Masterclass on SLEEP. Tips to SLEEP BETTER and end SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

Chronic sleep deprivation has system-wide effects. It You know, sleep affects every organ system and every disease state. Let's be very clear here. Cancer cells multiply faster the more sleep deprived you are. As in any sprint, if you're an athlete running a quarter mile, you're going to need recovery after that. A lot of successful people, especially listening to the things that you're putting out there, have a success ritual in the morning. But, a great morning starts the night before. When people are depressed or bipolar or anxiety or fear or trauma or PTSD, it is stress. And they cannot break the loop. I tell you, we found the key to break the loop. That's where I am right now with the science. To get to sleep, we need to get cold. To stay asleep, we need to stay cold. And to wake up, we need to warm up. You don't actually get stronger when you're sprinting. You get stronger when you recover. What do you guys do to be more efficient in your sleep? A very consistent bedtime. I go to bed at midnight. I wake up at 6:17 whether I like it or not. I stop caffeine by 2:00 p.m. every single day. Um I stop alcohol roughly 3 hours before bed if I'm drinking. I'm not that big of a drinker, to be fair. Um I don't exercise in the evenings. I usually exercise based on my chronotype um around 10:30, 11:00 in the mornings, and that actually helps me out quite a bit. Um Um, and then when I wake up in the mornings, I get 15 minutes of sunlight and I drink a bottle of water. That's what I do. And it works. I tell people all the time, I think I'm the only sleep doctor in the universe that says it's okay to fall asleep with the television on. That's interesting. I've got people who need to watch The Simpsons to fall asleep. That's just what they need to do. It's amazing. If you turn it off, they're up all night. Like, it doesn't make any sense. Why would I recommend them to stop doing something that's effectively working for them? And by the way, having a television on in your room in the evening, there's these things called television timers. They're built into 99% of televisions today. Set the [ __ ] timer and go to bed. So, um, when it comes to rebalancing through nature, Right. I heard you talk about this and I thought that it was really interesting. So, I'm not a forest bather. I'm far more of a city bather. Uh, my idea of like the, ah, I can finally relax would be in Tokyo. Um, but I actually do get the whole notion of getting in rhythm with nature. What do you have people do? And I'd really like to hear about the nature rebalancing. So, there was a great study that was done. They took 20 insomniacs. They brought them into the woods, kept them there for 2 weeks. Lo and behold, at the end of the 2 weeks, almost none of them had insomnia anymore, right? So, there's lots of different ideas as to what helped, what hurt, things like that. I would argue that the lack of external crazy stimulation, lights on, cars, noises, all of that was helpful, but I think they just entrained themselves to the sun going up and the sun going down. I mean, let's be fair. Very little insomnia ever occurred before the electric light bulb. Okay? So, if Edison did anything, he [ __ ] up people's sleep forever because there's all these other things that you can now do because we have the presence of light consistently in the evenings. And so, entraining yourself to the natural cycle would be great, but let's be People aren't walking into the woods for two or three weeks to fix their sleep. So then what can we do along the way and how do we help these people with insomnia? The biggest problem is between your ears. Right? Every single patient that I talk to, they say, "Doctor Bruce, I can't turn off my brain." Right? That's not a surrounding problem. That doesn't have anything to do with blue light. That has to do with our inability to slow down. That has to do with our inability to deal with stress. So things like cognitive behavioral therapy are highly effective for these people. So cognitive behavioral therapy is a two-component process for insomnia. So we know that insomnia is what we call psychophysiologic insomnia. So psycho being something going on in the head, physiology in the body. So what we do is we create schedules for people. When should you go to bed and when should you wake up? And that's part one of the therapy. And to be fair, we would actually restrict their sleep. You would like that cuz you don't like sleep, right? And so what we do is we tell them if you normally go to bed at 11:00 and you don't fall asleep until 1:00, don't get in bed until 1:00. Cuz all you're going to do is lie there and be pissed off anyway, right? So we restrict their sleep, we build up their sleep deprivation on purpose because we want that natural sleep deprivation to help them fall asleep and stay asleep. If that doesn't work, then we go to the cognitive portion. The cognitive portion is what do you think about sleep? A lot of people say, "Well, if I don't get 8 hours, it's going to peel, you know, years off the back end of my life." There's no data to show that. None. So what I do is we take all these dysfunctional thoughts and we ask the patient, "What are you thinking about sleep?" And we get them to rate them and then we give them the facts. 90% of the time they just don't know the facts, right? It's my job to educate as many people as I possibly can about what sleep really is. What we know obviously has been the rise of sleep difficulties in society and that has been matched by unfortunately a rise in pharmacology and particularly sleeping pills. And I say unfortunately not because I'm anti-medication and I know a lot of people who work at these pharmaceutical companies and they're good people, great scientists wanting to do good things. But unfortunately sleeping pills are largely blunt instruments and they don't produce naturalistic sleep. Um they're in a class of drugs that we call the sedative-hypnotics. And when we take sleeping pills, we mistake sedation for sleep, but it's not natural sleep. And in fact, um sleeping pills have been associated with a significantly higher risk of death as well as cancer. So much so that in 2016, the American College of Physicians made a landmark recommended um intervention. They said that sleeping pills must no longer be the first-line treatment for uh insomnia. Instead, the American College of Physicians said it has to be cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia that must be the first-line recommended treatment for those sleep problems. And so cognitive behavioral therapy in general really tries to target two things, cognitive and behavioral. And so the cognitive aspects for insomnia are aspects where we try to correct your beliefs or your misbeliefs around sleep. And some of your ideas around sleep. Some of those things that can be either inappropriate, incorrect, or just triggering anxiety or worry. So we try to modify those cognitions, those beliefs, but then we also look at what you're doing in your life, the different behaviors that you're doing or things that you're not doing. And try to correct the behaviors as well. For example, how's your caffeine intake? How's your alcohol intake? Uh what time you going to bed? What time you waking up? What's your chronotype? Are you a morning type, evening type? Are you sleeping in harmony with your chronotype or against your chronotype. Um, are you getting daylight in the morning? Are you getting too much daylight at light at night, artificial light at night? Do you exercise? And so, we change behaviors and we change thought patterns and together, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term, but what's great is that when you stop working with that clinician um, or your online uh program, and I should say that I um I'm I work with a a company uh I'm an advisor to a company called Shuni. Um, it's s h u n i dot i o if people want to go and explore it, and you can get cognitive behavioral therapy online there. But you work with your therapist and after about uh five or six sessions, you can continue that benefit of improved sleep for up to five years. The studies have demonstrated now. Whereas with sleeping pills, when you stop their use, then not only do you go back to the bad sleep that you you were having, you typically go back to even worse sleep. It's called rebound insomnia. And now you have to go back onto the use, so you become dependent. There is an addiction dependency cycle. So, that's really what CBTI is and that's really the best approach for sleeping uh problems right now. All right, so I have two sleeping problems. One is that there are times where I will get um either really stressed or I'll get really excited, and I have a very easy time falling asleep, but then I'll wake up after three or four hours, and I find it very difficult to fall back asleep. And then the second part, just so I don't forget, is sleep inertia in the morning. But what can I do to um optimize for staying asleep. Yes, so there it's a case of trying to deal with that sort of downgrade the activation of the nervous system. The reason that people typically wake up uh in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep, not always but often, is because they have this sort of stress related carrying this anxiety. And anxiety, biologically, is the principal mechanism that we think underlies most insomnia. And what happens, in part, is that the fight or flight branch of the nervous system becomes overactive. And that's exactly the opposite of that. down? Like I find it so easy to fall asleep, but I can tell on the nights where I'm going to wake up. It just seems weird that it dips, but then my subconscious mind kicks it back alive. Yeah, why why would it be that way? And the reason is because after about 16 hours of wakefulness, you've built up a lot of that healthy sleepiness, what we call sleep pressure. And the longer that you're awake, the more of that sleep pressure builds up. And it's a chemical that builds up in the brain called adenosine. And then when we go into sleep, it's the time when the brain can actually start to clear out that adenosine. And it's so it starts to lower the sleep pressure. And after about 8 hours of sleep, you've cleared away 16 hours of that adenosine, of that sleepiness. And so you wake up naturally and you feel refreshed and restored. But what will happen is that you can be stressed and sort of or excited, but the sleepiness, the weight of sleepiness pulling you down is so heavy at that point that you can get to sleep. But then 3 or 4 hours later, you've jettisoned maybe 50% of all of that adenosine, maybe even more, cuz it principally happens during deep sleep. And so now your brain is much more vulnerable to those awakenings because it doesn't have the weight of that sleepiness. It does that make some sense? It total sense and it makes you want to punch myself back to sleep. It's so obnoxious. Well, because the the benefits or or I should say the the damage that you do by not getting sleep is so terrifying that I'm every time I wake up, I'm like, Yeah. "Come on." Like, you know how much better you will perform if you just sleep. And I am not one of those guys that's like, "Hey, I you got to grind in 4 hours sleep." I'm like, if I need 9 hours of sleep, I want to get 9 hours of sleep every single night forever until the end of time. So, it's just always super obnoxious. hoisting that flag, I will salute it, and I definitely, you know, not everyone, but certainly in the type A sort of particularly business culture, maybe, there is this sort of sleep machismo attitude where people wear their lack of sleep like a badge of honor. Um, but you're right, it's it's foolhardy for a number of reasons. But, let me come back to that issue of of, you know, beating ourselves up because we need to have some degree of self-compassion when it comes to sleep. You know, I am not invulnerable to sleep problems myself. I've had bouts of insomnia throughout my life to be completely transparent and open with you. Um, and everyone, every one of us is going to have a bad night of sleep. It's not unusual. Don't worry. Don't stress. You know, back when I was starting to write the book, it took me about 4 years to write it. In 2014, you know, sleep was sort of the neglected step-sister in the health conversation of that time. And I was so saddened by the sickness and the disease and the suffering that was happening because of a lack of sleep. You know, I came out, you know, all guns blazing. And I think that that was important, but for those people who were struggling with sleep, those people who had sleep problems with insomnia, you know, the book kind of felt almost as though it was, you know, sleep or else {dot} {dot} {dot}. Um, and I didn't mean it to be that way. So, I want to say right now because I've I've learned to soften and become a a much better appreciator of these conditions just like you described. If you wake up and you can't get back to sleep, don't worry. Just realize tonight is not my night. It's not the end of the world. I'm still going to be able to function somewhat tomorrow. Don't stay in bed awake for too long though. That's the important message here because tricky. I'm super curious to see what you think about this because I know where you're going, right? Yeah, you're training yourself that being in bed is is being awake is okay while you're in bed. So, that's right. I used to get up and whether I slept for 2 hours, 3 hours, whatever, if I couldn't fall back asleep in like 15 minutes, I'd get out of bed. And I would go to work and start doing my thing and then I would go lay back down and sleep and sometimes I'd fall asleep for, you know, 2 or 3 more hours. But the number of times I would wake up with a headache after that was just too much. So, I was way frustrated and I'm like, all right, there's got to be something else. So, what I found is if I put an audiobook on, dude, I will be back asleep in like 10 or 15 minutes. It's crazy. And the only thing that wakes me up is the fact that I have headphones in my ears or if they start yelling in the book or something like that which always pisses me off. Uh, but it puts me back to sleep so reliably, it's crazy. That's great. That's exactly what we recommend. So, don't go to work. Don't start checking emails. Don't eat because it trains the brain to expect food. But instead in a dim room, somewhere different so you change the context so you're changing the learned association. Just read a book, listen to an audiobook, um, meditate in dim light. All of these things are great. Find out whatever works for you and then only when you're sleepy do you return to bed and there's no time limit for that. And that way you train the brain back out of a bad association that it's learned, which is my bed is this place of being awake, which if you repeat that over time, you become trained to be awake in the bed. And then you will relearn the association that your bed is the place where you're asleep. So, you're 100% right. That's exactly what we recommend. Um to your second question, which is sleep inertia, it's a real thing. Sleep inertia is typically where we wake up and your brain requires some time to kind of warm up to operating temperature. Like an old vintage car, you know, you can't just turn the engine on and start, you know, flooring it and going up to red line. You need to sort of circulate the fluids and warm the oil up and get the engine warm and then you can really start to push it. It's the same way with our brain in some ways. Now, different people have different severities of sleep inertia. I'm actually like you. I suffer from quite bad sleep inertia. You know, for the first hour, you know, my partner, she when when I come through in the morning, she wakes up a little bit earlier than me, you know, she kind of knows that I can say, "Look, honey, I am not the best version of myself in the first hour. I I know that I may have done something bad yesterday and we should talk about it and I I want to resolve that, but can we not do it in the first hour because I'm not the best version? So, firstly, accepting that it's normal and it's real. The second thing though, however, is you can sleep inertia typically happens in very severe amounts if you're mismatched between your sleep schedule and your chronotype. That's in schedule. And so, you can go on um and you can go online and type Google um morningness eveningness questionnaire. And it's a questionnaire that you fill out and it figures out what your chronotype is. Are you um a morning type, somewhere in between, or you are an evening type. And what we find is that morning types, when they wake up in the morning at their normal time, which is very early or early, they don't have sleep inertia. They're good to go. They can jump into the gym and they're like energized bunnies and they're all happy and, you know, joyful. And to me, I'm just like, "Ugh." You know, whereas evening types waking up at the time that morning types have to wake up, which is in some ways the way society is designed. Society is desperately biased against evening types. And wrongfully so, because it's not your fault. It's genetically determined. There are about six or seven genes that we know right now that dictate what your chronotype is. It's not your fault. Gifted to you at birth. Um you don't get to choose. Now, if you are suffering from sleep inertia, what we find is that if you can sleep a little bit later into the morning, go to bed a little maybe a little bit later, sleep later, play around with that and see if the speed with which you wake up is better, that your sleep inertia is less. That's one way. It may not always work. Another way is temperature. Now, it turns out that when people have a cup of coffee, they say, "Look, I just need like 5 minutes." And I swig a couple of, you know, mouthfuls of coffee and now I'm alert. That's nonsense. Caffeine doesn't actually get into your system until about 12 to 15 minutes. So, if you're feeling any effects of caffeine before that, it's not the caffeine. It turns out that when we go to sleep, we drop our core body temperature. We get very cold. We become almost hypothermic. Now, to wake up, we have to warm up. So, to to get to sleep, we need to get cold. To stay asleep, we need to stay cold. And to wake up, we need to warm up. And so, one way that you can artificially accelerate or try accelerating your inertia in a quicker dissipating manner is to try to warm up more quickly. So, get a hot drink in the morning. Doesn't have to be caffeine if that's not your thing. I don't drink caffeine, but I'm not against it. Caffeine is an issue It's not the really the dose that makes the poison, it's the timing that makes the poison when it comes to sleep and caffeine, which we can come on to, but drink a hot drink, get your body temperature up. If you like, if you've got a smart thermostat, program it to start to rise temperature in your bedroom or in the house in the last hour before your alarm. And you could it can really start to help you wake up. And then play around with these smart lights. I have one where it sort of starts to bring me out of sleep about 5 minutes before my alarm. That can help, but the data is not good on that. The data on temperature much better. Sleep is individual. And the biggest thing that I want people to remember is sleep is healing. That's what our body does in sleep. It heals physically and it heals mentally. So, it's it's interesting to me that you hate sleep because it's the thing that's going to get you the furthest and the longest. Yeah, so the my relationship with sleep goes like this. I prioritize it. It is the most important thing for me to get in terms of my wellness schedule, my wellness regime. The one thing I don't [ __ ] with is sleep, which is why I don't set an alarm. Do I wish that nature in its infinite wisdom, Mr. McKeown, do I wish that it had figured out something through evolution so that we didn't need it? Yes. Do I admire the dolphins for sleeping one hemisphere at a time? Yes. Um, do I recognize that being tired is a unique form of torture? Yes. So, I have no interest in sleep deprivation. Um, I don't get it. I make sure I get my sleep. Um, my thing is, much like we've been talking about here with sleep efficiency, I believe in, you know, the that if you shorten the amount of time that you sleep, you will become less efficient, and you will actually get less done than you would just by clocking the hours, getting the sleep that you need, um, and moving forward. But, I do think also about longevity, and so if there is something to look, cleaning the glymphatic system, it just takes a certain number of hours, and you need to do it, and that's just that. Because I do worry in my own life that I am betraying this is a true statement. I am betraying myself and my desire to live forever by the way I live my life, which is at 1,000 miles an hour every day. But, it's going to be a U-shaped curve in a in a way, you know, you Well, you so you there's the benefit actually doesn't go on and on forever. So, you lose sleep, you sleep Yeah, well, there's two Well, let's say increasing or decreasing your sleep. There's going to be an optimal point. So, you know, your conflict is you want more hours in your day because you want to do really great things. Um, but you can't do really great things if you're tired, and you do need a certain amount of sleep. So, yes, you can peel it back. So, what so what we're, you know, I think it's quite clear we're not saying you must get your hours. Right. You should try and find the optimum amount for you. If that shortens it down, and you you 6 hours is great for you, well, then you have an extra 2 hours in your day. If you then keep pushing and pushing and pushing, and you go down to like 4 hours, those 2 hours are not going to be your best performance, and it's probably going to actually affect the other hours in the day. So, there's a benefit where you can come down, but at some point you just can't keep scraping off hours and hours and hours. Really incredible to watch you be so mission-driven and mission-focused. Um, and I want to talk about that at a high level, the notion of really optimizing yourself, because you have a it's very atypical notion of optimization versus the just grind it out, work your face off kind of mentality. Where'd that come from? Well, I think it's really a pragmatic approach. You know, I think you can always get in that super grind mode that that real push that sprint to get things done. But as in any sprint, if you're an athlete running a you know, quarter mile, you're going to need recovery after that. You know, and I think that's something that we can sometimes fail to recognize that you don't actually get stronger when you're sprinting, you get stronger when you recover. And I think the psyche is just the same as the body in that we perform best when we have periods where we push and then periods where we reflect, integrate, recover. And so for me it's just been listening to what works for me. You know, I can continue to grind and continue to perform worse and worse and worse or I can take the opportunities when I'm inspired and push really hard and then take those next phases to recover, adapt and try and come back the next time and sprint even faster, sprint even farther. But it's just finding that balance that's really effective for me to get what I need to get done. And how do you find that? Like is there an internal self-awareness that you've cultivated or Yeah, there's like a natural sense to find balance. And I think we all have that. I think we know it. We just override that voice. We're like, oh, more coffee or oh, more something else to hide the signals that our body is naturally telling us. Like our body is constantly giving us clues. But the problem is it comes with a whisper and we can drown out that whisper in a million different ways with distraction, with you know, mental processes, with you know, physical things like like I said, drinking coffee or taking Adderall or doing whatever you need to do to drown out that sound that says, "Hey, really you need to sleep." You know, like that's really what your body is asking for. And so I think it's really just tuning in to what you need and being able to listen to that voice and not only hear it, but follow through on what it says. If you had to put a really fine point on what you think optimization should be, when somebody hears you talking about that, um what should they take away from it? Well, it's ultimately the principle that, you know, you want to be a little bit better in some way tomorrow than you are today, but it's not going to be in a linear path. Again, these go through cycles of stress and recovery. So, it's just kind of being able to surf the flow of that and know again, it's it's really comes down to balance. So, it's the practices, like you need to know what to do for sure. And then you need to know how to apply those things in the right way. So, when you when to push and when to take the the pressure off the gas as well. And I think that's really understanding that. So, part of it is the knowledge and then part of it is the follow-through and then part of it is the discipline to know not only when you need to go, but when you need to rest. What are things in that people can do to actually optimize their sleep? Yeah, this is what it's really all about. You know, I I like to start with the low-hanging fruit first. Um, and something really really fascinating is just simply changing or embracing the time of day that you exercise can improve your sleep quality. And so, Appalachian State University did a really cool study and they wanted to see what time of day exercising at various times of day how's it impact your sleep quality. And so, they had the study participants to exercise exclusively at 7:00 a.m. and another phase exclusively at 1:00 p.m. in the afternoon, another phase exclusively at 7:00 p.m. in the evening. They compiled all the data and at the end of the study they found that morning exercisers spend more time in the deepest, most anabolic stages of sleep, so they're producing more human growth hormone. They have more efficient sleep cycles, what we've been talking about. They also tend to sleep longer and and this is the one that kind of can get glanced past. On average, they had about a 25% greater drop in blood pressure at night. So, what's what's up with that? That's correlated with a deactivation of your sympathetic fight or flight nervous system, right? So, you're actually able to shift gears, get to that parasympathetic rest and digest calming down by getting some exercise in in the morning. And so, how do we employ this though? That's the question. Because some people just like, you know, I can't exercise in the morning. And there's also people who exercise in the morning who might have terrible sleep. And it's because this is not like the magic bullet. This is a thing to stack in your condition. If you're doing this and then messing up the one I'm going to talk about next, you're probably not going to have the best sleep. So, here's how to employ this. Just 5 minutes. And I tested this. Each morning I do this 5 minutes of exercise. You know, it might be just jumping on a rebounder, you know, a little mini trampoline for 5 minutes, go for a quick power walk, uh do some Tabata, which is just 4 minutes, and a little mobility work. I'm going to guess most people don't know what Tabata is. It's high-intensity interval training, basically. It's 20 seconds of exercise followed by 10 seconds of rest, repeated over and over again for 4 minutes. And in his clinical studies, this was found to outperform, you know, traditional cardio, like the kind of moderate-intensity 45 minutes of exercise, in 4 minutes. The change in your cardiovascular benefits, body composition, and also change in your mitochondria as well. This is why it works. It does something called a cortisol reset. All right. And we talked about cortisol, but again, it's a good thing if it's in the right time and the right amount. Clinically, I would call these people tired and wired that would come in and looking at the hormone panels. And the cortisol would be really low in the morning and high at night. Thus, they have sleep problems. So, you naturally, if your if your cortisol is on a natural hormone rhythm, it would be elevated at its peak in the morning, right around 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., and then gradually decline as the day goes on. Does that have to do with what time you wake up? Sort of. I mean, the cortisol will kind of tend to nudge you out of sleep, but also will tend to notice that as the day as it your sleep goes on it becomes lighter and lighter anyways, right? This is when you tend to remember your dreams like at the at the end of the sleep. And so getting this little boost like helping your body to propel and get your cortisol up via exercise helps to reset that rhythm and get you back on track. So that's why it works. So that's number one, low hanging fruit. Just getting 5 minutes of exercise start in the morning no matter what. Just 5 minutes is all you need. It's going to help to create this snowball effect of good things for you. You know, 5 minutes. If this is a time you do go to to the gym and do your full workout, so be it all good. But everybody who's not already doing that just get that 5 minutes in. The second one and this one is more of the tough love and most difficult but this is the most important one in our culture today. And this has to do with our tech. All right? So Harvard researchers have confirmed that blue light exposure from our favorite devices, you know, our iPads, our iPhones, Androids, tablets, televisions, they do in fact suppress your melatonin substantially. Because it your body essentially thinks the sun's out, is that the problem? So we have photoreceptors that are always trying to gauge what time it is, right? Because our bodies are wired up to be in sync with nature. But only recently like literally just the past few decades have we been able to manipulate and basically create a second daytime, right? So your body is just it doesn't really know how to figure it out. And so the blue and white spectrum specifically are the ones that are more similar to daylight. Mhm. And so what it's doing is and so here's what the researchers found. Basically every hour you're on your device at night suppresses melatonin for about 30 minutes. All right? So if you're on your you know, you're watching a movie, 3-hour movie for example, your melatonin is going to be suppressed even if you go to bed right after. You're not producing adequate melatonin for about an hour and a half. And so again, you can be unconscious from sheer physical exhaustion, but you're not going to go through your sleep cycles efficiently. And so, just be mindful of that. What I encourage people to do is to give yourself a screen curfew, just 30 minutes. All right? I don't want to make this complicated, just 30 minutes. But, here's the rub. We are addicted to our devices, like straight up. We just need to be on it. I am. We all are, you know? Basically, it's because of this dopamine loop, right? Dopamine is so powerful, so interesting. Dopamine is one of the things I truly feel has helped to create our civilization as it is, because it drives us to seek, right? Dopamine drives us to to to seek and and to grow and to find, to discover. The internet is perfect for manipulating this, because every time you look for something, you find something. Especially social media, you seek, find, seek, find. You produce the dopamine, it drives you to look. But, why do you keep going is every time you find something, you get a little bit of a a hit from your opioid system. Like it's like the slow drip of like morphine. And so, it starts to like feel really good. And to the point where you might be doing your work and like you got a deadline, and you'll just you know, like I'll check Instagram real quick. Before you know it, it's like 30 minutes later and you've fallen into the internet black hole. It's like it just pulls you in. So, be aware of that. I'm not saying again, our connection with tech is just going to grow. So, I'm not bashing that. It's just be aware of it. And that when you try to abide by this principle, which will really, really help your sleep quality, to give yourself a screen curfew, you can't just sit there and twiddle your thumbs, because you'll get what I call the internet jitters, all right? You'll start getting like um a little bit of a withdrawal effect, like let me just check one just one one post. What we have to do is this, you have to replace it with something of greater or equal value. It's really that simple. Hopefully, is what I encourage people to do. This is an opportunity to connect, right? Connect with your significant other, your kids, the people like physical like have a real conversation with somebody, right? I know it sounds crazy, but it really works. It's really really good. And also, this is a great opportunity if you, you know, if you're in a relationship or not, whatever you're into, you could, you know, uh utilize and I have got a chapter on this as well, intimate time because there's a big connection between sex and sleep. And there's also a big connection between sleep and sex and how it impacts your sex life. So, when we have an orgasm for example, we produce a chemical, uh I'm sorry, cocktail of chemicals including oxytocin, uh norepinephrine, prolactin. And oxytocin for example has been found clinically to uh basically combat the effects of cortisol. And hopefully sex is more interesting than Instagram, but you know, I don't know. It depends on how you're doing it. And so, that's what I want people to do, a screen curfew and or use these hacks, utilize some blue light blocker blockers. And so, for your desktops, laptops, things like that, you can get an app called f.lux that pulls out the most troublesome sleep-sucking spectrum of light from your screen. It basically cools your screen off. And it's a simple app. You set it and forget it. It's totally free. You just go to Dr. Google, type in f.lux and a couple clicks and it's on your device. I've been using it for maybe five or six years. I love it. And uh for your uh telephone, you know, your uh cell phone, we've got on the iPhones built in now is night shift. Uh with Androids, the best one out there uh from my research is one called Twilight. You know, so there's options for everybody. And then what about the ambient light at night or if you're watching a movie? Again, I don't want to get don't get too neurotic about it, but if this is a problem for you and you're not sleeping as well as you could be or your results, your body composition not changing, you're not getting that blood pressure down, you're not having that focus you need through the day, um then you might want to address this, but another little hack is to get some blue light blocking The first ones I had were straight up like I just built a birdhouse. But now there's some really cool stylish ones that you can rock. As a matter of fact, you'll create a neural association when you put the glasses on and you'll start to get sleepy. Mhm. You know, it's nuts. And that is another thing right there. Is to create an evening ritual. Right? Your brain is always looking for patterns. A lot of successful people, especially listening to the things that you're putting out there, have a success ritual in the morning. Mhm. But a great morning starts the night before, you know, a truly great morning. And so a couple of quick things people can can do is the thermoregulation piece. Turn down your thermostat, all right? Now this one's again, this is going to hit a pressure point for some people, but according to research between 62° and 68° Fahrenheit is ideal for sleep. And so for some people it's going to sound a little bit frosty, but it lowering the thermostat a little bit can incre have incredible benefit uh for your sleep. But this doesn't mean you can't use your covers and put on some warm socks, that kind of thing. So cooling off this thermostat, um making sure that your bedroom, ideally, I I call it a sleep sanctuary. And so that when you walk into your bedroom at night, if your brain has a neuro association when I go into my bedroom, I'm watching television or I'm working, those channels are going to fire because of the myelin getting laid down over the years of you doing that behavior or even months it can get laid down. And so you might have the intention of going to bed, but if your TV's in there, your brain is going to be firing expecting to watch television and parts of your brain are going to be waking up in a way. Mhm. And so I encourage people to get the tech out of your room. Have your sleep Have your bedroom be a sleep sanctuary, you know, some place that's just for the the double S, which is sleep and sex. Here's also a really interesting reason why. There's an Italian study done, they found that couples who have a television in their bedroom have 50% less sex. Really? Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. And you know, this is a little bit more middle-aged, little past middle-aged the people in the study. But and I know some people like, "That's not true. I have sex all the time." You probably do it in a snowstorm. Like, it doesn't matter where you are. Like, you're a human rabbit. It doesn't matter. But for other people, it's like a distraction, right? It's a distraction and it can also, you know, um create all of those kind of chemical soup issues that we've been talking about with elevating cortisol and those kind of things. So, I ideally, get your television out of the room. Uh the other tech. And last thing with the sleep environment I'll share. When I talked about melatonin, you need those two two conditions, biological night and you also need a dark environment. And so, if you're in an environment where you're maybe in a suburban or city environment where there's like neighbors' porch lights coming in, there's LEDs outside, cars coming up and down the street. As crazy as this sounds, that that small amount of light, what we're now dubbing light pollution, can have a significant impact on your sleep quality. And here's Here's why we know this. Cornell University I think did the best study on this. And they took a test subject and had them sleep in an otherwise dark room. And they took a a light, a fiber optic cable, and a light the size of a quarter and put it behind their knee. And that was enough to disrupt their sleep cycle. Because your skin also has photoreceptors that are sending information to your brain, your nervous system, your internal organs to try to tell your body what time it is. It's trying to figure it out. You know, so we want to get rid of that artificial light exposure. Now, does this mean moonlight and stars? No, humans have evolved with those things. And their lux, like I actually put a lux chart in the book, is so small compared to even the weakest fluorescent bulbs. And so, get yourself some blackout curtains if that external light is an issue. Internal light, you know, your alarm clocks and, you know, light, you know, lamps, you know, some people still are sleeping with with lights on and things like that. Be mindful of that and also what you can do is just change the bulb color. You know, if you still have issues with the dark, which some adults do and that's okay. Um you can change the bulb cover color and I actually had some NASA scientists or people that work with them to send me some different bulbs because folks in space, they don't have that biological clock. And so they would experience all these different health challenges. They had to try to figure it out. They knew that it was an issue with their sleep. And so they start to give them different bulbs for different times of day in a way, you know, even though they're in outer space. So it's really cool what you can do with these little hacks, but bottom line is you want to have a dark cycle so you can produce melatonin. And you know, those are just a few. Those are just a few of the different things people can do. Everybody knows that if you're stressed out, take a deep breath. Well, don't take one deep breath, take six. And this is something I talk about a lot. The research from a Japanese study shows that six deep breaths are what it takes to actually create state change. So start practicing that. You get flustered, you get emotional, don't take a breath, just take six. Use that mental override to take six damn breaths and really start to unplug from that. And then use use the cold. You know, use the cold as an ally. Use that to practice mental override, use that to reduce inflammation, use that practice. I think that's something that's really important. Um making sure you stay hydrated. I talk about the morning mineral cocktail. I think a lot of us we go from caffeine to all these different other substances and foods and whatever and a lot of us are running chronic dehydration and not only dehydration from water, but the minerals and electrolytes that you need. So adding in some sea salt or some Himalayan salt in with your water is going to be effective. I wake up every morning 16 oz of water, Himalayan sea salt, about 3 g of that and a splash of lemon. Um that's something that's really important. Finding some way to practice mindfulness. So, finding that way to get to mental stillness, I think it's really important. Knowing your body enough to know, all right, this is what happens when I have a bunch of sugar. You know, I feel good for the second, then the insulin kicks in, and then I go hyperglycemic, then I feel exhausted, and then I reach for more coffee. Like, you got to have insight into those cycles and understand what's going to be best for you. And knowing you knowing yourself with training, knowing what movement patterns help, knowing how your body feels and reacts. Um, you know, getting your head and your ego out of your sex life, so it can be a way to really engage with your partner in a way that creates deeper connection and allows you to be mindful, be present, you know, be in the big now. Um, sleeping, taking naps. You know, I think that's one thing that a lot of people miss. They think that you have to get all your sleep overnight in this uninterrupted 8 hours. Well, good luck. Like, I don't know anybody who gets uninterrupted 8 hours. Maybe one or two people, but for the most of us, you know, we're going to get what we can at night, but then feel free to take a nap or what Nick Littlehales book Sleep calls a controlled recovery period, 30 minutes where you just kind of zone out and allow yourself to recover. Um, and then of course on the on the other side, it's a lot of the other things we talked about, but ultimately, you know, trust that you got to forgive yourself. You know, forgive yourself for everything that's happened in the past, understand that you're not the same person that you were then. You're the person who's learned from all those things. You know, Heraclitus has a quote, "No man steps in the same river twice, for he's not the same river. It's not the same river, and he's not the same man." You know, we're we're different at any different moment, and we can decide to be different. We can decide to have listened to this and change something or change everything or change whatever. We have that ability. We have way more power than we recognize and what people will tell us that we have. So, stepping into that power and deciding for ourselves what we want to do with it. When people are depressed or bipolar or anxiety or fear or trauma or PTSD, it is stress and they cannot break the loop. I tell you, we found the key to break the loop. That's where I am right now with the science. And now this needs to be implemented for those in need and there are many many in need. Your neurology is in sight that and it connects with your body the way nature meant it to be and in the primordial state of our cells, the cells should be protected by proteins. But because of our comfort zone behavior, they are inactive. And thus inflammatory impulses through the transcription factors, just little [ __ ] and will go into the cell and they begin to mess up the telomeres, the longevity, the cell division, the condition thereof and we live shorter and better so less and we are becoming vulnerable for the wrong genome expressions and that causes diseases. That's really interesting. If this is really um shaking down to hormesis, which said another way is a little bit of bad does you a lot of good. Yes. And so you actually need something that stresses a system in a way that most people would think of as bad Yes. that actually ends up being good. And this is where um I'm jarred in the best way possible with what you were saying about it being this meditative experience for you because I think of going in ice is brutally painful, of requiring all of my discipline and desire to battle through Mhm. and I I wouldn't have thought of it as being something that I have to relax into of, you know, really sort of releasing, letting go, relaxing, almost removing myself from the certainly removing myself from the suffering of the pain, but I'm curious. Are you When you're doing this and you've talked about dipping under the ice and going into this meditative state and you've described it with these sound effects, which I always found really interesting. But when you're going into that, do you feel the pain and divorce yourself from the suffering or do you literally not feel any discomfort? You feel anything, but you learn to let go. You follow the breath and thus the hormonal system, the endocrine system, which we have shown in scientific research, is really active within your command. And with that comes the adrenaline, the epinephrine, the opiates and the cannabinoids. All right, now I have a They are very strong. I have a really They're really strong painkillers as well, right? So, that's interesting. So, you're saying that you're actually killing the pain by tapping into that system because you've kicked off all this neuropharmacology, basically. Yes. Okay, that's super interesting. What I want to know is when you're going into the meditative state, you know you've just been injected with the endotoxins. What are you visualizing? Like what are you actually thinking when you're trying to get to adrenaline or bone marrow or I tell you. If you go into the ice, you are really not thinking about your mortgage or your wife or this or that. You are not going to picnic. You feel The focus will be on your feeling. And how to get this feeling into adaptation and to overcome whatever is coming. And it goes directly. And I tell you, the cold has been my teacher. I just follow the teacher, the feeling, and learned to let go. Intuitively, I felt I want to do this. I did yoga, I did kung fu, I did all kinds of things and and uh great. But, the cold is really merciless, but righteous. And I was ready to go in. I felt intuitively, I want to go in because it has got something. I don't know what it is. And yes, I went in. And I felt it. The connection was there beyond any word. And that's what I was looking for. This tapping into deeper parts of the brain, a feeling pure energy, feeling power, innate capacitated power we have to deal with that. I was looking for that. And since then I went on and on and on and on. I did all these records and many more challenges. I did crazy stuff, really. Sitting all the night in in in your shorts outside in freezing temperatures and feel great. That is something, but that is power. And I've been venturing and discovering more and more. And finally, I began to realize but it's all in the mind. Oh, yes. So, learning to let go in the right way, following your breath. The breath is able to prime uh the body and then your mind, the neurology of the mind. If I'm able to make my skin temperature not going down while being exposed to ice cold water, skin temperature, that's power. And that power is the same power we can learn to embrace and awaken uh in which we are able to tackle any stressor in the world. Any stressor emotionally and physically. And mentally, whatever you you come up, we are built to be able to oppose that, to get through, and to learn. And not to be afraid cuz we have the power of the mind. I would argue that um Ambien is going to have a really big competitor. Um it's called weed, and it's out, and it's recreational in a couple of states. I live in, you know, California, and it's very, very interesting. smoke? Sure. Interesting. Absolutely. What do you find that it does to your sleep? So, it depends on when you smoke it, what you smoke, and how much you smoke. So, it's all There's a lot of different things out there, but I've written extensively about if you're going to use marijuana to help you sleep, what should you look for? I've also break I've also broken down the cannabinoids. So, a lot of people out there are talking about CBD, CBD, CBD, right? Let me be clear. You'd have to have almost 200 mg of CBD to have any effect on sleep. Much lower dosage to help with pain. You want CBN. Okay. CBN, which turns out to be oxidized THC, helps with sleep much more. At least that's what the data would suggest. So, how does one oxidize THC? You let weed lie around for a little while, and it's basically CBN is old weed. Hm. Now, to be fair, people are learning how to process it and make that process move quicker, but what we're starting to see is now we're starting to see cannabis, like if you go into a cannabis dispensary and you say, "What have you got for sleep?" They have a section. Right? Like when people my age, 50, 51 years old, are walking into a dispensary, we're not going there to get high. We're going there because we got pain, we have sleep issues, and we want and we want to use the medicine. Right? That's where the gold is. And so, when you start to really look at it, like, let's treat it like a medicine. Let's look at it in a way that can be helpful. I mean, we have an entire endocannabinoid system in our body that isn't being used except for with cannabinoids. So, also to be fair, cannabinoids are in many other things besides marijuana, but they're really in marijuana. So, why shouldn't we start to walk down that path, create that technology, and help more people? All right. So, you've said that if you're going to drink alcohol, stop 3 hours before bed. What's the protocol with weed? So, with I think it's going to be different, and to be honest with you, I don't think I know yet. Um it's definitely something that I'm studying and I'm and I'm learning more and more and more about, but I would argue that the tinctures, like the the liquid that comes in the droppers that you can do sublingually, I would say that would be a place to start. even heard of that. Oh. drop it under your tongue? Yeah. You just take it, drop it underneath your tongue, let it sit there, 60 seconds, and swallow it, close eyes. One thing that is super weird is things that during the day are not in any way, shape, or form intimidating or daunting when I'm supposed to be sleeping. So, if I wake up in the middle of the night, I'll start stressing about something, and I'll I'm literally like, once I get out of bed, this is not going to stress me out. So, why is it stressing me out at night? Is there a part of my brain that shuts off? Is there a part of my brain that becomes active? Like, why are things at night do they seem so big and dramatic? Whereas in the day, it's like, "Nah, it's not a big deal." Yeah, I We actually don't really fully understand, in truth, but part of this is to do with context. That it's dark, um you don't have full awareness, you don't have full functioning of the brain. Because when we wake up, that sleep inertia, by the way, in part is because your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that makes us most human, it's like the CEO of the brain, it's very good at understanding high-level concepts, putting things into contextually appropriate boxes, making top-down control decisions, it regulates our emotions. That part of the brain's the last thing to come back online as we wake up, and that's why we're not very, you know, brilliant if we have sleep inertia. But when we're waking up out of sleep in the middle of the night, we also have some of that. So, we don't have the rational, logical part of our brain fully engaged. Plus, the context is one that's dark, and so we don't have sort of the daylight sort of giving us this sort of normative safe feeling. And so what happens is that the brain starts to default to rumination and catastrophization. You know, it's almost like this Rolodex of anxiety that then starts to unfold. And that one memory that, you know, you bring back into mind um at that moment of waking up is the finger that flicks the domino on that cascade of of, you know, rumination. So again, just realize I've done this before, I've experienced this before. I know that tomorrow by, you know, 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon, I think about this and I think that was ridiculous to be worrying about. It's it's okay. Try to remind yourself of that. Look at what sleep you need and look about how you can make that more efficient. It is the single most, in in my opinion, most important thing that you could do easily, which will have a really positive impact as as we discussed in like literally every organ in your body. It reduces your risks just of so many comorbidities. For for someone who wants to be, and a lot of your listeners want to try and looking at high-performance output, if you are not managing your sleep, it is crazy to think that you can run at optimum efficiency. All right, so I'll slightly change it for you cuz I imagine your answer is going to be something to do with sleep. If it is, what is the one thing people should do that would have the biggest impact on their sleep? Know your chronotype, without question. It's super easy. Go to chronoquiz.com. It's my website. Um you'll learn in 30 questions what your chronotype is, and then you can figure out, I mean, in my book I tell people the best time to have sex, eat a cheeseburger, ask your boss for a raise, and sleep. So it's useful in all facets of life. Nice. It's a great place to leave you all. Guys, sleep, man. I'm telling you, get it. It is the number one thing. People are always asking me, uh trying to accomplish as much as I'm trying to accomplish, if I set an alarm. In fact, I stopped posting about how early I wake up because people are getting the wrong idea. They thought that I was setting alarm to wake up at 3:00, which I do not. Uh Uh get your sleep. And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.