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

Note: This transcription is split and grouped by topics and subtopics. You can navigate through the Table of Contents on the left. It's interactive. All paragraphs are timed to the original video. Click on the time (e.g., 01:53) to jump to the specific portion of the video.

Introduction

Intro (00:00)

Sleep is undeniably essential to our health and longevity. More than half of adults worldwide report that they are getting less sleep than they need on average per night, making sleep problems a global epidemic. In this episode, I have three sleep experts join me to talk about how we can approach this program. Sean Stevenson, author of Sleep Smarter, Give yourself a screen curfew, just 30 minutes.

Understanding Sleep And Its Importance

Start your day with physical activity (00:20)

Matthew Walker, author of the New York Times bestseller, Why We Sleep. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, that must be the first line recommended treatment.

Dan Pardi Bio (00:32)

And Dan Party, CEO of HumanOS.me and Dan'sPlan.com. Sleep ends up being a very great window into your soul, you know, into the workings of the brain. Pay attention to get the inside scoop on sleep and its necessity in today's world.

Step 1: Remember, Your Night Sleep Begins in the Morning Before (00:47)

Number one is to remember that your night sleep begins the morning before. And one of the most important things that you can do is get direct sun exposure into your eyes and on your skin first thing in the morning. Now, I know a lot of people live in northern latitudes and you're stepping outside and it's basically just a great day. But even that helps, it's better than nothing. You want to get out, you want that sunlight to hit your eyes, you want that sunlight to hit your skin because it helps to set your circadian rhythms. It's one of the most important things you can do for actually getting a good night's sleep, but it starts the morning before. And by the way, as a pro tip, when you're traveling, this is one of the critical things that you want to do to adjust to the new time zone. The second you wake up, get out, go outside and get that sun exposure. And I try to look up into the sky, not at the sun as that will burn your eyes out. But I try to look up into the sky and make sure that I'm getting the maximum amount of sunlight into my eyes. I'm not wearing sunglasses. I'm not wearing blue blockers like I'm wearing now, which is part of the night routine. But in the morning when I'm trying to get all that sunlight into set my circadian rhythms, then I'm making sure that I get that exposure. Make sure that you're using your body throughout the day. It's incredibly important to actually be physically active, to burn that energy off, to make sure that you earn your night's sleep in a modern lifestyle so often we're spending so much time sedentary that we don't actually tax our body in any meaningful way, which means that by the time we're trying to lay down to go to bed, we don't have the impulse to sleep. And so doing things that are physically taxing throughout the day is an extraordinarily useful way of being ready to actually go to bed. As you go through the day, I find that there are certain things you need to be very careful about in terms of what you intake, so eating and drinking. So a big one for me is the last meal that I eat and what time that happens at. Now I get up very early, which we'll cover as we get later in my day around what time I go to bed, but I typically get up very early somewhere between 4 and 5 a.m. So my day already is skewed that way, but my last meal I eat usually around 115 to 145 p.m. And that is the last meal I will eat for the day. I won't have anything after that, literally nothing. I don't even have a water after 2 p.m. Now the reason that I don't eat after 145 ish is because I want to do intermittent fasting and it's much easier for me to get through the rest of the evening without taking any more food than it is to spend the whole morning hungry until say 12 or 1 o'clock, which I know a lot of people do. It's dealer's choice, whatever works better for you, but having an extended fast is very, very helpful. Now also another reason that I end it early is that I think you will notice a massive difference in how you sleep if you have your last meal at least, at least bare minimum, three hours before bedtime. So if you go to bed at 9 p.m. like it's a religion like I do, then your last meal is going to be at 6 p.m. anyway. So you're going to want to get that out of the way and I wouldn't start chewing at 6. I would try to be done chewing at 6. So that you actually have a full three hours rest between when you had that last bite and when you go to bed. Your digestion stops in the middle of the night so it can create discomfort if your digestion stops sort of mid-process and you're sitting with something sitting either still in your stomach or in your upper intestines. So that can be very uncomfortable. So that disrupts people's sleep and makes it hard for them to get to sleep and remember that you have trillions of microbes inside of you and when they are being asked to sit in all the things that they're digesting it can create issues. So I find that I sleep way better by not just eating three hours before bedtime but taking that all the way back to where I'm done chewing at about 1.15, 1.45 excuse me. So that's worked out really, really well for me and if you're worried that you're going to get hungry remember you're taking in a normal amount of calories you're just having your last meal later and what I have heard said before and I think is really clever and brilliant is that as I get hungry I have sleep for dinner and I love that. I love that idea of right when I'm about like yeah I could eat now I brush my teeth which for whatever reason the taste of toothpaste kills hunger so just as I'm thinking I want to eat I brush my teeth and then boom I go to bed I fall asleep with no problems and I'm able to stay asleep. Now the reason that I stopped drinking at 2 p.m. is I find that if I have any substantial amount of water because I'll still have a sip of water here and there but sips and the reason is that I'll wake up in the middle of the night to pee if I and by the way if I'm eating too close to bedtime same thing because there's so much water in the food you eat but I don't want to wake up in the middle of the night if I can at all avoid it so the times where I eat late or drink late I find myself waking up in the middle of the night to pee and then my brain kicks back in and I start problem solving and it makes it impossible for me to fall back asleep and I was losing two sometimes three hours a night of productivity because I wasn't sleeping I was trying to fall back asleep I wasn't doing anything useful other than tossing and turning and ruminating over everything that had happened during the day that I need to do that I could have done better it was nightmarish so not only are you fatigued suboptimal cognitively but it's just really a lame way to spend time because there's an interesting part of your brain that shuts off in the middle of the night that makes fears seem way bigger than they will as soon as you're up and are actually attacking your day it all feels very manageable but in the middle of the night it feels terrifying it feels overwhelming feels like you know just absolute stress inducing and so that makes it even less likely that you're going to be able to fall asleep so anything that I can do to mitigate waking up in the middle of the night and starting that

Step 3: Be Mindful of Light Exposure in the Evening (06:46)

death loop I'm going to do so that's one of the reasons that I stop eating and is definitely the reason that I stop drinking at 2 p.m. every day okay the next thing that I do for sleep hygiene as it's called is as the evening wears on I make sure that I'm not getting a substantial amount of blue light and bright light into my eyes so I'm going to dim my computer screen I'm going to put my computer screen on screen on night mode so you can go into your phone you can go into your computer and set them to just automatically at a certain time I think I set mine for 6 p.m. if I remember right and it just automatically flips over to an orange or light I dim the screen so I'm not getting super bright light happens again both on my phone and my computer and then on top of that just to make sure I put on blue blocking glasses to make sure that I'm not getting too much of my eyes and there are some days if I'm going to be at the computer for a really extended amount of time I'll wear blue blockers even during the day just so I'm not getting an overwhelming amount of the artificial blue light from my screen so that's how I curb that and then another thing that I do around my computer is I try not to do any work that I think will be stress-inducing for the final hour before my bedtime so I'm still going to work right up until I go to bed my rule in life is Monday through Friday if I'm awake I'm either working or working out now I love my work so this isn't a torture chamber I'm sure some people are imagining that and thinking it's horrible but for me it's completely joyful and I do though have to acknowledge that there are some things that I work on that stress me out and so I don't check text messages after APM I'm not looking at emails after APM I'm doing things that are work but enjoyable now I'm not religious about it there are definitely times where I feel that something really just has to be done in a timely fashion and so I will break that rule light occasionally but I try not to because I do find that I sleep much better if for the last hour before bed I'm doing fun things I'm doing things that give me energy that make me feel light that are part of that passion that feel good and I can feel a difference in my stress and anxiety levels there's a lightness to it that I don't know I don't have a better word for it but as I'm going to bed I just feel relaxed I feel joyful I have a sense of purpose and it's like I can let everything go for the day and when I climb into bed I remind myself that I only have one job now that I'm going to bed and that job is to sleep and that mantra the only job I have now is to sleep has helped me a lot especially when I wake up in the middle of the night so when I lay down then I have a host of different mechanical things that I do one of them is to make sure that I have my own blankets I use a two blanket system so I myself have two blankets that way if at any point during the night I'm getting cold I can pull the other

What I Do (09:43)

blanket up so I start it down where it's basically just covering my shins and below and then if I'm getting cold I can pull that up to my waist if I'm a little cold but not too cold or I can pull all the way up if I'm really cold and that allows me to better control my temperature and then this is the one that people think is weird I've been doing it forever so it seems so normal to me I do not ever under any circumstance share blankets with my wife now the reason is when they move it becomes your movement or you're playing tug of war for the blanket or worse the other person might actually pull the blanket off you or you might pull the blanket off them and give them a bad night's sleep so that was a lesson I learned very early on because for whatever weird reason I like to sleep with the blankets up over my head I like to be completely cocooned it feels so nice there is no light which by the way is another thing make sure your room is dark make sure your room is dark so no light no light leaks no phones no nightlights nothing as dark as you can get it cover up if things have like little LED power lights cover those up do whatever you can to get the room actually dark for me I have another layer which is I sleep under the blankets now if you're like my wife Lisa the last thing you're ever going to do is cover your head with the blanket she absolutely hates it and feels like you know she's just claustrophobic and has to get it off of her but for me it just feels like I'm in a womb and it's so wonderful so I love it so I have slept with the blankets over my head for decades at this point which is another reason why I need to have my own blankets so get my own blankets I can meter them based on the temperature in the room which brings me to another point one of the best signifiers to your body that it's time to go to bed that's going to kick you into sleep mode is making sure that your room is cool so we keep our room somewhere around 67 to 68 degrees it should be cool enough that when you go to take your clothes off and get your pajamas you kind of don't want to because it's that cold so that's the right temperature so whatever that temperature is for you you want to get it there get under the covers you're nice and warm it's not like you're sleeping cold but you want the room to be cool to signal to your body that it's nighttime right we've come up through evolution with all of these signals from daylight from the brightness the color temperature the difference between fire light which is dim and orange to daylight which is bright and blue and so we have all of these subtle signals including a drop in temperature so as the temperature comes down it's yet another signal to your body that it's time to go to sleep so from setting our circadian rhythm with getting that sunlight directly in our eyes on our skin actually being outside to the temperature dropping the color temperature of the light changing the brightness of the light changing all of these are signals that keep your circadian rhythm where you want it to be so that you can fall asleep what is up my friend tom bill you here and i have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of one to ten if your answer is anything less than a ten i've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful boring which is what kills most people are possibly scary or even painful now here is the thing achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring building your levels of personal discipline is not easy but let me tell you it pays off in fact i will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline right i've just released a class from impact theory university called how to build ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you right click the link on the screen register for this class right now and let's get to work i will see you inside this workshop to impact the university until then my friends be legendary peace out this particular topic is and me being a nutritionist like i was all like food matters food first food is the most important thing but in my practice and seeing people coming in that you know we've got these folks over here you know 80 percent of the time are able to reverse type 2 diabetes heart disease get off their lissinapriels and all this different stuff and then we've got this category of people who just like literally sometimes would ironically kind of keep me up at night like what is wrong like i'm doing all these things right are they lying to me and it wasn't until i started to ask people about their sleep that it just like it changed everything and this was about six years ago and so then and here's the key i can't just tell people they need to sleep more you know this like people don't want to change that much like we want change but we want to be a little bit right and so i found clinically proven strategies that are super easy to implement almost things that can happen on automatic to help them improve their sleep quality right and once we did that it's like the floodgates would open for people you know they've been struggling for sometimes you know 15-20 years with their weight finally the weight comes off you know and seeing people struggling with heart disease or high cholesterol you know the so-called bad cholesterol and seeing those numbers finally get regulated once we got their sleep optimized and i knew that this was incredibly important part of the conversation that was left out and as we'll talk about i know now that our sleep quality is more important than our diet and exercise combined but when it does for our health and also literally our physical appearance fascinating stuff how much more fat you lose when you get optimal sleep it's it's insane that's a bold statement so walk me through what are some of the um the just core benefits that i'm going to get assuming that i'm sleeping sub optimally like why is that a problem since that's probably one of the most celebrated like things like when you get a little sleep people like champion you normally had sleep five to six hours a night with no alarm okay i haven't set an alarm in 15 years so that's just that was my cycle um i go to bed early very consistently my diet is on point my exercises on point and so i'd wake up feeling awesome yeah and so i thought this is cash money but because i don't set an alarm that my sleep cycle will change and right now i'm getting like seven to nine hours out of nowhere and super consistently and i literally have no idea why i'm warmer now so i used to be freezing cold at all times and then at the same time that my and i don't know correlated causative no idea um i've started being warmer while i sleep and then during the day so what are like

Core Components of Sleep (17:09)

the core components of sleep was something bad happening to me or less than optimal when i was only getting six hours even though i felt good yeah um any correlation between those he told us that you're asleep there's there's there's a lot time pack there number one uh what's so interesting is that you you were doing something exceptionally right as far as what the research shows with improving your sleep which is you were going to bed kind of consistently a little bit earlier than other folks might and so what we call what we call this is this anabolic window or what we call money time sleep and this is generally between the hours of ten and two because it's more lined up with their natural melatonin secretion so if you go to sleep during those times you actually spend more time in the deepest most anabolic stages of sleep and you tend to produce more human growth hormone than other folks so you were already winning with that this is why you have a tendency to feel better even if you're getting less sleep because this isn't called sleep more right it's sleep smarter and there are many people who sleep you know eight to nine hours and they wake up feeling like straight up you know hot garbage you know what i'm saying and they're just wondering why it's because it's the quality of sleep and when i say quality of sleep what does that mean let's break that down so your sleep is regulated by changes in your in your brainwaves it's really fascinating stuff and we still don't know really what sleep is trying to define sleep is like trying to define um you know in force of comfort like life is like a box of chocolate sleep is like pretending to be dead we don't really

Sleep is regulated by changes in your brain waves. (18:20)

know right but we do know the changes that happen in the brain we cycle from kind of a normal waking state with with gamma beta um but probably in beta right now we move to alpha theta deltas where the deep anabolic dreamless sleep takes place and we need all of them and there's a certain percentage we spend in each that helps to rejuvenate our mind and bodies and if you optimize certain things you'll do it more efficiently one of those gear shifts like if you think about your body like this kind of manual transmission is melatonin like people hear about melatonin is a sleep hormone it just helps your body to efficiently go through your sleep cycles and if your melatonin is suppressed by various things you know i'll share a couple then you're not going through those efficiently and you can wake up feeling like a piñata after the party the next step even though you're spending all this time on the mattress so that's number one number two there's this interesting process called thermal regulation there's a natural drop in your core body temperature at night to help facilitate sleep for all of us if things are running properly but what was fascinating and i shared a study about this is that uh they tested insomnia accident everyone in this particular clinical study all had too high body temperature at night it would not go down and so what they did was they fit them with these thermosuits right that lowers their skin temperature not even their core temperature just one degree and virtually eliminated all their symptoms of insomnia whoa ambient can't do that all right and it's as simple as paying attention to how your body temperature influences your sleep and so with your body temperature changing like that it's kind of feeling more of an insulation as a result of having more sleep there's a ton of different things that could be correlated there so i'm not going to say that the sleep is a causative factor but it's really interesting how your body does change in accordance of sleep there's a natural rise in your core body temperature as the day goes uh i'm sorry as the night goes on that helps to kind of wake you up um so what i did want to share though when i said that kind of bold statement in the beginning when we're talking about how sleep influences your body composition

Sleep influences your body composition. (20:24)

i think everybody needs to know this there was a this study really blew my mind and this was done to the university of chicago and they took people and they put them on a calorie restricted diet kind of typical stuff again i'm taught in college to see the impact on weight loss when they're asleep deprived or getting enough sleep all right so they put the people on this particular diet monitor everything one phase of study they're getting eight and a half hours of sleep all right and then they track all their metrics another phase of the study same exact diet same exercise they don't change anything else but now they sleep deprived them and they take away three hours of sleep so now they're getting five and a half hours of sleep versus eight and a half hours of sleep at the end of the study they found that when individuals were well rested they burned 55% more body fat just by getting more sleep and so the question is how does this happen melatonin when i talked about this a little bit earlier it's not just that it's involved in sleep it's also involved in fat loss and this study they was done in

How does this happen? (21:37)

the journal pineal research found that melatonin production helps increase your body's mobilization of something called brown adipose tissue right this is a type of fat that burns fat all right the reason that it's brown is that it has more mitochondria so it's very energy dense right these mitochondria just for people who i'm sure people have heard of this but it's like these energy power plants in yourselves that are creating the energy currency of your body like how you experience energy the energy exchange something called ATP and so when you are producing adequate melatonin you're producing and mobilizing adequate amounts of brown adipose tissue which just puts you in a metabolically advantaged state all right but if you're not getting the melatonin production which you've got to meet two requirements number one you need a biological night so that means this could actually be during the day but it's a consistent cycle of when it gets produced but the other requirement needs to be met that you need darkness your body produces melatonin exclusively in darkness and so that's one also how do they how do they get that body fat change hgh production which we talked about too human growth hormone is muscle sparing and it's a big driver of energy it's also known as a youth hormone kids have an insane amount of hgh being produced this is why they have so much energy we have a pretty sharp decline in our production right around 18 to 20 but my argument is that around 18 to 20 we generally in our culture like leave the house we might go to college that kind of thing and we no longer have structure we no longer have rules and we're not going to produce as much hgh third thing really quickly um is and this is all has to do with the diet and the food choices is leptin all right and I know people have talked about leptin before but leptin is your body is kind of glorifies the tidy hormone and so when you're producing adequate amounts of leptin you feel more in control right you feel more satiated but when when leptin kind of falls off the map or you have leptin resistance can take place then we're going to have some pretty big issues with you regulating your cravings your appetite and so Stanford University researchers found that just one night of sleep deprivation radically suppresses your leptin

Leptin falls off the map you have a big problem controlling your cravings. (23:29)

and now I hope folks can start to pay attention whenever you might not get the best sleep how your cravings change the next day you're gonna have a tendency to want to number one eat more number two you want to eat more kind of the starchy crunchy salty sugary type things and I remember my wife who's actually here when we had our son and I she she's never seen me eat this food I was sitting there like waiting for the baby to come I was eating chocolate covered raisins I'm just like and I didn't even realize I was doing it you know it was like three o'clock in the morning you know and so that's another thing and last one I'll share and there's so many that create that change in your body composition but this one is incredibly important is cortisol cortisol has been drug through the mud recently you know it's been blamed for everything but it's not really a bad guy it's just misunderstood right cortisol is incredibly important for example cortisol is important for your thyroid to work right and that's kind of like the metabolism regulator of your body but here's the thing just one night

Cortisol is incredibly important (24:33)

of sleep deprivation radically increases your cortisol and suppresses melatonin actually as well but this rise in cortisol has a really powerful ability to start to break down your muscle tissue which your muscles your body's kind of fat burning machinery and so it can convert your muscle tissue into glucose it's a process called gluconeogenesis as a kind of fight or flight response because your physiology doesn't know why you're not sleeping you know it must be some danger about you know and so understanding those major hormones and there's many others you start to see the picture that gets painted with just how much your sleep

Sleep quality impacts your physical appearance (25:34)

quality impacts your physical appearance it's really crazy I've always known you need sleep but I didn't know why and so getting into or transitioning I should say because I always knew you needed sleep because if I didn't get it I felt terrible but that was sort of the the end of it and I even let myself just stop it that we don't really know why you sleep but not diving into the real breakdown which is really fascinating so what are things and that people can do to actually optimize their sleep yeah this is what it's really all about you know I like to start with the low hanging fruit first and something really really fascinating is just simply changing or embracing the time of day that you exercise can improve your sleep quality and so Appalachian State University did a really cool study and they wanted to see what time of day exercising various times a day how does it impact your sleep quality and so they had the study participants to exercise exclusively at 7 a.m. and another phase exclusively at 1 p.m. in the afternoon another phase exclusively at 7 p.m. in the evening they compiled all the data and at the end of the study they found that morning exercisers spend more time in the deepest most anabolic stage of sleep so they're producing more human growth hormone they have more efficient sleep cycles what we've been talking about they also tend to sleep longer and this is the one that kind of can get glanced past on average they had about a 25 percent greater drop in blood pressure at night so what's up with that that's correlated with a deactivation of your sympathetic fight or flight nervous system right so you're actually able to shift gears get to that parasympathetic rest and digest calming down by

Optimizing Sleep And Night Time Activities

Get a 25% greater drop in blood pressure at night. (26:52)

getting some exercise in in the morning and so how do we employ this though that's the question because some people is just like you know I can't exercise in the morning and there's also people who exercise in the morning who might have terrible sleep and it's because this is not like the magic bullet this is a thing to stack in your condition if you're doing this and then messing up the one i'm going to talk about next you're probably not going to have the best sleep so here's how to employ this just five minutes and i tested this each morning i do this

Exercise for sleep (27:30)

five minutes of exercise you know might be just jumping on a rebounder you know a little mini trampoline for five minutes go for a quick power walk do some tabata which is just four minutes and a little mobility work and i guess most people don't know what tabata is it's a high intensity interval training basically it's 20 seconds of exercise followed by 10 seconds of rest repeated over and over again for four minutes and in his clinical studies this was found to outperform you know traditional cardio like the kind of moderate intensity 45 minutes of exercise in four minutes wow the change in your cardiovascular benefits body composition and also change your mitochondria as well this is why it works it does something called a cortisol reset all right we talked about cortisol but again it's a good thing if it's in the right time in the right amount clinically i would call these people tired and why i would come in and look at the hormone panels and the cortisol would be really low in the morning and high at night thus they have sleep problems so you naturally if you're if your cortisol is on a natural hormone rhythm it would be elevated its peak in the morning right around 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. and then gradually decline as the day goes does that have to do with what time you wake up sort of i mean the cortisol will kind of tend to nudge you out of sleep but also will tend to notice that as the day is that your sleep goes on it becomes lighter and lighter anyways right this is when you tend to remember your dreams like at the at the end of the sleep and so getting this little boost like helping your body to propel and get your cortisol up via exercise helps to reset that rhythm and get you back on track so that's why it works so that's number one low hanging fruit just get in five minutes of exercise start in the morning no matter what just five minutes is all you need it's going to help to create this snowball effect of good things for you you know five minutes if this is the time you do go to the gym and do your full workout so be it all good but everybody who's not already doing that just get that five minutes in the second

Stop abusive use of technology (29:44)

one and this one is more of the tough love and the most difficult but this is the most important one in our culture today and it's has to do with our tech all right so Harvard researchers have confirmed that blue light exposure from our favorite devices you know ipads or iPhones and droids tablets televisions they do in fact suppress your melatonin substantially because it your body essentially thinks the sun's out is that the problem so we have photo receptors that are always trying to gauge what time it is right because our bodies are wired up to be in sync with nature but only recently like literally just the past few decades have we been able to manipulate and basically create a second daytime right so your body's just it doesn't really know how to figure it out and so the blue and white spectrum specifically are the ones that are more similar to daylight and so what it's doing is and so here's what the researchers found basically every hour you're on your device at night suppresses melatonin for about 30 minutes right so if you're on your you know you watch a movie a three hour movie for example your melatonin is going to be suppressed even you go to bed right after you're not producing adequate melatonin for about a hour and a half and so again you can be unconscious from sheer physical exhaustion but you're not going to go through your sleep cycles efficiently and so just be mindful of that what I encourage people to do is to give yourself a screen curfew just 30 minutes all right I don't want to make this complicated just 30 minutes but here's the rub we're addicted to our devices like straight up we just need to be on iam we all are you know basically it's because of this dopamine loop right dopamine is so powerful so interesting dopamine is one of the things I truly feel has helped to create our civilization as it is because it drives us to seek right dopamine drives us to seek and to grow and to find to discover the internet is perfect for manipulating this because every time you look for something you find something especially social media you seek fine seek fine you produce the dopamine that drives you to look but why do you keep going is every time you find something you get a little bit of a hit from your opioid system it's like this slow drip all right morphine and so it starts to like feel really good and to the point where you might be doing your work and like you've got a deadline and you just you know like I'll check Instagram real quick before you know it's like 30 minutes later you fall into the internet black hole just like it just pulls you in so be aware of that I'm not saying again our connection with tech is just gonna grow so I'm not bashing that it's just be aware of it and that when you try to abide by this principle which will really really help your sleep quality to give yourself a screen curfew you can't just sit there and twiddle your thumbs because you'll get what I call the internet jitters right you'll start getting like a little bit of a withdrawal effect like just check one it's one one post what we have to do is this you have to replace it with something of greater or equal value it's really that simple hopefully it's what I encourage people to do this is an opportunity to connect right connect with your significant other your kids the people like physical like have a real conversation with somebody right I know it sounds crazy but it really works it's really really good and also this is a great opportunity if you you know if you're in a relationship or not whatever you're into you could you know utilize and I have a chapter on this as well intimate time because there's a big connection between sex and sleep and there's also big connection between sleep and sex and how it impacts your sex life and so when we have an orgasm for example we produce a chemical I'm sorry cocktail of chemicals including oxytocin nor penephrine prolactin and oxytocin for example has been found clinically to basically combat the effects of cortisol and hopefully sex is more interesting than instagram but you know I don't know it depends on how you're doing it and so that's what I want people to do a screen curfew and or use these hacks utilize some blue light blockers and so for your desktops laptops things like that you can get an app called Flux that pulls out the most troublesome sleep sucking spectrum of light from your screen and basically cools your screen off and it's a simple app you set it and forget it's totally free just go to dr. google type in f.lux and a couple clicks and it's on your device I've been using it for maybe five or six years I love it and for your telephone you know your cell phone we've got on the iphones built in now is night shift with androids the best one out there from my research is one called twilight you know so there's offices for everybody then what about the ambient light at night or if you're watching the movie again I don't want to get don't get too neurotic about it but if this is a problem for you and you're not sleeping as well as you could be or your results your body composition not changing you're not getting that blood pressure down you're not having that focus you need through the day then you might want to dress this but another little hack is to get some blue light blocking glasses the first ones I had was straight up like I just built a birdhouse but now there's some really cool stylish ones that you go rocket it's a matter of fact you'll create a neural association when you put the glasses on and you'll start to get sleepy you know it's nuts and that is another thing right there is to create an evening ritual right your brain is always looking for patterns a lot of successful people especially listening to the things that you're putting out there have a success ritual in the morning but a great morning starts the night before you know truly great morning and so a couple of quick things people can do is the thermal regulation piece turn down your thermostat all right now this one's again it's going to hit a pressure point for some people but according

The night-before blueprint for optimising sleep... (35:12)

to research between 62 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit is ideal for sleep and so for some people it's going to sound a little bit frosty but lowering the thermostat a little bit can have incredible benefit for your sleep but this doesn't mean you can't use your covers and put on some warm socks that kind of thing so cooling off this thermostat making sure that your bedroom ideally i call it a sleep sanctuary and so that when you walk into your bedroom at night if your brain has a neural association when i go into my bedroom i'm watching television i'm working those channels are going to fire because of the myelin getting laid down over the years of you doing that behavior or even months it can get laid down and so you might have the intention of going to bed but if your tv's in there your brain is going to be firing expecting to watch television and parts of your brain are going to be waking up in a way and so i encourage people to get the tech out of your room have your sleep have your bedroom be a sleep sanctuary you know or some place that's just for the the double s which is sleep and sex here's also a really interesting reason why there's an Italian study done they found that couples who have a television in their bedroom have 50 percent less sex really yeah yeah that's interesting and you know this is a little bit more middle age little past middle age the people in the study but and i know some people like that's not true i have sex all the time you probably do it in a snowstorm like it doesn't matter where you are like your human rabbit it doesn't matter but for other people it's like a distraction right it's a distraction and it can also you know create all of those kind of chemical soup issues that we've been talking about with elevating cortisol most kind of things so ideally get your television out of the room the other tech and last thing with the sleep environment i'll share when i talked about melatonin eagles to two conditions biological night and you also need a dark environment and so if you're in an environment where you're maybe in a suburban or city environment where there's like neighbors porch lights coming in there's LEDs outside cars coming up and down the street as crazy as this sounds that that small amount of light where we're now dubbing light pollution can have a significant impact on your sleep quality and here's here's why we know this cornel university that i think did the best study on this and they took a test subject and had them sleep in a otherwise dark room and they took a light a fiber optic cable and a light the size of a quarter and put it behind their knee and that was enough to disrupt their sleep cycle because your skin also has photoreceptors that is sending information to your brain your nervous system your internal organs to try to tell your body what time it is it's trying to figure it out you know so we want to get rid of that artificial light exposure now does this mean moonlight and stars no humans have evolved with those things and there are luxe like i actually put a luxe chart in the book it's so small compared to even the weakest fluorescent bulbs and so get yourself some blackout curtains if that external light is an issue internal light you know your alarm clocks and you know light you know lamps you know some people still are sleeping with their lights on and things like that be mindful of that and also what you can do is just change the bulb color you know if you still have issues with the dark which some adults do and that's okay um you can change the bulb cover color and i actually had some nasa scientists or people that work with them to send me some different bulbs because folks in space they don't have that biological clock and so they would experience all these different health challenges they had to try to figure it out they knew that it was an issue with their sleep and so they start to give them different bulbs for different times of day in a way you know even though they're in outer space so it's really cool what you can do with these little hacks but bottom line is you want to have a dark cycle so you can produce melatonin and you know those are just a few those are just a few of the different things people can do if sleep is so good for me and dreams are amazing and they help with creativity and they they take the sharp edges off my emotions why the

The scientific reason you have nightmares... (39:22)

hell do i have nightmares yeah so what we know is that nightmares aren't necessarily pathological um and we we know that in some conditions and PTSD is a is a very good example of this that they can sort of step over that threshold from being normative to non-normative i mean they can be very concerning and and disruptive to people and it's also very traumatic too to relive those and and wake up from them we do think it's part of the same process of sort of emotional regulation that it's the brain trying to understand and better comprehend what this thing called waking life and all of its emotional peaks and troughs are all about so the bottom line here is that as long as they're not causing you distress and harm then you don't have to worry about them if they are doing that though there are new clinical therapies for what we call nightmare um disorders and it involves usually just what you were describing before which is speaking with a therapist writing down the nightmare and then replaying it while you are awake sort of you know speaking about it writing it back down working with the therapist and essentially trying to sort of just say like okay in that context it's safe let's better understand that and repeatedly doing that type of work where you're sort of reactivating the nightmare and then trying to change the context to something that's safe or that's less fearful or that's less negative gradually over time that type of work can dissipate the frequency and the severity of those nightmares so nightmares by themselves not necessarily a bad thing if they are causing you problems you can go and speak to your doctor and there are some therapies for that that you can sort of just google around nightmare therapy etc and those will help yeah and that like the way in which your brain chooses to interpret its sort of dream reassessment of the real world will have huge implications in your life it could be PTSD it could be a bazillion things i have a feeling i have never had this out before but i have a feeling that the more we learn about how individual brains recontextualize things and how much the conscious mind and subconscious mind sort of come into cahoots to decide how they're going to line things up because when i was in my early 20s and i was convinced i was stupid i was interpreting the world one way that was just had me paralyzed by fear and then as i began to realize sort of the nature of the brain and oh just because i'm stupid now doesn't mean i can't learn about this you know that carol dweck's notion of yet right i'm not good yet and so that since then consciously i have changed the way that i frame things but i would bet a bazillion dollars and i'm also doing that subconsciously as my brain sort of processes the day i think that's what you know dreaming if it's one of its functions is that recontextualizing of those experiences you know dreaming i think is a is a way for us to understand the world in which we live and we can do it whilst we're awake you know i'm not suggesting that we don't form connections and we don't see links between different pieces of information but the way that we do it in dreaming is very different you know i often liken it to when we're awake you're sort of inputting this information into the brain and it's almost like a google search page one where you insert your search term you hit return and you get the most obvious immediate hits the direct connections that's what waking is all about dreaming is you inserting the search term hitting the return button and being taken straight to page 20 you know and you inserted you know impact theory university and all of a sudden on page 20 it's about a field hockey game in utah and you think hang on a second what on earth is but then you read it and you think ah i can it's a distant wacky connection and it's not obvious to me that i would have made that but it's a potentially powerful one because when you start to fuse things together that shouldn't normally go together but they cause these marked advances and evolutionary fitness it sounds like the biological basis of creativity and that's one of the things that we're learning about with dream sleep as well contextualization emotional resolution creativity yeah so you know as we start talking about dreaming and nightmares and all of the different ways that the brain is sort of interacting uh trying to make sense of the conscious world one thing i heard you talk about is cognitive behavioral

Connecting dream sleep to creativity and learning (43:52)

therapy for insomnia which i found very interesting and i know so little about it but knowing what i know about cognitive behavioral therapy in terms of patent interrupting and things like that are you is this like us sending a sort of subconscious signal to our brain like how does that work not quite so what we know obviously has been the rise of sleep difficulties in society and that has been matched by unfortunately a rise in pharmacology and particularly sleeping pills and i say unfortunately not because i'm anti-medication and i know a lot of people who work at these pharmaceutical companies and then good people great scientists wanting to do good things but unfortunately sleeping pills are largely blunt instruments and they don't produce naturalistic sleep um they're in a class of drugs that we call the sedative hypnotics and when we take sleeping pills we mistake sedation for sleep but it's not natural sleep and in fact um sleeping pills have been associated with a significantly higher risk of death as well as cancer so much so that in 2016 the american college of physicians made a landmark recommended um intervention they said that sleeping pills must no longer be the first line treatment for uh insomnia instead the american college of physicians said it has to be cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia that must be the first line recommended treatment for those sleep problems and so cognitive behavioral therapy in general really tries to target two things cognitive and behavioral and so the cognitive aspects for insomnia are aspects where we try to correct your beliefs or your misbeliefs around sleep and some of your ideas around sleep some of those things that can be either inappropriate incorrect or just triggering anxiety or worry so we try to modify those cognitions those beliefs but then we also look at what you're doing in your life the different behaviors that you're doing or things that you're not doing and try to correct the behaviors as well for example how's your caffeine intake how's your alcohol intake what time are you going to bed what time are you waking up what's your chronotype are you a morning type evening type are you sleeping in harmony with your chronotype or against your chronotype um are you getting daylight in the morning are you getting too much daylight at night artificial light at night do you exercise and so we change behaviors and we change thought patterns and together cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term but what's great is that when you stop working with that clinician or your online program and i should say that i i work with a company i'm an advisor to a company called shoonie um it's sh u n i dot i o if people want to go and explore it and you can get cognitive behavioral therapy online there but you work with your therapist and after about five or six sessions you can continue that benefit of improved sleep for up to five years the studies have demonstrated now whereas with sleeping pills when you stop their use then not only do you go back to the bad sleep that you've got you are having you typically go back to even worse sleep it's called rebound insomnia and now you have to go back onto the use so you become dependent there is an addiction dependency cycle so that's really what cbti is and that's really the best approach for sleeping problems right now all right so i have two sleeping problems one is that there are times where i will get um either really stressed or i'll get really excited and

Handling Sleep Challenges And Improving Sleep Quality

Why you wake up in the middle of the night (48:25)

i have a very easy time falling asleep but then i'll wake up after three or four hours and i find it very difficult to fall back asleep and then the second part just so i don't forget is sleep inertia in the morning but what can i do to um optimize for staying asleep yeah so there it's a case of trying to deal with that sort of downgrade the activation of the nervous system the reason that people typically wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep not always but often is because they have this sort of stress relief of carrying this anxiety and anxiety biologically is the principal mechanism that we think underlies most insomnia and what happens in part is that the fight or flight branch of the nervous system becomes overactive and that's exactly why does it shut down like i find it so easy to fall asleep but i can tell on the nights where i'm gonna wake up it just seems we're in business because but then my subconscious mind kicks it back alive yeah why why would it be that way and the reason is because after about 16 hours of wakefulness you build up a lot of that healthy sleepiness what we call sleep pressure and the longer that you're awake the more of that sleep pressure builds up and it's a chemical that builds up in the brain called adenosine and then when we go into sleep it's the time when the brain can actually start to clear out that adenosine and it's so it starts to lower the sleep pressure and after about eight hours of sleep you've cleared away 16 hours of that adenosine of that sleepiness and so you wake up naturally and you feel refreshed and restored but what will happen is that you can be stressed and sort of or excited but the weight of sleepiness pulling you down is so heavy at that point that you can get to sleep but then three or four hours later you jettisoned maybe 50% of all of that adenosine maybe even more because it principally happens during deep sleep and so now your brain is much more vulnerable to those awakenings because it doesn't have the weight of that sleepiness does that make some sense it makes total sense and it makes me want to punch myself back to sleep it's so obnoxious well because the benefits or I should say the damage that you do by not getting sleep is so terrifying that every time I wake up I'm like come on like you know how much better you will perform if you just sleep and I am not one of those guys it's like hey you got a grind in four hours sleep I'm like if I need nine hours of sleep I want to get nine hours of sleep every single night forever until the end of time so it's just always super obnoxious you're hoisting that flag I will salute it and I definitely you know not everyone but certainly in the type A sort of particularly business culture maybe there

Developing self-compassion around sleep (51:12)

is this sort of sleep machismo attitude where people were the lack of sleep like a badge of honor but you're right it's it's full hardy for a number of reasons but let me come back to that issue of you know beating ourselves up because we need to have some degree of self-compassion when it comes to sleep you know I am not invulnerable to sleep problems myself I've had bouts of insomnia throughout my life to be completely transparent and open with you and everyone every one of us is gonna have a bad night of sleep it's not unusual don't worry don't stress you know back when I was starting to write the book it took me about four years to write it in 2014 you know sleep was sort of the neglected step-sister in the health conversation of that time and I was so saddened by the sickness and the disease and the suffering that was happening because of a lack of sleep you know I came out you know organs blazing and I think that that was important but for those people who were struggling with sleep those people who had sleep problems with insomnia you know the book kind of felt almost as though it was you know sleep or else dot dot dot and I didn't mean it to be that way so I want to say right now because I've learned to soften and become a much better appreciator of these conditions just like you described if you wake up and you can't get back to sleep don't worry just realize tonight is not my night it's not the end of the world I'm still going to be able to function somewhat tomorrow don't stay in bed awake for too long though that's the important message here because very tricky I'm super curious to see what you think about this because I know where you're going right yeah you're training yourself that being in bed is is being awake is okay while you're in bed so that's right I used to get up and whether I slept for two hours three hours whatever if I couldn't fall back asleep in like 15 minutes I'd get out of bed and I would go to work and start doing my thing and then I would go lay back down and sleep and sometimes I'd fall asleep for you know two or three more hours but the number of times I would wake up with a headache after that was just too much so it was way frustrated and I'm like all right there's got to be something else so what I found is if I put an audiobook on dude I will be back asleep in like 10 or 15 minutes it's crazy and the only thing that wakes me up is the fact that I have headphones in my ears or if they start yelling in the book or something like that which always pisses me off but it puts me back to sleep so reliably it's crazy that's great that's exactly what we recommend so don't go to work don't start checking emails don't eat because it trains the brain to expect food but instead in the dim room somewhere different so you change the context so you're changing the learned association just read a book listen to an audiobook meditate in dim light all of these things are great find out whatever works for you and then only when you're sleepy do you return to bed and there's no time limit for that and that way you train the brain back out of a bad association that it's learned which is my bed is this place of being awake which if you repeat that over time you become trained to be awake in the bed and then you will relearn the association that your bed is the place where you're asleep so you're 100 right that's exactly what we recommend to your second question which is sleep inertia it's a real thing sleep inertia is typically where we wake up and your brain requires some time to kind of warm up to operating temperature like an old vintage car you know you can't just turn the engine on and start

Sleep inertia is real (54:40)

you know flooring it and going up to red line you need to sort of circulate the fluids and warm the oil up and get the engine warm and then you can really start to push it it's the same way with our brain in some ways now different people have different severities of sleep inertia I'm actually like you I suffer from quite bad sleep inertia you know for the first hour you know my partner she went when I come through in the morning she works a little bit earlier than me you know she kind of knows that I can say look honey I am not the best version of myself in the first hour I know that I may have done something bad yesterday and we should talk about it and I want to resolve that but can we not do it in the first hour because I'm not the best version so firstly accepting that it's normal and it's real the second thing though however is you can sleep inertia typically happens in very severe amounts if you're mismatched between your sleep schedule and your chronotype that's some schedule and so you can go on and you can go online and type google morningness eveningness questioner and it's a questioner that you fill out and it figures out what your chronotype is are you a morning type somewhere in between or you an evening type and what we find is that morning types when they wake up in the morning at the normal time which is very early early they don't have sleep inertia they're good to go they can jump into the gym and they're like energize of bunnies and they're all happy and you know joyful and to me I'm just like oh you know whereas evening types waking up at the time that morning types have to wake up which is in

How To Optimize Sleep for YOUR Chronotype (56:17)

some ways the way society is designed society is desperately biased against evening types and wrongfully so because it's not your fault it's genetically determined there are about six or seven genes that we know right now that dictate what your chronotype is it's not your fault gifted to you at birth you don't get to choose now if you are suffering from sleep inertia what we find is that if you can sleep a little bit later into the morning go to bed or maybe a little bit later sleep later play around with that and see if the speed with which you wake up is better that your sleep inertia is less that's one way it may not always work another way is temperature now it turns out that when people have a cup of coffee they say look I just need like five minutes and I swig a couple of you know mouthfuls of coffee and now I'm alert that's nonsense caffeine doesn't actually get into your system until about 12 to 15 minutes so if you're feeling any effects of caffeine before that it's not the caffeine it turns out that when we go to sleep we drop up our core body temperature we get very cold we become almost hyperthermic now to wake up we have to warm up so to to get to sleep we need to get cold to stay asleep we need to stay cold and to wake up we need to warm up and so one way that you can artificially accelerate or try accelerating your inertia in a quicker dissipating manner is to try to warm up more quickly so get a hot drink in the morning doesn't have to be caffeine if that's not your thing I don't drink caffeine but I'm not against it caffeine is an issue it's not really the dose that makes the poison it's the timing that makes the poison when it comes to sleep and caffeine which we can come on to but drink a hot drink get your body temperature up if you like if you've got a smart thermostat program it to start to rise temperature in your bedroom or in the house in the last hour before your alarm and you could it can really start to help you wake up and then play around with these smart lights I have one where it sort of starts to bring me out of sleep about five minutes before my alarm that can help but the data is not good on it the data on temperature much better that's interesting how it helps it does but I'm surprised that you say to get warm because have you been cold showers before yeah cold showers are sort of more of a noradrenaline thing yes they wake you up real fast they do now that's not necessarily a normative thing you know that's you you know shocking your fight or flight branch of the nervous system to go from a temperature that it's become accustomed to and it's acclimated to then all of a sudden being dumped in ice water as it were and it doesn't know it's a threat mechanism it thinks you're under attack and so of course you're going to wake up now that comes with an adrenergic spike in the body it comes with an accelerated heart rate it could come with a cortisol spike so I'm not against that but we don't have to go to those extremes you can do it in these more subtle manners which are all the more natural ways fair enough I have a question going back to waking up in the middle of the night one thing that is super weird is things that during the day are not in any way shape or form intimidating or daunting when I'm supposed to be sleeping so if I wake up in the middle of the night I'll start stressing about something and I'll I'm literally like once I get out of bed this is not going to stress me out so why is it stressing me out at night is there a part of my brain that shuts off is there a part of my brain that becomes active like why are things at night do they seem so big and dramatic whereas in the day as I'm eh it's not a big deal yeah I we actually don't really fully understand it in truth but part of this is to do with context that it's dark you don't have full awareness you don't have full functioning of the brain because when we wake up that sleep inertia by the way in part is because your prefrontal cortex which is the part of the brain that makes us most human it's like the CEO of the brain it's very good at understanding high level concepts putting things into contextually appropriate boxes

Why you can't make good decisions first thing in the morning. (01:00:47)

making top-down control decisions it regulates our emotions that part of the brain is the last thing to come back online as we wake up and that's why we're not very you know brilliant if we have sleep inertia but when we're waking up out of sleep in the middle of the night we also have some of that so we don't have the rational logical part of our brain fully engaged plus the context is one that's dark and so we don't have sort of the daylight sort of giving us this sort of normative safe feeling and so what happens is that the brain starts to default to rumination and catastrophization you know it's almost like this rolodex of anxiety that then starts to unfold and that one memory that you know you bring back into mind at that moment of waking up is the finger that flicks the domino on that cascade of you know rumination so again just realize I've done this before I've experienced this before I know that tomorrow by you know one or two p.m. in the afternoon I think about this and I think that was ridiculous to be worrying about it's okay try to remind yourself of that. What is up my friend you and I are living in a golden era of self-improvement we have books platforms like YouTube courses seminars virtual events workshops the list really is endless the internet has been so good for people like you and me who want to accomplish greater and greater things in life and now my friend it is about to get even better I've been spending most of this year working on the single most entertaining tool that you're ever going to have around self-improvement and it is called Project Kaizen it's a web three based game experience that will be unlike anything else you've ever engaged with in your life partly because the technology is new and it's amazing if you're not familiar with blockchain NFTs and all of that Kaizen is going to be the perfect introduction for you as it is an excellent intersection of entertainment and learning all back by the blockchain we're getting closer and closer to launching this project for you every single day we are working our faces to the bone to get this thing out there and my friend I want you to experience it so click the link on your screen and head on over to my discord channel to stay up to date and be one of the first to join me inside of Project Kaizen which by the way gets its name from the Japanese term of never ending improvement all right back to today's episode should we the book changer die a heaven so the the concept is pretty straightforward you tell people to change and most people don't so even if the outcome is hey if you don't take this pill and I think it was that simple it's like you have to take a pill once a day every day and compliance after like three months or something drops to like five percent yeah which is crazy but what I love is that you didn't hit that and go oh well that's just a thing you dive into human behavior what did you learn in that discovery process about human behavior what's working against us how do we begin to take hold of it and then maybe most interestingly what is the loop method sure the idea is in order for somebody to adopt and sustain a health behavior for a long term not just a 30-day trial or 60-day period so this becomes a part of their pattern of living they should know why they are doing something how to do it if they're doing it and if it's working and you can see that each one of those four components independently will reinforce somebody's ability to pick something up and take and go with it so oftentimes what you'll see is that if somebody doesn't let's say change their behavior one information is given to them you might just log more information provisions at them right oh here's more information but maybe they just didn't have the skills to implement that good idea or they tried it for a little bit and then their old behaviors were swept back up they didn't have any feedback or to say this is actually are you living in accordance with your own goals or maybe they just didn't know if it was actually working or not and because one you know insidiously challenging aspect of our health is that a lot of things that are good for us might be what I call the meaningful but invisible they matter but we don't get that feedback to make us immediately detect if it's having a presence and it might be right you might have a significant improvement in let's say memory performance over a 12-week period but you're but you might not recognize it by the time you get there it might actually feel like you're just performing as you've always been and that actually can go up and down improvements and decrements so is there a way to then use technology to then make people more informed about things that can help them more informed about their own patterns of living and then empowered to put all that into practice and I actually think that we need technology in this world to help us take care of our health well I found this so interesting in some of your talks you know define health yes so that question was posed to me a while ago and I totally stumbled on it it's one of those broad questions that is hard to define I think probably the explanation that I like the most is that it is the ability to maintain balance or homeostasis within the body so if you are challenged by some sort of you know infection or armbreak your ability to get back to a place of balance is a marker of health but it is also more than that it is it is something that can we can use as a currency to realize our goals and aspirations in our life and I think if you take that if you drink that in and you believe it then all these things that can feel like friction might actually just be opportunities to live in the fullest version of yourself I love that definition so now let's say that I have that but I'm still struggling to implement what are the behaviors and like what are the behavior modification tools that people can put in place to comply I think the first aspect of this is to clearly understand the problem at hand right if you don't

How to effectively upgrade your life and remain open to change. (01:06:57)

really know what your your challenges your own efforts will be either inefficient or you won't really know if you're headed in the right direction even though you're spinning your wheels we're born into a time where the default settings around us and the expectations of our environment are the pressures of culture and work and even the built environment will predictably lead to issues with our health chronic disease it will be a little bit weird we have to make a daily effort to counteract those forces to affect our pattern of living so that we actually are being good stewards of our health it's not something that is just there until it's gone it's something that you need to cultivate and nurture the next you want to be a lifetime learner because 15 20 years ago circadian rhythms the gut microbiota things like that were not a part of any model that was used to predict or describe health we know information is changing regularly so I love that saying um have strong opinions held loosely which means to me that you take the time to form an understanding now but you don't defend that at all at the face of new information so you need to be have the ability to upgrade that to up level that and then you have to be able to take big concepts that you learn about and personalize it into the fabric of your life your family your kids whatever that is how can you take this idea that you think is going to benefit you and make it real for you because if it's too if it there's too much friction and conflict you don't personalize it you follow rules you might be able to do that for two weeks three weeks but then you're really likely to go back to whatever patterns you had previously what else I think your response to failure right failure is a part of the process a regular part of the process can you address failure with compassion for yourself and also with resilience where you're like what can I learn about the fact that I wanted to go to the gym four times this week but I went twice what was it about the week constant assessment to then just know how you can do better next week so interesting that as you're talking about how to get people to comply with health stuff that you're talking about mindset in the beginning so when I first started this film everything journey and talk through all these problems it was why is the protein bar guy talking about mindset yeah and then when I exited quest and started impact theory and did all this mindset stuff and then I said guys we're going to do a show called health theory everyone's like why is the mindset guy talking about health and it's been like this constant frustration for me for people to understand if you want to optimize for your health you have to optimize your mindset if you want to optimize for your mindset you have to take care of your health and because I talk a lot about working hard and busting ass and all that and what greatness demands people think that I don't sleep they think that I just grind my way to success yep the reality is that if and you've talked really powerfully about this if you want to even have good decision making abilities yeah you've got to sleep run us through like a sleep 101 why it's so foundational to your work and what people should be doing yeah I left a company that I

Sleep, Hunger, And Diet Connection

Why Sleep is So Important (01:10:00)

loved at a job that I loved to start a startup and my PhD and I thought it could all implode it would be too much for me to handle and so I thought if I am going to up regulate my ability to show up every day I need to then basically take care of the machinery that is doing the work so what is it that makes me feel sharp every day and sleep then is of course one component of that and what I've realized it's so it's funny we kind of encapsulate sleep as it's this packaged thing but it's almost like tell me about daytime right that's a big window you know and what sleep ends up being as a very great window into your soul you know I'm into the into the workings of the brain and how like what is happening physiologically so you really understand it gives you a window to that narrow the field a little bit to then understand how our physiology works in general if you had to make a hypothesis about two or three reasons why we sleep what do you think are the two or three most important things that happen while people are sleeping yeah it's a good question because it's been almost like definition of health under what is the solitary unitary purpose of sleep has been notably hard to define we know very important things can happen it's purging of energetic by products it's purging of potentially neurotoxic products that are a result of that it is plasticity that's forming it is reregulation of our immune system there's a lot going on and I there has not yet been one I think model that explains everything but we do know that incredibly important things occur so what are people doing that messes up their sleep yeah so that's a it's a really good question and the the common question that you get is how much sleep do you need how much time should it be in bed it's easy but the things that matter for sleep are timing intensity and duration so duration is sort of the easy one it's that what I tell people is spend enough time in bed so that you wake naturally that means you're not waking by an alarm and so what I like to get what I call complete sleep is aim to spend half an hour more in bed than what you think you'll need so that if your body needs it on that night you'll get it now you might not ever need it or you might not need it or you might need it rarely but allow for complete sleep to happen you also want the timing of your sleep to be regular so for instance you go to bed usually from midnight and wake up at eight but tonight you go to bed at four am and you wake up at noon say it hours but this sleep will not be as restorative as it was if you were sleeping in that same window every night because we now are introducing concept of circadian rhythms which are repeatable 24-hour processes so when you're getting REM sleep at four am your body because of your past experience over the last several weeks knows do REM-like activities at that time and so it'll be more efficient sleep itself will be more efficient at doing what it wants to do if you regularize the timing of your sleep and then you have intensity and that is really not something that you can take action on directly go sleep hard yeah come on do it but you can do things during the day that then will facilitate depth and you can also create an environment that is less disruptive okay so talk to me what can i do during the day to make sure that i'm sleeping hard yeah so if you look at people that undergo bed rest because they have a broken leg or in studies that put people under bed rest to then see what their sleep is like you know that they end up having a fragmentation of their sleep so they have more naps during the day and they have more periods at night where they are without adequate amounts of physical activity there is a fragmentation of your sleep you don't need a ton to then get better sleep but then where does that sensitivity sort of drop off you use running as an example because we can just define it by time you go regularly for a 20-minute run today you go for a four-hour run you've now overloaded your system to a degree that might actually impair the amount of sleep that you get there's a bi-directional relationship there where a little bit of the stimulus aids in the depth of sleep and too much can overwhelm it now it doesn't

How to Get a Deep Sleep (01:14:02)

automatically mean you will sleep poorly but you have a higher risk of doing so you might sleep like a rock and then there's temperature fluctuations so this is actually a newer area but we live in a very insulated world right even if we go outside and there's not much variation in the temperature we can layer ourselves so that our what we're being exposed to is very narrow we also know that signals from a wider breadth of temperature within the day might actually feed into that what's called a homeostat these things that are collecting the signals of daytime usage that then help you sleep deeply and then a big important one is this light so light coming into your eye will communicate with receptors at the back of the eye that are not actually communicating with the visual cortex it helps us see but they are communicating with the master clock and we spend 90 percent of our time indoors now so if you we are not getting as much light as we used to so if you go outside don't wear glasses get outside for at least a half an hour a day sunglasses sunglasses yeah thanks and then in the evening you really just want to have whatever internal and light environment is reflect what's going on outside so as the sun goes down dim the lights and then also change the tones you're getting less blue light because that is the the blue is the major signal to these retinal ganglion cells that says to the master clock it's daytime yeah speaking of which yeah i was listening to one of your talks and you talk about how the fact the fact that fat has photoreceptors or light receptors how is it possible probably like one of the coolest discoveries of last year but those

Does Fat Affect Hunger? (01:15:28)

same receptors that are in the back of our eye they're called opsin receptors and all opsin receptors and there are many over a hundred they have the ability to transduce a light signal into a nerve signal of some sort so peter light in alberta researcher professor peter light you have to be joking i know isn't that i mean he's that is that hilarious yeah i wrote right over that one yeah peter light who studies light i don't think there was a name change there i think that's his his given name he did a screen to see are these receptors anywhere else in the body and he's found them in fat tissue wow and he's like this has to be an artifact this can't be this can't be a thing so he was able to test if light hitting fat tissue had an effect and he put his hand over the light and the signal went away he took his hand away from the light and the signal reappeared so he thought wow this there's something here and that made him investigate it more thoroughly and what he found is that fat tissue has light receptors the same ones in our eye and they respond to light and it makes the fat cells shrink become less inflammatory and they release a whole different profile of hormones and we might actually have a light deficiency not just for vitamin d but for our regulation of fat would we the conversation around fats regulation is oftentimes fairly uninformed we regulate fat tissue like we do temperature it is it is something that is not simply just a matter of did we you know the calories and calories out your body is making a lot of adjustments now those calories do matter but it is making a ton of adjustments to those calories to then say do i want that fat storage to shrink or to expand and you and it's trying to regulate it similar to how a thermostat would regulate temperature in a home you said it's 72 this is super interesting so we can say that the fat in our body works as a gland is that fair yeah you could say that it's yeah but is there a logic to like the the hypothalamus that thermostat you've talked about fat trying to stay in range that it goes up and down sort of regularly but it stays in that type and like this is so interesting to think of it as secreting hormones and being a gland walk us through the details of that yeah so we now know that fat releases i think over 50 different what are called adipokines adipofat kinds like a cytokine which is like hormone and so um as triglycerides enter into our fat tissue then leptin is produced continuously so that flux of fats fat tissue fat leaving and entering the fat tissue will then cause leptin to be to be made proportional to that then that signal goes into the blood and there's various receptors for it so one in the brain in the brain stem you actually have them under pancreas as well but then in the hypothalamus so the brain is then detecting how much fat is circulating uh you've lost a little bit of weight less fat storage less leptin release be hungry get that fat stores back up and you have neurons in the brain in the hypothalamus and these and a lot of the hypothalamic centers will connect so you have these discrete groups of cells that communicate with one another that then affect things like motivation, temperature, even sleep and so there's a balance of different cell types within an area called the archaeonucleus and depending on the signals that are present will then initiate this cascading effects that will affect hunger that'll affect energy expenditure all to try to keep your fat levels in a constant level now doesn't that have to be the exact same level but within a range now why do we then get fatter it's thought that this homeostat this fat homeostat is much better defending weight loss than weight gain makes sense evolutionarily it was probably much more of a concern and there's also some thinking that those neurons actually get damaged by our environment our internal environment from the types of foods that we eat and challenges to them from even things like poor sleep so nutrient inadequacies things like that all these things can affect the health of that tissue and it's one of the reasons why i am favorable towards a ketogenic diet because beta hydroxybutyrate is one of the ketones and it can cause those those tissues within the brain to actually start to remodel and regenerate and so somebody that has diet induced obesity they they have a very hard time losing weight because even if they lose weight their body wants to get back to that set point and if you look at people that are on a ketogenic diet for a lot of them they just start eating to satiety they eat normally and yet they the weight comes off naturally now is there's no guarantee that that weight will stay off but i think you put yourself in a much better position you know if you lose weight on other ways not all other ways but other ways if you look at somebody's physiology once they're 50 pounds lighter for a lot of people it looks like their body's desperately trying to get back up and weight their brain will stay active seeking food so if you do fMRI and there's food on the table they will stay seeking even out even if they're full right everything is engineered all the different processes are engineered to get you back up to that weight what are some of those processes that's so interesting like now so i i've had a lot of these symptoms so i used to be 60 pounds heavier i lost that and i did it so stupidly you can't imagine i did it in a rabbit starvation diet and just insane amounts of cardio so my calories were probably between 1200 and 1500 a day as much as i could make it just pure protein as possible i was inflamed it was crazy my joints hurt my knees my wrists my elbows i mean it's gnarly yeah but unfortunately i wasn't thinking hey listen to your body i was just thinking you're getting leaner you're getting leaner you're getting leaner but you want to talk about seeking food at all times like all i could think about was when my next meal was but i never thought of that as like anything other than well your calories are crazy low but what are the mechanisms that like trap people because there are some people who will swear that they can't no matter what they can't lose weight and i've always if i'm honest i've always really discounted the well it makes me hungrier yeah so interestingly a ketogenic diet i'm very interested in the mechanisms by which it might be working and there the ketone beta hydroxybutyrate might actually be turning on genes that help to reset those tissues that are controlling body fat effectively lowering your set point to a place that's healthier that's a possibility the other diet that can do that is

Impact of Ketogenic Dieting on Body Fat (01:22:01)

very low energy diets that actually have very low energy people's that's start in low calorie low calorie yeah because you don't have to actually be on a ketogenic diet to produce ketones if you are in a state of fasting or in hypochloric intake then you're going to produce ketones too so give me the order in which the body burns calories and and include alcohol as the fourth macro which some people will say yes so preferentially the body will burn glucose and that is thought because the brain is a very very glucose hungry it is only 4% of our body weight and

Order Your Body Burns Calories (01:22:42)

yet it consumes 25% of the calories we eat it's a very metabolically active tissue do macros always go in an order so here's what i heard this could be total bullshit number one that if there's alcohol in the system it will be metabolized first yeah followed by glucose it depends yeah so actually it depends on your relative relative status what type of macros have you been eating over the last couple of weeks and then what enzymes have been generated in response to that exposure okay so it's not like there's some set it's always going to burn them in this order see most studies are always looking at what is under this normal condition which is our standard diet mmm it's not looking at under all conditions and under things like fasting or what might be evolutionarily more regular in terms of like you know not having breakfast until maybe noon we have what's called metabolic flexibility which is thought to be something that is a good state to try to achieve which means that you can readily burn different types of fuel sources so you know it's it's extraordinarily complex people give simple explanations for it but you know this is actually one of the biggest public health needs in our world because the amount of comorbidities that associate with obesity it will bankrupt our society you know you think of weight you think of food but it's very possible that even things like light might be having a very large input here and like like sunlight even right we're talking about that so if fat is a regulated tissue and we are living fully clothed i wouldn't say that there's any silver bullet but there's a lot of different inputs and so i think overall one sort of perspective of mine is to try to live more naturally but in a way that is actually going to work within the modern world one thing you said that i found so interesting is all right fat's a regulated tissue it is creating all these hormones it's responding to the environment it actually has light sensitivity which still freaks me out i know and hey by the way boys and girls you're staying inside all day you're clothed up when you go outside guess what signal you're giving your body it's winter time guess if the body doesn't winter it stores more fat yeah i wanted to literally stop my research at that point strip and run outside just to like shred up a little bit yeah of course it's not going to work quite like that yeah so you got fat as a gland is a regulated tissue yeah um do i understand it correctly to say that it's breaking something as you get obese you're more likely to get more obese and there's something that breaks that because like when you look at people their set point is riding with them as they're getting heavier and heavier which is already terrifying and then it's also secreting things that make you more hungry that delay your um where you're still searching for food longer um one is all of that true like did i just explain that accurately yes but we're missing a very important part to the model which is that it's not the only thing that explains our food-seeking behavior we also will eat food because it tastes good right independent of our hunger right we know that where for instance somebody you know you eat a full meal and you're out and you're full but your appetite is renewed when the dessert cart is brought over and you're like oh i could eat that yeah let's get four of those that is another driver

Our Food Seeking Behavior Come from (01:26:05)

of food intake and we live in an environment that is really designed for over consumption so it's very easy to overeat in our world because the palatability of food is one that will then promote overeating and the design of food processed foods it also will make you feel less full per calorie so there's a delay before you even feel fullness all right we got to talk about that because you showed a visual in one of your talks it was so powerful and i've been in this a long time but for some reason that visual really hit me but when you showed the raspberry tart which is like a little raspberry pie it looks so innocent and delicious totally and then you showed the equivalent amount of calories in bowls of raspberries was like seven or eight bowls of raspberries it was crazy than just like that actually is a lot of work from barber rolls and her book volumetrics which is it is stunning when we think about that how we condense calories into modern food products and that's what i want to talk about when people say processed food what they're talking about is making it hyper-palatable so i want to overeat anyway yeah and then secondarily it it has a lot of calories per physical volume yes so our central nervous system preferences are designed to detect and prefer caloric density so it is different than eating the tart versus the raspberries right we have now the ability to design food to make us want to seek it it's a very disadvantaged environment but the good news is that eating raspberries is also perfectly satisfying but the more of that highly palatable clorkly-dense food that you eat the more that it'll drive food-seeking behavior so there is a behavioral element to this how it messes with your neural circuitry what's going on mechanistically though so is it is it through that mechanism that it's um it triggers the release of grellon instead of leptin like there's so many different molecules that are at play metabolically you're right grellon is released from what are called auxintic cells within the gut and it's very low after a meal and it'll rise and as it's rising between your meals it makes you hungry it's the only gut-derived peptide that actually promotes feeding versus fullness uh leptin is this what's called a tonic signal it's sort of operating

Sleep Deprivation And Its Effects

How Your Sleep Influences Your Hunger & Appetite (01:28:47)

in the background we call it a fullness signal it's not quite it's actually setting the tone of how full you'll even be from a meal so if you have low leptin you'll naturally be less sensitive to the fullness signals of a meal so satiety and long-term fat regulation will work together now independent of that you have this brain circuitry that's going on that can think of it almost like addiction to a rewarding signal the more exposure you get to it that will then drive seeking food-seeking behavior so you're not really hungry and yet you're craving a lot of people experience this in the afternoon you're bored and you're like i just want to eat something right we know it in our lives we can detect it instantaneously the easy example is when you bring something that is very calorically dense at the end of a meal and you're full but you now want to eat more it is not the homeostat that is evaluating calories and fullness that's saying oh you should eat more it is pleasure and the pleasure that derives from caloric density well now that's really freaked people out yeah talk to me about the impact on um will power maybe a cheesy way to say it but a decision-making if i slept poorly yeah what we see is that not only do hormones change in response to getting inadequately but our brain changes too so there's something called the neuro competitive model decision-making which means that if you look at that thing that tastes delicious this reward part of your brain will light up first it'll it'll respond to it before the executive control self-control area kicks in to says yeah you might love how that tastes but it's not good for you right so you can see that competition taking place it happens all the time that process of looking at the the donut that you love but ordinarily don't want to eat then that is biased towards eat this now and ends up creating a behavior we call effort discounting you then are much less likely to work at this thing that ordinarily you totally say i care about this so i'm going to make an effort to just not have donuts in my life and you're like you know effort i'm like tomorrow i'll just have it now and that can actually translate to like whether it's going to the gym or the food that you eat and people live in that in that state where i care 95 percent of the day i'm thinking about eating well and in that moment of hunger and potentially compared with sleep loss you make a decision that you're then disappointed in yourself and you've talked pretty powerfully about like how much time do you have to lose a night before you start to see some of this declination yeah what i found is that reliably people that miss out an hour or two of sleep have impairments in vigilance as you'd imagine so they're less objectively alert the next day and they feel sleepier so subjective alertness is

HOW MUCH SLEEP DO YOU HAVE TO LOSE? (01:31:29)

impaired too and interestingly independently so i'll tell you about the study because it's great cool i had people come in and what i cared about was what they ate so we created baseline and they had by the way eight different choices that range from like clearly unhealthy gummy bears to you know ostensibly healthy right so things like you know just cut apple slices or something and what's another criticism i've had of previous research is that the decisions of the healthfulness of the food were made by the investigators but everybody has their own opinion about food right if you think there's four different types of decisions there's i like it and it's healthy easy right i don't like it and it's not healthy easy the two in the middle are the most interesting it's really healthy and i don't really like it which is sort of characteristic of health choices that we have to make sometimes and the most interesting one is i love it and it's totally not healthy right how do people respond to food that they recognize or they think this isn't good for me but i love this and what we saw is that when people were subjectively sleepy they were much more likely to eat foods that they rated as highlight low health so they were defecting from their own personal health standards you can say and now just to compound things you've got all right you miss an hour or two on sleep and now the sudden you're leaning towards the things that you have highlight low health yeah but also losing sleep makes you look at a blood level like a prediabetic and so you get this double lammy walk us through that like what's going on metabolically when you don't get enough sleep yes so that is still being investigated but it was one of the very first

Consequences Of Insufficient Sleep

If You're NOT Getting Enough Sleep, You're a Look a Diabetic (01:33:08)

things that was discovered in response to sleep law so they did sleep law sleep deprivation studies found that healthy young subjects ended up basically looking diabetic after either one night of total sleep deprivation or a couple nights of partial sleep prescription where you're not getting as much sleep as your body wants what's going on there so then that stimulated it some more investigation into that now maybe that is because of altered circadian timing it was hard to parse that because we know melatonin a darkness hormone will actually cause insulin resistance you want it because over the course of the night you don't want insulin taking blood glucose out of the bloodstream and storing it because then you go hypoglycemic and you'd wake up so rather the body it's a it's a this beautiful dance when darkness falls melatonin is released melatonin travels to the pancreas and it prevents insulin from being released and you keep blood glucose levels stable across the night so I think when some people that are waking up in the morning they're looking diabetic they might still have high levels of melatonin at night from the night we also see that our fat tissue simply becomes less sensitive to the effects of insulin and so it's just not reading the signal of insulin and helping it to store glucose as well and so therefore blood glucose levels elevate and then you know whether or not that is pathogenic like does that cause diabetes well you can then look at epidemiological research and shows that people that chronically get less sleep are much more likely to develop diabetes so you have to look at acutely what's a mechanism and then epidemiologically what happens when people generally do this and then you have to just try to figure out what's going on in between but clearly there's an issue going on there and there's no part of the body that goes untouched when we don't sleep get the sleep that we need the only difference between excitement and fear is what your brain says and the problem is if you have a habit of worrying guess what you're going to tell yourself is going on that you're that you're like freaking out that you're not excited that something must be wrong oh gosh why would you say something's wrong because you got a habit of saying that all the time