THE SLEEP DOCTOR: Why Can't You Sleep? 5 Free Sleep Fixes to Try Tonight | Dr. Michael Breus

Let's dive into sleep chronotype then. So everyone go to sleepdoctor.com and do your sleep phenotype quiz. It kind of makes sense. When I did the sleep quiz, I'm a, I'm a lion.

So early birds, we call them lions. They're up and they're ready. Lions like to make a list every day and go from step one to step two to step three. They like to have some sort of an order and organization to their life because they're up early and they're ready to get shit done. Lions have a tendency in my world to be CEOs, not CEOs, they're organizational, they're operational, they are know getting the things to happen. Here's what's interesting is lions, their melatonin turns off earlier than everybody else's and their cortisol turns on.

Doctor Michael Bruce, everyone. Dear friend. And it's such a treat when I get to do this with a friend.

Absolutely.

And I love that we had dinner one night and then that was it. It's like, okay, we've known each other forever. We're good, we're good.

Absolutely.

Yeah. You are the original sleep docker doctor, Global sleep doctor. Whenever I talk to anybody about sleep, it's you that I reference.

Thanks.

You have a way of speaking and educating with a really fun manner. You make concepts about sleep that could be boring, super tangible and fun. You're one of the most entertaining speakers that I've ever known.

Thank you.

You're welcome. So I'm so excited. You were actually one of the first people that I had on my list of people that I wanted to interview for this podcast.

Oh, amazing. Why?

You were part of the inspiration for this podcast because people come to see me and they want to know, Mona, what do I eat? What are the supplements that I need to take? How do I work out? And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's talk about why you're not happy first.

And also the fundamentals.

How are you sleeping?

Yeah, that's a biggie.

It's a biggie. Yeah. So sleep is actually the first pillar that I address with my clients. So we're going to go into all of that.

Let's do it.

But to preface this conversation, this podcast is all about becoming, you know, really merging ancient rituals in our modern day world and how we can become rooted in ourselves again in this world where wellness is so over complicated and overwhelming. I think that there's an inner knowing that we all have that we have the capacity to heal we have the capacity to feel rooted in who we are and feel a sense of, like, safety and feel good. So what are things that help you feel rooted every single day for your health and happiness?

So I want to answer that, but I want to make a comment about what you just said, which is I feel like everybody is a healer for themselves, right?

Yes.

Like, you and I are healers to people out there because we figured out how to heal and we want to spread that word. But I think everybody who's listening has the opportunity to be a healer for themselves, and I think that's really where it starts. Like, I couldn't. I couldn't help heal other people if I hadn't started to work on myself. I know you feel the same way. And so I feel like there's a lot of that getting back to the idea of rooted in something. You really picked the best for me because my Chronotypes series is all very rooted in ayurvedics, which you are the expert in, not me. And I didn't even know it when I was doing it. So that's kind of crazy at the time. But I think the. The thing that I. I'm most rooted in is simplicity. Like, sleep's not complicated. It really isn't. You know, it's so funny, somebody compared me to a celebrity chef, you know, there, which. Which kind of made sense. Right. And I said, here's the only problem. I don't have as many ingredients as everybody else. Like, I have very few recipe cards, you know, that I can put together. Like, I can put together one for how do you fall asleep? How do you wake up? I can put one together for. What do you do in the middle of the night if you. You can't fall back asleep? But there's really only so many ways to get there. And I think what a lot of people do is they. They try to push the boundaries of those ways. And hopefully today we'll get a chance to discuss, like, hey, let me give you the. The guide rails. Like, don't go past this. But then inside here, you can play around and do whatever you want.

I love it. Simplicity. I love asking that question because every single person who sits in that chair, they list something that's free.

Yeah.

So in a world where we think wellness is so expensive and over complicated, everyone has said something that is free. And this is that ancient wisdom, right?

Absolutely.

So on the flip side, you and I work with a lot of people who have over complicated wellness.

Oh, my gosh. Yes.

Almost to the point and sleep is a big part of this. We have a checklist, the things that we need to do in order to feel our best or to feel rooted again. But it's the very same checklist that's actually causing you to feel uprooted and not great in your skin again.

Yes.

Do you notice the patterns or the habits that you have that cause you to feel uprooted?

Absolutely. So, for example, when I'm using too much automation in my life, when I'm using too many proxies versus the actual thing, right? And so, like, here's a great example is when I don't fill out a sleep diary by hand, but I take my aura ring data and I put it in, right? I am not rooted anymore to my own data, right? Because I'm not pulling it out of my head and putting it there. I'm letting a ring do it for you. See what I'm saying? So the further I get away from the actual process, the less rooted I feel. Right? And with sleep, there's only a couple of ways to go, right? Like, you can't over. Well, you can overcomplicate things. And I think a lot of people do, and I think that's how they get further and further away. So one of the things I think is important is sleep optimization, this idea of sleep optimization. So I'm going to call bullshit on sleep optimization because here's the thing. Everybody's sleep is different. And you need different amounts and different qualities and different quantities based on what happened to you that day. So if I'm being honest here, like, I think when people are trying to perfect sleep, something in terms of, like, optimizing it, I think that pulls them further and further away from their root because they're trying to optimize to somebody else's root.

Oh, yeah. I love that you brought that up. And we're gonna get to wearables also. But I'm celebrating day 10 of not wearing my OURA ring.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

But these 10 days, I'm going, my.

Finger, I'm going, dude, it hijacks your day. It's awful.

It's awful. But that's addiction, right? Totally. So it just goes to show, I'm looking for a metric to define the day that I'm gonna have and if I'm on track and actually, if you can.

Really?

Great. So we'll talk about the tools after.

Okay.

So diving in. We talk endlessly about food and fitness and supplementation and all of those things, and yet here we are with all of the Science and data showing us that sleep impacts every single biological system in our body, including our mood, our memory, our hormones, our immune system. Right. After Covid. Right.

Even disease states.

Even disease states.

Right. So sleep affects every organ system and every disease state. Like, literally everything you do, you do better with a good night's sleep. Cancer has a circadian rhythm, right?

Oh, my gosh, I never thought of that.

Right. Like, all, like, think about, like, asthma. Like, so when people out there, if they've got children with asthma, you notice asthma events occur at night.

Right.

They don't occur during the day. Why is that? Because they're on a circadian cycle. Like, sleep influences so many different aspects of our life. It's. It's just so fundamental. I mean, that's why I wrote the book Sleep, Drink, Breathe. Wellness is too complicated because we all have to kind of get back to that. I guess. Maybe that's a great rooting system.

Absolutely. The basics, right. The foundation.

What's the DNA of your wellness? Right.

But why is sleep so underrated then? All of these studies are out.

I can tell you exactly why it's.

Underrated for health and longevity. Longevity is such a buzzword, and yet still we're not focusing on sleep.

Yeah. Because you can go for really long periods of time without sleep and nobody can tell. Right. And there's part of our brain that, by the way, tells us, hey, don't take a nap right now because, like, there's a saber tooth tiger chasing you. Like, if you go back to, like, evolutionary times, like, it wasn't a good idea to slow down and sleep at that period of time. Now obviously, kind of, it's a little bit different, but generally speaking, I would tell you that a lot of people have a tendency to overcomplicate it. And, and so when you overcomplicate it, you don't think about it as much, or they do the opposite. They completely forget about it and they just say, oh, you know what? I'm just going to pass out at the end of the day, hope for the best and see what happens. And here's the truth. With a few simple tools or set or rules that, by the way, are free, you can have a great night's sleep and then do every single thing that you want to do. And by the way, have your nutrition work better for you, have your immune system work better for you if you've just got sleep. But people think. People don't think about sleep. People primarily because we do have a mechanism on our head that says, don't feel Sleepy, keep going. And because they think that it's kind of this variable thing. Like we used to think of it as sleep debt. Like there was this concept like you take eight hours out and you have to put eight hours back. By the way, eight hours is a myth. Very few people need eight hours. Like, I just want to be super clear here. Like, I sleep for six and a half, I'm 57 years old and I'm the sleep doctor. Right. So learning what you need becomes critical. Critical, critical.

I love the way that your brain works. Okay. So I've never thought about sleep in terms of the evolutionary lens. Right now one of the buzzwords in wellness is cortisol. Two high cortisol. We're experiencing two high cortisol throughout the day and this sympathetic overdrive. But I never relay to that in terms of how that would impact how we're choosing to rest or how we're choosing sleep. Even though mentally we see that eight hours or whatever is good for you at a cellular level, biologically, evolutionarily, we don't give ourselves permission to do that because we think that we're under a state of stress or threat.

Yeah. And I mean, and, and it's interesting because cortisol plays such a fascinating role. Sometimes I think of cortisol as the opposite of melatonin. Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Like, sometimes go, right? Like one is go, go, go and one is stop, stop, stop. Right. And while it's quite honestly not that simple, it is in certain ways. And so, you know, the big buzzword is cortisol these days. But one of the things that we need people to start thinking about is like, you don't want to get rid of your cortisol. Cortisol is a good thing. Like, we need cortisol. And by the way, cortisol and adrenaline are the things that help us wake up. So they're part of the sleep process of getting us out of sleep. I think we just have to understand, like when we run, you know, at Mach 3 with our hair on fire and we have cortisol going all day long, our brain gets burned out. And that's different than appropriately allowing cortisol to raise to the level. Maybe, let's say while you're working out or having a spirited conversation with your partner or something along where it's appropriate and good and all of those things versus I'm going to optimize and I'm going to run a, you know, I don't know, eight minute mile and I'm going to do that. And all Of a sudden, your cortisol levels are kind of all over the place because you're stressing yourself out.

So we seek perfection, and we think that we're not doing a good job if we're not getting our eight hours. Let's talk about that a little bit, because I certainly was like, you know, I read all the science and what's trending? And we think, okay, well, it is eight hours. We gotta get back to sleeping. It's no longer five hours or it's no longer sleep when you're dead.

Right.

So here's another. Here's another metric, though, that I think might be part of, like, this imprinting that's happening in wellness. Can you debunk that eight hours then?

Absolutely. So. So first of all, let me tell you where eight hours came from. So it came from a study at Stanford that was done in the 50s where they took people and they put them into these containers and they let them sleep as long as they want. Now they gave them food and they had a bathroom and all this stuff. And at first they would sleep 8 hours, 9 hours, 10 hours, 11 hours. And they were kind of working through some of what we used to call sleep debt, right? And then all of a sudden it went down and then it was, they could only sleep 10 hours, they could only sleep nine, then they could only sleep eight. And eventually their bodies would only let them sleep eight hours and 13 minutes, plus or minus 13 minutes. So that's where the number kind of came from. Our brains have changed a lot since the 50s. The type of stimulation that we're having these days is remarkably different. I would argue the amount of stimulation is remarkably different. Also, the light exposure that we're getting from screens or from whatever is remarkably different. So I think our bodies have changed. Now, one thing you might say is, well, Michael, we've got more stress. Maybe we need more sleep. Maybe we should be sleeping nine hours or 10 hours. By the way, when people show up in my office and they say, michael, I have to sleep nine and a half to 10 hours, that's a big red flag. That means the quality of their sleep might be not so great. Could they have narcolepsy? Could they have an underlying sleep disorder? Or could they be depressed? Right. So too much sleep is not necessarily good, but too little sleep is not necessarily good either. The lower level limit, I would argue, is six hours on the. As a general guideline. But to be clear, you can't do that forever, right? It's just not going to turn out well. What I will tell you is the single most important thing that you should do, believe it or not, is not look at the metric of how much sleep you get. It should, you should look at the consistency of the timing of your wake up, not of your going to bed, your wake up time. So if people get one tip from this entire podcast, this is my big tip. Like, people always like, what's the 80, 20? Like what if I do 20% of the time? Gives me 80% of the bonus. This is it. Waking up at the same time every day. Let me explain why. So our core body temperature rises, rises, rises. And when it hits this key point, it drops, right? And sends a signal to our brain to release melatonin. Keeps dropping, dropping, dropping. At some point in time, it comes back up. And then as it goes up, we rise. When we rise up, as our body heats up and our eyes open, light hits our eyeball. And we have a special cell called a melanopsin cell in our eyeballs. And it sends a signal to our brain to turn off the melatonin faucet in our head, okay? But it sets a timer for 14 hours later. So this is called the melatonin phase response curve. You guys don't have to know what that is, but just know the number 14. So if I wake up at 6am, 14 hours later is 8pm, and that's when melatonin starts. So I want to be very clear. The time at which you wake up directly affects when melatonin is produced in your body at night. So the more consistent you are with that, the more consistent your body kicks off melatonin at the same time every night. And consistency really helps with overall sleep. So what a lot of people don't understand is the only thing you honestly need to do is wake up at the same time seven days a week. Which means you're, you get up at 6:30 on Friday, you better get up at 6:30 on Saturday and on Sunday. So people like, oh, Michael, Michael, come on, I gotta catch up on my sleep. You're killing me here, right? Here's what it ends up doing. I give you time back in your day. And a lot of people don't realize it, but if you got up at 6:30 and the whole house doesn't get up until 9, you have two and a half hours to yourself that you can do magic. Any, it's total magic. You can journal, you can meditate, you can, you can go for a walk, you can. Like, there's so many important things that you could do with that time that you don't realize. And by the way, when you force you, when you know that you're going to be Getting up at 6:30 on Saturday morning, you don't stay out until 2:00 in the morning on Friday night.

Those days are gone.

Right.

Anyways.

Right. And I mean maybe they, that's okay. And maybe every once in a while we have a 2am kind of night. But generally speaking, I ask people if, if you're going to do it. That's the, that's the metric that you want to look at. And here's what's nice about it. You can set an alarm if you need to. Yeah, right. And force that metric to occur.

This is what I love about you. You're talking about losing the rigidity. But also if you want a metric to work, we have to unlearn. It's not about the consistency when you go to bed, it's about when you wake up.

Exactly.

So full confession. After we had dinner together, Michael was looking at my Oura ring and I thought I was doing something good. I was going to bed at like 8:45, 9:00 clock at night, really early. I know, but you started to notice. Well no wonder you're waking up so much. And no, you're not consistently waking up at the exact same time in the morning. So I push my bedtime just a little bit. Now I'm consistently waking up at 5:30.

And it's like clockwork. Right.

I get my morning pages in, I get a coffee, I get a workout.

That's kind of awesome.

I'm happier when the world wakes up. My kids see me smile first thing in the morning.

It's awesome.

It's kind of awesome. That's great. And I wanted to share that story because I think that for a lot of people, a lot of people that I work with especially, they get a bad night of sleep and it's like, ah, I'm not sleeping well, I'm a terrible sleeper. They give themselves a label and then it becomes part of their belief system then part of their belief system that like I just, I don't sleep well so I'm going to get sick. I'm prone to, you know, I'm not. Well.

Well I think that also follows with what you were talking about earlier, which is when, when you look at a sleep metric in the morning and it, and it's not what you're looking for, it crushes your day and then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, right. I've had patients turn to Me and they say, oh, I got a 45 on my whatever. And then they're like, my day was awful after that. And I'm like, what would have happened if you hadn't looked at it and you didn't know you got a 45? And they're like, I don't know. I said, don't check every day. Like, here's the thing. You don't need to know what your sleep looks like every single day. Like, that's a metric that I wish that you could set it so you could only look once a week, Right?

That's genius.

It would make more sense. And also, we're really looking for trends here, right? So it's very similar to what I do with athletes. And you've worked with athletes before. You know how this works is they have a training schedule, right? And they work on their training schedule, and they make through certain phases of their training schedule to get to the place that they need to go to to perform the way they want to perform. Sleep's no different.

As a sleep doctor, then are you looking at HRV consistently?

I do look at hrv. I like looking at HRV because it is a slightly more complicated way to give me an understanding of sympathetic and parasympathetic differences. So to break that down for everybody who may or may not know what sympathetic versus parasympathetic is, we have this thing called the autonomic nervous system that kind of runs our body. Sympathetic. I. So the only way I remember it is that Rolling Stone song, Sympathy for the Devil. Like, they're all getting out there and going. And so that makes me think of, you know, activity and then parasympathetic. I think of, like, ghosts and like, you know, things that go in the night.

So it's, I think, paragliding.

Oh, I like that. Oh, that's. That's better. So. So there's these two systems, right? And what HRV tells us, heart rate variability is it tells us the differences between those. So it tells us our highest high versus our lowest low, and it gives us a number in between there. So here's where it gets interesting. So your lowest low in terms of heart rate, it's always when you're sleeping, right? And here's what's interesting is the more consistently you sleep at the hours you sleep, the lower your heart rate gets, which means the better your HRV gets.

Your HRV then goes up. Exactly. Yeah. That's how it works. So I love that as a metric because it also ties into ancient wisdom, Right? Like when you go and see an ayurvedic specialist or a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, what do they do? They go to your pulse, they check your heart rate, and they do that consistently to see how you track.

Absolutely, yeah.

So that leads me into the next question, which is a sad state of what's happening now is the rise in anxiety, anxiety related disorders, depression, opioid addiction. Also, this is like amongst adults and youth, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So when we think about sleep, how then when you're looking at someone that's hrv, if they do have that sympathetic overdrive, what do you assess first? Like, are they in a sleep crisis that they can't get out of?

Just so that I understand, is this a patient who's currently addicted to drugs or is this a patient who's in recovery or is it neither?

Let's put this through the lens of everybody out there who feels a sense of an increase of consistent anxiety and sympathetic overdrive. Let's do that.

Yep. So when we think about anxiety. So first of all, everybody's got anxiety. I've got lots of anxiety. Okay. It should be pretty obvious from this interview. So anxiety is one of the fundamental aspects that we think about when we think of sleep. I would argue 75% of sleep related issues have an anxiety component to them or a depression component to them, bar none. Like, it's really hard to tease that part out. So it's always something that we want to think about because it always helps us with sleep. Why am I pinning on anxiety? It all has to do with heart rate. If you want to get into a state of unconsciousness, you need a heart rate of 60 or below. If you're anxious, your heart rate's not below 60. That's it. Bottom line, sleep is really about giving your body time to lower its heart rate enough to get there. Right. So I give you an example in your area of special, not one of your areas of specialty, which is nutrition. Right. So we know that inside of nutrition, if you eat within an hour of going to sleep, your heart rate's up because it's digesting food. And guess what, you don't sleep so well. But if you give yourself three hours before bed and you have no food, you know, during that period of time and you've digested and stomach is cleared and all that, you sleep a lot better.

Yeah. Your body's not working.

Exactly. And that's because your heart rate is lower. Right. Same with anxiety. Right. We've got to do things to lower our heart rate. This is why Breath work turns out to be so critical. Dude, I wish they had taught me breath work when I was getting my PhD. Do you know how many people I could have helped at this point in my career had I just none learned and understood breath work?

Do you know what? My heart palpitations were out there. Worse. They never even talked to me about breath work and how to break it, how do I break tachycardia. And it's like, proven.

Yeah, I mean, it's beyond proven. There's like 30, 40 studies on this stuff. Oh, and by the way, they've been doing it for 2,000 years. Right? So, like, I think we're forgetting, like, sometimes we get so wrapped up in the, in the tech of it all and the nuance of it all and the optimization of it all that we really have to get rooted.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So what do you say then to your client then who's going through. Let's call it a season. Season of acceleration and anxiety and overdrive. So they've now defined themselves as. I'm a shitty sleeper. Dr. Bruce.

Fix me. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So the first thing we do is we give them a sleep diary. Okay. We don't hand them an aura ring. Although, I'll be honest with you, most of my patients have OURA rings and I kind of double check them with that. I don't have anything against oura. It's just the accuracy level is okay. It's the best of the worst, but it's okay. I give them an actually paper and pencil sleep diary and I have them fill it out by hand. By hand is critical. And then they become. They're monitoring themselves every day. And so what happens is, is that they are now rooted in their data. Right. And they're starting to understand because the many people think that sleep just happens to them. Oh, I'm just not a good sleeper.

Right. I've never been a good sleeper.

Right. I've never been a good sleeper. Well, how much caffeine have you been drinking? Well, what kind of bedtime routine do you have? You know, have you thought about, you know, maybe reducing your stress before bed? Like everybody think it's not true. Everybody actually was born a pretty damn good sleeper. Right. As babies. Most babies are pretty good sleepers. I mean, there's a few things that can happen temperament wise, but generally speaking, most kids can sleep. And so we all unlearn.

Yeah.

How to sleep. And all I'm saying is we need to get back to the basics of it and be able to figure out so what exactly do I do to the. With these anxious patients? Let me give you some tactics, because I'm a tactics kind of guy. So one of the first things I do is I say, okay, number one is move the phone to a different room. Okay? Now this is incredibly hard for people, and it's so stupid because people say to me, well, what if I get an emergency call in the middle of the night? Okay, really? Like, how many of those have happened in your lifetime? Maybe one, maybe two. And. And people get paranoid about it. And then if you put it out, then it increases their anxiety, which is the opposite of what we want to do. So what I tell them is, here's what we're going to do. We're going to put your ringer on super loud, but we're going to put it across the room so you can't see it.

Love it.

And the reason is, is because what people will do as falling asleep or wake up is they'll grab it and they'll look at the time. They instantly do the mental math and now they're pissed. Right? And that's we're going in the opposite direction of sleep. Sleep. People should think of sleep as like energy transfer.

I love that.

Right. So during the day we have energy at a particular level to be able to do this, like have an interview, have a great conversation, have some food, do exercise, do all these things. But then we still have roughly the same amount of energy. We need to focus that energy in a slightly different way and we need to soothe that energy because we still need energy to sleep. Like, to be clear, you don't put the car in park.

Right?

Right. Like, that isn't what happens here. Right. Actually, you put the car in first gear, you put it into second gear. And then sometimes, like, I'm not sure people know this, but during REM sleep, your brain uses more glucose than when you're awake.

It's processing a lot, a lot.

A lot of information is going on in there, right? So thinking through some of those ideas, I think becomes critically important. So one of the things is phone across the room. That's an easy one. The other thing is, if you can some level of consistent bedtime, don't kill yourself over it. If you don't happen to get in bed at the same time every night, I don't care because I know your alarm is going to be waking you up in the morning. So that part is going to be good. The other big thing, relax, right? Like figure out how to relax. And I'm the only sleep Doctor in the universe. You're not going to like this, but I'm going to say it anyway. It's okay to fall asleep with the television on. Yes. You've heard it. I know. Did you see a roller eyes? Did you guys see your roller eyes?

Abby, it's one of my questions today because I knew, like, we disagree on this, but talk about it.

Yeah, so. So here's the thing is. And here's. Here's why I allow it to be done. So number one part of the reason is. And you know this, you know, my wife, she falls asleep with the television on every single night. And so, you know, I'm not getting divorced. I've tried. I told her I was going to fix her one day. She. That didn't go over particular. Try fixing your partner. It doesn't go particularly well. Right. So. So. But with some people, they watch television and they're not really watching it. Their eyes are closed. They're listening out of what I call the corner of their ear. And it's not like it's something good. It's like an old episode of Seinfeld. But it's enough to distract them from monkey mind.

Yes.

Right. Because that's where they get it. Now, if that's your gig, I don't think I have a problem with it. But if you'd like a better way to do that. It's called four, seven, eight breathing. Okay? So developed by Dr. Andrew Wild, this was not my, you know, idea, but it is a great one. And by doing 4, 7, 8 breathing, you can lower your heart rate to about 60 or below. And so what I do with a lot of my patients, as they're either falling asleep or if they wake up in the middle of the night, if they need to use the restroom, they go to use the restroom, they come back, and then they start this 4, 7, 8 breathing. And here's what's great about it, is it forces you to concentrate. So I have them actually vision it. So if you're doing so just for everybody's edification, 4, 7, 8 breathing is you slowly breathe in for a count of four. You hold for a count of seven. You push for a count of eight. What I have my patients do is keep their eyes closed and they imagine the number in their mind's eye. So they see a 4, then a 3, then a 2, then a 1, and then they see the 7, 6, 5, and then they back and forth. So they're envisioning the number, which distracts them from thinking about anything else. So Monkey mind is now off the table. And because they're actually doing the breath work, they're lowering their heart rate. So it's a twofer.

Absolutely.

Right.

It changes your state, gives your monkey mind something to focus on. It just makes sense.

Right.

Okay. So the people out there who have a TV in your room, it's like, okay, I know. For everyone on my community. Close your ears. Yeah. I always say that your bedroom should be for sleep, sex, and reading. That's it.

And. And to be fair, it would be great if that worked. Actually worked all the time for everyone. But, you know, I mean, also culturally speaking, there are people that have a family bed. There's a lot of stuff that goes on in bedrooms. And so I think we have to be thoughtful, but at the same time, still give some guide rails.

Yeah.

Right. And so what I tell people all the time is you can do whatever you want to help yourself fall asleep, as long as it doesn't disrupt your bed partner. Because there's usually somebody else in there. Right. And something else is potentially going on. And you want to. You want to be thoughtful there as well.

Absolutely. Let's dive into sleep chronotype then.

Sure.

So one of my favorites. One of the best things that I understood and this is I was a practitioner, but again, sleep wasn't really focused until I had kids. Then I saw, okay, I'm sleep training my kids. But I recognized that I went into a pattern of sleep with them that then I had to sleep train after that. But I needed to understand what type of a sleeper I was, how I needed to sleep. I'm the type of person who. I can't sleep with white noise at all. I need to hear the pin drop.

Got it.

Silence. Right.

Well, you do live in an environment where there's. It's pretty silent out here.

Right. I know people call me quiet and calming. It's like, yeah, it kind of makes sense. When I did the sleep quiz, I'm a lion.

Oh, that. That actually makes sense.

Does it? So everyone go to sleepdoctor.com sleepdoctor.com and do your sleep chronotype quiz.

Yep. Or you can go to chronoquiz.com. it's in both places so people can find it. And if you just type in animal sleep quiz, it usually pops up as well. Okay, so let me give everybody an idea of what are chronotypes, because we've been talking about them, but I didn't define them. Believe it or not, everybody out there knows this concept. But you haven't Heard the word chronotype. What you've heard is early bird or night owl. So if anybody out there has ever been called an early bird or a night owl, we're talking about you folks. So it turns out this is genetic. It is not something that you get to pick and choose. I can't count the number of people who say I'm an early bird because I force myself to wake up at 5am I. Dude, you ain't an early bird if you're forcing yourself. If you wake up naturally at 5:30 without an alarm, you bet you're an early bird. Scene, right? And so what we, what we wanted to do was understand the genetic sleep schedule. And so it all actually happened based on a patient. So I had a patient who came to me and quite honestly, I failed. I couldn't fix her. No matter what we did, we couldn't figure it out. And it was getting worse and worse at work. We tried cognitive behavioral therapy, we tried medication, we tried supplementation, everything. And when I fail really hard, I bring them back in, don't charge them a dime, and I just assess. Like I bring them in for a three hour long, like what did I miss? Thing. About two hours into the conversation, my patient turned to me and she said, this is when I was practicing on the east coast. She said, you know, if I just lived in California, everything would be great. I'm like, what are you talking about? She said, well, if I could, if I could live on the east coast but work on California time three hours late. And all of a sudden was like, oh, I think, I think I know what's going on here. I think genetically she's a super duper night owl.

Yeah, she's not a morning person.

Right. And it doesn't matter how many drugs you give them or how much cognitive behavioral therapy, you can't fool mother Nature, right? So I, I turned to her and I was like, I think I figured it out. You just need to go to work later and get up later. And she was like, michael, I can't do that. She was like, I'll lose my job. She's like, I'm gonna be honest with you, I think I'm gonna lose my job anyway. Like, I've gotten three write ups and I'm on like double secret probation. And I was like, well, can I call your boss and ask him? And she was like, go for it. So I called boss the next I'd met her on Thursday. On the Monday, I called boss. And I was like, hey, working with so and so And I've got an idea. Can we have her do this, come in three hours later and leave three hours later? He said, I don't really care. She's getting fired at the end of the week.

Oh, my gosh.

And I'm like, okay, no pressure, right? Like, can I have the week and can we try this experiment? He's like, no problem. So I called him up on Friday. Literally the first words out of his mouth. I've got three more employees I want you to talk to.

Oh, my gosh, Michael, right?

So, like, kind of gives you goosebumps, right? And so you're like, okay, there's something here. So then I started to say, well, there can't just be one late, late, late chronotype. Let's look into the literature and let's start to understand more. So I went into the genetics of it all and I discovered a fourth chronotype. So we know there are early birds, we know there are night owls and other people in between. It turns out there are people who are just messed up from either environmental problems or genetic problems. So let me go through all four of them so everybody can see. So early birds, we call them lions, right? Because who wouldn't want to be the king or queen of the jungle anyway, right? I'm a mammal, not a bird, right? I wanted, I. I wanted something that was inspirational, right, to get to. And my lions have got an interesting personality, right? So if you know these people, they. So first of all, if you don't know if you have a lion in your life, they've sent you an email at 6 o' clock in the morning. And for sure, you know that you've done it, you know you've done it, right? That, that's what happens is because they're up and they're ready. Lions like to make a list every day and go from step one to step two to step three. They like to have some sort of an order and organization to their life because they're up early and they're ready to get shit done. Lions have a tendency in my world to be CEOs, not CEOs, they're organizational, they're operational, they are, you know, getting the things to happen. Bears are people in the middle. We used to call them hummingbirds. I don't know why, but we call. I call people in the middle bears, which makes up almost 55,0% of the population. Only 15 lions, 50% bears. I know, it's. It's people surprising. Everybody thinks they're a lion or a wolf. Everybody Does. And that's nothing could be further from the truth. So bears are folks in the middle. And by the way, I wish I was a bear. Just to be clear, bears are perfect. Like well, 9.

5.

9 to 5 works perfect for a bear, right? Like society is built for them. Yeah, because it's 50 of society, right? So night owls become wolves, right? And that's me. I'm a, I've been a late nighter my entire life. Only once I turn like early 50s did things start to change. We'll talk about that in a second. But I became, I've been a night owl for, honestly, as long as I can remember. And here's what's interesting, by the way. So first of all, I don't think I've told anybody anything new, right? Like, I mean, let's be fair. Early birds, I changed the name to lions. Night owl, I changed the name to wolves. People in the middle, I changed the name to bears. Okay, Michael, that's not some great scientific discovery. What I did discover was a fourth type. And this is somebody that has an irregular hormonal pattern. So here's what's interesting is lions, their melatonin turns off earlier than everybody else's and their cortisol turns on. Right, we were talking about cortisol earlier, but with wolves that exact process happens three hours later. And it's all due to genetics, right? So everybody out there, by the way, has wolves in their lives if they have children. Because guess what, every 13 year old is a wolf, right? So it's interesting because we all go through all of these categories as we age. So lions are babies because babies go to bed early and they wake up early, right? And then middle schoolers are kind of in the middle. And bears, then adolescents become wolves. And then your chronotype seems to set for about 30, 40 years. And then when you hit your 50s, right, and melatonin production starts to slow down, you go backwards. So if you, if your parents are still alive and you go out to dinner with them, what time do they want to go out to dinner? 4:30 in the afternoon. And you're like, what's wrong with you, mom? And they're like, that's when I'm hungry. It's because their, their circadian rhythm is marching backwards. So what's so cool about knowing your chronotype is it's like a hack to your entire life. So let me give you an example. So I used to be in charge of waking the kids up in the morning. As you can imagine, that could be either really great or incredibly annoying coming from me. Right. And so with my. When my daughter was home, Carson, I would walk in and it was like, you know, 7:15 and she had to get ready for school. And I'd like, hey, Carson, good morning. Hey, what's on the plate for today? Trying to wake her up and she'd be like, leave me alone. Like I could barely get three words out of her. Right, right.

You lost a ball of energy walking in.

But if I walked into her bedroom at two o' clock in the afternoon when I know her late wolf chronotype has got her at her best energy, and I sit on the bed with her and I say, hey, Carson, what have you got on the plate? Today I get a two hour conversation with my daughter. There's nothing more important than a two hour conversation with my daughter. Right. So it's so cool because it opens windows for you, for people, and you can identify their chronotypes very easily. Right. It's kind of like this great unlock. I can teach people the perfect time of day to have sex, eat a cheeseburger, ask their boss for a raise. All based on when are your hormones at a particular moment in time where they're elevated so you can take advantage of them.

And knowing who you're speaking to, I'm just thinking about how you can use this to your advantage at work, in the bedroom, with your partner, with your family, with your siblings, with your children.

Absolutely. Believe it or not, I've even had people use it in business.

Yeah. I believe in.

So you know Dave Asprey from Bulletproof? Yeah. So when I came out with this concept, he was one of the first people, and I love Dave for doing it. To grab hold of this concept, he had his entire company chronotyped and then he would set meetings based on your chronotype. Because if you're a wolf and I'm scheduling a 7am creative meeting, it isn't going to go well.

What a way to change the culture of your company and in your house as well.

Absolutely.

And I want this to. I want to hover on this a little bit because how many people are trying to be a certain way because media and the wellness culture is saying that you need to be a certain way to be healthy or for optimized health or for aging. Well, but no one's talking about this. I know one of those areas is circadian rhythm right now, which is also having a moment.

Yep.

If you're a night owl and people are saying you got to wake up with the sun. You got to be out there while the sun gets up. Go and look at the light. But you're.

They're stupid.

Three hours ago.

They're wrong.

How disruptive is that?

Oh, it's awful. Well, it's awful if you have the wrong chronotype for it. It's fantastic. If you're a lion.

Yeah, right, exactly.

Let's go. Right. But, but here's the, here's what I would say. And maybe, maybe this is a story that would detail it. So there's a monk who wrote a book called the Monk in the Ferrari. His name is Robin Sharma. And so I was a credible guy, incredible guy. And I walked up to him, he had given a lecture. And we were in a conference together, Joe Polish, one of Joe Polish's genius networks. And. And I said, robin, I said, I'm just going to be honest with you. I would say 30 to 40% of the population physically cannot do what you're.

Telling them to do because he has a 5am Club.

Because he has a 5am club. And so it's like you are now telling people that they're going to fail. You are setting them up for failure if you're forcing a night owl to wake up at 5am and he took that. It was interesting. He listened to it. I'm not sure what he did with it, but I have another friend who did something with it. So I have a good friend. His name is Hal Elrod. He wrote the Miracle Morning. Yeah, right. And so I've known Hal for a long, long time. He actually interviewed me for his documentary. And I, I said to him, I said, you can have a miracle morning, but you don't have to have it at 6am wow. And he jumped on that and he was like, you're absolutely right. So we can all have this morning routine and have this great morning and do the things that we want to do. But for lions, it's going to be at 4:30, 5 o', clock, and for wolves it might be at 7:30, 8 o'. Clock.

I think I remember booking a dinner with you and I'm like, can we do it at like five? And you're like seven. Can we meet halfway?

Right, Exactly.

Yeah. And I think about so many people that I work with who tend to be very creative and their best ideas come to them at night. Right.

I mean, when's the last time a creative, you know, at 2:00 in the afternoon was like, eureka. Like, it never happens.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. So this is very insightful. Please Listen to this. Know when your magic hour is to function. And maybe you adopt your healthy lifestyle or your magic morning or your magic evenings. Maybe it's like magic 10:00pm or magic 11:00pm or something.

Well, if I'm honest with you, if you go to Chrono quiz and you and you do the quiz, I start sending you information to tell you exactly what that is. Like, I actually send you what time should you go to bed, what time should you wake up. I tell you when you should drink coffee. Believe it or not, there is a perfect time for drinking coffee. There's also a perfect time for drinking alcohol. Like, you would be shocked to learn that your alcohol is a great example, right? Your body has a particular time period where it metabolizes alcohol significantly better than another time.

When is that?

Happy hour. No shit. It really is happy hour. Like, I swear to God.

Okay, that makes sense.

So what happens? Guess what happens at happy hour. Your liver creates alcohol dehydrogenase around somewhere between 3:30 and 6:30 at night. It's a circadian rhythm of the liver. Right? And so it's a liver. I don't know if it's the liver that does it. I think it's liver. Yeah, that's right. So what's interesting there is your body is actually already telling you these things. Like, I'm not sure that bartenders from the 1800s figured this out from a circadian rhythm standpoint, but what they did figure out is I can feed that person more alcohol during this period of time so I can make more money. So this is their drinking time. And that's kind of what it is. Once you go past it, you have problems.

Shocking. We have to ask why. For everything.

Right?

When I'm thinking about this through the lens of meditation.

Oh, one of my things.

Let's talk about mindfulness for a second because. So at the ashram, we meditate twice a day. The first time is 6 o' clock in the morning. The second time is 6 o' clock at night. Some people meditate better in the morning, some people meditate better at night. Now I understand why. Chronotypes for sure, for everyone listening. If there's a health ritual that you have that you just say, I can't do it, it's not for me. Maybe switch the time and see if it feels like more ease for you.

I think it's a great idea. And that's kind of what we talk about in the book, is there is actually a perfect time of day to do absolutely every single activity you can think of, like, there's actually research on it. So in my third book called the Power of When, we actually detailed this out. So every single chapter, like, I can tell you what's the best time of day to tell a joke, believe it or not. Like, when are you funniest? Like, who knows? Maybe Seinfeld would want to know something. Oh, well, he's pretty funny anyway. But you know what I'm saying? Literally everything you do, we can figure out the timing of it. And then it gets really interesting because once you kind of have that schedule set, it's kind of done for you.

That's it.

So there's very little stress. Right. Because remember, we were talking about stress and how does stress affect sleep? I think the biggest way that stress affects sleep is you didn't get the shit done during the day that you wanted to get during the day. And you just keep pushing your bedtime, pushing your bedtime, pushing your bedtime. And sleep's not an on, off switch. Right. It's more like slowly pulling your foot off the gas, slowly putting your foot on the brake. Like there's a process that should occur. I tell people all the time, like, if you fall asleep in under five minutes. That's bad. Yeah, that's bad. That means you're sleep deprived.

You're too tired.

You're too tired.

Is there any validity to the yawns? If you yawn once, you should go to bed. If you lunt. You hear that?

I have heard that. So yawning is such a weird phenomenon because it's socially contagious social media. Right. So if I yawn, you would start yawning. And we're not 100% sure why that is. There are several theories about yawning. The biggest one is boredom and oxygen deprivation. Right. Is kind of what people are thinking. But generally speaking, what I tell you is when children or babies yawn, it's probably tired. When adults do, it's probably boredom or sleep deprivation.

Got it diverted for a second.

You're allowed.

It's your pod Now I know. Now I can debunk it at a party.

Exactly.

All right, let's go back to the lens of health through obesity. And I'm going to do this. You and I sit on the scientific advisory board for an amazing company called iFits.

Yeah. I'm psyched to be there.

Me, too. We were on a call this morning, and you'd mentioned the connection with sleep and weight loss.

Correct.

What Was the stat? 70% of American adults are overweight. Yeah. And studies are now Showing that poor sleep disrupts your ghrelin and your leptin.

Which are your very hormones. Very. You have nailed it.

I talk about the hormones, but now I'm looking at them through a different lens. So now for optimizing someone's sleep and for people out there who are still stuck looking for a protocol, a fad, a diet, the red pill, or anything else, stop. Look at your biology, and help us understand how sleep can impact weight loss goals.

So I'm just gonna throw a bunch of data at you. So to be fair, I actually wrote a book on this topic. So my second book is called the Sleep Doctor's Diet. Lose Weight through Better Sleep. So I actually know a tremendous amount about this in particular, so I'm going to break it down and give you some of the summary points. So we don't have a pod that's just talking about weight loss.

Yeah.

So first of all, everything gets bad when you become sleep deprived. Okay? So sleep deprivation causes insulin resistance. All right? So I want to. I want to break that down for just a second here. So here's what ends up happening, is the more sleep deprived you are, the more cortisol is in your system. Right. And insulin and cortisol don't get along particularly well. And so when you've got a lot of insulin in your system, you end up need. With cortisol, you end up needing more insulin. Now, what does insulin do? Insulin is kind of like the doorman to the apartment building. Okay. Right. So what insulin does is it opens the door and lets sugar in, but only a certain amount. Like, only if you live in the apartment do you get into the apartment building. Right. And so what ends up happening is, is when you have insulin resistance, or doorman resistance, you end up with the sugar staying outside the apartment, or high blood sugar sense. Right?

Yeah.

That becomes highly problematic. So number one, when you become sleep deprived with too much cortisol, you have excess insulin, which means you've got more sugar in your blood. Number one, that ain't good. Number two, you're. You're. You're. When you become sleep deprived, your appetite goes down. Very specifically for. Because. I'm sorry, your appetite goes up. Yeah, sorry. Because it's foraging for resources.

Right, Right.

So your brain is saying, I don't know why I'm awake, but I better get more food in here. And your metabolism slows down at the.

Same time, I want muffins, I want carbs, give me pasta.

So that's where it gets really interesting is because the cortisol is flying around. The easiest way to dampen cortisol in your brain is, is to eat a Snickers because it produces serotonin almost instantly and you get that feedback loop and then you're eating Snickers every time you're sleep deprived, which is a terrible, terrible idea. So once again, sleep deprivation. And by the way, sleep deprivation is different for everyone. Like me, sleeping six and a half hours could cause sleep deprivation in you and might be perfectly fine in me. So people need to understand where that is. But again, your appetite goes up and your metabolism goes down and then hunger kicks in. That's ghrelin. So there are two hormones that are very interesting, Leptin and ghrelin. Ghrelin starts with a G, so I remember that as the go hormone, right? And so when ghrelin increases, that increases hunger, which by the way is different than appetite. So in your brain those two things are different. But to be clear, they're both elevated when you're sleep deprived, which ain't good, right? Leptin is the, is the hormone of satiety, meaning when you feel full, and that's lowered by 15%. So just as a summary, when you get sleep deprived, your metabolism goes down, your appetite goes up, your hunger goes up and your feelings of fullness go down. This is not good. And then the Snickers hit, the cravings hit. Because when you're in this state, you crave more food. And in fact, you crave high fat, high caloric food because of the cortisol that's running around in your head. It's trying to dampen it. So quite honestly, every single diet out there needs to have a sleep component to it or it's simply not going to work. Now one question that I've gotten fairly recently is, are GLP1s the new CPAP machine? Are these the new way for better sleep? And so here's what I'm going to tell you, they'll help. But to be clear, GLP1s aren't magic. Okay. Will they help lower some of your cravings? Probably. But to be honest, if you just weren't sleep deprived, guess what? You probably wouldn't have them. So, and we also know that when you're sleep deprived, your metabolism doesn't function nearly as well in terms of efficiencies. So what ends up happening is you end up storing more fat the more sleep deprived you are. Again, if, if all people did was figure out how much they needed to sleep, let's call it seven hours, just to be kind of in the middle, and they got that on the regular. Everything works better. Everything.

All roads lead back to sleep.

I mean, it's so funny because when I first started in this business, like, I never really thought how important sleep was. Like, I got in there, I was doing a rotation in school, and I was like, this is cool. Like, I really am digging this stuff. But I've been in this 26 years now. It is so fundamental to overall health. And I mean, you know, now the big discussion is longevity. Oh, we want to live longer and healthier lives and blah. There ain't no way you're doing it without sleep.

Your body needs to recover. Yeah, biohack all you want. Unless you're recovering, it's not gonna work.

Right, Agreed.

Did you ever go through a sleep journey yourself? Like, did you have challenges sleeping? Were you on medication?

So, no. It's so funny because people always like, did you or somebody you love do this? And is that why you're, you know, interested and attached to it? And if I'm being honest with you, nope. Yeah, I just thought it was cool.

Yeah. I can see your brain get excited about how you can deconstruct things. And, like, I just. I love that about you. When you're working with your clients, then. Are you looking at biomarkers? We talked about, obviously, insulin. Are you look. Are you wearing glucose monitors? Are you looking.

Great question. So everybody asks me, what supplement should I take, Michael?

Okay, let's go there.

Yep. And. Well, because you're talking about blood work, I want to talk about supplements.

Yeah.

And so I have a theory, and my theory is very straightforward. I do not recommend supplementation until you have done blood work. So I know what your deficiencies are. I am not an md and so I ask you to go to your MD or go to Quest or wherever you want to go to get your. Your blood work done. And I want to know what deficiencies you have. I can assure you that nobody out there has a deficiency in Ashwagandha.

Okay, thank you.

It just doesn't exist. But they probably have a deficiency in vitamin D, in magnesium, or in iron. And all three of those are critical, critical, critical to the sleep process. And so when people come up to me, they're like, just give me the one sleep supplement that I need. It's like, bruh, you need a. You need a blood test, and let's figure that out first and let's get this unit up to par levels and working. Once we do that, then we know if you have a sleep problem or Not. But until then, we're really throwing darts at something that might be a really easy fix.

This is again, where, like, science. This is the cool part about science. Let's use science to understand our biology and our physiology and use that for you, because whatever tips you hear about working for somebody else out there, they're not you. They don't have your life, your history, your genetics.

What's interesting is everybody's health journey is different and strange and odd and different things occur. And it's really, really hard when somebody sees somebody doing something and they think that person's kind of like me. And that should work with me. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like, your husband and I could be the same height, the same size, and we could have markedly different reactions to every protocol that we've talked about so far. Right. And so what people have to do is they have to stop cheating. They have to get back to the basics. They need a sleep diary. They need a week's worth of baseline to see what's going on. And 90% of the time, people know what to change. Right. You and I were talking about this before the pod. Sometimes I feel like all I am is an accountability partner, but sometimes that's okay. Yeah, Right. Like, sometimes that's what people need is, you know, Michael, to get on the phone and say, because here's the best part is they know when they're going to see me. I'm not going to pull any punches. Right. Because they've been doing the sleep diary, they're turning it in. I'm seeing their data. Right. And so they. It almost forces them into doing the things we want them to do.

You got it right. Showing up. Yeah. And if a girlfriend says that Ashwagandha really worked for her and it's a game changer, doesn't mean that it's going to work for you.

Oh, and by the way, she might not be taking the same medication as you. And Ashwagandha might interact with that medication, and you might have a real problem on your hands.

And no Ayurvedic practitioner would ever put you on Ashwagandha long term. Ever.

Yeah, like that's not what it's for.

You got it. And it's a nightshade. I digress.

Right.

All right. Melatonin, Hot Topic.

Yeah.

I worked with a couple who's giving melatonin to their kids, and I almost lost. Lost it. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. And it's, it's. This isn't with judgment. A lot of people hear that. It's something that they can do online and then they try it, and we're all desperate to help our kids. But again, this is one of those situations where it will affect your hormones. Right. I'm going to let you take over.

Yeah. So melatonin is a hormone. That's what people don't understand. And so, and, and for some reason, back in the early 1970s, it got under the FDA's guideline. And so now you can, you can get it in any health food store.

Around, you know, at the airport.

Yeah, yeah. Which is also problematic. Like to be clear, outside of the United States, melatonin is by prescription only.

Yeah. In Europe.

Yeah, In Europe, in Australia, in all these places, like, you can't just go and get melatonin. And by the way, there's a reason for that. Okay, so let me go on my little diatribe about melatonin. So, first of all, most people don't know and understand a lot about melatonin, so I'm going to give you some really crazy interesting statistics. So at high dosages, melatonin is used as a contraceptive. Yes. Let that sink in for half a second. It is birth control.

Wow.

Think about it. It changes your circadian rhythm, so it, guess what, it changes your menstrual cycle.

That makes sense.

Right. And so at high, high dosage, you can use it. So when we hear about parents giving melatonin to young adolescent females, nothing could be worse in my brain, adding a contraceptive to a young developing female when it's not necessary to do so. I understand that there are situations that, that, that can warrant that, but generally speaking, no, it's a bad idea. Number two, 96% of children make four times the amount of melatonin that they need. So all you're doing is overdosing them. Okay. And by the way, you're teaching your kids they need a pill to sleep.

And you wonder why they're showing up with not focusing at school or being able to sit still.

Yeah, all of the above. Right. But most importantly, they think they need a pill to sleep. Why would you ever add that association there when it's not necessary? Like what I tell people all the time with medication because they come to me all the time like, oh, Dr. Bruce, you know, can you, can you help me convince my doctor to put me on medication? I'm like, well, we probably can, but then you have a sleep problem and a pill problem. Like, why don't we just fix your sleep problem without pills and see how you do right now? Melatonin is not dangerous. I want to be clear about that. However, most people don't know Melatonin interacts with several different medications. One of them is birth control. Makes sense, right? And so here's where it gets really interesting. So as an example, when I was working in our sleep laboratory in Georgia early in my career, one of the. One of our assistants there was trying to get pregnant, couldn't get pregnant, and kind of decided that she was no longer going to be worried about it, things like that. We ended up getting her on melatonin and all of a sudden she got pregnant.

Wow.

It just rejiggered her cycle. Right. So, like, you sit there and you think about this and you're like, come. Like, this is a major substance that has some pretty big implications. Okay, so how much melatonin should you take if you're gonna take it? That's another big problem. So the correct dosage is a half a milligram. A half a milligram is the correct dosage.

Was it three grams? That's usually the standard.

Three. Yeah, three, five or ten.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've even seen them in 20, by the way, if you take melatonin and you have weird dreams, you are officially overdosing. Like, that is a well known fact. So here's the. So here's what's crazy about this. So there was a guy out of MIT, Dr. Wortman, who discovered exactly the dose, which is half a milligram, to get plasma concentration levels up so that it causes sleep, and he patented the dose.

You can patent a dose back then.

Apparently you could. And so he didn't patent higher dosages. And so every company didn't want to pay him his royalty, so they just said, let's put in more. Now, it also begs the question, similar to testosterone, which is a hormone, if you start taking it, will your body stop producing it? This is a question I get often. The answer is no. We know that for a fact. You can be on melatonin for years. Stop. And your body will institute and reproduce melatonin again. But once again, adding something that doesn't necessarily need to be there isn't a good idea. And the interaction doesn't just happen with birth control. It happens with all SSRIs and antidepressants. The number one drug that people are on in the world are antidepressants.

Yep.

Okay. It also affects diabetes medication, it affects heart, blood pressure medication. So again, just don't go willy nilly to this to the drugstore and grab your bottle of melatonin. Bad idea. Talk with your doctor. By the way, 90% of doctors have no idea that their interaction effects. So you're gonna have to go and look stuff up online. Yeah, Come to my website. I've got all kinds of information about this for you. And it also begs the question of Benadryl. Okay. Because a lot of people will do this, especially with their children. They'll just give them a dose of Benadryl to make them fall asleep. So once again, bad idea. For adults in particular, all of the PM medications, all it is, is an analgesic plus Benadryl. Right? So it's ibuprofen plus Benadryl or acetaminophen plus Benadryl. And I'm giving Benadryl a bad rap, but it should get a bad rap.

I agree.

Benadryl is an anticholinergic. And when you take it on the regular, you get Alzheimer's period, like full fucking stop. Right? And what do you think Zquil is? It's all Benadryl. That's all it is.

Different name.

Yeah. So you've got to read the labels. There isn't, there's not a shortcut, but you don't need a shortcut. Your body knows how to do this. If you just leave it alone and let it do it. I swear to you, if you just have some guidelines, like go to bed a little bit later, not earlier, which is everybody's tendency. I'm going to get in bed early so I can catch up on my sleep. Never works. Okay. Wake up at the same time every day. Get your lock and load, seven hours. Just start there, see how you do. You'll be shocked at how much better you feel.

Stop messing with your circadian rhythm.

Yeah.

And supplements are just that. They're to supplement what you're not getting in your diet. And even for the things that are really great, I cycle my clients in and out and I look at their biology to see what you actually need. We're living in this like pill popping revolution, right?

It's getting out of control optimization idea. Which is why I like why I like the idea that you're presenting, which is rooted in wellness. You're going back to the roots. You're going back to the basics, like where your influences came from with Ayurveda and living on the ashram and all of those amazing things that you did. Like, that's where health is, folks. Like I, you know, biohacking is a lot of quackery. Okay. Like, let's be very clear.

I just Hate the name itself. Don't hack your body. There's nothing to hack.

It seems like a bad idea. Right. Like, I want to work with my body.

You got it.

Right. Like, my energetic flow is incredibly important. And if you can tap into it, it will lead you every place you're supposed to go.

Yeah. And tap into these things that we're talking about when. When the time is there.

Yeah.

Is there some herbs that you do recommend in times of need?

So it depends. Like I said, I do the blood work, but if somebody's really hurting, I will tell you. Living here in California, I've explored cannabis quite a bit to try to understand because it is recreationally legal here in the state of California, it's also medicinal. And a lot of people ask. And so here's what I can tell you about cannabis, because that is something that I can see my way to for short periods of time. And to be clear, sometimes we have to use something to break the cycle of insomnia, because if somebody's only getting three hours a night, it's almost impossible to help them. You want to give them something that they can grab onto and maybe get four hours of sleep or five hours of sleep and kind of work through. When I look at cannabis, here's what I'll tell you. There is almost no data to suggest that CBD makes you sleep. Almost none. However, CBD can lower your anxiety and lower your pain. And if you have pain that's preventing you from sleeping or you have anxiety that's preventing you from sleeping, CBD might help. But CBD ain't making you sleep. It's lowering your pain or lowering your anxiety. Yeah, right. Which, by the way, There are about 100 different ways you can go do that other than CBD. CBN, as in nighttime, is the. Is the constituent that I has got the most data on it. Two studies. To be clear, people have been looking for this for a while, and quite frankly, most cannabis disrupts sleep.

Absolutely right.

In fact, when you get above 5 milligrams of THC, what we have a tendency to see happens with most people is their REM sleep goes down and their heart rate goes up. And remember, I've been beating that horse. Heart rate, heart rate, heart rate. We want it down, not up. So the goal here is not to get stoned and go to bed.

I know it might seem tempting.

Right? Right. And you know what? It's the end of the day, I.

Just want to relax.

I'm just going to take a few hits. It'll be fine. No no, no. Treat it like a medicine and it'll work like a medicine.

Yeah.

If you treat it recreationally, you're just getting drunk before bed.

You got it. I just got a client off thc, seven years consistent. It's not working. So we finally are looking for other solutions. So just a ritual at night, red light therapy, legs up the wall with breathwork.

Oh, I love it.

And he's sleeping again.

Yeah. I mean, if, if we, it's, it's so amazing. If we just give people alternatives.

You got it.

And, and sometimes hold their hand. Yeah, right. And be like, hey, I know this is a little on the scary side. You've been, you know, using weed to help you sleep for the last seven years. But let's run a couple of experiments. Let's see if we can find something that's a healthier, better solution. If we don't, maybe we find a modified way of using your cannabis differently for you. But again, it's probably not working for you. And I think that's what we've kind of seen together. Like that's the root, you know, that I'm taking with people. And to be clear, I'm not recommending cannabis for sleep, but what I am saying, telling people is a vast number of people use cannabis for sleep. Um, every time I go into a dispensary and I go into quite a few to survey them, is there's only three reasons why people go to a dispensary. Sleep, pain, recreation. That's it.

Wow.

That is it. And so, and when you go to these dispensaries, there's hardly ever any sleep products. Like everybody's got a brand and then they have an offshoot of a sleep product. But there's almost no companies that were developing straight up sleep related products. And so you have to be thoughtful and kind of look around.

Can you speak to the listeners who they might, their doctor prescribed them something like, what is it, Ambien or another sleep aid Sonata?

Lunesta.

They got the prescription, they use it, they're dependent on it. Shocking. Years later, they still take it, but it's still not working. But they were told that it was safe and that they. Now there's fear around stopping it.

Yeah.

Can you just share with us, can they get off of it? Should they inquire?

Yeah, so. So this is absolutely one of the more important questions that I get asked, which is, well, let me tell you the story. So I have patients who come to me and here's what they say. I've been taking Ambien for 15 years. I only sleep three to four hours a night. And I say, okay, well why are you still taking the Ambien? It's clearly not working. And the first thing they say is, can you imagine how bad my sleep would be if I didn't take Ambien? That's the logic, right? So number one, that's super sad. Like we have to break that cognitive thinking right away because that's not necessarily the case. Can we get people off of drugs? Absolutely we can. But you have to use a taper schedule. Nobody should ever, ever, ever cold turkey themselves off of sleep meds. Because here's what happens. You're awake for four days and the only way they can get you to sleep is giving you a med. And so now you're right back to where you were, but with a traumatic situation that will have occurred. So what I do with all of my patients with their prescribing doctor is I contact a prescribing doctor. We all get on a zoom call together and we say, how are we going to do this together? While we're tapering the medication, I'm also doing cognitive behavioral therapy because they've got all these wrong thoughts in their head and we've got to fix those, We've got to change those what we call cognitive distortions. Right. And get them out of their head and understanding the biology of sleep because they're, they're, they're getting in their own way. You got it right.

Yeah.

So, yes, we can get people off of drugs. Is it scary? You bet. Have we lost anybody? No. Nobody's died from coming off of sleep aids, I can assure you of that. And every single person that we've gotten off sleep aids is incredibly thankful afterwards.

I really wanted to hear that from you. And I know a lot of. There's actually a couple people in my community and the way that I see it now is just like going on a detox. I hate that people call detoxes diets. You're literally detoxing a bad food diet and you're just going back to eating real food. But that first week is challenging. So there's a lot of hold handing that has to happen. You need to set the parameter. You need to talk to everybody in your household. You need to have a backup plan. You need to have your 4, 7, 8, maybe your screen. You need to have a cold bedroom. We'll talk about that next. But just be prepared. And just like no one's ever regretted coming off of medication. That no longer works.

Correct I love that. Correct. And when you talk about sleep environment, which it sounds like you want to.

Talk about next, that's where we're going.

Is here's what I'll tell you is your environment can absolutely, positively screw up your sleep. However, it's rare that I've ever fixed a case of insomnia just with environmental fixes. Okay, now to be clear, there have been times where I have, and that's when there's a snoring bed partner that's keeping the person awake and we treat the snoring bed partner for sleep apnea and we get rid of the snoring and then magically that person can sleep. I'm not talking about that, but what I am saying is that sleep environment doesn't just encompass the physical room in which you sleep, it encompasses the habits that you had before going to bed as well. So caffeine, alcohol are part of, in my mind, your sleep environment. So when you're walking into that room where you're hopefully going to close your eyes and get some rest, what's on board? Right. And where is your head at? Your head should be more clear and more blank and ready to go on your journey at night. Then it should be thinking about all the problems that you've got and you know, the sports equipment you have to get for the next day and things like that. And so what I ask my patients to do is what I call a power down hour. Right? So if your bedtime is 10 at 9 o', clock, take that hour, chop it up into three 20 minute segments. So just 20 minutes for just you got to do. So in our house, it was backpacks together, making lunches for the next day. Kid, kid related stuff to make the mornings easier. 20 minutes for hygiene and then 20 minutes for some form of meditation, relaxation, prayer. You need Runway to land the plane, right? And so by doing that, then you can look at the exterior environment. So what do you want your exterior environment to look like? You want it to be dark, quiet and cool, Right? That seems pretty obvious, right? At the same time, there are a lot of people who do a lot of crazy, weird stuff. Like I have to sleep with a red light on because no, stop, relax, go into a room and make it comfortable for sleep. It really isn't some crazy recipe.

I wrote an article called just build your sleep sanctuary. Whatever feels like a sanctuary for you just has that word of itself. Causes you to take an exhale.

Absolutely.

Okay. This feels good in here, right? Feel good where you are. Anything that's distracting Is going to cause monkey mind.

Yeah. Well, piles of laundry in your bedroom suck.

Yeah. Piles of stacks of papers.

And stacks of papers. If you're going to have one place in the house that's just a little bit zen, you get your bedroom. Right. Because when you come into it, you can kind of lower that anxiety level. And that vibe really helps, you know, put you to bed.

Dark, cool.

Yeah. Dark, cool and quiet are the biggies. But you know, at the. People can adapt to anything. So I'll give you an example. So we have French bulldog that sleeps in our bed. Yeah. And he snores like a freight train. And my wife is gone and I was watching the dog and usually I try to put him in another room so he doesn't bother me and all this stuff. And she was like, you know, you need to hear him snore so you know he's okay. And it changed. Like I changed the emotional attachment to the, of the snore from the. This is an annoying dog that is driving me crazy to, oh, this is my buddy and I need to make sure he's okay. Yeah, it's like music to my ears.

Right. Feels so much better.

When you change the emotional valence to the thing that is bugging you so much, you'd be shocked what the body can adapt to. I mean, don't forget people sleep in the craziest places. Right. People sleep on submarines. People sleep in tanks. Right. People sleep in airplanes. People sleep on the side of the road. Right. Our body is incredibly adaptive. So create an environment that makes intuitive sense, that allows you a level of relaxation. Yeah, right. And a level of comfort. Because whatever is relaxing you lowers your heart rate and gets you there.

Sleep is a booming industry with gadgets and mattresses and sound and all of these things. Sheets and bedding and pillows and mattresses, you name it.

Oh, yeah.

When is it worth it? I mean, you know.

Oh, good question. Like, should I spend $35,000 on a mattress? There's actually a half a million dollar mattress out there right now.

Exactly.

Here's what I'll tell you is I think you get what you pay for up to a certain point. If you're sleeping on a $400 bed and that's the best that you can afford, that's okay. But if you can invest a little bit of time and money into, into a good product, it will serve you very, very well. As an example, though, let's say that you're on a budget and you, you don't want to buy a $4,000 mattress. You can buy a $500 mattress and put a really nice topper on top of it.

Yeah.

And you can. You can. You can work that. Right. Or have a really nice pillow. Right. As part of your accoutrement. It works. It works really, really well. But I would tell people that you can find what you're looking for, but don't get consumed by the hype, okay. Because there's a ton of it. If you're going to pick a mattress, I like hybrids because it's got foam and spring. So you kind of get the best of both worlds. I personally like pillow tops. Some people don't. The data would suggest you're looking for a medium firm in almost every case. You really don't want a super soft, marshmallowy mattress because then you don't get the spinal support and that becomes problematic.

Or a pillow.

Right, Or a pillow. And so here's what's interesting, is if you have a medium firm mattress, you should have a soft pillow. If you have a soft mattress, you should have a firm pillow. They should oppose each other. And it works actually significantly better that way. And I'll be honest with you, I've saved more sleep by fixing people's pillows than I have fixing their mattresses. The way I think about it is if you have neck or upper shoulder pain, that's a pillow problem. If you have low back pain, that's a mattress problem.

What a great tip. You're a walking sleep encyclopedia. God, where have you been on our lives?

Well, now I'm in your life.

Now you're in my life. You stuck with me.

You're not going to get rid of me anytime soon, I can tell you that.

I could talk to you forever, but let's just debunk something out there when it comes to sleep, as we are still living in this insane world of hustle culture and we're still normalizing this, and we're kind of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. We're hearing that sleep is really something we need to focus on and prioritize right now. Is there a trend that you want to debunk or something you want to say to people to stop doing so?

Bed rotting is a terrible idea. Sitting in bed all day long is just stupid. The sleepy girl mocktail of, what is it? Tart? Cherry juice, magnesium, and soda water. So nothing could be worse. By the way, you'll have diarrhea and gas most of the night, so your bed partner will really appreciate that.

They'll probably spike your blood Sugar too, Just before bed.

Oh, for sure. You're spiking your blood sugar before bed, which can be highly problematic. Do you need a tracker? You need a tracker if you want to be thoughtful about your sleep. But don't let your tracker rule your life. Like take the ring off, take the strap off. It's going to be worthwhile for you. And if I'm giving, here's what I want to do. I want to give people a five step program.

Okay?

Okay. Step number one, wake up at the same time every single morning based on your chronotype if you can. Step number two, stop caffeine by 2pm Right? This allows you about, about 50% of it to get out of your system, which would be helpful for sleep. Step number three, stop alcohol three hours before bed. There's a big difference between going to sleep and passing out. Let's keep the alcohol out of it, Right? Right.

Good color.

Step number four, exercise daily. It's the best way to improve the sleep quality. But don't exercise within four hours of bedtime because your heart, your body temperature gets too hot and it's hard to go to sleep. And then step number five is when you wake up in the morning, I want you to do what I call the three 15s. 15 deep breaths, 15 ounces of water, and 15 minutes in the sunshine. All of it works on, on the biological level. But if people can do these five things every day, instant improvement in sleep.

Those are all free. All of those are going to apply to you feeling better, looking younger. They're part of your longevity protocol. You're optimizing your digestion protocol, everything.

It's remarkable. And it's funny that I like the fact that you said you're going to look better. You know what, everybody, when you see somebody that hasn't slept well, it's no secret, right? Doesn't matter how much makeup you put on, everybody knows when you haven't slept well. So, you know, admit it to yourself and fix it.

You got it. All right, two rapid fire questions. But first, how can people find you? I want everyone to order sleep, drink, breathe, talk about the pillars for optimal health. How do you communicate with your audience? You have so many great talks, you've got a website of so many resources for people.

So right now we're spending a tremendous amount of time on my YouTube channel. So we've got a lot of videos there. So there's a tremendous amount of content there. I think you can find pretty much what you want. I've got five different books, my Newest book is Sleep Drink Breathe Wellness is Too Complicated. Available kind of everywhere. We're on everything. Facebook, TikTok X, Twitter, Instagram. I don't know what they're all called anymore, but we're on all of them and we put different information out. So like on Instagram we have more to that demographic. Facebook, maybe a slightly older demographic depending upon who is out there, but those are the ways to get me. And by the way, it's all the same moniker, the Sleep Doctor. So we have thesleepdoctor.com, we have the Sleep Doctor. Facebook, the Sleep Doctor x the Sleep Doctor, YouTube, the Sleep Doctor.

The One and only. Everyone go do your sleep Chronotype quiz and notice how that impacts aspects of your life that might surprise you. Comment what your sleep type is below. In closing, I want to wrap up with asking you what's something that excites you about modern medicine?

Oh, AI.

Yeah.

I think it's going to be really cool. Like, I think if we get a chance to figure out math and physics, I think medicine comes next. Like, I'm talking to people now and like, like for drug studies, like they're running computer simulations that live would have taken 10 years to get through and they're doing them in like 10 days. So it's, it's really interesting to start to see what kind of things we're going to see go forward. But it also scares me because I don't want to get caught up in the technology and the knowledge of it all. Most of us know what to do, right? I mean, the stuff that you talk about is thousands of years old. Right. And so I, I, I'm excited for the AI of it all and I'm excited for medicine to be able to help more people. But I think there's a note of caution that we all need to just kind of kick back and, and not get so caught up in it.

I think we just have to be responsible with amplifying the good. AI can amplify the good.

Yeah, I like that.

Yeah. What's your favorite ancient healing remedy?

Oh, breathwork. That's easy.

Yeah, it's a go to and tell us what you're most passionate about right now.

Oh, wow. So I'm actually considering working on a fiction series. So I do a lot of nonfiction work with my books and things like that. So I'm playing around with characters in my head, so I'm excited about that. And I'm doing a lot of lectures these days and I really, that's kind of my flow state. Like, I love. Like, I like this, and I like being in front of a crowd and teaching people about sleep. So I'm doing a lot of that. That's been pretty much it. My son and my daughter both graduated college, so now I get a chance to spend more time with them. And that's been exciting as well.

So great. You're such a great storyteller.

Thanks.

I can't wait to have you back.

I can't wait to come back. Number one, this place is awesome. Like, if people get a chance to come out to do the pod with you, like, this is a treat. Thank you. Because a lot of times, you know, you end up in some studio in the middle of LA or whatever. Like, this is absolutely gorgeous. So thank you for having me to your home. It's been lovely.

Thank you.

Sweet dreams.

Sweet dreams.