Sleep and The Mental Game in the NBA Finals

Hi and thanks for hitting the snooze button. My name's Neil Headley. Special bonus episode for you this week in the middle of what frankly was an unexpected Covid induced hiatus. It kind of felt a little like the abbreviated 2020 Major League Baseball season. We've been off long enough now that we're actually gearing up for a full length season three of the show, complete with a new website and and a pile of new sleep obsessed content that will be flowing in your direction on a regular basis. We're gonna announce launch day soon on all our social places. You can follow us there at getyoursnooze on or you can hit our website@thesnewsbutton.com quick nod to our friends at Nexcess web hosting who have an insane summer special going on. Now that allows me to offer you a special 50% off coupon. So if you go to the website NeilSentMe.com you'll find all the details there. Nexcess is step of every single project that I'm involved in. I can't recommend them highly enough, but to get the deal you got to go to this website, Neil sentme.com Now I made a reference a minute ago to Major League Baseball and sure enough, here we are in the middle of a pretty exciting NBA final. Lots of questions out there in social media about things happening on the mental side of the ball. And that's where this week's guest comes in. He is the director of wellness and development of the 2019 NBA champion Toronto Raptors. And as such, he deals with everything, including sleep that is north of the neck for that elite group of athletes. So without any further ado, here is my conversation with Dr. Alex Auerbach. Alex, I'm going to start you with the very same first question that everybody that's ever been on the show and everyone that ever will be on the show gets. It's always the same question. How'd you sleep last night?

Very well, thank you.

Good. How does what's very well look like for you?

Very well for me is somewhere in the ballpark of seven to eight hours, largely uninterrupted and I think sort of quiet and restful. I don't often remember like dreams or anything like that personally, but if I'm in that 7 to 8 ballpark and not waking up frequently, I'm usually pretty good.

We're going to get into. I like that you said ballpark twice so far because we're going to get into your work with athletes In a minute. First thing, I've got a. You're not related to Red, are you?

So this is always a question that comes up. The short answer is I don't really know the exact relation, though I have been told there is one, because I.

Look at your last name and how do you look at your last name? And you think, oh, yeah, legend. Basketball legend. And then you see that you are, at least right now, tied to basketball. And I go, okay, there's got to be some kind of correlation there.

It's certainly a fortuitous last name to have in the current circumstance, but I don't know the exact connection. I am in the process of trying to figure it out if it does, in fact, exist. I at one point had a camp counselor when I was much younger who supposedly did the research and shared with me that it was true, which was cool. But as I have gotten older, it's become more important to confirm for myself.

Sure, we'll try and get you sent one of those little DNA kits that you can get in the mail or whatever. I'm not even sure how they work. They scare me a little bit. So there's a lot to dig into here. The thing I want to touch on first, in all of the work that you do with athletes, because the work that you do with athletes isn't just limited to sleep. It's. It's everything north of your neck. And so I'm interested if there is a point where, for an athlete, male or female, if the immortality of youth sort of takes a backseat and people become more interested in just doing the things that are going to work for. For them. Is there. Is there an age where that happens? Or do athletes just always think, no, I'm good, I'm immortal, nothing can hurt me. I'm going to be fine?

That's a great question. I don't know if there's a specific age where it happens, but I think what my experience has shown so far is there's kind of these different milestones players hit or different challenges they bump into when they start to then figure out that they might need to take a different path or try something new to overcome a new obstacle that they haven't faced before. And so that can often lead to sort of confronting that immortality. So the most maybe prevalent or common one that people see is injury. Right. You know, if you tear an ACL or, you know, have a blowout in Achilles, that can be, you know, a real identity shaker in terms of being withdrawn from the team, having to explore who you are away from the team context, away from being a performer. And it's sort of like an early identity crisis in a lot of ways for athletes when they're confronted with an injury. But I think other sorts of obstacles can prompt the same kind of thoughtfulness and reflection. And then I think, you know, there is a point as athletes age, right, that, you know, you sort of proverbially lose a step and you have to come up with alternative ways to maintain your high performance. And so, you know, for some athletes that might be doubling down on the physical training or spending more time on rehab and prehab, and for some athletes, it's a greater incorporation of the ment side, learning how to rest and recover more effectively. But everyone, I think, at the elite level is looking for a way to get a competitive edge. It just sort of takes. You know, there are different stigmas or challenges that you have to navigate in each domain that also factor into that.

One of the most interesting recovery stories that I can think of in the last decade, and it's pertinent to the geography that you and I are in, certainly, but it's also, I think, interesting because this was a. For the year that it happened, it was one of the biggest stories in sports was Marcus Stroman at the time from the Toronto Blue Jays, when he blew out a knee and then basically ended up coming back about a year earlier than anyone predicted he would be able to come back and in fact, was dominant almost immediately upon his return. Is that kind of drive common among elite athletes, or was he just sort of a freak of nature? With all due respect to Marcus.

I think. I think it is common. I think that the way it manifests is different. So, you know, and it's also. There are other functional people kind of in the context that would shape some of that, right? So if you've got, you know, a team of docs or athletic medicine folks who are, you know, have. Have a different kind of level of freedom to sort of work with you, or you're working with a really specialized group, or you feel different pressures from, like, all that stuff can sort of coalesce and shape what your return looks like. And then there's also the functional aspects of where you are in a season and stuff, right? So if you maybe tear an ACL and you've got, you know, 30% left of the current season, that might extend your Runway into rehab for the next season. Whereas if it's at the start of the season, maybe you want to, you know, hurry some elements of it up to get back for the playoffs. So there's all sorts of things that go into that kind of recovery. But generally, I think people as a whole, and certainly elite athletes are just driven to be the best that they can be. Right. But how that manifests and how people deal with the different obstacles they hit, like an injury, is certainly different. And so you do find that some athletes will respond to an injury with kind of that increased sense of resolve, that motivation to respond and get back as quickly as possible. And I think some of that's shaped by the social and contextual factors I mentioned before. And then you'll have athletes who need to take some time to sort of reflect, and it might impact in a more what we might perceive as, like, a negative way. I kind of think of it as more of, like, a little bit of a stop sign and a slowdown and reflect than it is like, oh, my goodness, you're really taking this hard. It's like, well, this is just a normal part of your identity development, and adversity affects people differently. And so here we are.

How often does that stop sign not appear right away? You know what I mean? Does. Does the drive ever get in the way in your experience? Are there. Are there people who don't take to the you just need to rest message right out of the gate and that ends up getting in the way?

Yeah, I mean, I think certainly culturally in sport for a really long time, there's been a drive to just do more, work harder, you know, lift more, get bigger, faster, stronger. All those things are. Are highly relevant in this space. And it's really been pretty recent, I think, where people have started to pay more attention to things like sleep, things like recovery. And I mean, some of it is kind of the interesting historical sports stuff that I love thinking about. Like, you know, early on in sport, the head coach was the athletic trainer and the sports psychologist, you know, and the sleep doc and, you know, the strength coach. Right. And so at that point, volume of work was almost like a necessity to get everything done. And as sport has become more specialized, we started to pay different levels of attention to those different aspects and be more mindful and sort of sports psychology. And psychology is, I think, the newest sort of player with a seat at the table. And that's brought along with it more of this idea about thinking about rest more productively and like an investment that maybe historically. So I think culturally, some of that's changing a little bit right now. But I think generally, you know, as a society, I think at least in American culture, where A lot of sport resides that I'm used to. There is just a premium placed on working more and working harder and often more is kind of in conflict with rest.

This is sort of related to one of the first questions that I asked, but to me contextually different. Is it easier to convince, you know, a 35 year old player that rest is more important than it is a Rookie because the 35 year old is maybe now looking for ways to extend their career?

Yeah, I think simply the simple answer is yes. I think, you know, the reasoning might be extending their career, but there's also like energy differences and stuff too. Right? You know, if you're a rookie who's just joined the league and you're maybe playing three or four minutes a game, you know, there might be motivation to go work out after the game or show up and do 2A days or do something differently or do, you know, more work than there would be for the veteran who's in his 30s who played 35 minutes, you know. And so on top of the age factor and the, you know, body wear factor, there's also the differences in how much time has been played, what's gone into the performance, those kinds of things that that factor in. But I do think as athletes mature generally maybe it's less a function of like, you know, static age number and more function of just developmental player maturity and time in the league. I do think there starts to be an increased premium on things like, like rest or recovery. And I think, you know, not necessarily always rest and recovery in terms of like completely off your feet, not doing anything but rest and recovery. In terms of some of the active things we think about too, like a mindfulness or pre, prehab or stretching, Pilates, yoga, these different things that help the body and mind heal and recover but might also involve some movement or some more active doing of stuff.

It's interesting too. You look at different players and I'll go back to. Because I started thinking about Marcus Stroman, I started thinking about baseball players. So let me jump over to baseball for a second and maybe even tie in a couple of other sports. You look at for example, a Tom Brady whose training regimen is ridiculous, and you look at Tom Brady and you go, that guy right there is a finely tuned athlete. And you look at some other players like you know, I start thinking about legendary baseball players, John Kruck and stuff like that, who look like they just put down three cheeseburgers before they picked up the bat and walked out onto the field. You know, and so I think People sometimes look at that and they go, okay, maybe it's not all in the training, maybe it's not all in the. How do you explain, for example, to a player or even justify the difference between the two different types of apparently high performance athletes?

Yeah, I think my argument might be that for the guy who eats three cheeseburgers before he goes out to bat, that he might perform even better if he didn't eat the cheeseburgers. Right. And that's obviously a slippery slope because I think everyone can use a good cheeseburger once in a while. But. But I think, you know, what Tom Brady has done, if we're using him as the example that's, that's spectacular is I think he's really gone out of his way to max out every dimension of his performance and preparation. And so maybe that's made him or contributed to how elite he is. You know, I think a lot of us would, in the performance side would look at that as kind of a model of what someone maxing out really looks like. And a lot of the way I think about this stuff is just odds of putting yourself in a position to be successful. Or so a lot of sport is luck too. Right. And so if you're a guy like Tom Brady, what you've done by training that way is you've basically controlled all of the odds that you can control and put yourself in the best position to be successful. Knowing that you really can't control the other 21 guys on the field completely when you're on the field. And so I think, you know, the players who are not doing that doesn't mean that you can't be successful. It just may mean that you're leaving more up to chance than you need to. And so that's where I think you could start to have some of those conversations, which is, you know, it's not necessarily that doing all of these things that Tom Brady does means you're going to be the next Tom Brady, but I would argue that it does increase your odds of being a successful performer. And so I think of them as, you know, not necessarily competing, but they kind of work together. Like, sure, you could eat a whole pizza and then go play a basketball game. I don't know that that's going to be the best basketball game you've ever played or that you could do that consistently over time. Right. I think that's the other that people look at a lot in sport is these sort of like one off great performances. You know, Kobe scores 81 or Brett Favre after the passing of his father. And those are players who, you know, we admire those performances, but they're consistently also over performing or outperforming everybody else. And I think a lot of that is what we should pay maybe more attention to. That's the stuff that's more interesting to me is how do you kind of get to and maintain that high performance versus looking at these peak performances? And so I think as you start to work with players on thinking about consistent high performance versus how do you just kind of get through the day to day hoping that you hit a peak performance once in a while? I think you could start to make progress on some of that stuff.

I know I'm going to get a note from somebody about referring to John Kruk as a legendary baseball player. But let's, let's take someone of a similar physique, Babe Ruth, for example, who was legendary, you know, drinker, eater, smoker. I think there are shots of him standing in the batter's box with a cigar in his mouth and things like that. Who. People would have argued that if Babe Ruth had taken better care of himself. There's two schools of thought here. If he had taken better care of himself, he would have been even better. And there's other people that say, no, no, it's all the weight and all of those things that made Babe Ruth the player that he was. And a lot of who Babe Ruth is, was came from the. The player that he was north of his neck. So which side of that would you fall on?

Oh, I think sport is really, really complicated. Yes. And so I think to distill it down to one or the other, I think is tough. I think, again, if I look at my experience and the folks I've worked with, you know, I think everyone. It's like any strength, I think, you know, people find certain strengths, strengths that they lean on more than others, perhaps because they feel more comfortable or it's more a part of their identity, whatever that might be. And so, you know, maybe Babe Ruth centered more of his identity on what happens north of the neck. And so that was a factor and something he believed in. And then I think you have other players or athletes who might believe that, you know, really, it's. It's the body that's sort of the vehicle for performance. I think for me, I'd argue it's. It's a both and it's not an either or, but I think it's. It's. You know, there's also a lot to be said for kind of what you believe in and what you focus on.

Too well, and let's go down a road I wasn't expecting you to go down. But that's what I love about these conversations when, when, when they start to evolve and become fun. There's a million different roads you can go down. Let's talk about the psychology behind, for example, performance enhancing drugs, because I'm sure as we talk about the Babe Ruth example, and let's take it to a completely different example where you have, I don't want to name names because then, etc. We've all heard about players who take these substances that make them completely jacked. And there are people who will make the argument that there are some sports where being bigger doesn't necessarily work in your favor. And for example, there are people that will say that, yes, because you've put on, you know, an extra 25 pounds of muscle, maybe you're going to be able to hit the ball farther, but you're not going to be able to swing the bat as hard, for example. Other sports bring different kinds of things to the table with them, but for some players, there is that psychology of this is what I absolutely need to do to compete. How do you combat that for a person who, who, like you, works with the north of the neck part of the player?

Yeah, I think like any, you know, anytime when someone's maybe thinking about some kind of compensatory mechanism for themselves or for performance, I think it's about trying to understand, for me, it's about trying to understand sort of the perceived deficit and then what someone is hoping for, what they're hoping to accomplish. And so I think, you know, if I reflect back on some of the times when maybe it was a little bit more in our face, the use of performance enhancing drugs than it is right now. You know, I think some of that is about competition, but some of that is about fear and some of that's about, you know, not wanting to be left behind, being able to adapt and those kinds of things. And so those are all very real human concerns and very real things to try to imagine how you can, can compensate for. And then I think like anything, there are maybe healthier, more productive ways to compensate. And then there are other ways that, you know, we might not fully understand the full range of effects of those compensatory mechanisms. But I think, you know, in professional sports, certainly there's a premium placed on competitive advantage. And so I think that's just an inherent part of the culture, is that you may end up with not necessarily performance enhancing drugs as the only example, but different ways that people are trying to gain a little bit of an edge. I think that's inherent in a competitive landscape. But then I think there's sort of the dark side, if you will, of that too, which is what's motivating some of that use.

Well, and let's bring that full circle back around to what the show's about. Let's talk about the compensatory mechanisms for sleep, because I'm sure that if, and you know, the work you're doing, for example, with the Toronto Raptors, I'm sure that if somebody comes to you post game, pre game, whatever, even in the off season, says, I'm having a really hard time sleeping. I'm guessing you don't reach into a drawer for a bottle of Ambien. I mean, there's got to be, obviously things that are better options, you know, and we deal on the show all the time with what a terrible option for anybody, things like Ambien or even. And we can have the Melatonin argument as well about whether that actually does anything for anybody, because the science says it doesn't. But what do you do in a case where a player comes to you and one of the things that seems to be their biggest problem is getting enough rest, getting enough sleep?

Yeah, I think. Great question and I'm glad you're raising this because this is very common. And even before I was with the Raptors, when I was still working, working in college athletics, this is, you know, a concern that players and athletes tend to lead off with because it's, it's a huge part of how they're functioning and it's a huge part of their, their world. And so I think the first thing is to just examine, you know, the normal kind of barriers that we find in this age group to sleep. Right. So things like how late are you using your phone? How late are you playing video games? How late are you, are you watching television? What does that look like? What are you doing before bed? What kinds of activities are you involved in when you're having, when you want to go to bed? If you're out until 2:30 in the morning and then you want to try to go to bed at 2:45, it's just going to be harder. Start to look at some of the real behavioral things that are going on that we might be able to address and really sort of highlighting or focusing on anything that might sort of increase arousal or move us away from sleep, you know, so I Think using your cell phone is a great one. But, you know, particularly like social media, you know, if you're scrolling through Twitter or Instagram and reading all these comments that people are making about your most recent performance, good, bad or the otherwise. Right. Like that's a little bit of a stimulator for people and, you know, is something that sort of increases arousal. And so we want to look at that specifically and then try to just make, you know, subtle changes of marginal improvements. I think I try to come at it from kind of a scientist perspective and running little experiments like, hey, let's try this one thing and see how that goes. And I think there are sort of, you know, the normal sleep hygiene things you could do with people that you've had folks on the show who are much more competent than I am in that area and probably can give a much more better overview of what that looks like than I could. But, you know, I try to bring some of that stuff in, but I think oftentimes, you know, you just have to start with something. And so it's looking for those little places of intervention as a starting point and then monitoring progress and seeing what we can refine from there.

One thing, and it's interesting that you point to some of the other people who've been on the show that can talk about other aspects of sleep, but there is one that I want to zero in on with you is an acute sleep problem, for example, rather than someone who has chronic sleep issues. And this may be beyond the scope of anything that you've ever dealt with, but I have a hunch it's not. Let me create a hypothetical scenario for you. And because you work with a team that has, you know, the players have rings, and so this is something I think you can speak to in particular hypothetical. It's game changer Game seven tomorrow. And you're in that starting five and it's. Is there something you can do to combat the voices, the adrenaline, the everything else that's going on? Or have you even gotten a call maybe? I don't even know if this ever happens. But I envision if I'm like you and game seven is tomorrow. I'm waiting for the phone to ring at 11 o', clock, 12 o' clock in the morning from somebody who's having some kind of issue that's preventing them from getting rest, preventing them from getting to sleep, and they're worried about what their performance is going to be like because of it. Does that ever happen? And if it does, then what?

Yeah. So I think to me, where we might steer wrong to start is only thinking about it as this isolated incident, right. I've been thinking a lot about this since we first connected. And I think actually the preparation for the Game seven sleep starts in the preseason the same way that Preparation for Game 7 starts in the preseason. And I think a lot of that is if you've built, you know, if you think of sleep from a behavioral perspective and, you know, pairing your bed with sleep and all those things that come with, you know, some of the CBTI stuff and kind of retraining, you know, I think if you practice good sleep behaviors leading up to game seven, that ultimately those good stuff sleep behavior should play a big part in and how you sleep the night before the big game. And that doesn't mean that the pressure or circumstances aren't different, but I think there is real, that kind of behavioral pattern is a real mental skill. And so I think like anything in that circumstance, it's sort of helping people lean on the fundamentals of what usually helps them sleep well. It's trying to combat some of the things that typically interfere with good sleep, right? Like ruminative sleep thinking and stuff that might, you know, we might all expect to go on the night before any big performance, whether it's Game seven or a big meeting, right. We're all up thinking about how it's going to go and that kind of stuff. And so I think the more we can sort of detach from that and, you know, practice that kind of keeping it in perspective, not getting hooked by the ruminating, stepping back, relaxing, accepting, being, you know, trying to sort of go through the process that we would go through in preparation for any performance. It's like going through the process of preparation for great sleep. And then I think the final thing is one I've taken from one of your other guests, Dr. Grandner, but it's a nugget I've stored for forever is I think one simple way to start to move the needle in some of these smaller things is to reframe sleep as an investment in that performance. And so I think one of the things that maybe underlies that kind of not sleeping before the big game is sometimes a feeling of not being prepared right, or not doing everything that you could have done or sort of going down the rabbit hole in the mental checklist of is there anything I missed? Or what about this or what about that? And I think simply reframing sleep as an investment in tomorrow's performance, knowing that if you sleep well tonight, that's actually going to help you deal with those novel circumstances tomorrow. You don't need to plan for it all right now. Right. It's more about being prepared to take on whatever comes up tomorrow. And you'll be better prepared position to do that with a well rested body in mind. That subtle nudge, I think can go a long way. And so those would be some of the things that I would be thinking about and how I might be approaching that. And then it becomes, you know, if you've done the sleep preparation work from preseason, then this is like anything like any other game. It's just like getting ready for any other game. And I think, you know, rightfully so, perhaps maybe fans and media and sort of public perception will say that this game is more important. And I think internally sometimes we might even say, you know, this, there's more weight placed on a game seven, right. Because your season may end or whatever, you can be the champion or not be the champion, but ultimately the game is still 48 minutes long. You have the same, you know, two sets of five players out on the court. You're running the same offense, you're running the same defense. Yeah, you're going to have some changes and all that stuff, but we're not really doing anything novel, right. And these players are all incredible experts and elite performers in that particular domain. And so trust your training and trust your preparation and trust that you are ready for this moment sort of independently from all those other sort of narratives that could be out there. And so I think if you prepare that way, you can help yourself a lot with that Game seven sleep.

I talk sometimes about a study that Ravi Allotta did from Northwestern University where Ravi studied 40 years of baseball statistics. And he was looking in particular at jet lag and the impact that it had. He wanted to dig down and see if there was a statistic somewhere that could demonstrate that jet lag had an impact on performance. And the one thing that he found, and it was a, pardon the pun, slam dunk, was that a jet lagged pitcher would cough up more home runs. Is there any. And that was the only stat that seemed to be impacted was if you are a pitcher who is jet lagged, you will give up more home runs. Not necessarily more runs in general, you'll just cough up or more hits or anything like that. More walks, no home runs. It was the only thing that was impacted by that. First of all, do you know if there's a similar study that's ever been done of basketball players? If there's something that, because to me, basketball moves much because it moves so much faster than baseball does. To me, cognition is an incredibly important piece of a basketball player's day to day experience. And, you know, we go back to the very first episode of this show we ever did with Adrian Owen, where we talked about the impact that sleep can have on cognition. Do you see any signs, is there anything you can see in a player while they're at, out on the court or statistically or anything like that that points you in the direction of. I think we need to examine how much rest they're getting.

Yeah, so there was an article that came out not too, too long ago. It was more of like a naturalistic study, you know, examining the differences in performance between the bubble and the regular season from last year. Because the bubble obviously had no travel, it had a number of advantages in terms of rest. And so they did sort of find, I think the way they described it was that actually home court advantage might be more a function of not traveling than anything else. And, you know, there are different effects going west to east versus east to west. And those sorts of things I can't recall off the top of my head, you know, what specific numbers emerged from that study that sort of demonstrated that point. Although I do know that there was something in there around points per game and turnovers, I believe was the other one. And then I know Dr. Graner has a colleague, Dr. Jonathan Charay in Canada as well, who's done some work on different kind of more nuanced basketball statistics around performance based on sleep. And again, off the top of my head, couldn't rattle off to you the different stats that would be involved in that. But I know he's done some work on that and I think that's noteworthy also. And then I think, to answer the second part of your question, in terms of behavioral stuff, I think the cognition element is, is important, you know, I think so. I do look for things like decision making. I do look for things like, you know, paying attention in the game. Right. And can you, you can sort of spot, if you watch close enough from my angle, you can see moments where players sort of check in, check out, or lose focus and make what we would call sort of mental mistakes, though I don't have any, like, real data on my end to say, well, actually the mental mistakes are more, less, you know, at any given point. But the other thing I look for less cognitive is, is emotion regulation, because that's another element we know that's affected a lot by sleep too. And so, you know, if We. I pay close attention to how the players are emotionally processing the game and processing the normal sort of ups and downs and frustrations of performance, because, like you're saying, basketball is a very fluid game, and things change a lot over the course of 48 minutes. And so I think you can sort of get a sense of where people are. And some of it's maybe like personality dynamics and personality dimensions in terms of how they show up and what they express. But some of it is, you know, if you see something kind of out of the ordinary for a particular player in terms of how they're expressing themselves or processing emotionally, I think that's noteworthy. To keep an eye on for sleep as well.

I'm interested. We've talked a lot about a lot of different sports. One of the sports that seems to have stepped out the most in terms of promoting mental health, you know, one of the reasons that I love to have Michael Grander on the show and that I like to have people like you and Chris Winter and others on the show who work with athletes is because I hope that the message out of all of these conversations for the layperson becomes, listen, if sleep is an important part of performance for an elite athlete, maybe it's something that I need to look at for my own life as well. You know, just because I don't swing a bat or bounce a ball for a living, maybe my work in my office or at my factory or whatever it is, maybe that work can be enhanced. Maybe my overall health can be enhanced just by getting better rest. The NFL, I feel like, has done an amazing job lately of pushing forth this idea to the general public that mental health is important. I'm reminded of the TV commercial that's out there where you've got one of the players saying it's okay to not be okay. Are you seeing any payoffs from the work that various sports organizations and whatnot are doing in terms of getting the mental health message out to the general public? Do you think that's resonating?

I do. I mean, I think, you know, in basketball, I can point to the Kevin Loves and the demar derozans and the stories that they've shared. And I think kind of internally across players, I think there's a level of admiration for that courage to speak out and share your story and, you know, I think normalize the conversation for a public that looks up to these players and. And really admires the work that they do. And then NFL wise, I can certainly think of, like Hayden Hurst and Dak Prescott as good Examples. And so I think there is. There are probably a number of benefits to this kind of, you know, discussion and dialogue, right? So one is, I think humanizing elite athletes is a pretty important part of. Of this experience on the player side. You know, I think it's easy for people to look at them and think, wow, they must have, you know, everything, and life must be so grand and easy. And I think there's real merit to still understanding that these players are real people with real feelings and real challenges, just like the rest of us. And then I think, you know, it sort of works in reverse, too, which is, like, if people see them as human and more accessible and like me, then I think people can start to connect with, you know, what? Like, it's actually, you know, Hayden Hurst feels the way that I feel, or, you know, Dak Prescott. Recently, I heard Steph Curry on a podcast, and it's like, yeah, those people think about it the way that I feel. And I think a next step I'd love to see happen kind of in the general public, I think. But for. Certainly for people who go to work and think about how they use sleep as a work enhancer, I think all of us are high performers in something that we're doing, right? Like, whether it's working from home, working remotely, going to an office, taking care of kids. Like, those are all performance events, right? And nobody wants to just be average at raising their kids, right? We all want to be the best we can be at raising our kids. And we have different environmental constraints or different things that we want to accomplish, you know, in those domains. But ultimately, we're all professional performers in our own world. And so I hope that these conversations start to get people to think about being a performer in their own way and similarly think of sleep as an important part of their performance in their own way. And I don't think it matters so much, you know, what you're doing or what your role is or how public or not public it is, or, you know, how many people are involved or if it's your, you know, just your close nuclear family or you're working as a CEO of a giant organization. Like, ultimately, you know, we all want to be. Be great at what it is we're doing. And I don't think anyone's role is more or less important in that. I think we all play a part in shaping the larger cultural narrative of, you know, rest and recovery is an important part of holistic health and all of us trying to be our best and recognizing and appreciating that striving in one another I think is one great way that these kind of stories can, can go a long way for helping change a little bit of that culture.

The team slogan is we the north, but he the north of their necks. Alex, thanks for making room for this in your day today. I appreciate it.

Thanks so much for having me. It was fun.

There you go. Dr. Alex Auerbach, the director of wellness and development for the 2019 NBA champion Toronto Raptors. The video episode of that one's gonna be coming out soon on our YouTube channel, which you can find along with tons of other episodes and soon a completely new new website. When you go to the snooze button.com remember to visit Neil sent me.com for insane savings on the same web hosting infrastructure that's at the heart of everything I do. Until we get together again in a few weeks. My name is Neil Headley. Hey, get some sleep, would you?