How to Fix Your Terrible Sleep (Simple Habits)

Give me after all of the experimentation, what's the 30,000 foot view on how to get perfect sleep? You you want to lower your resting heart rate before bed. It's the highest value biioarker you can track on a daily basis. So you'll find that everything that increases your heart rate before bed besides sex is bad for you. And everything that lowers your heart rate before bed is good for you. And so for example, food timing of food is really important. So, if your bedtime's at 10 p.m., you want to have your final meal of the day at 6:00 p.m. So, 4 hours. Uh, I personally do like 10 to 12 hours because I really like that digestion time. It lowers my heart rate to like 39 to 40 beats per minute. So, food uh 4 hours before uh 60 minutes before bed, screens off. So, that's very hard because we're all addicted to our phones, but hard cut, phones off uh because you want to avoid scrolling, texting, working, and that's very arousing for the body. >> Um, red light, amber light in the house. So, whites, blue lights, uh, are really bad for melatonin release. Um, you want to have a like a wind a 60-minute wind down. So, when screens are off, you want to use that 60 minutes to just calm yourself down. So, this is very hard because people have we created these habits where we're glued to our phones and if we're not on our phones, we don't know what to do with ourselves. And so, it creates this panic. So, this 60-minute time window before bed is really precious in that you just need to kind of be with yourself. Now, you can hang out with a friend, a family member, you can go for a walk, you can do breath work, meditation, a hobby, like puzzle, journal, like whatever. But you just need to learn how to be with yourself without stimulation. And that will naturally allow you to calm yourself down. I do this process where I talk to myself. So, like I talk to my various Brian. So, like sleep Brian comes on duty at 7:30 p.m. because my bedtime's at 8:30 p.m. And then all the Brians line up and they want to talk to me. >> How many are there? >> Oh man, there's like probably a dozen. Like probably allowed. It's like a Bonnie Blue meetup. Okay. >> Yeah. So, the first one's Ambitious Brian. Ambitious Brian is by far the loudest, right? He's always like, he shows up and he's like, >> do more. >> I got a banger idea. Brand new idea. It's [ __ ] amazing. And Sleep Brian says, I love you, ambitious Brian, right? Doing us a real solid like doing great out there. Also, we're in sleep mode. So, I'm going to write down your idea and tomorrow we'll talk about this. And the next one is anxious Brian. He's like doing all the checks. Like, today, did you make any big errors? Did you like you know do anything upset >> anyone >> do anything anything stupid anything you say anything you regret and so like doing that internal reconciliation of like do you have good self-awareness and they all just line up but if you don't talk to them then when your head hits a pillow they show up and they're like we're here and we want to talk about our stuff and then you go to bed finally you wake up at 2 a.m. and they're like we're back and so you've got to have some kind of reconciliation process to calm those voices. So like those those are the big ones like food um light um windown routine screens off um that um yeah like and then caffeine. So you want to have your final caffeine around noon each day. So it has a 6 hour halfife. Those are the real big ones. So but what you want is like for a man you want to like be like 50ish heart rate. Same with the same with the female. If you're in that zone you're doing pretty well. if you can bump down a bit more. Um, and once you get that nighttime routine knocked down, then you can start exercising very well, like if you sleep really well, your willpower skyrockets. If you sleep poorly, it like knocks your prefrontal cortex offline. You can't really have it much willpower. So, that's like number one. >> Okay, lots there. >> How do you avoid an optimal routine becoming a fragile superstition? Yeah, I mean people um people try to uh they come back they come with an argument that's great like um the body loves routine. Now it does not mean that you have to always be in a routine but the body is built for routine. So for example if your bedtime is 10 p.m. your circadium rhythm rhythm is locked in to 10 p.m. And your body expects sleep to happen at 10 p.m. >> This is what jetlag is. >> Yes. Exactly. And so like you have a garbage truck that rolls through your body at around 10:30 p.m. and it's there to pick up all the trash. >> What is that? >> It's your your basically your cleansing system of like your your lymphatic system is cleaning all the trash from your body. And if you're not asleep at 10:30 p.m. and in your deep sleep mode, it's going to it's going to not come. So you've got trash build up. Like New York, you've got the trash bags all over the place. And so people think if I'm not in bed by 10:00, I'm going to go to bed at 1:00. That's okay. I'll sleep in tomorrow morning, wake up. It doesn't work that way. And so the body has very specific rhythms that it wants to be on. And so when you lock in, it's good. And so when someone makes the argument like, I'm going to give my body some horatic stress, right? I'm like, push it to one and then it go back. The body hates it. Like inconsistent sleep is as bad as little sleep. I was going to say, do you when it comes to prioritization, is duration more important than regularity or are they equal? >> Regularity by far is the best one. Yeah. >> More than duration. >> Uh oh, so I'm sorry. You said duration. Um I don't know. Uh I'm not sure on that one. >> It's kind of like picking your favorite child, I suppose. >> Yeah. Because you kind of need both. >> Yeah. Like the the lesson here is uh because these are bad habits people have. You need to be on time. You can't make it up. You can't uh skip during the week and then make it up in the weekend. It doesn't work that way. So, you miss a garbage truck every day. It doesn't come back. Like, sure, maybe the weekend, but then you're you're so off on your circadian rhythm that like now is the garbage truck even in service. >> Mhm. Okay. Um so, uh I understand what you mean with regards to the timing, but the 60-minute window, what if you don't get it? What if this you're out at dinner, you're doing something with friends, you're hanging out, you don't get to you're around some bright light. I've got a great a great story from a friend when he was in his hyper hyper optimizer zone which everybody goes through where it's like you the stress of trying to be perfect kills you more quickly than your imperfections do. Oh yeah. >> And uh he had this 60-minute wind down routine which was blue light blockers on and the mouth tape and the nose strip and the magnesium by glycinate and the everything else. And he'd been sort of winding down for 60 minutes and his girlfriend at the time had been downstairs and he was brushing his teeth in the dark so that he wouldn't have any light on. And she just comes like tinkering in, hits the light in the bathroom like the lights come on. He's like ah he's blinded. He hasn't looked at light for for an hour. goes to bed and he's raging. He's like, "My entire routine's been messed up and I laid there sort of staring at the ceiling, doesn't sleep, and she drops off within five minutes having just come in from like, you know, scrolling TikTok or whatever." >> Um, >> the example is about the fragility of reliance on that and the fear that without it, what does that create? >> Oh, I mean, how am I going to be able to write my book today? I didn't get my, you know, like as you said, like what were the stupid things that I said today? That's anxious, Brian. But another type of anxiety is, oh, I didn't get my routine done, therefore I can't sleep, which becomes self-fulfilling. Sleep's one of the very few things that trying harder at it makes it worse. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people can find their happy balance. I think if you look at the uh various archetypes of people, some people love that kind of regimen. They love to be um regimented. They like structure. They like process, procedure, order, and that's just their personality type. Other people like the girlfriend in the story. She's not. And so the I think the thing here is for people to recognize their kind of archetype of where they naturally gravitate to where they feel good about themselves. If you're not naturally orderly and structured, like don't be that, right? if you're >> so it's just like find your jam but understand there are principles at play which you can't just override right >> regardless of whether you like structure or don't like if you have a three-hour swing between bedtimes across a week >> yeah your body doesn't work in that way okay um what are what are the things that people focus on for sleep that don't move the needle I I really uh I guess I take 300 mcgs of magnes of um melatonin which is like so a third of a gram a microgram milligram. >> Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. >> People people [ __ ] way way way overcooked >> like 1 milligram 5 milligrams like >> there's 30 and 50 milligrams out there. >> I do a very tiny dose of melatonin. Uh it's to offset the calcification that happens in my pinal gland. Like as you age your pinal gland calcifies you produce less melatonin. So like a little offset, teeny bit. >> So in 10 years time, maybe you'll take 500 micro. >> Yeah, exactly. And so it's it's a very small touch. Otherwise, I don't take anything for sleep. >> Okay. >> And so I'd so much rather build habits. And this is the same thing like Americans just like we are. We take more anti-depressants than any country in the world. >> Quick fix. >> We love pills. Like we love pills to solve fundamental problems and habits. >> A gummy or a powder. >> Yeah. Habits are the strongest ones. So like that's why I focus on like just build your sturdy habits in the archetype you are. That's the tried and true thing that delivers the best. 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