sort of in this mixed state of consciousness in your between the worlds of wake and sleep, as it were, but your body is still in the paralysis. So you are, you can't lift your eyelids. Why voluntary skeletal muscles. You can't shout out, why voluntary skeletal muscles? And it's often paired with a sense, understandably so, of dread and fear and a presence of someone else being there. And it turns out that this phenomenon called sleep paralysis accurately explains most, if not all of so called alien abductions. Because when you, you know, when was the last time you heard on the news an alien abduction story that happened in the middle of the day? And you know, people were outside at lunchtime with friends at work, you know, they're all eating their sandwiches and then all of a sudden they heard this sound, whoosh. And it's like, my goodness, you know, did you see that Tommy was just abducted by alien. You know, it never happens like that. It's usually at night, you're usually by yourself. You describe a presence or a sense in the room. You say that they injected you with some kind of paralyzing agent. You tried to fight back, but you couldn't. It's sleep paralysis.

Paralysis, yeah.

Right now, by the way, it's a, it's not necessarily something to be worried about. If you have it, it seems to be somewhat normal. About 25% of the population will experience it. In other words, it's as common as hiccups. But just be aware that there's nothing wrong with you and it's not that you're being visited by anything strange or there have been some kind of worries in religious sort of domains that you require some kind of, you know, exorcism or there's sort of a long history of that in the past. We understand the biology. It's a basic science fact, and it's largely normal. So.

So when someone experiences it, what should they do? Just try to maintain calm and just wait for the body to wake up naturally.

And that's exactly right. You will come out of it and try to, if you can, having heard this, understand what's going on. Sometimes even I don't recognize what's going on when it's going on, despite knowing what I know. But gradually I get to the place where I realize what's happening, and then I just relax and I say, I'm just going to give it time. And I may fall back asleep or I may continue with my, you know, Runway jet propulsion, and I hit escape velocity of both consciousness and physical paralysis. And it will be just fine. But it's very disconcerting. It really is a very strange.

Scary, right?

It's very scary. Very scary.

Very scary.

And I'm telling you, there's one thing your viewers can get from me about things to watch out for. Whatever you buy, pick it up if it's in a box or in a can.

And look on the side.

Don't look just at the. At the label, look at the.

I mean, at the name of it.

Look at the side and see if you recognize the ingredients.