What are the most popular questions people come to you with as a sleep doctor?
There's three biggies.
Number one is what do I do if I fall asleep okay and I wake up in the middle of the night and I can't fall back asleep?
And you can help people with that.
Absolutely.
The second question is what pillow should I buy?
And I'm going to walk you through which pillows make sense for which people.
And then another one that people ask me all the time is what's the best time to have sex?
That's a strange thing for somebody of your profession to be.
Yeah.
Well, let me explain why.
So I've been an actively practicing sleep specialist for 26 years.
I take care of people's sleep problems like apnea, insomnia.
And I'm really interested in the things that you might be doing right now that are messing up your sleep, that are easy to fix.
So, for example, most people don't know that they have a genetic sleep code inside them, called their chronotype, which decides when your brain releases things like melatonin cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine.
And so I can show you, based on your chronotype, when it's bedtime, but also the perfect time of day to do almost any activity, including the perfect time to have coffee and alcohol.
Crazy.
There's even data to show that your ability to understand complicated concepts improves when you're more in line with your chronotype.
Now there are three known chronotypes, but what I'm famous for is discovering a fourth one which I think might be you.
So we're going to talk a lot about that.
We're also going to talk about dreams, because dreams can tell you things about yourself that you may not want to know.
And then there's how to fix jet lag whether you should sleep with a TV on, the truth about melatonin supplementation and my favorite way to get magnesium.
Before we get into all of that, shall we go and look at the best possible sleep position?
Yeah, let's check it out.
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Thank you so, so, so much.
Dr Bruce, what is it you do?
Why does it matter so much now?
And what perspective do you take on what you do that is atypical versus other people I might have spoken to about this subject?
I'm a sleep doctor.
I take care of people's sleep problems like apnea, narcolepsy, insomnia, things like that.
I've dedicated a good portion of my career not just to understanding how to treat those disorders, which are sleep disorders, but what I also I call disordered sleep.
I'm really interested in behavioral habits.
What's going on?
What are the things that you might be doing right now that are kind of messing up your sleep, that are easy to fix and be able to maybe change how things are going forward?
I didn't start out thinking I was going to become a sleep doctor.
If I'm going to be honest with you,
That was not on the path.
I was actually going in a completely different direction.
And one of the things I really discovered was when you change someone's sleep dude, you changed their life.
Like it is fundamental to who they are.
And it's important for me to be a sleep educator in a way, shape and form that's practical, so that people can actually get something from what I'm talking about and apply it right then and there.
And there's probably a couple of million people that have clicked onto this conversation to listen.
Yeah.
Who is this conversation for?
I think it's for anybody out there who's either curious about sleep or wants to try to improve their sleep, or may be suspicious that they could have a problem with their sleep.
I think any one of those three types of people would find tremendous value here.
And what are we going to be able to do for those people today specifically?
So I'm going to give people several different plans if you will, maybe even a five-step plan of things that they can absolutely learn how to do.
They're also going to learn about a genetic sleep code that they have inside them, called their chronotype.
A lot of people don't even know that they have a chronotype, or maybe they've heard of the, But they haven't ever heard of the term.
We're going to learn a lot about that.
We're also going to talk about dreams a little bit.
I'm excited to have the opportunity to do that.
I've spent the last year and a half learning more about how to use dreams in my clinical work as a psychologist, which is very interesting stuff.
So I'm excited to share some of that.
So I think people are going to learn a whole bunch.
And dreams matter.
Oh, yeah, they absolutely matter.
I call dreams emotional metabolism, right?
And so when you're dreaming, what is the function?
What is the purpose?
What are you doing?
You're actually working through your emotional states that you had during the daytime.
This is why we have nightmares, right?
And so in a nightmare, it's a scary scene, and all of a sudden it gets so emotional, you wake up.
That is officially called a nightmare, that awakening, but you stop processing.
And when you go back to sleep, you go back to the dream and you get to that scary point you wake up again and you get caught in this loop, right?
And so dreams matter because they can be incredibly disruptive.
Also, they can tell you things about yourself that you may not want to know or may not have in the front of your mind at all times, right?
Sometimes people have very interesting dreams, like dreams of being chased, or dreams of their teeth falling out or all these different things.
And they can mean a whole host of different things.
But I want to be super clear.
There's no guidebook that says hey, you know, if you're dreaming that you're in water, you hate your mother.
Like, it doesn't really work that way.
Dreams mean something to the dreamer.
And so the goal is to understand the context within that.
So who is the dreamer?
What is the dream?
And then how do those two work together?
And what is the experience that you're drawing from academically, but also professionally?
Give me a view of how many people you've worked with.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The range of things people come to you with.
Yeah.
So I've been an actively practicing sleep specialist for 26 years.
So I work in offices with medical doctors because I'm not a medical doctor.
I have a PhD.
And I work with them on their patients a lot of insomnia patients, but also the apneas, the restless legs, the narcolepsies of the world.
Because I have kind of a unique distinction in that I'm one of 168 people in the world who took the medical boards without going to medical school and passed.
So I can work within that framework and really understand a lot of what's going on.
I don't prescribe medication, but if I'm honest with you, most people don't need sleep medication as far as I'm concerned.
I can get them to sleep usually without any medication at all.
And you're a psychologist as well.
I am.
I'm a clinical psychologist.
And how does those two worlds make one plus one equal three?
Sure.
So when you talk about sleep, psychology is all over the place.
I would argue 75% of the reason people don't sleep is anxiety or fear.
That really falls well within the range of psychology for sure.
And it's different kinds of fears.
It's fears that you know about that are right in your face.
Like something that's going on in your daytime.
But it could be other fears.
It could be fears of your relationship.
It could be financial fears.
It could be a whole host of different things.
So I think there's a lot of psychology that gets to be played in all of this kind of thing.
I've got two more questions before we really get into the details and specifics and start really helping the audience with whatever they're dealing with.
The first is we have lots of props here.
Yes.
Give me a top line view of the types of things you're going to show me and why you've brought all of these wonderful props.
Absolutely.
So I get asked a lot of questions, as you might imagine.
And one of the big questions that I get asked is what bed and pillow should I buy?
So sitting next to you is a large stack of pillows, all different types, actually.
And I want to be able to show some of your viewers how you look at pillows and which pillows make sense for which people.
Believe it or not, there's like a fitting process.
We're going to go through that.
This device right here is a sleep test, believe it or not.
So it used to be we'd have to send you to the hospital.
Yeah, you can unwind it.
You have to send you to the hospital.
We'd put 27 electrodes all over your body, respiratory belts across your chest.
We'd have cameras zoomed in on you.
And then, by the way, you're supposed to be able to go to sleep, right?
And we're supposed to be able to monitor you.
Now, historically, we were able to do that pretty well.
But once COVID hit—
Nobody wanted to sleep in the same bed that somebody else had been sleeping in the day before.
So now we have what are called HSTs or home sleep tests.
Wow.
Yeah.
We'll talk about how to use it and what it can tell you.
My last question, before we get into the details, is what are the most popular questions that people come to you with as a sleep doctor?
Yeah.
So I'd say there's probably three biggies, right?
Number one is hey, Dr Bruce, I fall asleep just fine, but I wake up somewhere between one and three o'clock in the morning and it either takes me 20 minutes or three hours to fall back asleep.
What the heck is going on there?
And you can help people with that.
Absolutely.
I'm going to give everybody exactly what I do in clinic.
Like I'm going to explain to everybody exactly what I say to my patients and how to go about getting through that particular problem, because it's so flagrant.
Everybody needs to know how to work with that.
The second question would be what bed should I buy or what pillow should I buy?
I think we're going to address that over here.
And then another one that people ask me all the time is, you know, Is there some kind of timing?
I feel like my body is off.
They say this all the time.
They're like, if I just lived in a different time zone, I feel like everything would work out well.
So the very basics of sleep.
What do I need to know about?
What sleep is, the role it solves for us to even understand the context of the things we're going to talk about today?
Yep.
There's only a few things that are truly important to understand about sleep.
One is how does sleep work in the brain?
It turns out that there's two separate systems in the brain.
One is called your sleep drive.
The other is called your sleep rhythm.
And they both work in an interesting way.
They're both a little bit like hunger.
So sleep drive is like hunger because I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry.
I eat something and that hunger begins to dissipate.
Same holds true with sleep.
The longer you stay awake, the more sleepy that you get.
When you look at it from a biology standpoint, it's kind of interesting.
So when a cell eats a piece of glucose, something comes out the back end.
One of those things is called adenosine.
It works its way through your system and goes to a very specific receptor area.
As adenosine accumulates, you get sleepier and sleepier and sleepier.
Now, why am I going into so much detail?
Turns out when you look at adenosine and you look at caffeine, they're off by one molecule.
So here's a little tip or trick early in the pod for everyone.
I call it the Napa Latte.
So what you do is you take a cup of drip black coffee, just throw in a couple of ice cubes right, merely to cool it down.
Drink it as fast as you can, then immediately take a 25-minute nap.
The adenosine that's built up in your brain will burn through while you're napping.
Caffeine, since it's so close in molecular structure, can fit into that receptor site.
It blocks any new adenosine.
You're good for four hours, guaranteed.
I use it with every CEO that I work with.
So let's say you only got three hours of sleep the other night and you've got a big presentation to do or an award ceremony or something like that.
You can do a Napa Latte for about 25 minutes or so.
And you will feel much better.
That's sleep drive.
Let me just... Sure.
I want to make sure I really understand this.
Can you explain this to me again as if I'm a 16-year-old?
Why having a coffee and then taking a nap would make me feel energetic?
Because one would think that having a coffee and taking a nap are like...
It would be almost impossible, right?
So number one, the caffeine doesn't kick in before the end of the nap.
So a lot of people think when I drink coffee boom, it just kind of spins up and all of a sudden I'm able to.
You know, I get a lot of energy from it.
That's really not actually how caffeine works.
It has to go down.
It has to get absorbed.
It has to be digested.
And so, while all that's going on, which takes approximately 25 to 30 minutes, you're actually taking a nap to lower the amount of adenosine that has built up in your brain.
Let's say it's 2 o'clock in the afternoon and you only slept for four hours and you are dragging right.
All that adenosine that's built up when you take that 25-minute nap.
You'll burn through a lot of it, and then caffeine fits in and blocks any additional adenosine from coming in.
So that way, you're actually adding caffeine to the situation, and boom, your energy goes straight.
Oh, okay.
So adenosine makes me tired.
Exactly.
When it's docked in my brain.
Exactly.
So I have four hours sleep, which means there's lots of adenosine.
And sleep clears the adenosine.
Correct.
And then caffeine comes in because it fits so perfectly into that receptor site.
And off you go.
That's sleep drive.
Sleep rhythm has to do with your circadian rhythm, right?
And so lots of information about that.
But basically, your circadian rhythm is also a lot like hunger, right?
You ever notice you're hungry around breakfast time, around lunch time, around dinner time, right?
That's your circadian rhythm for hunger.
For sleep.
Most people, at least here in North America, have a tendency to – fall asleep somewhere between like 1030 and 11 o'clock, 1130 at night.
So that's kind of the circadian rhythm there.
So when your circadian rhythm is high and your drive is high, you sleep.
But if either one of them is off, that's when you have a sleep disorder or disordered sleep.
My circadian rhythm is high.
When your circadian rhythm is on point.
High is probably not the right word.
On point, so meaning you are abiding by your circadian rhythm.
Now, another question you might say to me is, well, how do I know what my circadian rhythm is?
And we're going to talk a lot about chronotypes because that's what your circadian rhythm is.
Okay, so let's do chronotypes then.
You've got some cards in front of you.
I do.
I kind of like these cards.
So when we talk about chronotypes, a lot of people may have heard of the idea but not actually heard the term chronotype before.
So if anybody out there has ever been called an early bird or a night owl, those are chronotypes.
So we've got early birds.
These are people who, by the way, this is genetic.
You don't actually get to choose this.
There's a special area on your genome called the PER3 area.
And when you have something called a single nucleotide polymorphism or a SNP, if it's Flipped one way, you're an early bird.
If it's flipped another way, you're a night owl.
If it's not flipped, you're in the middle, okay?
So, so far, I haven't told anybody anything new.
Like, this is all stuff that we've already learned.
The new part is this irregularity that seems to happen for people during for their sleep schedule, specifically an irregularity in their melatonin and cortisol production.
So all of this is predicated on when does your body make melatonin.
So if you're an early bird, your body makes melatonin earlier in the night, starting at around 8 o'clock in the evening.
It makes you want to go to bed around 9.30.
You had a question?
So melatonin is a hormone.
It is.
That...
You produce inside of your body that actually helps you sleep.
It guides, it tells your body when it's bedtime, which is a little bit different than the adenosine which makes you feel sleepy.
I guess people listening now would be asking themselves, why does it matter to know my chronotype?
As it relates to my productivity, the way I live my life, my relationships, whatever matters to me.
Why does it matter?
Because I can show you, based on your chronotype, the perfect time of day to do almost any activity.
So if you know when your body is doing certain things, when it has melatonin or when it has cortisol or adrenaline or all these other things, if you know the schedule, you can actually just change your activity to when your body is naturally producing the hormone, and then you do the hormone better.
So let's talk about the easy one, which is sex, right?
So a lot of people want to know, hey, Michael, what's the best time to have sex?
By the way, I think that might be the third question that I get asked most often, other than the insomnia one and the mattress one, I think is what's the best time for sex might be the other question that I get asked more than anything.
God, it must be tricky if the time you want to have sex and the time your partner wants to have sex are off.
Well, think about it like this.
What if your partner's an early bird and you're a night owl?
Yeah, I think that's me.
Yeah.
Don't worry, we're going to be able to fix you.
So first of all, there's a couple of different answers to this question.
So number one is you want to have a time.
So first of all, most people are intimate between 10.30 and 11.30 at night.
That's just a survey that we did.
So it makes kind of a lot of sense.
But here's what's interesting is your hormone profile doesn't look too good at 1130 at night for having sex.
In order to have successful sex, you want to have estrogen testosterone progesterone, adrenaline and cortisol all to be high and melatonin to be low.
What do you think your hormone profile looks like at 1030 at night?
It's literally the opposite, right?
Melatonin is high and all those other things are low.
That's hint number one as to when would probably be the best time to have sex.
Hint number two if you happen to be having sex with somebody who was born biologically male, what do most men wake up with in the morning?
An erection.
If that's not Mother Nature telling you when to use that thing, I don't know what is, right?
So when you start to look at it and we actually did the surveys we discovered that people actually have greater connection and greater performance in their sex when they have sex in the morning time.
Now, do you have to brush your teeth and throw in a little mouthwash first?
Yes, of course you do.
Like, let's be fair to your partner here.
But you end up learning quite a bit.
Again, your body is telling you this is actually the perfect time to do something like this.
Did you know there's like a perfect time to have coffee?
I didn't.
Yeah, there's absolutely a perfect time based on your chronotype too.
One of the first things that I ask people all the time I'll ask you is the first liquid that crosses over your lips in the morning caffeinated.
Yes.
So let's talk about why that's probably not the best idea.
So most people don't know.
Sorry, most people don't know, but sleep in and of itself is a dehydrative event.
You lose almost a full liter of water just from the humidity in your breath by breathing all night long.
Caffeine is a diuretic, which means it makes you have to go pee.
So when you're already lost a liter, now you add a couple of cups of caffeine, which makes you have to pee.
You're going to turn into a raisin before this whole thing is through okay.
So we need to get some water inside of you.
And so one of the big recommendations that I give all of my patients is don't have caffeine for the first 90 minutes you're awake.
Now you're going to sit here and say 90 minutes, that's an Michael, that's a long time not to have any caffeine.
Like, how am I going to do that?
Like, I've got my morning routine.
I can smell the coffee in the morning.
It smells so good.
Everything's going.
How's this going to work?
Let me explain the biology.
In order to exit a state of unconsciousness, you need two hormones and then you need a lot of them.
You need adrenaline and cortisol and they both wake you up.
When you have a brain that's full of adrenaline and cortisol and you add caffeine to it, it's like adding weak tea to somebody who's taking cocaine.
OK, it's not a very powerful stimulant compared to the hormones that are in your brain that are a powerful stimulant.
But if you just wait 90 minutes, cortisol and adrenaline naturally drop.
If you have your caffeine, then it actually boosts the cortisol and gives you a bigger bang for your buck.
So you hydrate before you caffeinate.
And about the amount, somewhere between 15 and 20 ounces of water.
If you can get that down in the first hour and a half that you're awake.
What's that in English terms?
Oh, I don't know.
We'll have to look it up.
Is it one cup?
Is it two cups?
Oh, I would say it's probably three to four cups of water.
Okay.
Well, that's a lot.
Well, don't forget, you've lost a lot of water while you're sleeping.
And you might have lost it the previous day because let's say you worked out or things like that.
So let's get into these chronotypes then.
Yeah.
So let's start off with the lion.
So lions are my early birds.
You know you've got a lion in your midst when you get an email at 6 a.m., right?
That's somebody who's been up for a while and who's got their brain kind of cooking.
Lions like to make a list and go from step one to step two to step three every single day.
They get a lot of confidence and they get a lot of pleasure following this list.
But if I'm honest with you, Being a lion isn't all it's cracked up to be, because dinner and a movie is out for a lion.
They've been up since like 4.30, 5 o'clock in the morning, right?
They don't want to go see a concert late at night.
They want to go to bed at like 8.30, 9 o'clock.
So when you're looking at lions, or early birds, what I call lions, they've got some very interesting characteristics.
They make up between 10% and 15% of the population.
From a biological characteristic standpoint.
Their melatonin stops early and their cortisol starts early.
So their melatonin stops at about 435 o'clock in the morning, and that's when cortisol starts, and that's the reason why they wake up so early.
What sort of window do lions wake up in?
So it's interesting because I've got some lions who are kind of extreme like they're getting up at 430 in the morning, which is not really probably the best idea.
But generally speaking, my lions get up right around 5, 5.15, up until about 6, 6.30.
They are definitely my early risers.
They have a small breakfast.
They don't like to eat a lot of food early in the morning time because a lot of these people like to go work out fairly quickly after they've woken up, which is very different than some of my other chronotypes.
My night owls don't like to work out in the morning.
They don't like to do anything in the morning.
So my lions like to work out early in the morning, a light breakfast.
And also their best work window is usually somewhere between like 9.30 and 11.30.
Like that's when all the good stuff gets done.
Like when they have, if they'd have to get details or they have to do brainstorming or things like that.
That's really kind of where a lot of the magic happens for them.
By about 2 o'clock in the afternoon, there's not a lot of stuff left inside the line to be able to do a lot of good things.
That's when I have lines do more physical activities that don't require a lot of cognition.
So maybe you go for an afternoon walk or maybe you're meeting with your folks.
That may not be really detail-oriented, but more process-oriented in the afternoon.
Admin and stuff.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I actually had one fellow chronotype his entire company and then move meetings based on who was going to be in the meeting.
He had all the early birds and he had a meeting at 8 o'clock in the morning, and then all the night owls.
He had a meeting at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
He said it was amazing.
He said it worked out really, really well.
What's the next one?
So the next one is the bear.
So bears are representative of people that are in between early birds and night owls, right?
So bears are the best.
Honestly, dude, I wish I was a bear.
Because the whole schedule of life works on a bear schedule.
Nine to five is perfect for a bear.
And they make up between 50 and 55% of the population.
So literally one out of two people is a bear.
And when's their peak work time?
So their pick work time has a tendency to be sort of in the noon to 2 o'clock range.
They're a little bit later than what you would see at the line.
Some of them I think can actually be better at 11.
It's kind of interesting.
We've had almost 3 million people take the quiz.
And we've discovered that inside of bears, there appear to be early bears and later bears.
So there are people who fall into that category but like to get up a little bit early.
So for them, their productivity window is probably 10, 30, 11.
But for the later bears it's more like 11 30 12, and then it's about a two-hour window after that.
For the people listening on screen at the moment is a grid showing you the different chronotypes, the wake times, the peak work window and the sort of afternoon slump time.
What's the next chronotype?
So the next chronotype is me, the wolf.
I think I'm a wolf.
You might be a wolf.
As much as I love lions.
I get it.
I think I'm a wolf.
Well, you might be.
Hey, look, join me.
It'd be great.
So wolves represent the night owls, right?
And so...
Wolves are my artists, my actors, my creatives.
If you know a creative, when do they get their biggest idea?
It's not 2 o'clock in the afternoon.
It's 2 o'clock in the morning.
Wolves are my highest risk takers.
I know that probably you fall into that category as well.
Wolves are the folks that show up at the party at 11 o'clock at night, but they stay till 2 o'clock in the morning and they help you clean up.
And they hate mornings more than anything.
Mm-hmm.
So should we talk about dolphins?
What's the next one, yeah?
Dolphins.
This is the category that you fell into.
So let's talk about who are the dolphins and what does this actually represent?
So dolphins are usually highly intelligent.
They're usually people who are fast-talking, well-read.
These are people who are a lot like a lion in terms that they like to get up.
They creep, crave longer bouts of sleep, but unfortunately their body just doesn't have a long sleep drive.
And so they get really frustrated a lot of times.
Also, I think they have just a teeny bit of anxiety behind them.
So a lot of them, for example, the details really matter to a dolphin.
Right.
Versus other people where details might not matter nearly as much.
I think a lot of my dolphins have got just a little bit of obsessive compulsive disorder.
So they're kind of focused in on the different things.
Like if I ask a dolphin to do a project, generally speaking they're never finished with it until I say can you just give me the project back now?
Because they're always working on a little detail here or working on a detail there.
But dolphins are my favorite.
They're the people that I actually wrote the book for.
They're the ones that I enjoy working with the most, because they're actually the easiest to work with, because we can –.
Once I explain to them how their hormones can be up and down and sideways, it starts to make a lot more sense for them.
And for anyone trying to figure out which one of these they are, where do they go to do the test?
And how long does it take?
Yeah, you can go to my website.
It's called chronoquiz.com.
And it takes about three, four minutes.
It's not very long at all.
It's going to ask you a bunch of questions about your sleep, about timing, things like that.
Okay, I'll put that in the description so after you finish listening, you can all go take it.
And let me know your thoughts in the comments section as well.
So once you figure out what your chronotype is, come back to the episode and let me know below.
Please.
And does my sleep change with age, Michael?
It does.
Absolutely.
So do my chronotypes change with age?
They do, actually.
So believe it or not, you've gone through all the chronotypes already.
When you're an itty-bitty baby, you're a lion.
You go to bed really early, you wake up really early, right?
Then you're a toddler, right?
In like grammar school, you're a bear.
You're going to bed around 7.30, you're waking up around 7.30.
Then adolescence hits, right?
What do you want to do?
Stay up until midnight and sleep until two, right?
You become a wolf.
Then at about 23, 24, your chronotype has a tendency to set into one of those three or four things.
And then you stay there for an extended period of time, like 25, 30 years, until you hit my age.
So I'm going to be 58 soon.
And right when you hit in the mid-50s, what we see is melatonin production can either slow down or get earlier.
So, as an example, if your parents are still alive and you said hey mom dad, I want to go for dinner, what time would they want to go for dinner?
Early.
Right.
Four o'clock in the afternoon, 4.30 in the afternoon.
You're like, what is wrong with you, mom?
What's going on?
That's her chronotype is going backwards.
And your sleep changes over the course of time.
To be clear once you hit like age probably 50, 45 or 50 we start to see a slowdown in production of melatonin.
We also see an increase in what are called EEG arousals.
So things that break up your sleep and make it so it's not so continuous, that can be problematic as well.
So there's a lot of things that can happen as you age.
So do I start sleeping less as I get older?
You start sleeping of poorer quality.
I'm not convinced that it's always less.
I mean, is that going to make me grumpy?
Yes, it is.
Really?
Absolutely.
Poor quality sleep, as I would argue, is much worse than poor quantity sleep.
I would rather I've got somebody who got five hours of really great sleep versus seven hours of really light, crappy sleep every time.
Does that mean that as I get older, I'm going to be more grumpy?
It depends on the quality of your sleep.
So what I can teach you is how to not get poor quality sleep as you age.
Perfect example.
A lot of folks who are a little bit on the older side are used to drinking coffee late in the day.
Well, if you change that habit, then you don't have as many sleep problems.
And I shouldn't be having coffee late in the day at all.
Probably you want to stop by about 2 p.m.
So if you stop around 2 p.m., the half-life of caffeine is between six and eight hours.
So eight hours later is roughly 10, which is roughly when people are kind of wanting to go to sleep.
So I would say that that would probably be the time to do it.
I think about my siblings and us all being woken up for school and I think about my performance in school.
And of all my siblings, there's four of us.
I was the one that always struggled with being woken up in the morning, in part because I'd gone to bed later.
But then I was also the one that struggled with school the most.
Yeah, that characteristic of a wolf, characteristic of this night person.
If I'm honest with you dude, like most kids, should not be waking up at the time.
They're waking up to go to school.
Right.
I mean, so many kids are waking up at real like, you know, five thirty, six o'clock in the morning.
They have an hour long bus ride.
Then they get there.
And if you're an adolescent, I don't think anything could be worse.
Right.
So we have to really start to try to be a little bit more thoughtful and look at like, what are some of the activities that kids are doing?
How can we get them to maybe take naps during the day if they need them?
Athletic performance can depend on sleep.
Academic performance can depend on sleep.
It's it's unbelievable all the different things.
Has there ever been any research done on different chronotypes academic performance?
There has been, actually.
They labeled it directly as chronotypes, but they've looked at it based on age range.
And we know that, for example, here in the United States, there's a big push to change school start times.
So that way high schoolers aren't starting at 7 o'clock in the morning, because high schools shouldn't be starting at 7 o'clock in the morning.
Preschoolers should be starting at 7 o'clock in the morning, because their body naturally wakes up at that time.
So we've actually seen – there was a great study that was done at the University of Minnesota that discovered that when they just had people come in one hour later from their first period, they've improved by one full letter grade, meaning they went from being C students to being B students or from B students to A students, merely by changing the timing of their first class.
So that should give you pretty good insight as to sort of these big areas.
And all children are vulnerable to this.
I'm not telling you anything that's new.
These are studies that have been going on for quite a while.
And there's actually a whole movement trying to get school start times to slow down now.
Looking at some of the research here, it says research consistently shows that morning types, which is the lion, earn higher grades, not due to higher IQ, but because exams are scheduled during their peak alertness windows.
You got it.
That's crazy.
Wolves turn out to be much smarter, but because they can't perform at those early times, nobody knows.
Remember, wolves are my creatives.
Like where do you think some of these great creative innovations and ideas come from?
In the tech world right?
Like.
These are the wolves that are out there that are up late at night coding and trying to figure out what's going on.
It's pretty cool when you think about it.
And there's this thing called the synchrony effect, from a study in 2020 where nearly 800 students found a clear synchrony effect.
Students performed significantly better when their class schedule matched their chronotype.
Exactly.
Those morning people dominated in morning classes and the owls or the wolves often caught up and outperformed the morning people when tested in the afternoon or evening.
Exactly.
It's pretty fascinating.
Now think about it like this.
Could you imagine a school system where, if we identified children's chronotypes during their particular age range and then we changed the testing so that they got tested when they're at their peak hours?
Yeah.
They'd actually do better.
People don't know this, but I never do podcasts in the morning morning.
I don't blame you.
You shouldn't.
Yeah.
It's not your time.
Yeah.
Right?
Like you have a very specific subscribe time that I think works well for you.
So I think you should abide by that.
Yeah.
Duration of sleep.
There's lots of conversation around how long you're supposed to sleep for.
What's the truth here?
Eight hours is a myth.
Let's be fair.
Like we came up with that from like the 30s.
There was a great study at Stanford that came up with eight hours and 13 minutes plus or minus.
And that's kind of where we came up with that as an idea.
The truth of the matter is somewhere between seven and nine hours really is kind of the amount that people should be looking for.
But some people don't have that luxury.
Some people don't have that much time that they can put towards sleep.
And so they get a little bit less sleep.
But for the lower level limit, I don't like anybody getting less than six hours.
When somebody gets less than six hours sleep, their driving is off.
And so you can't operate machinery.
So if you're driving to work or God forbid, carpooling your kids to school and you only got less than six hours of sleep on board, it's probably not going to go well.
We do have to stop here and talk about parents because listen, you're either a parent now, you might be someday.
Absolutely.
Maybe you won't be.
But for those I've just got a huge amount of respect for parents, because you know, I'm not a parent yet.
I hope I will become one.
But when I see what my brother, who has three kids under the age of seven now.
How much sleep has he lost?
A lot.
And his wife as well.
But you must get parents coming to you all the time being like, what the hell do I do?
Like, I've got to wake up when the kids wake up.
But it's destroying my relationship, my marriage, my sex, whatever it might be.
Yeah.
So parenting children and sleep are difficult to coexist, but they're not impossible.
It really has to do with discipline and kind of thinking through some ideas for yourself.
So I have a 23-year-old son and a 22-year-old daughter.
So I'm a little bit out of the realm of having to deal with them every day.
But I was, like I said before, I was in charge of mornings at our house waking them up.
And it's a lot, right?
And so the very first thing that I try to explain to parents, especially if they have a child who has an irregular sleep pattern and is really causing chaos for the rest like one child who won't go to sleep and it's keeping the whole house up first thing you want to do educate the kid, right.
A lot of kids don't know what they're doing is causing a lot of problems.
They're just kids just hanging out having fun.
You know they've got energy.
They want to be awake so that you want to educate them and say hey, now is a particular time to wind down.
This is where your body recovers.
This is how you get to do sports the next day, or theater the next day, or whatever your computers, whatever your thing is.
You can tie it to sleep and performance pretty easily, and so getting them to understand that becomes very, very critical.
Number two is have some guidelines, Have bedtimes, have wake-up times, and follow them as closely as you can.
For parents.
Oftentimes, what I try to tell them to do is like look after your child goes to bed.
If you've got a child that has problems for sleeping, Take turns.
Do what I call the on-call method.
So as a doctor sometimes you know you get a call in the middle of the night because you're covering patients at the hospital for your buddy or something like that.
You're on call.
So when you've got two people who are managing one child, one person handles Monday night, Wednesday night, Friday night.
The other one handles Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.
You flip a coin for Sunday.
So if the kid wakes up at 2 o'clock in the morning, both parents aren't awake.
One parent has that responsibility.
The other one can keep their eyes closed and go to sleep.
Interesting study was done looking at men and women in bed when a child cries.
So women take care of the child, whereas men lie there and fake sleeping in order to be able to stay asleep.
Right.
That's problematic.
How did they know in the study that they were fake sleeping?
Because they asked the men afterwards, what were you doing?
And they all said they woke up and they were faking it.
It's pretty crazy when you think about it.
But this is a big deal for parents, right?
A lot of parents turn to me and they're like, this is killing our marriage.
Like we haven't had sex in three years because we've got a child who maybe the child has special needs, or maybe the child doesn't have special needs but has other things going on, or maybe it's just normal development.
And, you know, they're worried about it.
And so what I like to sit down with parents and do is number one let's figure out when your kid needs to sleep, and let's set some guidelines and rules.
But number two, let's do the same for you.
A lot of parents.
When they're super stressed out, one of the first things they do grab a glass of wine.
Right.
Wine's about the worst thing you could possibly do for sleep, to be fair.
Now I'm going to teach people how you can still have a glass or two of alcohol and not completely destroy your sleep.
But I want to be very clear about something.
If you're using alcohol as a stress relief tool at night before bed, it's messing up your sleep, probably pretty bad.
You might be asleep, but the quality of your sleep is shit.
It's awful, right?
And, interestingly enough, during the one stage of sleep that alcohol knocks out, which is stage three and four sleep.
What's the most interesting is that during that particular stage of sleep, there's something called the glymphatic system that comes in and scoops out these proteins that have a tendency to accumulate in your brain.
And when proteins accumulate in your brain, they wrap around the nerves and that's called Alzheimer's disease.
So stage four sleep is imperative to avoid Alzheimer's disease.
And when you drink alcohol, you destroy stage four sleep.
So it would be great if nobody drank alcohol.
But I'm not so stupid as to think that.
Plus, I like bourbon.
I like whiskey.
I enjoy a glass of champagne every once in a while.
So how can you successfully still drink alcohol and still get a decent night's sleep?
I'm going to give you a quick one. right?
Let's say you're having dinner at 6.30.
Have your first glass of wine, then have a glass of water, right?
Then your second glass of wine starts at, let's say, almost 7 o'clock, right?
Then you have your second glass of water.
Then you stop everything by 7.30.
You wait three hours, which would be 10.30, and then you can go to bed.
Why the water?
Why the weight?
So the water helps wash it through the system.
Also fills your stomach up so you don't have too much.
So you've got more fluid in there.
So that way you don't drink extra wine.
And it makes you have to pee, which flushes the system out as well.
The three hours.
And it hydrates you?
It does.
Okay.
Absolutely.
Because remember, wine pulls both magnesium and most water out of your system, because it makes you have to go pee.
Helps with the hangover?
So there's a couple of different things that I would say.
Number one, this definitely helps with the hangover because you've got water going in.
For a lot of my patients.
What I tell them is the very last thing that you could do is have a little bit of coconut water.
So coconut water is loaded with zinc, magnesium and vitamin B, And those are some of the things that get pulled out of your system when you're drinking.
By the way, did you know that there are happy hours specific to your chronotype?
Yeah, so it's kind of interesting.
So here's what's cool about it is, your body produces something called alcohol dehydrogenase, which is how you metabolize alcohol, but it does it at a particular time, and the time is different for each chronotype.
So your body is most efficient at drinking between basically, the hours of 4 and 8 happy hour, as a lot of people know it.
And how do you think about what time you eat at nighttime?
Such a great question.
So three hours before bed, you want to stop fluids, including alcohol and food.
You want to just stop it all three hours before bed.
Why three hours?
So it takes your body about that level of time to number one digest, clear all the food and then have all the mechanisms that are working towards digestion now be able to be refocused onto the recovery process of sleep.
However, I will tell you that there's this—I've seen a couple people and there are people out there that are claiming that if they stop eating at 11 o'clock in the morning, that it helps their sleep dramatically at night.
And it turns out it has to do with your heart rate.
So one of the big metrics that is very important, that all of our viewers and listeners want to know, is you need a heart rate of 60 or below in order to enter into a state of unconsciousness.
And when you've got food in your stomach, your heart rate is up.
So the longer you can wait, the lower your heart rate is, the easier it gets into sleep.
And so when we're talking about – so a great example, let's get back to parents for a second, right?
You feed your kids at an earlier time and then what do you do?
Oh, then you go back and have dinner with your spouse, right?
Maybe that's not the best idea because you're having dinner so late.
Maybe you should have dinner with your kids, right?
And enjoy that time with them and eat earlier, because that gives you more space later on to be able to relax and go to bed.
I said that tracks because I remember I've told this story once or twice before.
I remember when I was doing some podcasts over here in L.A. and we had Seth Rogen on.
Sure.
And the day before in the hotel, before I lived here, I had a cookie from the mini bar.
I'm going to admit it.
I had the cookie.
They're so good.
And then I went to bed pretty quickly.
Oh, God.
Which is terrible.
And I was looking at my Whoop the next day.
Yeah.
Hashtag ad.
Shunk.
And my heart rate was like 75 or 80 for the first two to three hours after I got into bed.
Isn't that crazy?
And I woke up feeling like hell.
Yep.
Terrible day the next day.
I was terrible during the conversation.
Yeah.
And I looked at my Whoop and go, oh my God, it was that cookie.
It put my heart rate high.
So also on top of that is sugar.
Yeah, I mean, fuck me, yeah.
Right?
So sugar actually slows production of melatonin.
Remember, melatonin is kind of the key that starts the engine.
Yeah, the key that starts the engine for sleep.
So is there anything else that I can do to make sure my heart rate is low as I get into bed?
Absolutely.
Meditate.
Okay.
Breath work.
All kinds of things.
Brings my heart rate down.
Yeah, absolutely.
So what a lot of people don't realize is just because we're breathing doesn't mean we're actually breathing in a way, shape and form that can be helpful for us for sleep.
So in my most recent book Sleep Drink, Breathe I talk a lot about breathwork and what is it and how does it work for you?
But I'd love to teach you my favorite form of breathwork and meditation that I think you'll get a lot out of.
And I do this before bed.
Exactly.
Okay.
And you can, by the way, you can do it in the middle of the night if you wake up as well.
Right.
So let's talk about how to get, how to fall asleep and do some relaxation exercises for that.
And then I'm going to give you some different ones for in the middle of the night.
So let's talk at the beginning of the night.
So number one, you need runway to land the plane.
Okay.
So many people think they're just waiting for their head to be bobbing in front of the TV and then they go, brush their teeth and they get in bed and then all of a sudden they're wide awake and they don't know what's going on, right?
So you need time for your system to shut down.
It's not an on-off switch.
It's more like slowly pulling your foot off the gas and slowly putting your foot on the brake.
There's a process.
It should take you about 12 to 15 minutes to actually fall asleep, okay?
So, number one, what I ask people to do is take the last hour before bed and chop it up into three 20-minute segments, right?
So let's say you're going to bed at 11, starting at 10 o'clock.
And, by the way, set an alarm on your phone to to tell you that it's 10 o'clock, because it's really easy to slide by your bedtime.
And then all of a sudden it's like all bets are off.
So set the alarm 20 minutes for shit you just got to do.
So in our house it used to be getting backpacks together for school for our kids, finding sports equipment, maybe laying out my stuff for work the next day or getting the last email sent something like that.
20 minutes for hygiene, right?
Brush your teeth, wash your face, maybe take a shower or something along those lines.
And then 20 minutes for some form of meditation, relaxation, prayer.
I don't care what you do, but it has to be something that's calming to get you there, okay?
So one of my favorite techniques to do is meditation.
Now, I'm going to be honest with you.
I'm a terrible meditator.
I have never been able to do it.
I've actually gotten kicked out of meditation retreats because I'm the guy that's like what's going on?
Like, am I doing it right?
You know, I'm kind of that person.
And so I was told about this tool called a Muse headband.
We have one right here.
So this is my personal muse.
I actually brought it from home.
And you'll notice on the inside.
There are sensors here and there are sensors along the earpiece here.
And so what happens is, is you wear it on your head, right?
And it's measuring your brainwaves.
And so one more, yeah, check it out.
And so when we're doing it and we're measuring brainwaves, yep, exactly.
And that goes on the back part.
Yeah, there you go.
So what's cool about this is it's attached to an app.
And then while it's measuring your brainwaves, you're listening to a particular music.
It could be a guided meditation.
It could be any of those things.
And while you're doing this... the volume gets lower.
And then you know you're getting closer to a meditative state.
The volume comes down when?
On the app, when your brainwave starts to relax.
Oh, okay.
So you're immediately getting feedback.
We can try it if you want.
But it's pretty interesting.
And then when you get to the alpha state, little birds start chirping.
The alpha state?
Yeah, the alpha state is when your eyes are closed and you're at the most relaxed state of your brainwaves.
It's called the alpha state.
And that's really what people are trying to get to for meditation.
And are you affiliated with this company in any way?
I am not.
And how much does it cost?
I think it's around $275, I think is the headband.
Okay.
Interesting.
It's pretty fascinating.
I've been pretty impressed with them.
So that's meditation.
You talked about breathwork as well before?
Yeah.
Let's talk about it.
So one of the other things that I do is I do something – well, this isn't breathwork.
This is called progressive muscle relaxation.
So this is where you tense and relax muscles, starting from your feet and going all the way up your body.
And as you tense and relax the muscles, you feel that relaxation from – releasing that tension, and it helps you fall asleep.
Actually, you know, what i can do is i can send you a an audio file that has me walking through progressive muscle relaxation that we can make available for everybody.
If you want me for free, it's no big deal amazing.
I'll put that in the description below as well.
Yeah, people will really dig it.
I think they'll really enjoy it.
So that's another thing that we do.
But now let's talk about the middle of the night, right?
So, by the way, do you have this as an issue?
Has this happened to you before?
It happens sometimes.
And it's typically when like, my sleep is somewhat disordered or disruptive, or when there's really something on my mind.
Yes.
So that precipitory anxiety, like before flight.
Like if I have an 8 o'clock in the morning flight, like I sleep like shit the night before because I'm constantly worried about that right.
But a lot of times what people do normally is they just wake up in the middle of the night and they can't return to sleep, and they're really not sure why.
So number one, there's biology involved.
So your core body temperature rises, rises, rises.
And when it hits a peak, it drops.
That drop is then a signal to your brain to release melatonin, right?
Again, the key that starts the engine for sleep.
However, your core body temperature continues to drop, drop, drop.
By the way, this is the reason why we tell people you want to sleep in the cool, not the warm, environment.
Because again, your core body temperature is dropping.
If it's too hot, your core body temperature can't go down and you can't get to sleep.
Which tracks with evolution.
Exactly.
So here's where it gets interesting, is it keeps going, going, going.
And then at some point in time, your body has to heat up.
And if it doesn't heat up, you go hypothermic.
Guess what time that is?
Between one and three o'clock in the morning.
Oh, your body starts heating up at 1 and 3 o'clock.
Every single person's body on earth does this.
Everybody on earth wakes up between 1 and 3 o'clock in the morning.
However, most people burp, roll over, get comfortable, and fall back asleep in 30 seconds.
However, there's a select group of people who end up being my patients who don't have that, and herein lies the problem.
So here are the steps you want to take in the middle of the night to be able to solve this issue.
So number one, don't go pee.
I know, I know, I know.
People are like, what?
What are you talking about, Michael?
So here's what ends up happening is when people wake up in the middle of the night.
They say to themselves well, I'm up.
I might as well go pee, right?
Here's the problem.
Remember I told you the big metric was in order to enter into a state of unconsciousness, you need a heart rate of 60 or below right.
What do you think happens to your heart rate when you go from a lying position to a seated position, to a standing position and walk across the room?
Sure. your heart rate goes straight up.
So what we want to do is keep your heart rate down.
So if you don't really have to go to the bathroom, don't go to the bathroom.
75 of people sleep on their sides and they kind of squanch up, which means they're putting pressure on their bladder.
So my guess is is that most of those people, if all you did was when you woke up, is lie and get on your back for about 25 seconds and see if you still need to pee?
If you don't need to pee, stay in bed and keep your heart rate down.
If you need to pee, please go pee, right?
If you're going to go to the bathroom, have a strategically placed nightlight along the way so you don't have to flip on the light in the water closet.
Because if you do that, you just told your brain it's morning and it stops producing melatonin.
But let's say you don't have to pee.
The second thing, don't look at your phone.
Now, this turns out to be very difficult for 99 of the people out there, because the first thing they do is they grab their phone and they head to the bathroom, right.
And they're either checking emails, looking at Facebook or Twitter or whatever social media they're on.
Or just trying to figure out what time it is.
And that's where the problem is is, as soon as you see the time, you instantly do the mental math.
And now you're pissed off, right?
It's 3.30 in the morning.
I got to get up at 6.00.
Sleep.
Sleep, sleep.
And you try to force your brain to sleep.
Dude, in the history of time, nobody has been able to force their brain to sleep, okay?
Because your heart rate's going in the wrong way, right?
It needs to be coming down.
So if you can, don't look at the clock.
All right.
So you haven't peed, you haven't looked at the clock, but you're still awake and nothing's going on.
Here's where the breathing technique comes in.
It's called 4-7-8 breathing.
I did not develop this technique.
It was developed by Dr. Andrew Wild, Harvard-trained natural doctor, super smart dude.
And he did it for the military, to teach them how to lower their heart rate during stressful situations.
We use it because it helps lower our heart rate past 60, and it's super simple.
I'm going to get you to try it.
So go ahead and sit up straight, okay?
And so all you're going to do is breathe in for a count of four, you're going to hold for a count of seven and you're going to breathe out for a count of eight.
And I'm going to walk you through it.
I want you to have your eyes closed.
And what I also want you to do, you're going to go in through the nose, out through the mouth.
And then what I also want you to do is picture the number in your head.
So when I say breathe in two, three, four, you should picture the two.
The three, the four in your mind's eye, okay?
With my eyes closed?
With your eyes closed.
You ready?
Yep.
Breathe in, two, three, four.
Hold, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Push, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Good.
You want to get through about 20 cycles of that.
It's incredibly relaxing.
I actually did it before I came out here to do the pod, because it helps lower my heart rate and gets me centered.
It's pretty remarkable.
Now, there's some problems with the technique.
Number one, sometimes it's hard to hold for seven and sometimes it's really hard to push for eight.
So I tell people you can do this four, five, six. four, six, seven, or four, seven, eight.
So just work your way up to it, right?
If it's too hard to hold your breath for seven seconds or it's too hard to push your breath for eight, you can do a little bit less, just while you're getting used to it.
And then the other big thing is it's hard to figure out where the 20 cycles is, because you need to get to 20 cycles of this.
So what I have people do is take their hands and make light fists while they're doing this.
And when they do one cycle, they put out a finger.
Another cycle, put out a finger.
And before you know it, you got 10.
And when you bring it back, you've done 20 cycles.
It's funny, I just did two and I started yawning.
I know, I just saw that.
I'm telling you, dude, this thing works, right?
And so I have people do this technique.
Here's the best part, is it avoids monkey mind.
Right?
So what is monkey mind?
Monkey mind is I'm thinking about stuff that I have no business thinking about in the middle of the night, for absolutely no reason.
Like what's on the grocery list, or what did I say to my spouse, or did that podcast go okay, or any of the things that might be floating through your head.
You cannot count and worry at the same time.
And why does it work?
What's going on in my physiology?
You're distracting the brain from the thing that's stressing you out, and it's lowering your heart rate, and then the natural sleep process comes in after it.
So all these are our distraction techniques, to be clear.
Now, there's several of them out there.
One of the other ones I use for some of my patients is I tell them hey, count backwards from 300 by threes.
It's mathematically so complicated you can't think of anything else, and it's so damn boring you're out like a light.
On that point of distractions, a lot of people go to bed listening to podcasts or movies.
Jack was just saying that he needs to listen to something to fall asleep.
I'm the same.
I listen to like serial killer stuff, which is- That's interesting.
Don't-
Don't judge me.
Wait till we get to the dreams part of the podcast.
I can't wait to hear what you dream about.
I don't... I think... I always try and figure out why it is.
And my sister's the same.
My sister Amanda.
And she... She listens to serial killer stuff to fall asleep.
I think it's because... This is just hypothesis.
My mum... would always ask me to put on forensic files, which is this like murder documentary thing.
When we were younger, because she couldn't use the remote.
So my mom would say, she'd pass me the remote and say, put on forensic files.
And I'd like put on the number for her.
And so that was always playing in our house at that time.
And we all had TVs in our bedroom that just mirrored what was playing downstairs.
Of course.
So when I got into bed, I'd watch forensic files and I'd fall asleep.
This explains a lot about you.
I know, right?
You say that to people, they think you're...
So let me tell you what it's like in my house.
And actually, you and I have a commonality.
So in my house, we have a big screen TV.
It's on all night long.
In which room?
In my bedroom.
Okay.
Okay.
When I met my wife, she said to me Michael, if you ever happen to spend the night, I want to let you know that I sleep with the television on.
I said, don't worry about that, Lauren.
I'm going to be a sleep doctor.
I'm going to fix that.
We met when I was 30.
Okay.
So I've known her for quite a while.
And you ever tried to change something in your bed partner?
Good luck.
Yeah, good luck.
So I took the TV out.
She said, if you ever want to come back in here again, I suggest I put the TV back in.
And then I studied her to learn what was going on.
And it turns out that she's listening to it out of what I call the corner of her ear.
Her eyes aren't even open.
And half the time it's an episode of Seinfeld or something like that.
My wife actually likes murder mysteries, and so it's usually forensic files or something along those lines.
That's going on.
But for her, it's a perfect distraction technique.
Now, there's a second thing that's important in our bedroom that happens is we have two dogs.
They sleep in the bed with us.
I'm the freaking sleep doctor, dude.
Like it's insane.
But the point here is sleep is flexible.
Okay.
Just because it works for you doesn't mean it works for your bed partner.
And vice versa is also true, right?
Like, just because some people can't sleep with the TV on doesn't mean that it's going to mess up your sleep forever to have the television on because it's not.
And by the way, 99% of TVs have timers built into them.
Like if You don't know what it is?
Ask your kid.
I had to ask my son.
He showed me how to use it.
We turned it off.
It wasn't a problem, right?
So creating a sleep environment that is conducive to sleep for you and your bed partner can have a lot of variation to it.
And I don't think people – there's no hard and fast rule that says hey, nobody should ever sleep with the TV on.
I mean there are people out there who say that, but quite frankly, everybody sleeps with the TV on.
Well, a lot of people do.
I wouldn't put the TV on in our bedroom.
I mean we've done it once or twice or whatever, because we're watching something and we slip off to sleep.
And I wake up and I realize it's on and I turn it off.
But I also really think it's an important point to say that people will listen to podcasts like this.
They'll listen to the biohackers of the world.
And then they'll get so militant about how they fall asleep that it will cause friction because one part is different.
Don't do that.
And I had this problem in my relationship, which was...
My girlfriend sleeps in silence and has such a glorious routine to everything she does.
Right.
And I am... Completely the opposite.
The opposite.
I want to listen to a murder.
Opposites attract.
I can be on my phone.
It's like, when I look at my whoop scores... works for me.
Yeah.
It's like, I am getting, I get great sleep, even if I'm listening to a serial killer documentary.
But not if you eat a cookie before bed.
Not if I eat a cookie.
That's gone.
But I saw what I do is I put one AirPod in, in my right ear.
So whichever is not going to be on the pillow.
And it means I can listen to her if she says something.
Right.
But when it's silence, all I hear is the thing that I'm listening to.
So I've got a trick for you.
And I wake up in the morning and dig the AirPod out of the bed where it ended up.
Right.
So now I'm going to help you with the digging of the AirPod.
So first of all, they now make these things called pillow speakers.
Oh, interesting.
Right.
So it's a Bluetooth speaker that will attach to your phone that you can just slide.
And it's just under your pillow, so only you can hear it.
So that's number one.
You might want to consider that.
And they're pretty inexpensive.
Number two, they now make specifically earbuds designed to be slept in.
Oh, nice.
So there's a new company out called NextSense.
And they have developed an earbud that actually measures your brainwaves while you are sleeping.
And when you move into a lighter stage of sleep, it sends in a frequency signal to help you go back to sleep or to stay in that depth of sleep.
Brand new company, NextSense.
I have nothing to do with them.
I mean, it's a friend of mine who owns the company, but I'm not on their board.
I would like something to do with them.
We'll figure that out.
So does it allow you to play your music as well?
It does.
Or your podcast or whatever?
I can listen to Diary of a CEO every single night while I fall asleep.
And it will make sure that I don't wake up from any dreams.
And you can still like and subscribe and stuff.
Even through the earbuds, of course.
I think everybody should like and subscribe.
I think it's a good feature.
AI agent that helps you subscribe.
Okay.
So that's, that's your wake up in the middle of the night.
Don't pee.
Don't check your phone.
You're doing these breathing exercises.
You don't give yourself a hard time.
And then what happens?
It doesn't work.
What do you do?
Yeah.
Right.
So there's the new research on something called non-sleep deep rest.
We call it yoga nidra.
Okay, it's been around for thousands of years.
When you lie relaxed in like a corpse pose like this, you're actually doing something that's valuable for your sleep.
Now I want to be clear.
It's not the same as sleep, but if you lie there for an hour, it's like 20 minutes worth of sleep.
So everybody should know that even lying relaxed and calm is very, very helpful, right?
But if you start to get anxious and your heart rate starts to tick up, you need to get yourself out of bed, because that's when, because all you're doing then is thinking hey, this bed is this place where I get anxious and pissed off.
This is not a place to sleep.
So as long as you stay nice and quiet, the non-sleep deep rest, absolutely the thing to do.
The other big thing that I do and, by the way, this happens to me on occasion too, like I'm not immune to it just because I'm a sleep doctor.
You have to stay positive.
And what do I mean by that?
Is everybody.
When they wake up in the middle of the night, your brain is set to negativity.
There's no reason you should be up at three o'clock in the morning that something good is going on right.
Nobody's coming in and wishing you happy birthday at three o'clock in the morning.
Something terrible has happened and your brain has gotten accustomed to that.
So when it wakes up, it immediately goes to the negative and you start thinking about bad things.
You can't stop your first thought, but you can stop your second thought, right?
And so when you wake up and you think negative, What I want you to replace that with is okay.
Michael, for some reason, your body has decided to wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning.
It's not the game that I wanted to be playing tonight.
However, I think I'm going to be okay.
I'm just going to lie here and relax and let the natural sleep process take over.
If I feel my heart rate increasing, I'm going to go to another room in the house where I've already got a book and a light set up so I can do a little bit of light reading and then come back to sleep.
And I just tell myself that.
I give myself permission to just chill, just relax.
And then you know what happens?
The natural sleep process comes over.
As soon as your heart rate starts to go down, your body wants to get back to sleep.
And so it really has a lot to do with heart rate.
I love having these conversations on The Diary of a CEO because I have a huge amount of sympathy and concern for people that don't get sufficient sleep.
And I know there's a lot of people that don't.
And I actually think to some degree it's somewhat increasing because of the way we live our lives.
I was looking at some of the stats around the increase.
And there's a study done in 2025 and early 2026 that revealed we're in a global sleep crisis.
Oh, yes, we are.
Both the CDC and Stanford Medicine report said that one in three adults and nearly 80 of teenagers are now chronically sleep deprived.
Correct.
A 2026 survey by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found that 93 of Gen Z admit to regularly losing sleep due to social media usage.
And 71% of employed respondents globally have said...
That they sometimes call in sick at least once or twice just to fall asleep.
Just to sleep.
Yeah.
When I was down in Australia doing some work.
Down there a lot of Australians they take holiday and they just sleep.
Yeah.
Just to catch up.
Like it's pretty remarkable.
We're in a very sleep deprived society.
And I think there's a couple of different reasons why that is.
Number one.
Have you seen what's going on outside in the world today?
It's pretty crazy out there.
Well, I can understand why people are getting a little anxious.
I think one could argue it's been crazier through history, but we never knew about it.
Right.
Well, I mean the media.
Getting us this information so quickly, I think, is definitely what it.
I would agree with you.
It was much crazier during like...
World War II, you know, stuff like that.
But now we're getting information so quickly and people are getting so ratcheted up about it.
I think that has something to do with it.
But I think the bigger culprit is people being overweight.
You know, when you look here in the United States and you look at the obesity epidemic and you look at people being overweight, it's something close to like 70-something percent of people in America are overweight.
When you're overweight, that puts you in line for potentially having something called sleep apnea.
Now, I want to be clear.
Not everybody with sleep apnea is overweight, but a large percentage of the people with sleep apnea are bigger people.
And so when you look at a society that's getting bigger and all of the unhealthy food that we've got going on, all this highly processed food things of that nature, that isn't helping anybody.
It's adding the pounds.
And specifically, like for men, we gain weight through our necks.
I don't know if you've ever noticed it, but if you ever were heavy and you lose weight, the first thing somebody says is oh, it looks like you lost weight because I can tell from your face, right?
And they're like, oh, your neck looks different now.
And so we see a lot of what's going on in the world from a weight perspective and a food perspective could be driving some of the sleep problems.
Then there's the anxiety perspective that I spoke of earlier that I think comes in.
And again, I agree with you.
I don't think we have more crazy stuff going on.
I think we know about more crazy stuff that's going on.
But also work is now largely digital.
And I imagine for my great-grandfather he would go to I don't know the factory or wherever he worked.
His work would finish at six.
Yes.
Your work doesn't finish at six now.
It finishes when you're awake.
Yeah, absolutely.
It finishes when you go to sleep.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And that becomes problematic, right?
Because a lot of times, also, by the way, you need to have dividers in your home.
Like, let's say you live in a studio apartment and your bed is your couch is your kitchen, right?
You have no designated spot for sleep.
Your body needs to know, hey, this is the spot where I can chill out and finally get some rest.
And I think a lot of times our environments just aren't that way and more simple products, more scalable and easier to do.
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I've had so many founders speak to me and say why didn't this particular ad that I ran on this platform work for me?
Maybe the copy wasn't good, the creative wasn't strong, but usually the problem is they're not having the right conversation because that ad never reached the right person.
And if you're in B2B marketing, that is much of the game.
And this is where LinkedIn ads solves that problem for you.
Their targeting is ridiculously specific.
You can target by job title, seniority, company size, industry, and even someone's skillset.
And their network includes over a billion professionals.
About 130 million of them are decision makers.
So when you use LinkedIn ads, you're putting your brand in front of the right people.
And LinkedIn ads also drive the highest B2B return on ad spend across all ad networks.
In my experience,
If you want to give them a try, head over to linkedin.com slash diary.
And when you spend 250 on your first LinkedIn ads campaign, you'll get an extra 250 credit from me for the next one.
That's linkedin.com slash diary.
Terms and conditions apply.
Which sleep disorders should we start with?
Sleep apnea and insomnia.
Sleep apnea, for folks out there who may not know what it is, is when you are snoring at night.
Almost everybody who has sleep apnea snores.
Not everybody, but almost everybody.
And when you're sucking air in, you pull your tongue to the back of your throat and you cut off your air.
And you literally stop breathing, right, for a few seconds.
Then all of a sudden you...
You make all this kind of grunting, groaning noises, and then you wake up.
This can happen hundreds of times a night, and it can be very problematic because, of course, it wakes you up every single time that you have one of these events right.
And so as an example, we measure the events per hour.
So, as an example, somebody with sleep apnea could have between 5 and 15 times per hour that they stop breathing, and that's mild, right.
So how are they going to get into the deep sleep that clears out the brain?
They can't.
That's the problem, right?
And so apnea prevents them from getting into a lot of that deep sleep.
And so their brain doesn't clear out and then they're kind of screwed.
So at the end of the day, the goal here is to get as many people to number one, identify if they have a sleep disorder and then be able to try to figure out what to do about it.
And the percentage of people in the US that have undiagnosed sleep apnea is pretty big.
It's like somewhere between, I think like 18 to 20%.
This is crazy.
I was just looking at the stats.
It says.
According to 2026 data, approximately 936 million people to 1 billion adults worldwide have obstructive sleep apnea, which is what one in seven.
Yeah, that's about right.
Making it as common as diabetes.
One in seven people listening have sleep apnea.
Yes.
Wow.
As popular as diabetes.
Let that sink in for like half a second.
Everybody knows what diabetes is.
Almost nobody knows what sleep disorders are, specifically sleep apnea.
And it says 80 to 90% of those people remain undiagnosed.
That is correct.
So there's people listening, right?
There's actually a huge percentage of people listening right now that have sleep apnea and have no idea that they have it.
Exactly right.
How would they know?
Do the sleep test.
This thing here?
Yeah.
And what would this show?
So this actually collects what is your oxygen levels throughout the night?
What is your heart rate throughout the night?
How many times do you actually stop breathing?
And also the depth of your sleep, which stages of sleep you get when you fall asleep, things like that.
And what would this?
So you know, because people are going to be like how do I know if I need to do the test?
So great question.
So you want to think about the symptoms that you might have.
So do you snore?
Do you wake up gasping for air?
Has anybody told you that you're snoring stops for brief periods of time, or that they've heard you gasping for air?
Do you wake up with a headache in the morning?
Do you find your moods are up and down?
All of those are signs and symptoms of sleep apnea.
And this test, are you affiliated with this company at all?
I am not.
But we do have that test on my website.
We sell it to people so that way we can test them.
And how much does it cost?
$189.
Okay, so it's not... It's not exorbitantly expensive.
And it also is covered by insurance.
And it connects to an app?
Uh-huh.
Absolutely.
So you'd put it through your sleeve.
So I'd put that there and then like this?
Yeah, exactly.
And that's it.
You go to bed.
Wake up.
Then the information ports over to your phone.
And then tells us exactly what's going on.
Now, here's where it gets even better.
I know, right?
Can you imagine me getting in bed with my fiance and being like come on babe let's, We're recording all kinds of good stuff.
Who knows what she might like?
Is this going to help my sex life?
It's absolutely a will, because getting into bed and knowing how well you sleep and knowing if you have sleep apnea or not will definitely affect your sex life.
Also, by the way, I've saved more marriages as a sleep doctor than I ever would have as a marital therapist dealing with snoring in the middle of the night and things like that.
So you'd be surprised.
But what's nice about this is it's one night.
You don't have to do it multiple nights.
It's super easy.
And again, believe it or not, that's disposable.
You can actually throw that whole thing away after it's all said and done.
And on that point, before we just go a little bit further into sleep apnea, should we be sleeping in bed with our partners?
And I know that's an interesting thing to say.
Great question.
Great question.
The strength of your relationship has nothing to do with where you sleep, okay?
So lots of people are like, I got to sleep with my partner.
Otherwise, my relationship is going to go to shit and everything's going to go terrible and we're never going to have sex and whatever.
Not true.
OK, so a lot of times for people that I have.
So, for example, I've got people who have sleep apnea and they use a machine to help them sleep called a CPAP machine.
Right.
And that noise for some people can be disruptive.
And so they sleep, let's say, in a different room.
Right.
So is that is that detrimental to your marriage?
No, it's not.
Because here's what you do is you vacation on the weekends in your bedroom.
I can't count the number of people who sleep separately during the week and then together on the weekends.
And it turns out that they get much better sleep during the week.
And then guess what?
Intimacy shows up much faster on the weekends because they're not so tired.
Used to be, you know, not tonight I have a headache.
It was really not tonight I'm exhausted.
When you allow your partner to get good sleep during the week, there's a reasonably good shot that you're going to be able to be intimate over the weekend if they got good sleep.
So wearing that to bed might not be the sexiest thing in the universe, but it's better than having sleep apnea and eventually ending up dead.
Are the symptoms of sleep apnea different for men and women?
They are.
Great question.
So it turns out that men and women are quite different, but we've historically been scoring them the same.
So women don't have a tendency to have as much snoring as men do.
Um, Women have a tendency to have more arousals where they wake up constantly.
Women have a tendency to report headaches in the morning more so than men do.
So it's actually different types of symptoms for women versus men when it comes to sleep apnea, to the point where we're now considering using different testing devices.
So this testing device would not necessarily measure EEG.
And in women, EEG might be important.
That's what we're learning.
So, as an example our company is – finding a device specifically to send to women, so that way we can more accurately measure sleep apnea in women.
Now, there's a lot of questions about treatment for sleep apnea.
And the biggest reason why nobody gets sleep tested is because they're afraid that they're going to end up sleeping with a CPAP machine on their face at night.
And so let me describe to your audience what that is.
Also, full disclosure, I have sleep apnea.
I don't look like somebody who has sleep apnea.
I stop breathing in my sleep, I think it's 26 times an hour.
I know, right?
Kind of crazy.
And I wear a CPAP machine and it helps me sleep every single night.
Let me explain what it is.
So when your throat closes here, CPAP machine is a little air compressor with a tube and a mask that sits on your nose, pushes a just thin stream of just air.
And when it hits that blockage, it ever so slightly opens it up, shoots air straight down to your lungs.
Now you might be saying to yourself, that sounds barbaric.
That is insane.
That's a hairdryer blowing up my nose all night long.
Here's what I can tell you is when you have a severe case of sleep apnea, this can be a lifesaver.
This can be one of the biggest, most important things that you possibly do.
Now, a lot of people say, oh, I don't think I could sleep with a mask on my face.
Well, that's not the only treatment.
There are other treatments called oral appliances.
This is like a mouth guard, like you see the footballers wear, but it's an upper and a lower, and the lower slowly brings your jaw forward, which opens up your posterior airway space.
The same way that air pushes things aside, The oral appliance structurally moves your jaw slightly forward, thereby opening up your airway.
So that works well.
And there's no mask on your face.
There's a third device that you can wear on your tongue that vibrates, that shrinks your tongue by a couple of millimeters, which opens up this posterior airway space and allows you to breathe better.
Have you tried all of them?
I have, as a matter of fact.
And why did you choose the apnea machine?
So for me, the apnea machine worked the best and made the most sense for me right now.
But I'll be honest with you, I will probably get the mouth guard for when I travel.
There's a lot that can be done out there.
And by the way, there's also surgeries.
And surgeries are a little bit more permanent fix.
But in many cases, those surgeries can be quite effective.
Also, by the way, they're working on a pill for sleep apnea now.
And that's just apnea.
We haven't talked about insomnia yet.
I was just reading about the FDA approving a drug.
Yeah, it's quite remarkable.
And there's actually two.
I think there's actually three different companies that are working on different drugs right now for sleep apnea.
And I mean to be clear when that happens, I think it's pretty much game over for sleep apnea right.
I mean, once we can get it in a pill form, which means compliance increases dramatically, we can help a lot of people with sleep apnea, which I think would be pretty amazing.
And women are heavily undiagnosed, right?
Because we think of it as, I mean, I've heard it being referred to as sort of an old man's disease.
Yeah, absolutely.
And here's the thing.
Many women have a tendency to report insomnia types of symptoms over sleep apnea types of symptoms, when in fact they actually have undiagnosed sleep apnea which we can catch.
We talked a little bit earlier, but from many of the conversations I've had on the show about Alzheimer's Yes,
Your chance of getting Alzheimer's, I imagine, is going to increase, right?
Because you have sleep apnea.
Yeah, well, when you have sleep apnea, it keeps you out of the deeper stages of sleep.
The deeper stages of sleep is where that glymphatic system comes in and scoops out those proteins.
And that's really probably one of those big causes for it.
So that's one of the things that we always want people to understand.
But there's also something else that I think is important to maybe talk about, which is on the other side not sleep apnea side, but on the insomnia side, which is there's a lot of people who go and they go to the drugstore and they buy an over-the-counter sleep aid, right?
Now, I'm not talking about supplementation yet.
We can get into supplements in a minute if you want to.
But I'm talking about things like the PM medications, right?
You know, they—
So here in America, we have them where there's like an analgesic plus a PM.
So there's Tylenol PM, Advil PM.
And what it is is it's a pain reliever, but they add –
It's something called diphenhydramine, and it makes you feel sleepy, and it makes you fall asleep.
Diphenhydramine is actually an antihistamine, right?
So it's used for congestion and things like that.
But there's now data to suggest that daily use of the PM part of this not the pain relieving part, but the PM part can lead almost directly to Alzheimer's.
Oh, wow.
Right.
So if people can just go to bed and follow a couple simple rules and go to bed, naturally you'd be shocked at how much better your world is going to be.
The Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland found that people with untreated apnea have a 45 higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.
Like I said.
Which is crazy.
So here's the thing is we've got all these people who are watching your show right now.
They need to start thinking in their head like maybe I have sleep apnea, maybe I don't, but maybe I should take a look at what are some of the symptoms and see if that's something that could be going on for me.
Because again, testing is available.
And to be clear, it's not like I'm the only guy out there testing people.
I mean, there are sleep doctors all over the world that are testing people.
My encouragement to people is, hey, Figure it out.
If you can't figure it out, you know, shoot us an email.
We'll find a sleep center for you to go to.
But if you think there's something going on, it's definitely worth checking out.
Because by the way, you can stay with undiagnosed sleep apnea for your entire life.
And all it does is basically break down everything that's going on inside.
And that's not what you want.
Like, remember, sleep is recovery, right?
This is how your body still functions.
Like, if you want to lead a nice, prosperous life, you want to sleep.
Insomnia has become a bit of a word that people throw around.
For sure.
Right.
They kind of self-diagnose themselves.
We kind of think of it as this one specific thing.
I think people say I have insomnia when they just don't sleep well.
Right.
What is insomnia and what's the big myth around it?
Yeah.
So number one, there's a couple of different flavors of insomnia.
There's the I can't fall asleep.
There's the, I can't stay asleep, which we talked about quite a bit.
There's the, I wake up too early.
And then there's just the, I wake up from unrefreshing sleep.
So we really think that there are four sort of types of insomnia, right?
And when people I would say some of the biggest myths that a lot of people have surrounding insomnia is, or like, the biggest problem that they do is when somebody has a really crappy night, then what they try to do is, the next evening, go to bed early and try to catch up on some of that sleep that they missed.
So, to be clear, this is a terrible idea because your circadian rhythm isn't ready to go to bed early.
So you lie in bed and you're exhausted, but you can't fall asleep.
You're what I call wired and tired.
And so what we want people to do is, if you do have a bout of insomnia where you have difficulty falling asleep or difficulty staying asleep number one don't over-caffeinate during the daytime.
So many people are like, oh, I'm dragging.
I got to get a coffee.
And they caffeinate, caffeinate, caffeinate.
And then they caffeinate so late into the day that they have shitty sleep that night.
And now we're in the washing machine cycle going over and over and over.
It sounds like you might be relating to this a little bit, maybe yourself.
And then So we want to avoid that.
The other thing we want to avoid is overstimulation at night, right?
So a lot of times people get that nervous energy, and so they're just doing, doing, doing.
Again, you need runway to land the plane, so give yourself kind of that space.
And then just make sure that you've got some level of regularity.
I would argue for my insomnia patients, but quite honestly, for anybody who's watching this, the number one sleep tip that I can give people is to wake up at the same time, seven days a week.
Not go to bed.
I don't actually care when you go to bed that much.
I know there's a lot of sleep specialists out there who are like you gotta go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time.
I'm not of that ilk.
I don't really care that much about the going to bed time.
I really only care about the wake up time.
Let me explain why.
When you wake up in the morning, sunlight hits your eye and you have a special cell in your eye called a melanopsin cell which sends a signal to your brain to turn off the melatonin faucet in your head.
But it sets a timer for exactly 14 hours later.
It's called the melatonin phase response curve.
So if you're waking up at six, melatonin turns off until about 8 pm, then it takes about a couple hours for it to get up and in.
So then you start to get sleepy around 930 and you go to bed.
But if you did that and now it's Saturday and you sleep in until 8, melatonin doesn't kick off until 10 Saturday night.
So what I'm saying is the time that you wake up directly determines when your internal melatonin kicks into gear.
So if everybody woke up at the exact same time every single day, seven days a week, automatically you would get tired at the right time and you would start going to sleep.
And is there two different types of insomnia?
Sometimes I hear primary, secondary insomnia.
I think I heard that on your YouTube channel.
So when you look at primary insomnia versus secondary insomnia, the way we categorize that secondary insomnia is usually due to something else that's going on in your life.
Psychology.
So maybe caffeine abuse.
Oh, okay.
Right?
Maybe something along those lines.
Whereas primary insomnia is there's nothing else.
The only thing you've got going on is sleep disorder.
Another example of something where insomnia might be secondary would be pain.
So if you have a pain syndrome, if you have fibromyalgia or low back pain that could prevent you from sleeping, that would be secondary insomnia, secondary to pain.
And I hear that the most common treatment for insomnia is CBT therapy?
So yes and no.
So I would say that the most common therapy for insomnia is alcohol.
More people drink themselves to sleep than any other single thing out there.
And then you start to get into the pharmacy of it all.
And there's a lot of pharmaceutical drugs out there that people utilize for sleep.
And I want to make a point if I can is there's nothing wrong with needing a pill to sleep.
Okay.
I want to be very clear about this.
There are people out there. who need pills, right?
All kinds of different ones.
Thank you.
There's a whole host of reasons why you and your doctor may have come to the conclusion that a sleeping tablet is good for you.
The problem comes when those sleeping tablets are over-prescribed.
So insomnia is in the sleep world.
We call it a door handle diagnosis, because when the doctor has their hand on the door and they're just about to leave, that's when the patient says oh and, by the way, I'm not sleeping.
Mm-hmm.
And then the doctor usually pulls out the prescription pad and says you know, Ambien or Trazodone or something like that.
Writes it up.
Says here, come back in 30 days.
Well, you haven't really done anything for this person.
You've handed them a pill.
And, by the way, now they're probably either psychologically or physiologically addicted to said pill, right?
Now, once again, if you've got a major mental health issue, I don't think I care.
I think it's okay for you to have your Ambien and be fine.
And a lot of people that do have insomnia have depression.
Oh, I think it's one of the biggest things that we see.
But I would argue anxiety might be a little bit more than depression.
But yes, anxiety and depression, I would argue, make up 75% of insomnia at any given time, right?
I work with people and I do something called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which you correctly identified as CBT-I.
And so I work with patients all the time, and that's exactly what we do is we reschedule them.
So that's the behavioral part.
And then the cognitive part is we talk to them about how do you think about sleep?
Because a lot of people think about sleep in disastrous ways.
They're like, if I don't get eight hours, my whole day is screwed and everything's going to happen.
It rarely happens that way.
Like it's called catastrophizing.
You just make it worse and worse and worse.
And so we look at those cognitive distortions and we help fix them in therapy by really kind of what I call doing the math.
And so I say, well, have you ever had four hours of sleep?
Yes.
Did you do something terrible the next day?
No.
So where's your evidence, right?
And you start to get people to challenge themselves and all of a sudden they can kind of get there.
There's also another area that a lot of people go to, somewhere in between the pills and therapy, and that's supplementation.
So there's a lot of people out there who like to use supplements and try to understand how to fix quote their insomnia with supplementation.
So if we can, let's talk a little bit about supplements and sort of what's good and what's bad.
What is the difference between a supplement and a pill?
Are you talking about the same thing here?
So, under the context of this conversation, a supplement is a non-FDA regulated thing that you can purchase at any drugstore.
And a pill is a by prescription only from a doctor.
Okay.
That's how we're going to make the distinction for this particular conversation.
Okay, so those pills that are in front of you there.
So right in front of me, these are actually all supplements.
So these are not pharmaceuticals.
These are different things.
I mean, in different countries, it's different, right?
Great point.
So let's talk about melatonin, since that's kind of the biggie that a lot of people like to know about.
So number one melatonin is by prescription only almost everywhere other than the United States right.
So in England, in Australia, in Europe, you can't just walk into the drugstore and buy melatonin.
And there's a reason.
A lot of people don't realize it, but melatonin is a hormone.
There's a reason you can't go to the CVS and get testosterone and estrogen, right?
Because hormones affect the entire system.
They affect almost 300 different things in your body.
So what you don't want to do is have somebody just willy-nilly grabbing a hormone and starting to pop it without somebody understanding what's going on with them.
More importantly, melatonin in particular and the point I wanted to make earlier about depression.
Melatonin interacts with all SSRI medication.
And SSRI is a serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitor, an antidepressant.
So things like Prozac Zoloft Celexa, all of those are medications that will be affected by melatonin ingestion and nobody knows that it is.
In addition, melatonin affects birth control, Yes, you heard it here.
Birth control, it affects blood pressure medication and it affects diabetes medication.
So one of the problems is that people go into the local drugstore and they're like oh, I'm going to grab some melatonin and I'm going to make my sleep better, because I'm sleeping poorly.
So first of all.
That's not what melatonin does.
Melatonin is a sleep regulator, not a sleep initiator.
Melatonin doesn't affect sleep drive.
Melatonin affects sleep rhythm.
So remember in the beginning of our conversation, we're talking about the two systems.
Melatonin only affects your brain telling it when it's time to go to bed.
It does not make you sleepy.
That's adenosine.
We already talked about adenosine and caffeine and how similar their molecular structures are.
So when you look at something like melatonin, you need to really be thoughtful about using it.
Number two, melatonin is not... to be used in children, okay?
So a lot of people are like Michael.
I've got pediatricians all over the country telling me to give my children melatonin.
I'm gonna say it right here in front of everybody.
That is the dumbest idea I have heard in a long time, because you just taught your child that they need a pill to sleep.
Normally, no child needs pills to sleep.
And, by the way, most children make almost four times the amount of melatonin that their brain even needs.
So giving them extra melatonin doesn't do you any good.
There is however, one group of children where melatonin does work well, and that's in kids on the autism spectrum.
We don't know exactly why, or at least I don't.
But there is data to suggest that at 5, 6, 7 milligrams, that that can be very helpful for them.
Dosage also is a problem.
Like if you go to the drugstore, you almost can't find it in the appropriate dose.
The appropriate dose is anywhere from about... half a milligram to one and a half milligrams.
Maybe top out at three, but that's about as high as you want to go.
But when you go to CVS, you find the gummies in 10 and 20 milligrams.
And people tell me all the time, oh, I can't take melatonin.
It gives me crazy dreams.
Number one side effect of overdosing on melatonin is crazy dreams.
On this point of going to a supermarket and picking some melatonin off the shelf, FDA approval And the lack of FDA approval in melatonin means that there's less clarity on what's actually in there, right?
That's exactly right.
I was reading about a study in 2024 where they looked at different melatonins that were found on the shelf.
And they found very different things inside the bottle.
Very, very different things.
We looked at an analysis of melatonin gummies marketed for children and found that the actual amount of melatonin ranged from 0 to 667 of what was listed on the label.
Yep, see it all the time.
And in the same study, melatonin gummies contained absolutely no melatonin, while others contained hazardous contaminants like CBD that were not disclosed on the label.
Yep.
Because melatonin is sold as a supplement in the US and not a drug, the FDA does not test it for safety or accuracy before it hits the shelf.
You are 100% correct.
And that's a huge problem.
Just think about that for a second.
I mean, the market for melatonin is tremendous.
It's huge in the supplement world, yet there's no regulation whatsoever.
Nobody knows about these interaction effects, which are big, big, big problems.
And by the way, most people are using it wrong.
There's really only three, maybe four different instances when melatonin would be useful.
I would use melatonin for jet lag, and we should talk about jet lag.
I would use melatonin for shift workers, right?
So for people who work night shift, who have to sleep during the daytime, they would be excellent people to use melatonin.
People with a melatonin deficiency-
A lot of people don't think about that, but right around age 50 is when if you're going to have a melatonin deficiency, we start to see that happening for people is that their ability to produce melatonin begins to decline.
So I think those three situations absolutely would be on board for melatonin.
Believe it or not, there's some data to show that in ADD and ADHD there's some use for melatonin and then also for a very specific sleeping disorder called REM behavior disorder.
We're going melatonin crazy as a society, aren't we?
Absolutely.
We don't need it.
It's completely unnecessary.
I was looking at the data.
In 1999, 0.4% of Americans said they used melatonin.
Today, it's almost 30%.
So about 70 million Americans.
That's crazy.
That is problematic.
And again, they have no idea what it's doing to them, right?
And they're giving it to their kids.
Like.
I can't think of anything worse for a young female developing body than to add a contraceptive when it's not necessary.
Like, it just doesn't make sense to me.
The rise in children overdosing on sleep gummies is the fastest growing trend in poison control data.
Yeah, I think it's like almost 600 increase or something crazy like that for kids who have overdosed on melatonin.
There was a study that came out maybe a year ago.
Year and a half ago showed like almost 600 of increase in overdoses for kids.
That's pretty messed up when you start to think about it.
And here's the thing.
Kids know how to sleep.
Right?
You just got to stop.
You just got to let them sleep, right?
You got to give them some parameters.
Here's when you go to bed.
Here's when you wake up.
Don't get out of bed.
You know, don't come in and ask for 12 glasses of water.
You know, all the stuff that goes on there.
I mean, this isn't hard.
So when and how?
So I used melatonin once in my life.
Okay.
And I've got to be honest, it fucking worked.
Yeah.
Oh, if you use it right, it works, bro.
And it was actually about a week ago because I'd been struggling with lots of jet lag.
I'd flown from the UK to LA to UK to LA to Cape Town to Middle East to wherever.
And I was getting to bed every night at like 4 or 5 am and still waking up at you know, having to wake up at about 10.
So I thought, I need to correct this.
Yes, you did.
It's been going for two weeks and I need to correct this.
Absolutely.
So I thought, fuck it, I'm going to cave.
I took the melatonin and – corrected it.
Yes, it does.
So let's talk about jet lag.
So it's a bit of a story.
But i got involved with a company that um has got an app, which is very interesting.
Okay um, i don't have any, like i'm not invested in the company, just to be clear, but it's one of my close friends who developed this, so i'm kind of a space nerd.
It's not time shifter, it is time shift.
Oh really, I would also like an affiliation with TimeShifter.
No problem.
Yeah, I will get you that.
So here's what's fascinating is the way the whole TimeShifter started was.
So aren't you kind of a space guy?
I'm an investor in SpaceX.
Okay, so I'm a space nerd myself, right?
So you know the ISS is moving around at 17,500 miles an hour around the Earth.
It's cooking.
ISS meaning the International Space Station.
Yeah, it's whipping around, right?
Yeah.
Can you imagine how many sunrises and sunsets they get in a given day?
I don't know.
How many?
Every two hours.
So they basically get 12.
Wow.
Think about how messed up their circadian rhythms would be from seeing the sunrise and seeing it go.
It gets really messed up, right?
And by the way, you don't want to make big mistakes in the space station.
Like you don't leave the airlock open, you know, or shit like that.
Like that's when things get really, really bad.
So they called down to NASA, and they were like, hey, we got a problem up here.
Everybody wants to use the lab at the same time.
Like, people are seeing the sun.
Like, what's going on?
So they called a buddy of mine named Stephen Lockley over at Harvard.
Stephen is arguably one of the best circadian researchers in the world.
Super smart dude.
And he was like, well, let's send up a lighting kit, and let's create shifts on the space station.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
So that's exactly what they did.
So they set up a lighting kit.
I think it was on the Columbia shuttle before it got decommissioned.
And they set up lighting and then they set up timing for lighting.
And so there was a morning shift, a mid shift and a night shift for the astronauts.
Once they got the algorithm working, they brought it down terrestrially and they put it into the Mercedes-Benz Formula One race car team.
So they gave it to Lewis Hamilton.
Right.
Because when you think about it, think about what he has to do.
Right.
He's on or off the podium on hundredths of a second.
Right.
And he's in a different country every three weeks.
Right.
So this guy's got jet lag like you wouldn't believe.
And so once we were able to get it going there, then we created the time shifter app.
And so it's an app.
You can get it on your phone.
And what you do is you put in your flight number and it automatically pulls up the flight and knows where you are.
This is why I think that jet lag is a math problem.
Let me explain.
We learned about 20 years ago that when you take a certain frequency and intensity of light and you shine it in somebody's eyes, you can move their circadian rhythm by about eight hours, if you want to.
Their circadian rhythm again being?
Being that internal biological clock, the times when your body wants to go to bed and wants to wake up.
We can actually move that by about eight hours with about 10000 lux, which is the brightness level of a blue light, particular frequency of light.
Okay,
So when you hit that, If you start in LA and you're going to Manchester right, and there's a big time difference and you know what time it is in LA and you know what time it is in Manchester, it's a math problem of when do you get the light.
So that's what time shifter is, is it determines when do you need that light.
And then on the times when you don't need light, it has you use caffeine, right?
Or to keep you awake, or if it's time to sleep, then you use a little bit of melatonin.
That's when melatonin becomes so valuable.
It also tells you when to eat.
It does.
It tells you all of these different things.
And it's kind of nice because it kind of shows up on your phone.
It's like, hey, do this then, do this then.
And it works really, really well.
But Yeah, TimeShifter is one of my favorites.
I've been using it literally for 15 years.
Wow.
And it solves jet lag, bro.
Like, we're going to fix that for you.
No question.
How often should someone be having melatonin?
Is there like too often?
Because some people literally have it every day.
Yeah, I would argue it's a bad idea.
So if you have a melatonin deficiency, sure, have it every day.
Or if you're a shift worker, probably.
But I use it only for jet lag myself.
Otherwise, I'm not using it on the regular.
And what's the risk there of having it every day?
It's a good question.
So when you start to look at melatonin overdose and you start to look at melatonin on board, for long periods of time there's been some conflict in the research.
There's a group of people that say if you stay on melatonin for extended periods of time, your body stops producing it.
There's another group of people that have looked at research and have said actually that's not the case.
So right now, we have studies that lead out to about a year or so on melatonin.
And when you stop their melatonin production after they've been taking it for a year, their body seems to start back up, no problem.
It's different than testosterone, right?
So with testosterone, we know that when men start taking testosterone, their body actually stops producing it.
With melatonin, that does not appear to be the case.
But…
We don't have studies that go out past that year long.
And so if somebody's been taking melatonin every day for five, 10 years, you kind of start to wonder what's going to happen.
Also, don't forget that that melatonin is different than the melatonin that's actually produced in your head.
I think it was Andrew Huberman, who I was speaking to a couple of weeks ago, that was saying about not giving kids an overdose of melatonin.
And I think afterwards.
I was doing some research on it and I read something that said it has an impact on puberty, potentially.
So in high dosages, melatonin is a contraceptive.
So that would pause puberty.
Exactly.
Or change it in ways we may or may not know.
So I agree with Andrew on that point.
That again, melatonin is not something that kids need, unless you've got kids on the spectrum, which is again where I find it to be helpful.
And I've treated kids with that before.
But generally speaking, I don't put melatonin on anybody under the age of 18.
Am I more likely to have nightmares if I'm having lots of melatonin?
If you're overdosing, you are.
So the number one side effect of a high dose of melatonin is super vivid dreams and then eventually nightmares.
Why?
I'm not really sure.
If I was garnering a guess, then what I would say is that part of the reason why that you have crazy vivid dreams is from melatonin is because it probably does put you into REM sleep a little bit quicker than you normally would and might keep you there a little bit longer.
I don't have any data to support that.
So I want to be clear.
This is more of a hypothesis on my end, but that might make intuitive sense to me.
Just on a quick search.
Sure.
You're right.
It says it keeps you in REM sleep a little bit longer and more intensely.
There you go.
This leads to vivid, highly vivid dreams, or night terrors, which paradoxically makes you wake up feeling more exhausted.
Right.
I can't count the number of people who tell me I need to go back to sleep because I'm so exhausted from my dreams.
Oh, wow.
Right.
So let's finish off on these supplements then.
Yeah, absolutely.
So we talked a little bit about melatonin, which like I said, select usage.
A couple of other ones that we've got here, one of them is valerian, right?
So when we talk, valerian is probably the most studied.
It's a root.
It's called the valerian root.
But to be clear, it's an anti-anxiety medication, right?
So what it is, is it helps lower your level of anxiety.
And that is the reason why it has a tendency to work.
Interestingly when you look at the data, it works better when combined with hops, like what you'd find in beer.
So a lot of times when you're looking for a preparation, you should look for valerian plus hops as the preparation.
Also, we should talk for a second about supplements.
A lot of people don't understand this, but...
A lot of people will put a whole bunch of different supplements together and put it into a capsule.
I don't think that's the best idea.
I think you should have single ingredient supplementation.
Why?
Well, number one, you get the correct dose so you know it's actually working for you.
There's a lot of companies out there that are uh, that make a powder or something and they put a bunch of stuff in it and they put just enough in there to be able to say it on the ingredient profile, but not enough for it to actually do any good for the patient.
So i like using single ingredient uh supplement profiles because i know exactly how much of each thing that i'm going to get in there and i can make sure that it's the correct dosage for what the person needs.
So i prefer single ingredient supplementation.
Okay, so Valerian.
Yep.
Valerian root.
Not going to mess up my hormones?
Nope.
It's not going to mess up your hormones.
Going to help me with overthinking?
Probably not.
What it'll probably do is slow your thinking down a little bit, depending upon how much of it you take.
I think if you're looking for something that's going to slow down your thinking, then I would say we don't have the thing here, but it's called GABA, G-A-B-A. gamma-immunobutyric acid.
So this is a substance that your body makes.
It's kind of the brakes of the brain and you can buy it as a supplement.
I've had several people use that and that seems to help calm people down in the evening times.
What about ashwagandha or whatever it's called?
Ashwagandha.
Ashwagandha.
Exactly.
I just kind of like saying it.
So here's my theory on supplementation is the first thing I tell people to do is go do blood work.
What deficiencies do you have?
Fix your deficiencies first.
Before we start going to the valerians and the melatonins of it all.
If you're deficient in vitamin D magnesium iron, Fix those three things first.
Dude, I can't tell you.
I thought 15 of the people that show up at my doorstep we do blood work on and all I do is fix their deficiencies and their sleep magically gets better.
What are some of the surprising things that you discover?
Like blood sugar, like diabetes, that impacts sleep, no?
It absolutely does.
I also think that a lot of people who have uncontrolled diabetes, it wakes them up in the middle of the night because their blood sugar gets so low and then they're hungry in the middle of the night.
Then they have eating in the middle of the night.
Then they have sleep eating syndrome, which is kind of a pain.
There's this one here that I've never heard of before.
What's this one?
It's called tryptophan.
So L-tryptophan in particular.
So tryptophan is the substance that we find in turkey that has a tendency to make people sleepy.
However, when you really look at the data, you'd have to eat a 46 pound turkey in order to get enough tryptophan to make you sleep.
Even in my best days in college, dude, I couldn't eat a 46 pound turkey.
Okay.
Same holds true with milk.
Tryptophan is the thing in warm milk that supposedly makes people sleepy.
But once again you'd have to drink almost a half a gallon of warm milk, which is kind of disgusting in order to do it.
Tryptophan can be helpful for people if you have a tryptophan deficiency, but it's definitely something that lowers a little bit of anxiety and can make you feel a little bit sleepy.
But it is a naturally occurring amino acid in your system.
Calcium?
So calcium turns out is interesting because when you mix calcium with magnesium, it's easier to absorb.
So for some people, what we've discovered is, if you have a magnesium deficiency and you fix the magnesium deficiency, in many cases it can actually help with overall sleep.
And calcium is one of the things that can be added to it that helps with absorption.
Now, unfortunately, the big problem is that there are 13 different kinds of magnesium out there.
And so people don't know what's been studied and what hasn't.
So I'm here to let you know there's only a couple of brands out there that have actually been studied for magnesium.
The ones I like is there's one called Magnesium 308, which is made by a company called Magteen.
They actually have a published research study in the journals.
That's why I mentioned their brand name.
I have no association with them.
There's also another company called Upgraded Formulas.
They make a magnesium.
Kind of funny story is the guy who runs Upgraded Formulas told me he says my magnesium is the best in the world.
I can make anybody fall asleep.
And I said, hey, you want to put your money where your mouth is?
Let's do a clinical trial.
He handed me a check for 75 grand.
I went and did a clinical trial and he was right.
His magnesium really made people sleep better.
What is magnesium doing?
So we're not 100% sure.
In the deficient people, it's obviously clearing up the deficiency of magnesium.
And then magnesium is used in about, I think, almost 300 different functions in the body.
So it probably lets the body work more efficiently and probably –
That helps to overall sleep.
But I'm not convinced that we have the whole mechanism of action worked out.
I will tell you that when people take magnesium, they tell me that they introspectively feel calmer.
And we definitely know that it can definitely help cause a relaxation response in the musculature.
So I think that might have something to do with it.
Why did you bring a banana and a knife and a teapot?
This is my favorite way to get magnesium.
Oh.
A lot of people want to know, how should I take my supplements?
I'm tired of taking a fistful of pills every morning, Michael.
There's these powders, like what's the best way?
The best way.
So number one supplementation is when you're not getting all of the things the vitamins and minerals that you need from your food.
So the best place to get it from is food, generally speaking.
Turns out, magnesium is one of the best ones, but it's problematic because we have to eat our magnesium.
Our body doesn't actually produce it ourselves.
And, by the way, you could eat a bushel of kale and still not get enough magnesium, because here in the United States the soil has been over tilled, which means the magnesium isn't in the soil.
So it's not coming up through the root stocks and allowing people to have it.
So a lot of people require magnesium supplementation.
Believe it or not, between magnesium and vitamin D, I'd say we probably covered most of America in terms of having a deficiency.
Bananas are loaded with magnesium, but it turns out it's not the fruit, it's the peel oh itself.
So no, i'm not going to make you eat the peel, don't worry.
So i developed a recipe that i call banana tea.
All this is is a regular old banana.
So what i what you do is you cut off the stem right and cut it in half, and then you drop it in to some boiling water.
Okay, so we've already done this right, and you can see the banana has turned brown, right.
It's been soaking in the boiling water.
So it's not really tea.
It's just basically hot banana water.
But with the banana from the skin you also get these things called phytosteroids that actually help you absorb the magnesium better than if you just had it from a supplement.
So you have to really like bananas.
My daughter says it's very banana-y, dad.
The flavor, I mean.
Oh, it does smell like banana.
I'm telling you, if you like bananas.
It's nice.
I know it's nice.
And you can use this as a like an evening ritual, and you can make banana tea and have it in the evening with you know, a biscuit or what have you, and have a nice and read a book and just be chill.
How do I know the magnesium is actually in there?
Cause it came through from the, from the steeping in the water.
We could test it if we want, but I can assure you it's in there.
You need to leave it in there for about five minutes and we've been talking for a while.
So I'm pretty sure it's there.
And how long before sleep to get those effects?
I would say about 25, 30 minutes.
You don't want to have too much, by the way, because then you're going to have to wake up and pee.
So try if you can to be able to have it about 30, 40 minutes before bed.
So you can put it in anything.
A lot of people have different types of teas.
So you could just use that as the water instead.
Yeah.
Oh, without question.
Actually, that would be a really good idea.
And if you mix it with like a fruit tea, like an herbal fruit tea, that would be really delicious.
Are there any other supplements that you do encourage people to take if they're struggling with sleep that we haven't talked about yet?
We haven't talked about vitamin D and that's a big one.
So it turns out that vitamin D is a circadian pacemaker.
So when light comes into your eyeballs, it helps change your whole circadian system.
And if light is coming in for a certain amount of time about 15 minutes your body will start to produce vitamin D.
Vitamin D does a whole host of important things to your body.
But most importantly from a sleep perspective is it helps regulate melatonin and when your body produces it.
So by taking vitamin D every day or getting 15 minutes of sunshine.
Either way, you're gonna be in better shape.
So, like as an example, my morning routine that I have all my patients do is I have them when they wake up in the morning, I have them go outside, if it's nice out, sit in a chair and have 15 deep breaths, merely to wake up the respiratory system.
Then 15 ounces of water because, once again remember, you're dehydrated, and then 15 minutes of sunshine.
So they can do all of this together at the same time, and it's a nice way to wake up in the morning.
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So let's talk about waking up in the morning.
Sure.
Morning routines.
Yep.
A lot of people talk about what's the perfect morning routine.
Do you need to have a morning routine?
What's your take on that?
So it depends upon how disciplined you want to be and it depends upon how much time you have.
I can tell you what my morning routine is, because it's very specific and I've discovered that it works really really well for me.
So I wake up naturally somewhere between 6.10 and about 6.25 or so.
My body just seems to naturally wake up.
I do 15 minutes of red light therapy.
So I have a red light in my office that I sit in front of.
And I do my meditation at the same time in the morning time.
So I have about 15 minutes of meditation.
Sometimes what I'll do is I'll sit on the floor and the boys will come and sit on my lap, and then we'll all meditate together.
I know that sounds a little weird.
Then we do a 15-minute walk.
I try not to have any music or any telephone or anything like that at all up until this point.
I put the dogs away and then I hit the gym.
I'm at the gym from about 8 till about 9.30, 10 o'clock.
I do a sauna every day afterwards.
And then I'm in front of my desk by about 10.30 and that's when I have my breakfast.
And so I make the same breakfast almost every morning.
I do ground turkey with a third of a pound of ground turkey, three eggs and broccoli.
And I put it all into a skillet and I make it every morning.
Do you use any sleep trackers?
In the past, I've used a few of them.
I try them out because a lot of my patients try them out.
I think if I was going to be looking at them, I think the Oura Ring probably does the best job.
I really don't think they've gotten there quite yet.
Because remember, depth of sleep is based on brainwaves.
And it's hard to get brainwaves from your finger, right?
And so what they're doing is they're creating a proxy.
So they're looking at heart rate or oxygen or pulse or something along those lines and then saying okay, when Steven's at this pulse, we think he's in REM sleep.
So we're going to label every time that REM sleep, when in fact they don't really know because they're not measuring your brainwaves.
So I think until we get to the point where we can measure brainwaves from distally, I think we'll have a little bit better shot at it.
However, There's some interesting things that are going on kind of in the sleep tracker world.
And some people get a little too into the whole tracking of it all, if you know what I mean.
Like I can't count the number of people that are like oh my God, Dr Bruce you know this says I only slept 14 minutes last night.
Like, what do I do?
And I'm like, well, number one, how much did you sleep the night before?
And they say, oh, 16 minutes.
I'm like, okay, well, let's check you tomorrow.
They come back tomorrow.
It's even worse, 12 minutes.
I'm like, oh, you're fine.
They're like, what?
I'm like, look, it's being consistently inaccurate.
There's no way you only got 14 minutes of deep sleep, right?
That's just not how the body works, right?
But if you got 14 minutes, 14 minutes, and then one night you look at your score and it's 407 minutes, I want to know what happened on that night.
My friend was a big fan of Whoop, so he told me to try Whoop.
I tried a Whoop.
The most, I think, critical thing it's done for me is it allowed me to create some understanding of causation and associations with my sleep.
So one of the ones that completely changed my life when I first wore my Whoop which, by the way, I'm an investor in the company, so I have to disclaimer that was I didn't realize how impactful alcohol was on my sleep.
It's massive, dude.
Like it blew my mind because I had had one glass of wine.
Yep.
And then the bloody whoop thing said you're either really sick, really stressed, or you drank alcohol.
Yep.
And then I watched a video online where they compared all of the devices to the hospital grade stuff.
Yep.
Polysomnography.
And the Whoop 4 was the closest to the hospital grade.
And then I contacted the company and said, can I invest, et cetera, et cetera.
I've also tried like eight sleep.
I would argue that temperature, like if we're talking about what is the easiest thing to manipulate, to change your sleep either good or bad temperature is it.
And people don't realize it, but you can change the temperature in your bedroom, even in your bed, and you can change the quality of your sleep.
You mentioned Eight Sleep.
That's a company that has a topper type of thing that can change the temperature underneath the covers.
There's also taking a look at the accoutrement that's on.
So pillows sheets comforters, all of those things.
But if you can get your body to cool down— your body will go down and get into deeper stages of sleep.
If you can stay cool versus bumping up and down all night long.
Let's say you're a woman in menopause, right?
That becomes highly disruptive.
And so by being able to keep a consistent temperature stimulus to the body, it ends up sleeping a whole lot better.
Dreams.
Let's talk about dreams.
People are so fascinated by dreams.
Aren't they?
I love it.
But so little is known about dreams.
Yeah.
Well, yes and no.
I mean, here's the thing.
Dreams have been studied, honestly, since the dawn of time.
If you look in the Bible, you will see that people are talking about dreams.
If you look at ancient texts, people are wondering about these crazy movies that are going on in my head.
When you start to look at dreams, here's the thing that I will tell you is—
Dreams mean something to the dreamer.
They don't necessarily mean something to somebody who is not the dreamer.
And so when I do dream work – and so, to be clear, just to take a step back I took a year and a half and I became a dream therapist.
So what does that mean?
What is that even – is that even a thing?
So dream therapy, by the way, is not dream interpretation.
That is not here's a symbol, here's what that means.
Dream therapy is where you use dreams in the therapeutic context to help people with things like depression and anxiety.
Let me give you an example, a nightmare, right?
So when somebody has let's say, somebody was in an active theater of war and they watched one of their friends, God forbid, something terrible happened to them.
And that image is now in their head.
And now they constantly have this image over and over and over.
But what happens is they're going, going, going, and they wake up.
They're going, going, going, they wake up.
We talked a little bit about it earlier that dreams are emotional metabolism, right?
So dreams are where you work out all of these different things that are going on in your head and kind of become okay with them.
So that way next day, you can kind of move forward and keep doing your thing.
Do we need to explain why we dream?
Because I think that's the big sort of, Sure.
So there's a couple of theories.
One theory is that this is a great stage for practice, right?
So we dream about things that we're eventually going to try in the real world.
And so we get a chance to practice them in our head beforehand.
To make sure we don't kind of screw the whole thing up.
So there's that whole idea of being able to kind of work stuff out in my head.
Then there's the processing idea that we talked about before where this is emotional metabolism.
Therapy.
Right.
Exactly.
It's like you go to therapy every single night.
Actually, it's a really good way to think about it.
I hadn't thought about it like that, but I think I'm going to use that.
I'm going to take that from you.
I like that dreams are therapy every single night because they really are.
You're really moving through a lot of that emotionality.
Some people think dreams are complete nonsense.
Some people think that's just some crazy movie in your head and it's just this after effect of your brain moving into a different mode, and who knows what it could mean.
I find that one hard to believe myself.
Because humans don't do anything.
I don't think so.
That isn't for some type of survival benefit.
For sure.
It's a waste of time.
Yeah, I agree.
And so if we looked at it from an evolutionary perspective, like what is the evolutionary purpose of dreams, I would argue that it probably has something to do with emotions and being able to move through some emotionally difficult times.
And or it's an early warning system.
A lot of people dream things and it helps them understand something else that's going on in their life.
You ever heard the thing people say, before I make this big decision, I want to sleep on it?
Yeah.
Right?
This is what they're doing is when they sleep on it.
All these desperate pieces of information come together and work themselves so that you can come to a solution.
So I think the other thing, that reason that we dream, is to come to solutions and to create innovation.
That tracks in my life.
I can be going to bed really thinking about something, quite like you know, remunerating about something to the point that it's like overthinking and it's a problem.
It's stressing me out.
I can get eight hours sleep and wake up and it's like the clouds have parted.
Right.
It's like magic.
It's like magic.
It's great.
And I didn't really realize this in the last couple of years, when you know business, my businesses got bigger and there was more problems, just to work, work through that.
Like actually i could use sleep as a weapon against the problem absolutely, versus trying to stay up all night and solve the problem.
I could focus on the sleep to solve the problem yeah, i do it all the time.
And and what you can actually do it's called priming is you can think about the problem in a in a way before you go to sleep and then it triggers your brain to think about the problem while you're sleeping.
What you write it down, or would you?
There's a lot of different ways you can go about doing it.
So, for example, what I have some people do is write down everything they can remember in their dream beforehand, before they come to therapy.
But what you can do is something different.
If you want to change your dream, you write it all down, but that you change the ending.
OK, and you read it several times before bed and it will actually change your dream.
So what am I writing down before bed then?
So let's say you had a scary dream.
OK, you're walking through a haunted house and something terrible is going to happen when you walk out the back door.
The night before.
Yeah, the night before.
Then I have you write all of that down.
And then when you come into session with me, I say OK, we're going to change the ending, because at the very end you walked out onto the porch and somebody got you.
Right.
So instead of that happening, you're going to walk out of the porch.
You're going to pull out a gun and you're going to shoot the guy.
And so we change that in the dream in what you wrote down.
And then we talk about it in therapy.
And then right before bed, you read this to yourself multiple times.
And over 7 to 10 days, you change the ending of the dream.
And how does that help?
So it makes it more positive.
And when you change the ending, the reason you're waking up is something is scaring you so much that you're waking up and you stop processing.
And so, when you change the ending and you don't wake up, you continue to process and then you move past the dream.
Just like you said, when you wake up and the clouds have cleared.
A lot of people wake up and the clouds don't clear, because they have nightmares.
And they keep repeating it over and over and over again.
Hmm.
It's quite remarkable.
The process is very interesting.
So what I do is I bring them into session, put them into a mild hypnotic state only by doing some simple breath work.
Right,
So let me give you an example of somebody that I worked with and tell you exactly how it went.
So I was working with somebody who had had pretty significant trauma.
They had been raped, right?
And so they were having nightmares about this.
So serious situation, right?
So she had a nightmare of being in a jungle.
And so I had her come in session, wrote it all down.
And when we got to the end, we were walking through the jungle.
She was actually being chased through the jungle.
So I turned to her and I said, OK, well, we're in the jungle.
Tell me more about this jungle.
And she said, well, what do you mean?
I said, well, in jungles, there's lots of tropical plants.
There are a lot of colorful flowers.
And she'll stop.
And you can see she's looking around inside her head at the dreamscape.
And then she says, oh, there are, there's some beautiful flowers over there.
I've now advanced the dream, right?
Because she didn't know there were flowers before.
Now she's imagined that they're flowers.
I'm moving the dream forward.
So we go over and we smell the flower.
And I said, well, you know, usually in jungles, there's animals.
Are there any animals?
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
Yeah, there's a lion.
Oh gosh, is the lion friendly?
Yeah, the lion is friendly.
Can we go over and talk to the lion?
Yeah, Michael, we can.
So again, in her head, we walk over.
So I say to her, does the lion have a name?
And she said, I don't know.
Let me ask.
So she asked the lion his name and she said, yeah, his name is Jack.
And I said, what does Jack mean to you?
And instantly she says, Jack was my uncle and he saved me from getting raped by my stepfather.
Now we're getting somewhere.
Now we understand what's chasing her.
Now we understand where she's headed to.
She's trying to head to the person that saved her.
Now she starts to understand where this dream is coming from.
And guess what?
In three or four more sessions, she doesn't have the dream anymore.
Because you did what?
Because she now understands where it is.
She's no longer scared in the middle of her dream.
She's able to understand it, wake up and move forward.
It's remarkable.
It's kind of the coolest thing ever if you want to know the truth of the matter.
Working with people's dreams is just amazing stuff.
And for people at home that might not have access to you, is there a simple thing that they can do to start to sort of get a hold of these dreams?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Number one is you could actually start a dream journal.
So it's just a journal.
And there's a couple of things that you would write down in a given dream journal.
So you might write down what was the theme.
Right.
So was it like describe it like was it dark out?
Was it light out?
Was it scary?
Was it happy?
You might describe the surroundings of it and you might describe the people that are in it as well.
And start listing these things and getting as detailed as you possibly can.
Once you've kind of gotten through the point of getting the details down of your dream, then if you want to change them, you can change the ending.
It's not hard.
You just change it the way you want it to be.
Then you start to read it over for yourself.
Now, I want to be clear.
In terrible nightmare situations, this can be a little bit difficult.
And so you're probably going to want to talk with your therapist about it and maybe work with the therapist while doing something like this.
But it is absolutely possible to collect information from in a dream journal and be able to do some interesting stuff with it.
I would not recommend taking your dream and stuffing it into chat GPT and asking chat GPT what it means.
Lots and lots of people are doing that these days.
And here's why that's probably not the best idea.
So number one unless ChatGPT really knows and understands you, it's going to give some very broad based sort of encyclopedia.
You know, here's a symbol that means this type of thing which, once again, we have very little evidence that that actually works.
So I would argue that you're better off talking about your dreams with people who know you, because they can actually help you understand a little bit more about what's going on.
There's a few other items on the table here.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't use this exact one, but maybe I should.
But this has been an absolute game changer for me.
So when I travel, when I'm on planes.
I love a good sleep mask.
My wife says it looks like I'm living in the 50s, you know, when I'm wearing it.
But I love a good sleep mask.
That one in particular is pretty cool because you can remove the eye cups and you can change the sizing of where you want it.
And then these can actually, you can replace these with things that heat or cool.
But I love that particular eye mask.
It works.
Yeah, it's awesome, really works quite well.
It's very dark in there, you definitely can't see.
That's crazy, right.
And then i've got one more thing that i think people will find interesting.
I can't explain how much of a game changer it has been to cover my eyes when I go to sleep because gosh, the amount of nights per week where I don't know there's like a crack in the curtains or I don't know, someone gets up early.
Well, also for you, you're traveling all the time.
You're in planes.
You're in different environments.
Also, by the way, every time you're in a different environment, you have something called the first night effect.
So we see this with every human on earth.
When you sleep in a new place for the first night, you never sleep well because it's new sounds, new sights, you know, new smells all that stuff is new.
So what's nice about having this is when I put one of these on, I don't have to worry about light.
I don't have to worry about anything.
Does CO2 play a role?
In what way?
In changing sleep.
I was thinking if ventilation, the amount of oxygen in the room, matters at all, because sometimes I go to hotels and they don't have windows you can open.
Right.
So...
Air quality is also an important thing, not just air quantity, right?
And so number one thing if I was to tell people hey, here's an easy thing to do to make your sleep better just go out and buy an air purifier for your bedroom.
Think about it.
It's the room you spend more time in than any other room in the house.
You want that air to be fresh and filtered. right?
And it's not a big, it's not expensive.
20, 25 bucks.
One sits in the corner, just runs the air cycles all day long.
That way, you know, you have good, clean, fresh air.
Also, I tell people open the windows once a week.
It's good to get fresh air in.
Now the only problem comes is if you have allergies and the allergens fly in and there's pollen or dust or things like that.
That can be somewhat problematic, but generally speaking, if you don't have enough oxygen going on, you're definitely not going to sleep well and your body's going to wake up.
So if you were in, let's say, a oxygen restrictive environment so let's say that you were underneath the covers right, and you've got the thing all the way over your head you're not going to sleep particularly well and eventually you're going to get so feel so restricted that you're going to open up the covers.
I want to understand the best possible sleep position.
I do have a bed in the room next door that we can go to and talk about these pillows.
But before we do that, I would like to talk about relationships, arguing with your partner sex, all those kinds of things.
What do I need to know to protect my sleep but also to protect my relationship?
If we start with talking about – I know you wrote about it in your book, The Power of When.
You talked about – I think it's on page 101.
101, you talk about arguing with your partner before bed.
Possibly the worst thing you can possibly do is argue with your partner before bed because it's increasing heart rate, right?
What I tell all my patients to do is, if you need to have an important discussion with your spouse or your partner, do it right after dinner, right?
So like in that seven o'clock range, seven to eight o'clock range.
So that way you have enough space and time to be able to discuss something and not hopefully, go to bed angry, if you can avoid it at all possible.
It happens.
Look, I can't say that I've never gone to bed angry.
I'm sure you can't say that either.
Sometimes things are a bigger deal.
But if you can find better times to schedule those things, they work out a lot better.
For me.
The other thing that I oftentimes ask a lot of my patients to do is, for example, if there's known issues that are going on like, let's say, somebody's going through marital therapy or – there's an issue that they're trying to work on, then maybe that's better off done at 11 o'clock in the daytime versus starting to kind of address some of those issues in the evening time.
I like evening times to be as stress-free as humanly possible.
Now, if you've got something you got to talk about, you got to talk about it.
But generally speaking, I would say, the less emotionality that you have towards the evening, the better, unless it's joy or happiness.
So many couples, they have these difficult conversations on the pillow.
Yeah.
Including me sometimes.
Yeah.
Well, and it makes sense.
Like, when else do you see that person, right?
You haven't seen them all day.
You're literally face-to-face.
Like, hey, I got something I got to talk to you about.
This is kind of the best time to do it.
It ruins your sex life. as well, doesn't it?
It absolutely ruins your sex life and lets you to have makeup sex afterwards.
And then it's great.
But at the end of the day, it's not a lot of fun to have those conversations at night.
That's again why I choose to.
If I'm going to have that conversation, the best time honestly to do it is right after breakfast.
In my relationship, we've banned difficult conversations at nighttime.
Good.
That's probably a smart move, dude.
You're tired and it's going to destroy your sleep.
Right.
You can't think straight.
You're probably more emotional.
And you haven't put all the pieces together yet of the issues that are really going on.
I can assure you, if you sleep and then have your discussion in the morning, you'll actually think about the issue better.
Mm-hmm.
It's so crazy as I've gotten older, I've realized how much of my mood is determined by my sleep.
Like it's so, and I think it's got worse with age.
Oh, absolutely it does.
Because at 25.
You can blow shit off.
Oh yeah.
Or you could drink a monster or a Red Bull or whatever.
I felt like I always woke up in a good mood.
Yeah, sleep matters.
And I think that's the button that you're pushing here.
And I think it's important for your audience to hear that, right?
Look, you're 33 years old and you're already seeing things changing in your sleep that have a big effect in your life.
I'm 58 years old, okay?
I see the same thing happening.
Everybody.
Sleep is so fundamental to the human condition that it's one of those things that we've got to really pay attention to.
And the thing is, most people don't pay attention to it because they're like well, my body does it automatically, Michael.
Like, how tough could this be?
I walk into that room in the back of the house, I turn off the lights, go to bed.
Then I wake up, something magical happens and I should be great, right?
It doesn't always work that way.
I was reading in your work about the best time to fall in love.
Yes.
That's a strange thing for somebody of your profession to be thinking much about.
It was in this book, wasn't it?
Yeah, it was.
When you think about it, Everything is based on timing, right?
So the timing when your hormones are at a certain point and you meet that person and their hormones are at a certain point and then all of a sudden there's a connection, right.
That's hard to do when you're exhausted, right?
Try going on a first date when you're complete, like when it's the worst, right?
You know you're not giving a good impression of yourself.
You know that you're not getting a good impression of that person because your mind is not going where it needs to be.
So there's timing involved.
And understanding your chronotype and that person's chronotype really leads you in that positive direction.
And I would argue that it's pretty easy to fall in love at that time.
Okay.
So in your book Power of When, on page 94, you say dolphins' best mood is in the afternoon to evening.
So the best time for them to fall in love is 8 p.m.
Yep.
Lions, 7 a.m.
Right.
Because remember, they're early morning people.
They're exhausted at the end.
Damn.
So they should be going on morning dates.
Yes.
Bears, 4 p.m.
And the wolf, like me, 11 p.m.
That tracks.
Yeah.
I get it.
So should I be doing my...
You know, okay, I'm in a relationship.
I'm about to be married.
Yes.
I heard you got engaged.
Congratulations.
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
But I should be doing my dates later.
It kind of tracks.
That's kind of when I did them.
Well, look at your whole schedule, dude.
You don't do a thing before 11.
That's true.
Right?
I think you're exactly like I am.
Shall we go and look at the best possible sleep position?
Yeah, let's check it out.
And we'll talk about pillows too.
Okay, so I'll bring all the pillows with me.
Okay, great.
Okay, so we're going to go into the next room where there's a bed and you're going to tell me what can you tell me when we look at the bed?
How can you help?
So there's a couple of different things.
So, number one, I'm going to look at your starting sleep position and I'm going to give you some feedback about that.
Then we're going to fit you for the right kind of pillow for you.
And then there's some cool technology in there that I want to show you as well.
That can help keep you cool all night long.
And do we need to take this with us?
Yes, take the Orion.
We'll take that one.
And then how many pillows are there?
I think there's five.
There's five different pillows.
Yes.
Okay, great.
They all do different things.
Okay.
Okay, so we're now downstairs in a bedroom we have in the house.
I have lots of pillows here.
Quite a few.
And there's a bunch of questions I have for you.
The first is pillows.
Do they matter?
Is there a perfect one?
Is it different for every individual?
Sleeping position.
Is there a perfect sleeping position?
There is.
And the third one is about temperature.
You got it.
Let's go.
So I just grab whatever pillow is in the bed wherever I travel.
Terrible idea.
Really?
Terrible idea.
So first of all, a lot of people need to understand that a pillow is a bed for your head, right?
And so the goal here is to keep your nose in line with your sternum, which is sort of the center part of your chest right.
But you don't want it facing down and you don't want it facing up.
You want it to be completely in the center like that.
And so if you have a pillow that tilts your head to the one way or tilts your head to the other, it causes a pain signal from the strain of the musculature that goes to your brain.
You don't get into deep sleep.
So you really want to make sure that you've got a good pillow.
Otherwise, you end up with a crick in your neck.
You don't get good deep sleep.
It becomes problematic.
Okay.
So the big question is how do you pick a pillow right?
So first question you want to ask yourself is squishy or firm, right?
So let's take a look at our tower of pillows here.
So for you let's, let's take a look.
So this is a pretty firm one.
This is a basically a foam based hunk of foam pillow right versus this one, which is sort of the normal kind of pillow, much more squishy.
So which are you?
Are squishy or a firm?
That one Okay, perfect.
So you're more on the squishy, which means you like to manipulate the pillow.
You don't want it to have a huge form factor where your head is on a block of cheese, right?
Got it.
So perfect.
So let's move this foam pillow out of the way.
The second thing you want to look at from the pillow is...
When the fabric comes together here, it forms what's called a knife's edge.
So it's where the two pieces of fabric meet.
Now, why is that important?
Because when you have your head on a pillow like this and the knife's edge is down here, you're not getting as much support underneath your neck here, right?
So in order to fix that, we have something called a gusset.
So a gusset is this piece of fabric that comes along here.
So you notice these two pieces of fabric don't meet.
There's a thickness here.
So when you were to sleep on it, it actually catches you all the way down.
So let's say you would be like this.
It gives you support all the way down.
Now you don't like the foam of it all, but you do like the gusset, right?
Mm-hmm.
Here's one that's got the gusset without the foam.
So it's squishy and has the gusset.
So if you were going to use this.
That's good.
So now we've been able to fit you for the pillow.
Now the next question we have.
Well, the last one is there are some special types of pillows, actually.
This one has got a cutout.
So you notice how that's got like a moon here?
It fits perfectly here.
And notice, right?
This is my personal pillow.
Okay, I have to shift.
I know, sorry.
And so you can see it really comes all the way down to your neck and it gives you support all the way, from the base of your neck all the way up through.
And that's one of the reasons that I like it because I can cut it out and put it right there on me.
For the average person, if they had to pick one pillow without you knowing anything about them, which pillow would you pick of these six?
So of all of these six, well, if I had my choice, I'd pick this one because this is my favorite.
By the way, there's also another feature of this that I think is important and that people should notice is it's got a zipper, which means I can change the stuffing and I can pull it out or put it in.
So I can change the height of my pillow.
And what stuffing is that?
This is actually a shredded latex, which I really like to sleep on.
So what's this pillow called?
So this is by a company called Coop.
And I like it because of the change in the shape as well as the stuffing and the zipper on the side.
It really makes it kind of what I would argue to be probably the best pillow ever.
And what's the worst pillow?
The worst pillow that we've got here, this one.
So almost no support, right?
It's super squishy.
Yeah.
Right.
We don't we don't we have the knife's edge here.
There's not much to it.
Also, by the way, it feels like this is made with polyester, which is a heat trapper.
Now let's lie you down on the bed, get you in your starting sleep position.
And I'm going to show you exactly where the pillow should go and what pillow should be for you.
So if you can lie down for me.
Now, what is your starting sleep position?
Are you a back sleeper?
Are you a side sleeper?
Are you a stomach sleeper?
I start on my stomach and I roll to my right side.
Got it.
Okay, perfect.
Go ahead and get on your stomach for me.
By the way, how weird is that?
Roughly 75% of sleepers are side sleepers, either right or left.
So you're definitely not, don't fall into that category.
Another 20 or so percent are back sleepers.
You're in the like 5% category of stomach sleepers.
The reason it's the worst position is when you're lying on your stomach right and the pillow is here.
You're pushing on your back.
Yeah here, and it causes what's called a splay, which is extra pressure on your lower back and that can give you low back pain over time.
I only do it for the first like 10 minutes, and then you rotate, and then i rotate onto my side.
Which side?
Right or left, my right, this side, perfect.
So in all actuality, you actually want to be on your left side because when you lie on your right side you're actually all of your organs push down onto your stomach and it can leak some of those gastric juices and you end up with something called gastroesophageal reflux disease.
So the way I teach people is right is wrong.
So you don't sleep on your right side.
You sleep on your left side if you can, if you can.
But let's fit you anyway.
Let's go ahead and get you down on your, what would be your right side.
And let's see how you do.
Lie down.
How I normally lie down?
Yeah.
Okay.
This is how I lie down when I first get in bed for the first time.
I can't wait to see it.
I'm like this.
I move the pillow out the way.
Right.
And I just lay like this for a while.
Okay.
And you have no pillow.
No pillow.
Perfect.
And then when you rotate to get to your side, show me that.
I sleep like this on my right side, like roughly like this.
So what you'll notice is your shoulder is now up into this part here.
So it's still being supported.
Your head is fine.
And what you'll notice is his head is in line with his sternum right.
His nose is in line there.
It's not falling too far, it's not overextended.
What's my sternum?
Your sternum is the direct center of your chest.
It's the mid, like your breast plate is what you would call it right okay right, sort of in the center.
So you want your nose to be in line with that which it basically is.
And when i look at your head, your head is not tilted to one side or another.
So i know there's no more neck strain.
So that would be the perfect pillow for you.
But that happens to be my pillow, So I'm not going to give it to you, but I might get you one if you're nice to me.
Thank you.
What about these other pillars?
So the bad one was which one?
The bad one was this one.
So now go ahead and put yourself on that one.
Yeah, I'm going too far down.
Right.
And you're not even trying.
You don't even have to push your head that far.
And look, where do you put your arm?
Your arm's not supported.
People don't realize it, but pillows matter.
What I try to tell people is, I used to be a runner.
And when you're a runner, equipment matters.
Your shoes matter.
Your music matters.
Your dry fit wear matters.
The same holds true with sleep.
If you don't have good pillow, good mattress, good sheets...
You don't have the right equipment.
You're not going to get good sleep.
That is a terrible pillow.
I'm telling you.
That's a really, really bad pillow.
Okay.
So sleeping on my left side is the correct side.
With a good pillow.
With a good pillow.
But now let's talk about temperature.
Yeah.
So while you're lying here, you may have noticed that there's different temperature on either side of the bed.
So if you feel here.
Oh, it's warm.
It is.
That's correct.
So when you're lying there, your body will naturally become more warm.
So remember how we were talking that sleep follows the core body temperature cycle, right?
And so as your core body temperature drops, you want your environment to drop with it, because if it doesn't, and the environment is too hot, you can't fall asleep.
So this is a product.
It's called an Orion Sleep System and it's a topper that you're lying on top of, has a thin tube that goes through it.
You can't feel the tube should feel cool over there and warm over here.
It's cold here, it's warm here.
Exactly.
And you can rotate it however you want.
But what's so fascinating about this is you can actually set it so that it follows your circadian rhythm and it actually can help you stay asleep.
The only thing that you, as a consumer, can manipulate in your sleep.
Like you can't write a pharmaceutical prescription, you can't get a CPAP machine, but what you can do is control the temperature.
So you might say to yourself...
When would I want to control the temperature for my sleep?
Well, if you were female and you were 45 years old and you were going through menopause, you really want to control the temperature, because hot flashes might wake you up in the middle of the night.
Those types of things become very, very important.
And how much does this cost?
So this runs about a little over 2,000 US.
The nearest competitor is significantly more expensive, almost a third more expensive.
Are you affiliated with them in any way?
I am affiliated with these guys.
I am their chief sleep officer.
Oh, nice.
I didn't know that was a job title.
I know, I didn't know.
I made up the job title myself.
Thank you very much.
Is there anything else I should know about the broader room that is pertinent?
So when I talk about broader room aspects, I think of the five senses.
So sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, right?
So sight is light, right?
So clearly you want the lights down as we're starting to get towards bed.
Maybe having a dimmer switch or something like that is a great thing to slowly start to do that, or cut the overhead lights and just have the bedside table lamps about 30 minutes before bed.
Again, setting the tone.
The next one would be sound.
So it's always better to be quiet.
But at the end of the day, sometimes you can have that and sometimes you can't.
It's really about the emotionality that you attach to the sound itself.
If you get annoyed by something, it's just going to get worse and worse.
But if you can...
Think in your head, hey, this isn't so annoying anymore.
It becomes less problematic.
But to be clear, certain volume sounds and certain decibel levels are going to wake you up.
And so you really, it's hard to sleep next to a big highway, right?
So you want to have as much sound buffering as you possibly can.
So we did sight, we did sound.
Let's do touch.
Touch is temperature.
We talked about that.
You want the bedroom to be cool.
If you can, get the air conditioning on.
But let's say you've got the air conditioning on, but it's a super hot summer and you're not fortunate enough to have an Orion sitting underneath your sheets.
What do you do?
Go out and buy a plastic bottle of water, two of them, stick them in the freezer, then put them into socks and then put them on your sides.
Okay.
So frozen water bottle inside a pair, inside a sock that sits on your side.
It's like a mini air conditioner underneath the covers.
It works like a charm.
I use this when I travel because a lot of times you know the room.
You can't necessarily change the thermostat or things like that.
And it's a great way to be able to do that kind of stuff.
And the final one is smell.
So people always ask me, does aromatherapy really work?
Believe it or not, there are at least two scientifically rigorous studies that show that aromatherapy can actually be helpful for you.
But I want to be clear, candles are not the way to do aromatherapy.
Fire and sleep do not mix, okay?
But a diffuser, I'm fine with.
Or a little sachet or a pillow mist.
All of those can be quite helpful.
And you just put them, you spray it on your pillow or you have it right next to your pillow.
And as you breathe in the aroma, two aromas have been shown to be helpful for sleep.
One is lavender.
Surprise, surprise.
The other is called Ylang Ylang.
That's one that's actually got some data on it.
And I actually think I saw a study on vanilla.
And should I be sleeping naked?
Such a good question.
So here's what I'll tell you is you thermoregulate better with less clothing on.
So less barriers allow your body to do exactly what it should do.
So I would argue you definitely could sleep naked.
And I think there's an argument for sleeping naked will allow you to sleep better and thermoregulate better.
However, be careful because if you have animals in the bed and you're sleeping naked, what looks like a chew toy to them might be important for you.
You're speaking from experience?
I'm just letting you know there's problems out there.
I'm not saying that I had one of those problems myself.
Okay.
I think we've covered it, right?
Last one.
Yeah.
Socks.
Oh, socks.
Everybody wants to know, should I wear socks to bed?
So here's what's interesting is you dissipate heat faster with unsocked foot because there's no hair on the bottom of your feet.
You ever notice when you're hot at night and you stick your foot out from under the covers.
You instantly cool down and everything's okay.
So what i do for some of my patients who have thermoregulation issues, i have them start with socks but no clothes, and then they can remove their socks afterwards as they start to get too warm.
Okay, let's go back upstairs and finish this conversation.
Important question to ask you.
Okay, so i want to go back upstairs.
Thank you so much for that.
Super, super useful sure, Dr Michael Bruce?
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for.
Oh, I didn't know this.
This is awesome.
And the question that's been left for you is if you could have the power to change one thing in the US healthcare system, what would it be and why?
What I would like to see happen, well, there's two things.
One is a wish and one is, I think, a possible reality.
So the possible reality is I'd like to see everybody in the United States get tested for sleep apnea.
It's so underdiagnosed.
There's so many people that are suffering from it.
You saw the statistics.
I mean, it's an epidemic.
So if I could have one thing that happens in the U.S. healthcare system, it would be that –
Somehow or another, somebody at the powers that be say, hey, you know what?
We need to test everybody for sleep disorders, specifically sleep apnea.
I think that would be a great big wish that I would have.
The second wish, which I don't know would ever happen, but I'm going to take my second wish anyway, even though you didn't offer it is.
I want everybody to get a great night's sleep.
But I want it to all be on the same night.
I want everybody in the world to get a really good night's sleep on that.
Can you imagine what would happen the next day?
What if people actually found peace in the warring nations because they actually got a good night's sleep?
What do you think innovations would happen if we get some of the smartest people in the world to just get a good night's sleep?
What about charities?
What about philanthropy?
Like every single thing that you do, you do better with a good night's sleep.
Wouldn't it be cool if everybody got one just for one night and see what happens?
Nine months later, there'd be a lot of kids.
There would be a lot of kids born for sure.
That's so beautiful.
Michael, thank you so much for the work that you do.
It's so incredibly important because, as the numbers and the stats have shown, people are struggling increasingly in the world that we live.
But through lifestyle factors and the way that we work and all these other factors we talked about, with this more than anything.
And for so many people, it's the cause of so much frustration.
It is the thing furthest upstream from a lot of the problems that they struggle with in relationships, in their work, in their sex life and everything in between.
So Having great educators out in the world that help to demystify this black box is so critical.
And you're one of the very, very best I've ever met.
And in part because you're so unbelievably engaging.
You're a great storyteller.
You've been in the field doing this with patients of wide varieties.
But also you bring that psychology element, which is quite rare, to people that talk about the clinical side of sleep.
You have several great resources if people want to continue to learn. learn more.
I would highly recommend people if you've gotten to this point in the conversation I would highly recommend going over to your YouTube channel now and watching some of your top videos, because I found them to be fascinating and I learned so much more.
We weren't able to go through everything today, but if there's specific things like waking up in the middle of the night, your videos about that have six or seven million views over on your channel and they're very, very focused on that subject.
So if there's specific things that you felt weren't covered in this conversation right now, go over to Michael's channel.
It'll be linked below and watch more there.
But also if you're a reader and you love to read, and that's your thing, which I know is great for sleep.
Two great books here in front of me The Power of When, Discover Your Chronotype and The Best Time to Eat Lunch, Ask for a Raise, Have Sex, Write a Novel, Take Your Meds and more.
And also this book here Sleep Drink, Breathe which talks broadly about the simple daily habits for profound long-term health.
Michael, thank you.
Thank you.
This has been so much fun.
I wasn't exactly sure what to expect, but it was lovely.
I really enjoyed it.
Everybody here is fantastic.
And I just want to wish everybody sweet dreams.
