Sleep Better, Work Smarter: Optimizing Your Zzz's for Health and Productivity

Another thing that came up you said a few minutes ago was about sleep. And pretty much everyone in this group has an oura ring. It's something that we give them as a gift when they join our community. So knowing that you've hacked or tuned your sleep, what are some recommendations, some foundational things that you can suggest that can make the biggest impact on sleep? And I know it's bio individualized for some people, but what do you think would be some great grounded recommendations that have the biggest, broadest effect?

Well, there's kind of two answers to this. One is I'll run you through some of the basics, but I just put it all in one place because I've answered this question so many times. Sleepwithdave.com it is by far the funniest URL of my entire career. And every time I say it, it makes me laugh because I have a seventh grade sense of humor. But it's just everything I know about sleep is there in the sleep challenge thing. And it's free. I'm not charging for it, it's just a gift. But one of the things that I think people underrate and something that I certainly underrated was how important light is for sleep. Light is more important than food, is more important than temperature. So when you're looking at biohacking and the first definition, when I released it, I made this cool little infographic, looked all steampunk and it said the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your own biology. Well, that means you need to know what parts of the environment to change in order to get the most benefits for sleep. And that order of operations is so important. Light, food, temperature. And if you understand that 2 billion years ago, the parts of you that are in charge of your sleep, they were single celled bacteria floating in the ocean and the middle of the day when they could sense sunshine overhead. All full color spectrum, right? Coming from above. It was warmest, it was brightest, and there was algae to eat because it had been growing all morning as the sun came up. And then as the sun goes down, we get more red colors, it becomes cooler, food becomes less abundant, the water becomes cooler, and then we go to sleep. And if you can replicate that for the cells in your body, it works amazingly well. And 5% of the cells in your eyes receive light, but you don't see that light. That light bypasses your visual cortex and goes into the SCN in your brain. And that's the timing, the timing control system, the Reason I make truedark glasses the way I do and actually wrote a patent for this, is that there's five variables in light that control whether it's going to wake you up or not. Blue blockers simply don't work. They block too much during the day, so you don't wake up. And then at night, they don't block enough. So I wear partial blue blockers during the day and I wear sleep glasses at night. And here's the five things in light that matter the most. One is the angle of the light. Light from a reading lamp is much less harmful than light coming from direct overhead like most houses have now. So turn off the overheads, have a reading light, preferably with a dimmer switch, because the intensity of the light is another variable. Then is the color of the light. Red light is least harmful, but if you have a red spotlight in your eyes, it's still bright enough to mess with your sleep. So dimmer, calmer, red light is okay. But there's four colors of light that wake you up even if they don't raise. Melatonin, blue, we know is bad for sleep. Green and amber and violet are also proven in multiple studies to affect your sleep. So I make two dry glasses that block all of those, and they change the angle of the light because I'm lazy. And then I can wear those. And I, you know, maybe I have a dimmer switch, maybe I don't. Maybe I'm in a hotel room, maybe I don't. But when I started doing that an hour before bed or just radically lowering the lights in my house and having red night lights, I doubled my deep sleep. And I'm a guy who used to get five minutes of deep sleep every night. And I get easily an hour and a half to two hours every night. And I sleep six and a half hours a night like I always have. So 90 minutes of deep, 90 minutes of REM pretty much every night, and sometimes more. To go from being a horrible sleeper to that, oh, my God. So light is the big thing. I do use a cooler on my bed. The first half of the night, you want to lower the temperature of your mattress. And the second half of the night, you want to have your mattress at a neutral temperature, not too hot, not too cold. And that's going to give you the most deep sleep in the first half of the night, and in the second half of the night, the most REM sleep. And then donate after the sun goes down, or at a minimum, donate three hours before bed.

Beautiful, simple, yet profound tips and things that we can implement ourselves immediately if we're not already, and also things that we can recommend to our clients. You know, one of. One of the big things that our community is. Is focused on is kind of quantum leaps in people's health. So you kind of describe, you know, the. Not that less is more, but the right amount is more. And that's a big thing that we're trying to focus on as well. Because if we could show people results quickly that require less effort, or in some cases, little to no effort, then it allows them to move forward faster with less frustration. If you've probably studied Alex Ramozi's work, one of the parts of his value equation is time delayed and the amount of effort and sacrifice that people have to make. So if we can show people, through the work that you've done and the research that you've done, that we can actually get better results or the same result with less effort and less time, then that, I believe is like a quantum shift in how we can deliver our care and our services. How do you.