TRY THIS TONIGHT - Learn How To Sleep CORRECTLY! | Tom Bilyeu

Sleep is undeniably essential to our health and longevity. More than half of adults worldwide report that they are getting less sleep than they need on average per night, making sleep problems a global epidemic. In this episode, I have three sleep experts join me to talk about how we can approach this program. Shawn Stevenson, author of Sleep Smarter, Give yourself a screen curfew. Just 30 minutes. Matthew Walker, author of the New York Times best-seller Why We Sleep, Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, that must be the first line recommended treatment. And Dan Pardi, CEO of humanOS.me and dansplan.com. Sleep ends up being as a very great window into your soul, you know, even into the into the workings of the brain. Pay attention to get the inside scoop on sleep and its necessity in today's world. Number one is to remember that your night sleep begins the morning before. And one of the most important things that you can do is get direct sun exposure into your eyes and on your skin first thing in the morning. Now, I know a lot of people live in northern latitudes and you're stepping outside and it's basically just a gray day, but even that helps. It's better than nothing. You want to get out. You want that sunlight to hit your eyes. You want that sunlight to hit your skin because it helps to set your circadian rhythms. It's one of the most important things you can do for actually getting a good night's sleep, but it starts the morning before. And by the way, as a pro tip, when you're traveling, this is one of the critical things that you want to do to adjust to the new time zone. The second you wake up, get out, go outside, and get that sun exposure. And I try to look up into the sky, not at the sun, as that will burn your eyes out, but I try to look up into the sky to make sure that I'm getting the maximum amount of sunlight into my eyes. I'm not wearing sunglasses. I'm not wearing blue blockers like I'm wearing now, which is part of the night routine. But in the morning when I'm trying to get all that sunlight in to set my circadian rhythms, then I'm making sure that I get that exposure. Make sure that you're using your body throughout the day. It's incredibly important to actually be physically active to burn that energy off to make sure that you earn your night's sleep. In a modern lifestyle, so often we're spending so much time sedentary that we don't actually tax our body in any meaningful way, which means that by the time we're trying to lay down to go to bed, we don't have the impulse to sleep. And so, doing things that are physically taxing throughout the day is an extraordinarily useful way of being ready to actually go to bed. As you go through the day, I find that there are certain things that you need to be very careful about in terms of what you intake, so eating and drinking. So, a big one for me is the last meal that I eat and what time that happens at. Now, I get up very early, which we'll cover as we get later in my day around what time I go to bed, but I typically get up very early, somewhere between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. So, my day already is skewed that way, but my last meal I eat usually around 1:15 to 1:45 p.m. And that is the last meal I will eat for the day. I won't have anything after that, literally nothing. I don't even have a water after 2:00 p.m. Now, the reason that I don't eat after 1:45-ish is because I want to do intermittent fasting and it's much easier for me to get through the rest of the evening without intaking any more food than it is to spend the whole morning hungry until, say, 12:00 or 1:00, which I know a lot of people do. It's dealer's choice, whatever works better for you, but having an extended fast is very, very helpful. Now, also, another reason that I end it early is that I think you will notice a massive difference in how you sleep if you have your last meal at least, at least, bare minimum 3 hours before bedtime. So, if you go to bed at 9:00 p.m. like it's a religion, like I do, then your last meal is going to be at 6:00 p.m. anyway. So, you're going to want to get that out of the way. And I wouldn't start chewing at 6:00. I would try to be done chewing at 6:00 so that you actually have a full 3 hours rest between when you had that last bite and when you go to bed. Your digestion stops in the middle of the night so it can create discomfort if your digestion stops sort of mid-process and you're sitting with something sitting either still in your stomach or in your um upper intestine. So, uh that can be very uncomfortable. So, that disrupts people's sleep and makes it hard for them to get to sleep. And remember that you have trillions of microbes inside of you and when they're being asked to sit in all the things that they're um digesting, it can create issues. So, I find that I sleep way better by not just eating 3 hours before bedtime, but taking that all the way back to where I'm done chewing at about 1:15. Uh 1:45, excuse me. So, that's worked out really, really well for me. And if you're worried that you're going to get hungry, remember you're taking in a normal amount of calories, you're just having your last meal later. And what I have heard said before and I think it's really clever and brilliant is that as I get hungry, I have sleep for dinner. And uh I love that. I love that idea of right when I'm about like, "Yeah, I could eat now." I brush my teeth, which for whatever reason the taste taste of toothpaste kills hunger. So, just as I'm thinking I want to eat, I brush my teeth and then boom, I go to bed. I fall asleep with no problems and I'm able to stay asleep. Now, the reason that I stopped drinking at 2:00 p.m. is I find that if I have any substantial amount of water, cuz I'll still have a sip of water here and there, uh but sips. And the reason is that I'll wake up in the middle of the night to pee if I And by the way, if I'm eating too close to bedtime, same thing because there's so much water in the food that you eat. Uh but I don't want to wake up in the middle of the night if I can at all avoid it. So, the times where I eat late or drink late, I find myself waking up in the middle of the night to pee, and then my brain kicks back in, and I start problem-solving, and it makes it impossible for me to fall back asleep, and I was losing two, sometimes three hours a night of productivity because I wasn't sleeping. I was trying to fall back asleep. I wasn't doing anything useful other than tossing and turning and ruminating over everything that had happened during the day, that I need to do, that I could have done better. It was nightmarish. So, not only are you fatigued, sub-optimal cognitively, but it's just really a lame way to spend time because there's an interesting part of your brain that shuts off in the middle of the night that makes fears seem way bigger than they will as soon as you're up and are actually attacking your day, it all feels very manageable. But in the middle of the night, it feels terrifying, it feels overwhelming, feels like, you know, just absolute stress-inducing, and so that makes it even less likely that you're going to be able to fall asleep. So, anything that I can do to mitigate waking up in the middle of the night and starting that death loop, I'm going to do. So, that's one of the reasons that I stop eating, and is definitely the reason that I stop drinking at 2:00 p.m. every day. Okay, the next thing that I do for sleep hygiene, as it's called, is as the evening wears on, I make sure that I'm not getting a substantial amount of blue light and bright light into my eyes. So, I'm going to dim my computer screen. I'm going to put my computer screen on screen on night mode. So, you can go into your phone, you can go into your computer, and set them to just automatically at a certain time. I think I set mine for 6:00 p.m. if I remember right, and it just automatically flips over to an orangier light. I dim the screen, so I'm not getting super bright light. Happens again both on my phone and my computer. And then, on top of that, just to make sure, I put on blue blocking glasses to make sure that I'm not getting too much in my eyes. And there are some days, if I'm going to be at the computer for a really extended amount of time, I'll wear blue blockers even during the day just so I'm not getting an overwhelming amount of the artificial blue light from my screen. So, that's how I curb that. And then, another thing that I do around my computer is I try not to do any work that I think will be stress-inducing for the final hour before my bedtime. So, I'm still going to work right up until I go to bed. My rule in life is Monday through Friday, if I'm awake, I'm either working or working out. Now, I love my work, so this isn't a torture chamber. I'm sure some people are imagining that and thinking it's horrible, but for me it's completely joyful. And I do, though, have to acknowledge that there are some things that I work on that stress me out. And so, I don't check texts text messages after 8:00 p.m. I'm not looking at emails after 8:00 p.m. Um I'm doing things that are work, but enjoyable. Now, I'm not religious about it. There are definitely times where I feel that something really just has to be done in a timely fashion, and so I will break that rule light um occasionally, but I try not to because I do find that I sleep much better if for the last hour before bed I'm doing fun things, I'm doing things that um give me energy, that make me feel light, that are part of that passion, that feel good. And I can feel a difference in my stress and anxiety levels. There's a lightness to it that I don't know I don't have a better word for it, but as I'm going to bed, I just feel relaxed, I feel um joyful, I have a sense of purpose, and it's like I can let everything go for the day. And when I climb into bed, I remind myself that I only have one job now that I'm going to bed, and that job is to sleep. And that mantra, the job I have now is to sleep, has helped me a lot, especially when I wake up in the middle of the night. So, when I lay down, then I have a host of different mechanical things that I do. Um one of them is to make sure that I have my own blankets. I use a two blanket system. So, I myself have two blankets. That way, if at any point during the night I'm getting cold, I can pull the other blanket up. So, I start it down where it's basically just covering my shins and below. And then if I'm getting cold, I can pull that up to my waist if I'm a little cold but not too cold, or I can pull it all the way up if I'm really cold. And that allows me to better control my temperature. And then, this is the one that people think is weird, but I've been doing it forever, so it seems so normal to me. I do not, ever, under any circumstance, share blankets with my wife. Now, the reason is, when they move, it becomes your movement. Or you're playing tug-of-war for the blanket, or worse, the other person might actually pull the blanket off you, or you might pull the blanket off them and give them a bad night's sleep. So, that was a lesson I learned very early on because, for whatever weird reason, I like to sleep with the blankets up over my head. I like to be completely cocooned. Feels so nice. There is no light, which by the way is another thing. Make sure your room is dark. Make sure your room is dark. So, no light, no light leaks, no phones, no nightlights, nothing. As dark as you can get it. Cover up if things have like little LED power lights, cover those up. Do whatever you can to get the room actually dark. For me, I have another layer, which is I sleep under the blankets. Now, if you're like my wife Lisa, the last thing you're ever going to do is cover your head with a blanket. She absolutely hates it and feels like, you know, she's just claustrophobic and has to get it off of her. But for me, it just feels like I'm in a womb and it's so wonderful. So, I love it. So, I have slept with the blankets over my head for decades at this point, which is another reason why I need to have my own blankets. So, get my own blankets, I can meter them based on the temperature in the room, which brings me to another point. One of the best signifiers to your body that it's time to go to bed, that's going to kick you into sleep mode, is making sure that your room is cool. So, we keep our room somewhere around 67° to 68°. It should be cool enough that when you go to take your clothes off and get in your pajamas, you kind of don't want to because it's that cold. So, that's the right temperature. So, whatever that temperature is for you, you want to get it there. Get under the covers, you're nice and warm. It's not like you're sleeping cold, but you want the room to be cool to signal to your body that it's night time, right? We've come up through evolution with all of these signals from daylight, from the brightness, the color temperature, the difference between firelight, which is dim and orange, to daylight, which is bright and blue. And so, we have all of these subtle signals including a drop in temperature. So, as the temperature comes down, it's yet another signal to your body that it's time to go to sleep. So, from setting our circadian rhythm with getting that sunlight directly in our eyes, on our skin, actually being outside, to the temperature dropping, the color temperature of the light changing, uh the brightness of the light changing, all of these are signals that keep your circadian rhythm where you want it to be so that you can fall asleep. What is up, my friend? Tom Bilyeu here and I have a big question to ask you. How would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of 1 to 10? If your answer is anything less than a 10, I've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now, discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful, boring, which is what kills most people, or possibly scary or even painful. Now, here is the thing. Achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging, stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring. Building your levels of personal discipline is not easy, but let me tell you it pays off. In fact, I will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline. All right, I've just released a class from Impact Theory University called How to Build Ironclad Discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you. All right, click the link on the screen, register for this class right now, and let's get to work. I will see you inside this workshop from Impact Theory University. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Peace out. This particular topic is and me being a nutritionist like I was all like food matters, food first, food is the most important thing. But, in my practice and seeing people coming in that you know, we've got these folks over here, you know, 80% of the time are able to reverse type 2 diabetes, heart disease, get off their lisinoprils, and all this different stuff. And then we've got this category of people who just like literally sometimes would ironically kind of keep me up at night like, what is wrong? Like I'm doing all these things right. Are they lying to me? And then it wasn't until I started to ask people about their sleep that it just like it changed everything. And this was about 6 years ago. And so then and here's the key. I can't just tell people they need to sleep more. You know this. Like people don't want to change that much. Like we want change, but we want it to be a little bit, right? And so I found clinically proven strategies that are super easy to implement. Almost things that can happen on automatic to help them improve their sleep quality, right? And once we did that, it's like the floodgates would open for people. You know, who'd been struggling for sometimes, you know, 15, 20 years with their weight. Finally, the weight comes off, you know? And seeing people struggling with heart disease or high cholesterol, you know, the so-called bad cholesterol. Um and seeing those numbers finally get regulated once we got their sleep optimized. And I knew that this was incredibly important part of the conversation that was left out. And as we'll talk about, I know now that our sleep quality is more important than our diet and exercise combined. And what it does for our health and also literally our physical appearance. Fascinating stuff. How much more fat you lose when you get optimal sleep. It's It's insane. That's a bold statement. So, walk me through what are some of the um the just core benefits that I'm going to get assuming that I'm sleeping suboptimally. Like why is that a problem since that's probably one of the most celebrated like things? Like when you get a little sleep, people like champion you. Normally, I'd sleep 5 to 6 hours a night with no alarm. Okay, I haven't set an alarm in 15 years. So, that's just That was my cycle. Mhm. Um I go to bed early, very consistently. My diet is on point. My exercise is on point. And so, I'd wake up feeling awesome. Yeah. And so, I thought this is cash money. But because I don't set an alarm, that my sleep cycle will change. And right now I'm getting like 7 to 9 hours out of nowhere and super consistently. Yeah. And I literally have no idea why. I'm warmer now. So, I used to be freezing cold at all times. And then at the same time that my and I don't know correlated, causative, no idea. Um I've started being warmer while I sleep and then during the day. So, what are like the core components of sleep? Was something bad happening to me or or less than optimal when I was only getting 6 hours even though I felt good. Any correlation between the heat and the extra sleep? There's There's for There's a lot to unpack there. Number one, what's so interesting is that you you were doing something exceptionally right as far as what the research shows with improving your sleep, which is you were going to bed kind of consistently a little bit earlier than other folks might. And so, what we call what we call this is this anabolic window or what we call money time sleep. And this is generally between the hours of 10 and 2 because it's more lined up with your natural melatonin secretion. So, if you go to sleep during those times, you actually spend more time in the deepest, most anabolic stages of sleep and you tend to produce more human growth hormone than other folks. So, you were already winning with that. This is why you have a tendency to feel better even if you're getting less sleep because I This isn't called sleep more, right? It's sleep smarter. And there are many people who sleep, you know, 8 to 9 hours and they wake up feeling like straight up, you know, hot garbage. You know what I'm saying? And they're just wondering why. It's because it's the quality of sleep. And when I say quality of sleep, what does that mean? Let's break that down. So, your sleep is regulated by changes in your in your brain waves. It's really fascinating stuff and we still don't know really what sleep is. Trying to define sleep is like trying to define um you know, when Forrest Gump is like life is like a box of chocolates, sleep is like pretending to be dead. We don't really know, right? But we do know the changes that happen in the brain. We cycle from kind of a normal waking state with with gamma, beta, um we're probably in beta right now. We move to alpha, theta, delta is where the deep anabolic, dreamless sleep takes place. And we need all of them. And there's a certain percentage we spend in each that helps to rejuvenate our mind and bodies. And if you optimize certain things, you'll do it more efficiently. One of those gear shifts, like if you think about your body like this kind of manual transmission, is melatonin. Like people hear about melatonin as a sleep hormone and it just helps your body to efficiently go through your sleep cycles. And if your melatonin is suppressed by various things, you know, I'll share a couple, then you're not going through those efficiently and you can wake up feeling like a piñata after the party the next day, even though you're spending all this time on the mattress. So, that's number one. Number two, there's this interesting process called thermoregulation. There's a natural drop in your core body temperature at night to help facilitate sleep for all of us if things are running properly. But what was fascinating and I shared a study about this is that they tested insomniacs and everyone in this particular clinical study all had too high body temperature at night. It would not go down. And so, what they did was they fit them with these thermal suits, right, that lowers their skin temperature, not even the core temperature, just 1°, and virtually eliminated all the symptoms of insomnia. Whoa. Ambien can't do that, all right? And it's as simple as paying attention to how your body temperature influences your sleep. And so, with your body temperature changing like that, it's kind of feeling more of an insulation as a result of having more sleep, there's a ton of different things that could be correlated there. So, I'm not going to say that the sleep is a causative factor, but it's really interesting how your body does change in accordance to sleep. There's a natural rise in your core body temperature as the day goes as I'm sorry, as the night goes on that helps to kind of wake you up. Um so, what I did want to share though, when I said that kind of bold statement in the beginning, when we're talking about how sleep influences your body composition, I think everybody needs to know this. There was a This study really blew my mind and this was done at the University of Chicago. And they took people and they put them on a calorie restricted diet, kind of typical stuff again I'm taught in college, to see the impact on weight loss when they're sleep deprived or getting enough sleep, all right? So, they put the people on this particular diet, monitor everything. One phase of study, they're getting 8 and 1/2 hours of sleep, all right? And then they check all their metrics. Another phase of the study, same exact diet, same exercise, they don't change anything else, but now they sleep deprive them. And they take away 3 hours of sleep. So now they're getting 5 and 1/2 hours of sleep versus 8 and 1/2 hours of sleep. At the end of the study, they found that when individuals were well-rested, they burned 55% more body fat just by getting more sleep. And so the question is, how does this happen? Melatonin, when I talked about this a little bit earlier, it's not just that it's involved in sleep, it's also involved in fat loss. In this study that was done in the Journal of Pineal Research, found that uh melatonin production helps increase your body's mobilization of something called brown adipose tissue, right? This is a type of fat that burns fat, all right? The reason that it's brown is that it has more mitochondria. So it's very energy dense, right? These mitochondria, just for people who I'm sure people have heard of this, but it's like these energy power plants in your cells that are creating the energy currency of your body, like how you experience energy, the energy exchange, something called ATP. And so when you are producing adequate melatonin, you're producing and mobilizing adequate amounts of brown adipose tissue, which just puts you in a metabolically advantaged state, all right? But if you're not getting the melatonin production, which you've got to meet two requirements, number one, you need a biological night. So that means this could actually be during the day, but it's a consistent cycle of when it gets produced. But the other requirement needs to be met that you need darkness. Your body produces melatonin exclusively in darkness. And so that's one. Also, how do you get how do they get that body fat change? HGH production, which we talked about, too. Human growth hormone is muscle sparing. And it's a big driver of energy. It's also known as a youth hormone. Kids have an insane amount of HGH being produced. This is why they have so much energy. We have a pretty sharp decline in our production right around 18 to 20. But my argument is that around 18 to 20, we generally in our culture like leave the house, we might go to college, that kind of thing, and we no longer have structure, we no longer have rules, and we're not going to produce as much HGH. Third thing, really quickly, um is and this is all has to do with the diet and the food choices is leptin. All right? And I know people's talked about leptin before, but leptin is your body's kind of glorify satiety hormone. And so when you're producing adequate amounts of leptin, you feel more in control, right? You feel more satiated. But when when leptin kind of falls off the map or you have leptin uh resistance can take place, then we're going to have some pretty big issues with you regulating your cravings and your appetite. And so Stanford University researchers found that just one night of sleep deprivation radically suppresses your leptin. And now I hope folks can start to pay attention whenever you might not get the best sleep, how your cravings changed the next day. You're going to have a tendency to want to number one, eat more, number two, to want to eat more kind of the starchy, crunchy, salty, sugary type things. And I remember my wife, who's actually here, uh when we had our son, and I she she's never seen me eat the this food. I was sitting there like waiting for the baby to come. I was eating uh chocolate-covered raisins. I was just like and I didn't even realize I was doing it. You know, it was like 3:00 in the morning, you know? And so that's another thing. And uh last one I'll share and there's so many that create that change in your body composition. But this one is incredibly important. Is cortisol. Cortisol's been dragged through the mud recently. You know, it's getting blamed for everything, but it's not really a bad guy. It's just misunderstood. All right? Cortisol's incredibly important. For example, cortisol's important for your thyroid to work, right? And that's kind of like the metabolism regulator of your body. But here's the thing. Just one night of sleep deprivation radically increases your cortisol and suppresses melatonin, actually, as well. But, this rise in cortisol has a really powerful ability to start to break down your muscle tissue, which your muscles your body's kind of fat-burning machinery. And so, it can convert your muscle tissue into glucose. It's a process called gluconeogenesis. As a kind of fight or flight response because your physiology doesn't know why you're not sleeping. You know, it must be some danger about, you know? And so, understanding those major hormones, and there's many others, you start to see the picture that gets painted with just how much your sleep quality impacts your physical appearance. It's really crazy. I've always known you need sleep, but I didn't know why. And so, getting into uh or transitioning, I should say, because I was in you needed sleep because if I didn't get it, I felt terrible. But, that was sort of the the end of it. And I even let myself just stop at the we don't really know why you sleep, but not diving into to the real breakdown, which is really fascinating. So, what are things then 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 does 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 stage 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 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 are 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, do some Tabata, which is just 4 minutes, and a little mobility work. And 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. Wow. The change in your cardiovascular benefits, body composition, and also change 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 in the right amount. Clinically, I would call these people tired and wired that would come in and looking at their 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 will 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. 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 you'll 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 get in 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 the 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 the the 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, 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 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. 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're addicted to our devices like straight up. We just need to be on 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 that 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. All right, it's like this slow drip all right, of morphine. And so it starts to like feel really good into 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, utilize and I've 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. And so, when we have an orgasm for example, we produce up chemical I'm sorry, cocktail of chemicals including oxytocin, norepinephrine, prolactin. And oxytocin for example, has been found clinically to 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 for your telephone, you know, your cell phone, we've got on the iPhones built-in now is night shift. With Androids, the best one out there from my research is one called Twilight. You know, so there's options for everybody. 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 glasses. The first ones I had was 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 neuro association when you put the glasses on and you'll start to get sleepy. 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. 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 thermal regulation piece. Turn down the 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° F is ideal for sleep. And so, for some people that's going to sound a little bit frosty, but it lowering the thermostat a little bit can 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, 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-age, little past middle-age 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 did I think of the best study on this. And they took a test subject and had them sleep in a 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 their 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 color 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. And they had to try to figure it out, they knew that it was an issue with their sleep. And so, they started 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. If sleep is so good for me and dreams are amazing and they help with creativity and they they take the sharp edges off my emotions, why the hell do I have nightmares? Yeah, so what we know is that nightmares aren't necessarily pathological. Um and we we know that in some conditions, and PTSD is a is a very good example of this, that they can sort of step over that threshold from being normative to non-normative. And they they can be very concerning and and and disruptive to people and it's also very traumatic too, to relive those and and wake up from them. We do think it's part of the same process of sort of emotional regulation, that it's the brain trying to understand and better comprehend what this thing called waking life and all of its emotional peaks and troughs are all about. So, the bottom line here is that as long as they're not causing you distress and harm, then you don't have to worry about them. If they are doing that though, there are new clinical therapies for um what we call nightmare um disorders. And it involves usually just what you were describing before, which is speaking with a therapist, writing down the nightmare, and then replaying it while you are awake, sort of you know, speaking about it, writing it back down, working with a therapist, and essentially trying to sort of just say, "Look, okay, in that context, it's safe. Let's better understand that." And repeatedly doing that type of work where you're sort of reactivating the nightmare, and then trying to change the context to something that's safe or that's less fearful or that's less negative, gradually over time, that type of work can dissipate the frequency and the severity of those nightmares. So, nightmares by themselves, not necessarily a bad thing. If they are causing you problems, you can go and speak to your doctor, and there are some therapies for that that you can sort of just Google around um nightmare therapy, etc., and those will help. Yeah, and that like the way in which your brain chooses to interpret its sort of dream reassessment of the real world will have huge implications in your life. It could be PTSD, it could be a bazillion things. I have a feeling, I have never had this thought before, but I have a feeling that the more we learn about how individual brains recontextualize things, and how much the conscious mind and subconscious mind sort of come into cahoots to decide how they're going to align things up, because when I was in my early 20s and I was convinced I I stupid, I was interpreting the world one way that was just had me paralyzed by fear. And then as I began to realize sort of the nature of the brain and oh, just cuz I'm stupid now, it doesn't mean I can't learn about this. You know, that Carol Dweck's notion of yet, right? I'm not good yet. And so that since then, consciously I have changed the way that I frame things. But I would bet a bazillion dollars that I'm also doing that subconsciously as my brain sort of processes the day. I think that's what, you know, dreaming if if it's one of its functions, is that recontextualizing of those experiences. You know, dreaming I think is a is a way for us to understand the world in which we live. And we can do it whilst we're awake. You know, I'm not suggesting that we don't form connections and we don't see links between different pieces of information. But the way that we do it in dreaming is very different. You know, I often liken it to when we're awake, you're sort of inputting this information into the brain and it's almost like a Google search page one. Where you insert your search term, you hit return, and you get the most obvious, immediate hits, the direct connections. That's what waking is all about. Dreaming is you inserting the search term, hitting the return button, and being taken straight to page 20. You know, and you inserted, you know, Impact Theory University. And all of a sudden, on page 20, it's about a field hockey game in Utah. And you think, "Hang on a second, what on earth is But then you read it and you think, "Ah, I can It's a distant, wacky connection." And it's not obvious to me that I would have made that, but it's a potentially powerful one. Because when you start to fuse things together that shouldn't normally go together, but they cause these marked advances in evolutionary fitness, it sounds like the biological basis of creativity. And that's one of the things that we're learning about with dream sleep as well. Contextualization, emotional resolution, creativity. Yeah, so, you know, as we start talking about dreaming and nightmares and all of the different ways that the brain is sort of interacting, uh, trying to make sense of the conscious world, one thing I heard you talk about is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which I found very interesting and I know so little about it, but knowing what I know about cognitive behavioral therapy in terms of pattern interrupting and things like that, are you Is this like us sending a sort of subconscious signal to our brain? Like, how does that work? Not quite. So, 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? What time are you going to bed? What time are 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 program, and I should say that I, um, I'm, uh, work with a a company, uh, I'm an advisor to a company called Shuni. Um, it's s h uh, u n i.io. 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 CBT-I is, and that's really the best approach for sleeping 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 3 or 4 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 down? Like, I find it so easy to fall asleep, but I can tell on the nights where I'm going to wake up. Yeah. 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 build 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 three or four hours later, you jettisoned maybe 50% of all of that adenosine, maybe even more because 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. Does that Does that make some sense? It makes total sense and it makes me 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, "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 machoism 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 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 very tricky. I'm super curious to see what you think about this because I know where you're going, right? You have you're training yourself that being in bed is is being awake is okay while you're in bed. So, 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, it 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 audio book, 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 redline. 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 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 and some schedule. And so, you can go on and you can go online and type Google morningness eveningness questionnaire. And it's a questionnaire that you fill out and it figures out what your chronotype is. Are you a morning type, somewhere in between, or you 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 Energizer bunnies and they're all happy and you know, joyful. And to me I'm just like, oh. 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. It's gifted to you at birth. 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 in 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 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 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 can 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. That's interesting. Does that help you, Tom? It does, but I'm surprised that you say to get warm because have you done cold showers before? Yeah, cold showers are sort of more of a noradrenaline thing. Yes, they they wake you up real fast. They do. Now, that's not necessarily a normative thing, you know, that's you, you know, shocking your fight or flight branch of the nervous system to go from a temperature that it's become accustomed to and it's acclimated to to then all of a sudden being dumped in ice water as it were, and it doesn't know it's a threat mechanism. It thinks you're under attack, and so of course you're going to wake up. Now, that comes with an adrenergic spike in the body. It comes with an accelerated heart rate. It could come with a cortisol spike. So, I'm not against that, but we don't have to go to those extremes. You can do it in these more subtle manners, which are all the more natural ways. Mhm, fair enough. Um I have a question going back to waking up in the middle of the night. 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, meh, it's not a big deal. Yeah, I we actually don't really fully understand it 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 is 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 okay. Try to remind yourself of that. Well, as that, my friend, you and I are living in a golden era of self-improvement. We have books, platforms like YouTube, courses, seminars, virtual events, workshops. The list really is endless. The internet has been so good for people like you and me who want to accomplish greater and greater things in life. And now, my friend, it is about to get even better. I've been spending most of this year working on the single most entertaining tool that you're ever going to have around self-improvement and it is called Project Kaizen. It's a web 3-based game experience that will be unlike anything else you've ever engaged with in your life partly because the technology is new and it's amazing. If you're not familiar with blockchain, NFTs, and all of that, Kaizen is going to be the perfect introduction for you as it is an excellent intersection of entertainment and learning all backed by the blockchain. We're getting closer and closer to launching this project for you every single day. We are working our faces to the bone to get this thing out there. And my friend, I want you to experience it. So, click the link on your screen and head on over to my Discord channel to stay up-to-date and be one of the first to join me inside of Project Kaizen, which by the way gets its name from the Japanese term of never-ending improvement. All right, back to today's episode. Did you read the book Change or Die? I haven't. So, the the concept is pretty straightforward. You tell people to change and most people don't. So, even if the outcome is, "Hey, if you don't take this pill." And I think it was that simple. It's like you have to take a pill once a day every day, and compliance after like 3 months or something drops to like 5% which is crazy. But, what I love is that you didn't hit that and go, "Oh, well, that's just a thing." You dive into human behavior. What did you learn in that discovery process about human behavior? What's working against us? How do we begin to take hold of it? And then maybe most interestingly, what is the loop method? Sure. The idea is in order for somebody to adopt and sustain a health behavior for a long term, not just a 30-day trial or 60-day period, so this becomes a part of their pattern of living. They should know why they are doing something, how to do it, if they're doing it, and if it's working. Mhm. And you can see that each one of those four components independently will reinforce somebody's ability to pick something up and take and and go with it. So, oftentimes what you'll see is that if somebody doesn't, let's say, change their behavior when information is given to them, you might just lob more information provisions at them, right? Oh, here's more information. But, maybe they just didn't have the skills to implement that good idea. Or they tried it for a little bit and then their old behaviors were swept back up. They didn't have any feedback or to say, "This is actually Are you living in accordance with your own goals?" Or maybe they just didn't know if it was actually working or not. And because one, you know, insidiously challenging aspect of our health is that a lot of things that are good for us might be what I call the meaningful but invisible. They matter, but we don't get that feedback to make us immediately detect if it's having a presence. And it might be, right? You might have a significant improvement in let's say memory performance over a 12-week period, but you're but you might not recognize it by the time you get there. It might actually feel like you're just performing as you've always been. And that actually can go up and down, improvements and decrements. So, is there a way to then use technology to then make people more informed about things that can help them, more informed about their own patterns of living, and then empowered to put all that into practice? And I actually think that we need technology in this world to help us take care of our health well. I found this so interesting in some of your talks. Define health. Yes. So, that question was posed to me a while ago, and I totally stumbled on it. It's one of those broad questions that is hard to define. I think probably the explanation that I like the most is that it is a the ability to maintain balance or homeostasis within the body. So, if you are challenged by some sort of, you know, infection or arm break, it your ability to get back to a place of balance is a marker of health. But it is also more than that. It is It is something that can we can use as a currency to realize our goals and aspirations in our life. And I think if you take that you drink that in, and you believe it, then all these things that can feel like friction might actually just be opportunities to live in a through the the fullest version of yourself. Mhm. I love that definition. So, now let's say that I have that, but I'm still struggling to implement. What are the behaviors Yeah. and like what are the behavior modification tools that people can put in place to comply? I think the first aspect of this is to clearly understand the problem at hand. Right? If you don't really know what your your challenge is, your own efforts will be either inefficient or you won't really know if you're headed in the right direction, even though you're spinning your wheels. We're born into a time where the default settings around us and the expectations of our environment and the pressures of culture and work and even the built environment will predictably lead to issues with our health, chronic disease. We have to be a little bit weird. We have to make a daily effort to counteract those forces, to affect our pattern of living so that we actually are being good stewards of our health. It's not something that is just there until it's gone. It's something that you need to cultivate and nurture. Then next, you want to be a lifetime learner because 15, 20 years ago, circadian rhythms, the gut microbiota, things like that were not a part of any model that was used to predict or describe health. We know information is changing regularly. So, I love that saying, um have strong opinions held loosely. Which means to me that you take the time to form an understanding now, but you don't defend that at all in the face of new information. So, you need to be have the ability to upgrade that, to up-level that. And then, you have to be able to take big concepts that you learn about and personalize it into the fabric of your life, your family, your kids, whatever that is. How can you take this idea that you think is going to benefit you and make it real for you? Because if it's too if it there's too much friction and conflict, you don't personalize it, you follow rules, you might be able to do that for 2 weeks, 3 weeks, but then you'll really likely to go back to whatever patterns you had previously. What else? I think your response to failure. Right? Failure is a part of the process, a regular part of the process. Can you address failure with compassion for yourself and also with resilience where you're like, "Oh, what can I learn about the fact that I wanted to go to the gym four times this week, but I went twice? What was it about the week? Constant assessment uh to then just know how you can do better next week. So interesting that as you're talking about how to get people to comply with health stuff that you're talking about mindset. In the beginning, so when I first started this film uh everything journey and talked through all these problems, it was why is the protein bar guy talking about mindset? Yeah. And then when I exited Quest and started Impact Theory and did all this mindset stuff and then I said, "Guys, we're going to do a show called Health Theory." Everyone's like, "Why is the mindset guy talking about health?" And it's been like this constant frustration for me for people to understand if you want to optimize for your health, you have to optimize your mindset. If you want to optimize for your mindset, you have to take care of your health. Yeah. And because I talk a lot about working hard and busting ass and all that and what greatness demands, people think that I don't sleep. They think that I just grind my way to success. Yep. The reality is that if and you've talked really powerfully about this, if you want to even have good decision-making abilities, Yeah. you've got to sleep. Run us through like a sleep 101, why it's so foundational to your work, and what people should be doing. Yeah. I left a company that I loved at a job that I loved to start a startup and my PhD. And I thought it could all implode. It would be too much for me to handle. And so I thought if I'm going to upregulate my ability to show up every day, I need to then basically take care of the machinery that is doing the work. So what is it that makes me feel sharp every day? And sleep then is of course one component of that. And what I've realized is so it's funny, we kind of encapsulate sleep as it's this packaged thing, but it's almost like, "Tell me about daytime." Right? It's a big window, you know? And what sleep ends up being is a very great window into your soul, you know? And into the into the workings of the brain and how like what is happening physiologically. So you really understand um it gives you a window to like narrow the field a little bit to then understand how our physiology works in general. If you had to make a hypothesis about two or three reasons why we sleep, what do you think are the two or three most important things that happen while people are sleeping? Yeah, it's a good question because it's been almost like definition of health under what is the solitary unitary purpose of sleep has been notably hard to define. We know very important things can happen. It's purging of energetic byproducts. It's purging of potentially neurotoxic products that are a result of that. It is plasticity that's forming. It is reregulation of our immune system. There's a lot going on. And I think there has not yet been one I think model that explains everything, but we do know that incredibly important things occur. So what are people doing that messes up their sleep? Yeah, so that's a it's a really good question. And the the common question that you get is how much sleep do you need? Right? How much time should I be in bed? It's easy. But the things that matter for sleep are our timing, intensity, and duration. So duration is sort of the easy one. It's that what I tell people is spend enough time in bed so that you wake naturally. That means you're not waking by an alarm. And so what I like to get what I call complete sleep is aim to spend half an hour more in bed than what you think you'll need so that if your body needs it on that night, you'll get it. Now you might not ever need it or you might not need it or you might need it rarely, but allow for complete sleep to happen. You also want the timing of your sleep to be regular. So if for instance, you go to bed usually from midnight and wake up at 8:00, but tonight you go to bed at 4:00 a.m. and you wake up at noon, it's 8 hours, but the sleep will not be as restorative as it was if you were sleeping in that same window every night because we now are introducing concept of circadian rhythms which are repeatable 24-hour processes. So when you're getting REM sleep at 4:00 a.m., your body because of your past experience over the last several weeks knows, do REM-like activities at that time. And so, it'll be more efficient. Sleep itself will be more efficient at doing what it wants to do if you regularize the timing of your sleep. And then, you have intensity, and that is really not something that you can take action on directly. Go sleep hard. But, you can do things during the day that then will facilitate depth. And you can also create an environment that is less disruptive. Okay, so talk to me. What can I do during the day to make sure that I'm sleeping hard? So, if you look at people that undergo bed rest because they have a broken leg, or in studies that put people on bed under bed rest to then see what their sleep is like, you know that they end up having a fragmentation of their sleep. So, they have more naps during the day. And they have more periods at night where they are up. Without adequate amounts of physical activity, there is a fragmentation of your sleep. You don't need a ton to then get better sleep, but then, where does that sensitivity to sort of drop off? You uh use running as an example because we can just define by time. You go regularly for a 20-minute run. Today, you go for a 4-hour run. You've now overloaded your system to a degree that might actually impair the amount of sleep that you get. There's a bidirectional relationship there, where a little bit of the stimulus aids in the depth of sleep, and too much can overwhelm it. Now, it doesn't automatically mean you will sleep poorly, but you have a higher risk of doing so. You might sleep like a rock. And then, there's temperature fluctuations. So, this is actually a newer area, but we live in a very insulated world, right? Even if we go outside, and there's not much variation in the temperature, we can layer ourselves so that our what we're being exposed to is very narrow. We also know that signals from a wider breadth of temperature within the day can might actually feed into that what's called the homeostat. These things that are collecting the signals of daytime usage that then help you sleep deeply. And then, a big important one is is light. So, light coming into your eye will communicate with receptors at the back of the eye that are not actually communicating with the visual cortex that help us see, but they are communicating with the master clock. And it we spend 90% of our time indoors now. So, if you we are not getting as much light as we used to. So, if you go outside, don't wear glasses. Get outside for at least a half an hour a day. Sunglasses, yeah. Sunglasses, yes, yeah, thanks. And then in the evening, you really just want to have whatever internal light environment is reflect what's going on outside. So, as the sun goes down, dim the lights. Uh and then also change the tone so you're getting less blue light cuz that is the the blue is the major signal to these retinal ganglion cells that says to the master clock, it's daytime. Yeah, speaking of which, I was listening to one of your talks and you talk about how the fact the fact that fat has photoreceptors or light receptors? How is it possible? Probably like one of the coolest discoveries of last year. But, those same receptors that are in the back of our eye, they're called opsin receptors. And all opsin receptors, and there are many, over 100, they have the ability to transduce a light signal into a nerve signal of some sort. So, Peter Light in Alberta, researcher, Professor Peter Light You have to be joking. I know, isn't that I mean he's that is that That's hilarious. Yeah, I I rolled right over that one. Peter Light who studies light Uh I don't think there was a name change there. I think that's his his given name. He did a screen to see are these receptors anywhere else in the body? And he's found them in fat tissue. Wow. And he's like, this has to be an artifact. This can't be this can't be a thing. Mhm. And so, he was able to test if light hitting fat tissue had an effect. Mhm. And he put his hand over the light and the signal went away. He took his hand away from the light and the signal reappeared. So, he thought, wow, this there's something here. And that made him investigate it more thoroughly. And what he found is that fat tissue has light receptors, the same ones in our eye, and they respond to light, and it makes the fat cells shrink, become less inflammatory, and they release a whole different uh profile of hormones, and we might actually have a light deficiency, not just for vitamin D, but for our regulation of fat. What we the conversation around fat's regulation is oftentimes fairly uninformed. We regulate fat tissue like we do temperature. It is a It is something that is not simply just a matter of did we, you know, the calories in, calories out. Your body is making a lot of adjustments. Now, those calories do matter, but it is making a ton of adjustments to those calories to then say, do I want that fat storage to shrink or to expand? And you And it's trying to regulate it similar to how a thermostat would regulate uh temperature in a home. You set it at 72. This is super interesting. So, we can say that that the fat in our body works as a gland. Is that fair? Yeah, you could say that. It's a Yeah. But, is there logic to like the the hypothalamus, that um thermostat you've talked about fat trying to stay in a range, um that it goes up and down sort of regularly, um that it but it stays in that tight band? Like, this is so interesting to think of it as uh secreting hormones and being a gland. Walk us through the details of that. Yeah, so we now know that fat releases, I think over 50 different what are called adipokines, adipo fat kinds, like a cytokine, which is like a hormone. And so, um as triglycerides enter into our fat tissue, then leptin is produced continuously, so that flux of fats fat tissue fat leaving and entering the fat tissue will then cause leptin be to be made proportional to that. Then that signal goes into the blood, and there's various receptors for it. So, one in the brain in the brain stem, um you actually have them on your pancreas as well, but then in the hypothalamus. So, the brain is then detecting how much fat is circulating. Ah, you've lost a little bit of weight. Less fat storage, less leptin release. Be hungry. Get that fat stores back up. And you have neurons in the brain in the hypothalamus, and these and a lot of the hypothalamic centers will connect. So, you have these discrete groups of cells that communicate with one another that then affect things like motivation, temperature, uh even sleep. And so, there's a balance of different cell types within an area called the arcuate nucleus. And depending on the signals that are present will then initiate this cascading effects that will affect hunger, that will affect energy expenditure, all to try to keep your fat levels in a constant level. Now, it doesn't have to have to be the exact same level, but within a range. Now, why do we then get fatter? It's thought that this homeostat this fat homeostat is much better at defending weight loss than weight gain. Makes sense. Evolutionarily, it was probably much more of a concern. And there's also some thinking that those neurons actually get damaged by our environment our internal environment from the types of foods that we eat and challenges to them from even things like poor sleep. So, nutrient inadequacies, things like that, all these things can affect the health of that tissue. And it's one of the reasons why I am favorable towards a ketogenic diet because beta-hydroxybutyrate is one of the ketones, and it can cause those those tissues within the brain to actually start to remodel and regenerate. Mhm. And so, somebody that has diet-induced obesity, they they have a very hard time losing weight because even if they lose weight, their body wants to get back to that set point. And if you look at people that are on a ketogenic diet, for a lot of them, they just start eating to satiety, they eat normally, and yet they they the weight comes off naturally. Now, if there's no guarantee that that weight will stay off, but I think you put yourself in a much better position. You know, if you lose weight on other ways, not all other ways, but other ways, if you look at somebody's physiology once they're 50 lbs lighter, for a lot of people, it looks like their body's desperately trying to get back up in weight. Their brain will stay active seeking food. So, if you do fMRI and there's food on the table, they will stay seeking even even if they're full, right? Everything is engineered all the different processes are engineered to get you back up to that weight. What are some of those processes? That's so interesting. Like So, I I've had a lot of these symptoms. Um so, I used to be 60 lbs heavier. I lost that, and I did it so stupidly you can't imagine. I did it in a rapid starvation diet and just insane amounts of cardio. So, my calories were probably between 1,200 and 1,500 a day. As much as I could make it just pure protein as possible. I was inflamed. It was crazy. My joints hurt, my knees, my wrists, my elbows. I mean, it was gnarly. But, unfortunately, I wasn't thinking, "Hey, listen to your body." I was just thinking, "You're getting leaner, you're getting leaner, you're getting leaner." But, you want to talk about seeking food at all times? Like all I could think about was when my next meal was. But, I never thought of that as like anything other than well, your calories are crazy low. But, what are the mechanisms that like trap people? Cuz there are some people who will swear that they can't, no matter what, they can't lose weight. And I've always if I'm honest, I've always really discounted the well, it makes me hungrier. Yeah. So, interestingly, a ketogenic diet, I'm very interested in the mechanisms by which it might be working. And And there, the ketone beta-hydroxybutyrate might actually be turning on genes that help to reset those tissues that are controlling body fat, effectively lowering your set point to a place that's healthier. That's a possibility. The other diet that can do that is very low energy diets that actually have very low energy. People say that's starvation. Low calorie. Low calorie. Yeah, cuz you don't have to actually be on a ketogenic diet to produce ketones. If you're in a state of fasting or in a hypocaloric intake, then you're going to produce ketones, too. So, give me the order in which the body burns calories and and include alcohol as the fourth macro, which some people will say. Yes. So, preferentially the body will burn glucose and that is thought because the brain is a very very glucose hungry. It is only 4% of our body weight and yet it consumes 25% of the calories we eat. It's a very metabolic metabolically active tissue. Do macros always go in order? So, here's what I heard, this could be total Number one, that if there's alcohol in the system, it will be metabolized first, followed by glucose. It depend Yeah, so actually it depends on your relative status. What type of macros have you been eating over the last couple of weeks? And then what enzymes have been generated in response to that exposure? Okay, so it's not like there's some set it's always going to burn them in this order. See, most studies are always looking at what is under this normal condition, which is our standard diet. It's not looking at under all conditions and under things like fasting or what might be evolutionarily more regular in terms of like you know, not having breakfast until maybe noon. We have what's called metabolic flexibility, which is thought to be something that is a good state to try to achieve, which means that you can readily burn different types of fuel sources. So, you know, it's it's extraordinarily complex. People give simple explanations for it, but you know, this is actually one of the biggest public health needs in our world because the amount of comorbidities that associate with obesity, it it will bankrupt our society. You know, you think of weight, you think of food, but it's very possible that even things like light might be having a a very large input here. And like like sunlight even, right? We're talking about that. So, if fat is a regulated tissue and we are living fully clothed, um I wouldn't say that there's any silver bullet, but there's a lot of different inputs. And so, I think overall one sort of perspective of mine is to try to live more naturally, but in a way that is actually going to work within the modern world. One thing you said that I found so interesting is, all right, fat's a regulated tissue. It is um creating all these hormones. It's responding to the environment. It actually has light sensitivity, which still freaks me out. And hey, by the way, boys and girls, you're staying inside all day. You're closed up when you go outside. Guess what signal you're giving your body. It's wintertime. Guess what the body does in winter. It stores more fat. Yeah. I wanted to literally stop my research at that point, strip, and run outside and just to like shred up a little bit. Yeah. Uh of course, it's not going to work quite like that. Yeah. So, you've got fat as a gland, as a regulated tissue. Um do I understand it correctly to say that it's it's breaking something. As you get obese, you're more likely to get more obese, and there's something that breaks that cuz like when you look at people, their set point is riding with them as they're getting heavier and heavier, which is already terrifying. And then it's also secreting things that make you more hungry, that delay your um where you're still searching for food longer. Um One, is all of that true? Like did I just explain that accurately? Yes, but we're missing a very important part to the model, which is that it's not the only thing that explains our food seeking behavior. We also will eat food because it tastes good, right? Independent of our hunger, right? We know that where for instance, somebody, you know, you eat a full meal and you're and you're full. But your appetite is renewed when the dessert cart is brought over and you're like, oh, I could eat that. Yeah, let's get four of those. That is another driver of food intake and we live in an environment that is really designed for overconsumption. So it it's very easy to overeat in our world because the palatability of food is one that will then promote overeating. And it the design of food, processed foods, it also will make you feel less full per calorie. So there's a delay before you even feel fullness. All right, we got to talk about that cuz you showed a visual in one of your talks. It was so powerful and I've been in this a long time, but for some reason that visual really hit me. But when you showed the raspberry tart, which is like a little raspberry pie, it looks so innocent and delicious. And then you showed the equivalent amount of calories in bowls of raspberries. It was like seven or eight bowls of raspberries. It was crazy that just like That actually is a lot of work from Barbara Rolls and her book Volumetrics, which is it is stunning when we think about the how we condense calories into modern food products. And that's what I want to talk about. When people say processed food, what they're talking about is making it hyperpalatable so I want to overeat anyway. And then secondarily, it it has a lot of calories per physical volume. Yes. So our central nervous system preferences are designed to detect and prefer caloric density. So it is different than eating the the tart versus the raspberries, right? We have now the ability to design food to make us want to seek it. It's a very disadvantage environment. But the good news is that eating raspberries is also perfectly satisfying, but the more of that highly palatable, calorically dense food that you eat, the more that it'll drive food seeking behavior. So, there is a behavioral element to this. How it messes with your neural circuitry. going on mechanistically though? So, is it is it through that mechanism that it's um it triggers the release of ghrelin instead of leptin? Like There's so many different molecules that are at play. Metabolically, you're right. Ghrelin is released from what are called oxyntic cells within the gut. And it's very low after a meal, and it'll rise. And as it's rising between your meals, it makes you hungry. Mhm. It's the only gut-derived peptide that actually promotes feeding versus fullness. Uh leptin is this what's called a tonic signal. It's sort of operating in the background. We call it a fullness signal. It's not quite It's actually setting the tone of how full you'll even be from a meal. So, if you have low leptin, you'll naturally be less sensitive to the fullness signals of a meal. So, satiety and long-term fat regulation will work together. Mhm. Now, independent of that, you have this brain circuitry that's going on that can Think of it almost like addiction to a rewarding signal. The more exposure you get to it, Mhm. that will then drive seeking food seeking behavior. So, you're not really hungry, and yet you're craving. A lot of people experience this in the afternoon. You're bored, and you're like, I just want to eat something. Yeah. Right? We know it in our lives. We we can detect it instantaneously. The easy example is when you bring something that is very calorically dense at the end of a meal, and you're full, but you now want to eat more. It is not the homeostat that is evaluating calories and fullness that's saying, "Oh, you should eat more." It is pleasure Mhm. and the pleasure that derives from caloric density. Well, now let's really freak people out. Talk to me about the impact on um willpower may be a cheesy way to say it, but a decision-making if I slept poorly. Yeah. What we see is that not only do hormones change in response to getting inadequate sleep, but our brain changes, too. So, there's something called the neuro competitive model of decision making, which means that if you look at that thing that tastes delicious, this reward part of your brain will light up first. It'll It'll respond to it before the executive control self-control area kicks in that says, "Yeah, you might love how that tastes, but it's not good for you." Right? So, you can see that competition taking place. It happens all the time. That process of looking at the the donut that you love, but ordinarily don't want to eat, then that is biased towards eat this now and ends up creating a behavior we call effort discounting. You then are this much less likely to work at this thing that ordinarily you totally say, "I care about this, so I'm going to make an effort to just not have donuts in my life." And you're like, "Okay, you know, eff it." Or like, "Tomorrow. I'll just have it now." And that can actually translate to like, whether it's going to the gym or the food that you eat. And people live in that in that state where I care 95% of the day I'm thinking about eating well, and in that moment of hunger and potentially compared with sleep loss, you make a decision that you're then disappointed in yourself in. And you've talked pretty powerfully about like, how much time do you have to lose a night before you start to see some of this declination? Yeah, what I found is that reliably, people that miss out an hour or two of sleep have impairments in vigilance, as you'd imagine. So, they're less objectively alert the next day, and they feel sleepier. So, subjective alertness is impaired, too. And interestingly, independently, so I'll tell you about the study cuz it's pretty cool. I had people come in and what I cared about was what they ate. So, we created a baseline and they had, by the way, eight different choices that ranged from like, clearly unhealthy gummy bears to, you know, ostensibly healthy, right? So, things like you know, just cut apple slices or something. And what's another criticism I've had of previous research is that the decisions of the healthfulness of the food were made by the investigators, but everybody has their own opinion about food. Yeah, yeah. Right? If you think there's four different types of decisions. There's I like it and it's healthy, easy. Right? I don't like it and it's not healthy, easy. The two in the middle are the most interesting. It's really healthy and I don't really like it, which is sort of characteristic of health choices that we have to make sometimes. And the more most interesting one is I love it and it's totally not healthy. Right? How do people respond to food that they recognize as or they think this isn't good for me, but I love this? And what we saw is that when people were subjectively sleepy, they were much more likely to eat foods that they rated as high like low health. So, they were defecting from their own personal health standards, you could say. And now, just to compound things, you've got All right, you miss an hour or two on sleep and now all of the sudden you're leaning towards the things that you have high like low health. Yeah. But also losing sleep makes you look at a blood level like a pre-diabetic. Mhm. And so, you get this double whammy. Walk us through that. Like what's going on metabolically um when you don't get enough sleep? Yes, so that is still being investigated, but it was one of the very first things that was discovered in response to sleep loss. So, they did sleep sleep deprivation studies and found that healthy young subjects ended up basically looking diabetic after either one night of total sleep deprivation or a couple nights of partial sleep restriction, where you're not getting as much sleep as your body wants. What's going on there? So, then that stimulated it some more investigation into that. Now, maybe that is because of altered circadian timing. It was hard to parse that because we know melatonin, a darkness hormone, will actually cause insulin resistance. You want it because over the course of the night, you don't want insulin taking blood glucose out of the bloodstream and storing it cuz then you'd go hypoglycemic and you'd wake up. So rather, the body it's a it's a this beautiful dance. When darkness falls, melatonin is released. Melatonin travels to the pancreas and it prevents insulin from being released and you keep blood glucose levels stable at the across the night. So I think when some people that are waking up in the morning and they're looking diabetic, they might still have high levels of melatonin at night uh from the night. We also see that our fat tissue simply becomes less sensitive to the effects of of insulin. And so it's just not reading the signal of insulin and helping it to store glucose as well. And so therefore, blood glucose levels elevate and then, you know, whether or not that is pathogenic, like does that cause diabetes? Well, you can then look at epidemiological research and shows that people that chronically get less sleep are much more likely to develop diabetes. So you have to look at acutely what's a mechanism and then epidemiologically, what happens when people generally do this and then you have to just try to figure out what's going on in between, but clearly there's an issue going on there and there's no part of the body that goes untouched when we don't sleep get the sleep that we need. The only difference between excitement and fear is what your brain says. And the problem is if you have a habit of worrying, guess what you're going to tell yourself is going on. That you're that you're like freaking out. That you're not excited, that something must be wrong. Oh gosh, why would you say something's wrong? Cuz you got a habit of saying that all the time.