0:00 What are the most popular questions people come to you with as a sleep doctor? There's three biggies. Number one is, what do I do if I fall asleep okay and I wake up in the middle of the night and I can't fall back asleep? And you can help people with that? Absolutely. The second question is, what pillow should I buy? And I'm going to walk you through which pillows make sense for which people. And then another one that people ask me all the time is, what's the best time to have sex? That's a strange thing for somebody of your profession to be... Yeah. Well, let me explain why. So I've been an actively practicing sleep specialist for 26 years. I take care of people's sleep problems like apnea, insomnia, and I'm really interested in the things that you might be doing right now that are messing up your sleep that are easy to fix. So for example, most people don't know that they have a genetic sleep code inside them called their chronotype, which decides when your brain releases things like melatonin, cortisol, adrenaline, and dopamine. And so I can
0:49 show you based on your chronotype when it's bedtime, but also the perfect time of day to do almost any activity, including the perfect time to have coffee and alcohol. Crazy. There's even data to show that your ability to understand complicated concepts improves when you're more in line with your chronotype. Now, there are three known chronotypes, but what I'm famous for is discovering a fourth one, which I think might be. So we're gonna talk a lot about that. We're also gonna talk about dreams because dreams can tell you things about yourself that you may not wanna know. And then there's how to fix jet lag, whether you should sleep with a TV on, the truth about melatonin supplementation, and my favorite way to get magnesium. But before we get into all of that, shall we go and look at the best possible sleep position? Yeah, let's check it out. Guys, I've got a quick favor to ask you. We're
1:37 approaching a significant subscriber milestone on this show and roughly 69% of you that listen and love this show haven't yet subscribed for whatever reason. If there was ever a time for you to do us a favor, if we've ever done anything for you, given you value in any way, it is simply hitting that subscribe button. And it means so much to myself, but also to my team, because when we hit these milestones, we go away as a team and celebrate. And it's the thing, the simple, free, easy thing you can do to help make this show a little bit better every single week. So that's a favor I would ask you. And if you do hit the subscribe button, I won't let you down and we'll continue to find small ways to make this whole production better. Thank you so much for being part of this journey. It means the world and yeah, let's do this. Dr. Bruce. Yes. What is it you do? Why does it matter so much now?
2:27 And what perspective do you take on what you do that is atypical versus other people I might have spoken to about this subject? I'm a sleep doctor. I take care of people's sleep problems like apnea, narcolepsy, insomnia, things like that. I've dedicated a good portion of my career, not just to understanding how to treat those disorders, which are sleep disorders, but what I also I call disordered sleep. I'm really interested in behavioral habits, what's going on, what are the things that you might be doing right now that are kind of messing up your sleep that are easy to fix and be able to maybe change how things are going forward. You know, I didn't start out thinking I was gonna become a sleep doctor, if I'm gonna be honest with you. Like, that was not on the path. I was actually going in a completely different direction. And one of the things I really discovered was when you change someone's
3:16 sleep, dude, you change their life. Like it is fundamental to who they are. And it's important for me to be a sleep educator in a way, shape and form that's practical so that people can actually get something from what I'm talking about and apply it right then and there. And there's probably a couple of million people that have clicked onto this conversation to listen. Yeah. Who is this conversation for? I think it's for anybody out there who's either curious about sleep or wants to try to improve their sleep or maybe suspicious that they could have a problem with their sleep. I think any one of those three types of people would find tremendous value here. And what are we going to be able to do for those people today, specifically? So I'm going to give people several different, like, plans, if you will, maybe even a five-step plan of things that they can absolutely learn how to do. They're also going to learn about a genetic sleep code that they have inside them called their
4:04 chronotype. A lot of people don't even know that they have a chronotype, or maybe they've heard of the idea, but they haven't ever heard of the term. We're going to learn a lot about that. We're also going to talk about dreams a little bit. I'm excited to have the opportunity to do that. I've spent the last year and a half learning more about how to use dreams in my clinical work as a psychologist, which is very interesting stuff. So I'm excited to So I think people are gonna learn a whole bunch. And dreams matter? Oh yeah, they absolutely matter. I call dreams emotional metabolism, right? And so when you're dreaming, what is the function? What is the purpose? What are you doing? You're actually working through your emotional states that you had during the daytime. This is why we have nightmares, right? And so in a nightmare, it's a scary scene and all of a sudden it gets so emotional, you wake up. That is officially called a nightmare, that awakening, but you
4:54 stop breathing. processing. And when you go back to sleep, you go back to the dream and you get to that scary point, you wake up again and you get caught in this loop, right? And so dreams matter because they can be incredibly disruptive. Also, they can tell you things about yourself that you may not want to know or may not have in the front of your mind at all times, right? Sometimes people have very interesting dreams, like dreams of being chased or dreams of their teeth falling out or all these different things. And they can mean a whole host of different things. But I want to be super clear. There's no guidebook that says, hey, you know, if you're dreaming up that you're in water, you hate your mother. Like, it doesn't really work that way. Dreams mean something to the dreamer. And so the goal is to understand the context within that. So who is the dreamer? What is the dream? And then how do those two work together? And what is the experience
5:43 that you're drawing from? academically, but also professionally. Give me a view of how many people you've worked with. Oh yeah. Yeah. So the range of things people come to you with. Yeah. So I've been an actively practicing sleep specialist for 26 years. So I work in offices with medical doctors because I'm not a medical doctor. I have a PhD and I work with them on their patients. a lot of insomnia patients, but also the apneas, the restless legs, the narcolepsies of the world, because I have kind of a unique distinction in that I'm one of 160 people in the world who took the medical boards without going to medical school and passed. So I can work within that framework and really understand a lot of what's going on. I don't prescribe medication, but if I'm honest with you, most people don't need sleep medication, as far as I'm concerned. I can get them to sleep usually without any medication at all. And you're a psychologist as well. I am, I'm a clinical psychologist. And how
6:31 does those two worlds make one plus one equal three? Sure. So when you talk about sleep, psychology is all over the place. I would argue 75% of the reason people don't sleep is anxiety or fear. That really falls well within the range of psychology for sure. And it's different kinds of fears. It's fears that you know about, that are right in your face, like something that's going on in your daytime. But it could be other fears. It could be fears of your relationship. It could be financial fears. It could be a whole host of different things. So I think there's a lot of psychology that gets to be played in all of this kind of thing. I've got two more questions before we really get into the details and specifics and start really helping the audience with whatever they're dealing with. The first is we have lots of props here. Yes. Give me a top line view of the types of things you're going to show me and why you've brought all of these wonderful
7:17 props. Absolutely. I get asked a lot of questions, as you might imagine. And one of the big questions that I get asked is what bed and pillow should I buy? So sitting next to you is a large stack of pillows, all different types actually. And I want to be able to show some of your viewers how you look at pillows and which pillows make sense for which people. Believe it or not, there's like a fitting process. We're going to go through that. This device right here is a sleep test, believe it or not. So it used to be, we'd have to send you to the hospital. Yeah, you can unwind it. Send you to the hospital. We'd put 27 electrodes all over your body, respiratory belts across your chest. We'd have cameras zoomed in on you. And then by the way, you're supposed to be able to go to sleep, right? And we're supposed to be able to monitor you. Now, historically we were able to do that pretty well, but once COVID hit, nobody wanted to sleep in the same bed that somebody else had been sleeping in the
8:04 day before. So now we have what are called HSTs or home sleep tests. Wow. Yeah, we'll talk about how to use it and what it can tell you. My last question before we get into the details is what are the most popular questions that people come to you with as a sleep doctor? Yeah, so I'd say there's probably three biggies, right? Number one is, hey, Dr. Bruce, I fall asleep just fine, but I wake up somewhere between one and three o'clock in the morning and it either takes me 20 minutes or three hours to fall back asleep. What the heck is going on there? And you can help people with that. Absolutely. I'm going to give everybody a... exactly what I do in clinic. Like I'm gonna explain to everybody exactly what I say to my patients and how to go about getting through that particular problem because it's so flagrant. Everybody needs to know how to work with that.
8:50 The second question would be what bed should I buy or what pillow should I buy? I think we're gonna address that over here. And then another one that people ask me all the time is, you know, is there some kind of timing? Is there something like, I feel like my body is off. They say this all the time. They're like, if I just lived in a different time zone, I feel like everything would work out well. So the very basics of sleep. What do I need to know about what sleep is, the role it solves, for us to even understand the context of the things we're going to talk about today? Yep. There's only a few things that are truly important to understand about sleep. One is how does sleep work in the brain? It turns out that there's two separate systems in the brain. One is you called your sleep drive, the other is called your sleep rhythm. And they both work in an interesting way. They're both a little bit like hunger. So
9:37 sleep drive is like hunger because I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I eat something and that hunger begins to dissipate. Same holds true with sleep. The longer you stay awake, the more sleepy that you get. When you look at it from a biology standpoint, it's kind of interesting. So when a cell eats a piece of glucose, something comes out the back end, one of those things is called adenosine. It works its way through your system and goes to a very specific receptor area. As adenosine accumulates, you get sleepier and sleepier and sleepier. Now, why am I going into so much detail? Turns out when you look at adenosine and you look at caffeine, they're off by one molecule. So here's a little tip or trick early in the pod for everyone. I call it the Napa Latte. So what you do is you take a cup of drip black coffee, just throw in a couple of ice cubes, right, merely to cool it down. Drink it as fast as you can, then immediately take
10:25 a 25-minute nap. The adenosine that's built up in your brain will burn through while you're napping. Caffeine, since it's so close in molecular structure, can fit into that receptor site. It blocks any new adenosine. You're good for four hours, guaranteed. I use it with every CEO that I work with. So let's say you only got three hours of sleep the other night, and you've got a big presentation to do or an award ceremony or something like that. You can do a Napa latte for about 25 minutes or so, and you will feel much better. That's sleep drive. Let me just do it. Sure. I want to make sure I really understand this. Can you explain this to me again as if I'm a 16-year-old? Why having a coffee and then taking a nap would make me feel energetic? Because one would think that having a coffee and taking a nap are like... Would be almost impossible, right? So number one,
11:14 the caffeine doesn't kick in before the end of the nap. So a lot of people think when I drink coffee, boom, it just kind of spins up and all of a sudden I'm able to, you know, I get a lot of energy from it. That's really not actually how caffeine works. It has to go down, it has to get absorbed, it has to be digested. And so while all that's going on, which takes approximately 25 to 30 minutes, you're actually taking a nap to lower the amount of adenosine that has built up in your brain. Let's say it's two o'clock in the afternoon and you only slept for four hours and you are dragging, right? All that adenosine that's built up, when you take that 25 minute nap, you'll burn through a lot of it and then caffeine fits in and blocks any additional adenosine from coming in. So that way, you're actually adding caffeine to the situation and boom, your energy goes straight up. Oh, okay. So adenosine makes me tired. Exactly. When it's
12:01 docked in my brain. Exactly. So I have four hours sleep, which means there's lots of adenosine. And sleep clears the adenosine. Correct. And then caffeine comes in because it fits so perfectly into that receptor site and off you go. That's sleep drive. Sleep rhythm has to do with your circadian rhythm, right? And so lots of information about that, but basically your circadian rhythm is also a lot like hunger, right? You ever notice you're hungry around breakfast time, around lunch time, around dinner time, right? That's your circadian rhythm for hunger. For sleep, most people, at least here in North America, have a tendency to fall asleep somewhere between like 10.30 and 11 o'clock, 11.30 at night. So that's kind of the circadian rhythm there. So when your circadian rhythm is high and your drive is high, you sleep. But if either one of them is off, That's when you have a sleep disorder or disordered sleep. My circadian rhythm is high?
12:50 When your circadian rhythm is on point. On point, okay. High is probably not the right word. On point, so meaning you are abiding by your circadian rhythm. Now, another question you might say to me is, well, how do I know what my circadian rhythm is? And we're going to talk a lot about chronotypes because that's what your circadian rhythm is. Okay, so let's do chronotypes then. You've got some cards in front of you. I do. I kind of like these cards. So when we talk about chronotypes, a lot of people may have heard of the idea but not actually heard the term chronotype before. So if anybody out there has ever been called an early bird or a night owl, those are chronotypes. So we've got early birds. These are people who, by the way, this is genetic. You don't actually get to choose this. There's a special area on your genome called the PER3 area. And when you have something called a single nucleotide polymorphism or a SNP, if it's flipped one way, you're
13:39 an early bird. If it's flipped another way, you're a night owl. If it's not flipped, you're in the middle. Okay, so, so far I haven't told anybody anything new. Like this is all stuff that we've already learned. The new part is this irregularity that seems to happen for people during, for their sleep schedule, specifically an irregularity in their melatonin and cortisol production. So all of this is predicated on when does your body make melatonin? So if you're an early bird, your body makes melatonin earlier in the night, starting at around eight o'clock in the evening. It makes you wanna go to bed around 9.30. You had a question? So, melatonin is a hormone— It is. —that helps us sleep. —that helps us sleep. It's inside of your body that actually helps you sleep. It guides, it tells your body when it's bedtime, which is a little bit different than the adenosine, which makes you feel sleepy. I guess people listening
14:27 now would be asking themselves, why does it matter to know my chronotype? As it relates to my productivity, the way I live my life, my relationships, whatever matters to me, why does it matter? Because I can show you, based on your chronotype, the perfect time of day to do almost any activity. So if you know when your body is doing certain things, when it has melatonin or when it has cortisol or adrenaline or all these other things, if you know the schedule, you can actually just change your activity to when your body is naturally producing the hormone, and then you do the hormone better. So let's talk about the easy one, which is sex. Right? So a lot of people want to know, hey, Michael, what's the best time to have sex? By the way, I think that might be the third question that I get asked most often other than the insomnia one and the mattress one, I think is what's the best time for sex might be the other question that I get
15:12 asked more than anything. God, it must be tricky if the time you want to have sex and the time your partner wants to have sex are off. Well, think about it like this. What if your partner's an early bird and you're a night owl? Yeah, I think that's me. Yeah. Don't worry, we're going to be able to fix you. So first of all, there's a couple of different answers to this question. So number one is you want to have a time. So first of all, most people are intimate between 10.30 and 11.30 at night. That's just a survey that we did. So it makes kind of a lot of sense. But here's what's interesting is your hormone profile doesn't look too good at 11.30 at night for having sex. In order to have successful sex, you want to have estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, adrenaline, and cortisol all to be high. and melatonin to be low. What do you think your hormone profile looks like at 10.30 at night? It's literally the opposite, right? Melatonin is high and all those other things are low. That's hint number one as to when would
16:00 probably be the best time to have sex. Hint number two, if you happen to be having sex with somebody who was born biologically male, what do most men wake up with in the morning? An erection. If that's not mother nature telling you when to use that thing, I don't know what is, right? So when you start to look at it, and we actually did the surveys, we discovered that people actually have greater connection and greater performance in their sex when they have sex in the morning time. Now, do you have to brush your teeth and throw in a little mouthwash first? Yes, of course you do. Like, let's be fair to your partner here. But you end up learning quite a bit. Again, your body is telling you this is actually the perfect time to do something like this. Did you know there's like a perfect time to have coffee? I didn't. Yeah, there's absolutely a perfect time based on your chronotype too. One of the first things that I ask people all the time,
16:48 I'll ask you, is the first liquid that crosses over your lips in the morning caffeinated? Yes. So let's talk about why that's probably not the best idea. So most people don't know, sorry, most people don't know, but sleep in and of itself is a dehydrative event. You lose almost a full liter of water just from the humidity in your breath by breathing all night long. caffeine is a diuretic, which means it makes you have to go pee. So when you're already lost a liter, now you add a couple of cups of caffeine, which makes you have to pee, you're going to turn into a raisin before this whole thing is through, okay? So we need to get some water inside of you. And so one of the big recommendations that I give all of my patients is don't have caffeine for the first 90 minutes you're awake. Now, you're going to sit here and say, 90 minutes, that's an Michael,
17:36 that's a long time not to have any caffeine. Like, how am I gonna do that? Like, I've got my morning routine, I can smell the coffee in the morning, it smells so good, everything's going, how's this gonna work? Let me explain the biology. In order to exit a state of unconsciousness, you need two hormones and then you need a lot of them. You need adrenaline and cortisol and they both wake you up. When you have a brain that's full of adrenaline and cortisol and you add caffeine to it, it's like adding weak tea to somebody who's taking cocaine. Okay, it's not a very powerful stimulant compared to the hormones that are in your brain that are a powerful stimulant. But if you just wait 90 minutes, cortisol and adrenaline naturally drop. If you have your caffeine then, it actually boosts the cortisol and gives you a bigger bang for your buck. So you hydrate before you caffeinate. And about
18:24 the amount, somewhere between 15 and 20 ounces of water. If you can get that down in the first hour and a half that you're awake. What's that in? English terms. Oh, I don't know what that is. We'll have to look it up. Is it one cup? Is it two cups? Oh, I would say it's probably three to four cups of water. OK, well, that's a lot. Well, don't forget, you've lost a lot of water while you're sleeping. And you might have lost it the previous day because, let's say, you worked out or things like that. So let's get into these chronotypes then. Yeah. So let's start off with the lion. So lions are my early birds. You know you've got a lion in your midst when you get an email at 6 a.m., right? That's somebody who's been up for a while and who's got their brain kind of cooking. Lions like to make a list and go from step one to step two to step three every single day. They get a lot of confidence and they get a lot of pleasure following this list. But if I'm honest
19:12 with you, being a lion isn't all it's cracked up to be because dinner and a movie is out there. They've been up since like 4.30, 5 o'clock in the morning, right? They don't want to go see a concert late at night. They want to go to bed at like 8.30, 9 o'clock. So when you're looking at lions or what I, early birds, what I call lions, they've got some very interesting characteristics. They make up between 10 and 15% of the population. From a biological characteristic standpoint, their melatonin stops early and their cortisol starts. early. So their melatonin stops at about 4.30, 5 o'clock in the morning, and that's when cortisol starts, and that's the reason why they wake up so early. What sort of window do the lions wake up in? So it's interesting because I've got some lions who are kind of extreme, like they're getting up at 4.30 in the morning, which is not really probably the best idea. But generally speaking, my lions get up right around 5, 5.15 up until about
20:02 6, 6.30. They are definitely my early risers. They have a small breakfast. They don't like to eat a lot of food early in the morning time because a lot of these people like to go work out fairly quickly after they've woken up, which is very different than some of my other chronotypes. My night Owls don't like to work out in the morning. They don't like to do anything in the morning. So my lions like to work out early in the morning, a light breakfast, and also their best work window is usually somewhere between like 9.30 and 11.30. Like that's when all the good stuff gets done. Like when they have, if they'd have to get details or they have to do brainstorming or things like that, that's really kind of where a lot of the magic happens for them. By about two o'clock in the afternoon, there's not a lot of stuff left inside the lion to be able to do things. do a lot of good things. That's when I have Lions do more physical activities that don't require a lot of cognition. So maybe you go for an
20:50 afternoon walk, or maybe you're meeting with your folks that may not be really detail-oriented, but more process-oriented in the afternoon. Admin and stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I actually had one fellow, chronotype his entire company, and then move meetings based on who was going to be in the meeting. Like, he had all the early birds, and he had meeting at 8 o'clock in the morning, and then all the night owls, he had a meeting at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. He said it was amazing. He said it worked out really, really well. Wow. What's the next one? So, the next one is the bear. So, bears are representative of people that are in between early birds and night owls, right? So, bears are the best. Honestly, dude, I wish I was a bear, because the whole schedule of life works on a bear's schedule. Nine to five is perfect for a bear. And they make up between 50 and 55% of
21:38 the population. So literally one out of two people is a bear. And when's their peak work time? So their peak work time has a tendency to be sort of in the noon to two o'clock range. They're a little bit later than what you would see at the line. Some of them I think can actually be better at 11. It's kind of interesting. We've had almost 3 million people take the quiz. And we've discovered that inside of bears, there appear to be early bears and later bears. So there are people who fall into that category but like to get up a little bit earlier. So for them, their productivity window is probably 10, 30, 11. But for the later bears, it's more like 11, 30. and then it's about a two hour window after that. For people listening, on screen at the moment is a grid showing you the different chronotypes, the wake times, the peak work window, and the sort of afternoon slump time. What's the next chronotype? So the next chronotype is me, the
22:27 wolf. I think I'm a wolf. You might be a wolf. As much as I love lions. I get it. I get it. Well, you might be. Hey, look, join me. It'd be great. So wolves represent the night owls, right? And so wolves are my artists. my actors, my creatives. If you know a creative, when do they get their biggest idea? It's not two o'clock in the afternoon, it's two o'clock in the morning. Wolves are my highest risk takers. I know that probably you fall into that category as well. Wolves are the folks that show up at the party at 11 o'clock at night, but they stay till two o'clock in the morning and they help you clean up. And they hate mornings more than anything. So should we talk about dolphins? What's the next one, yeah. Dolphins. this is the category that you fell into. So let's talk about who are the dolphins and what does this actually represent? So dolphins are usually highly intelligent. They're usually people who are fast talking, well read. These
23:18 are people who are a lot like a lion in terms of they like to get up. They crave longer bouts of sleep, but unfortunately their body just doesn't have a long sleep drive. And so they get really frustrated a lot of times. Also, I think they have just a teeny bit of anxiety behind them. So a lot of them, for example, the details really matter to a dolphin, right? Versus other people where details might not matter nearly as much. I think a lot of my dolphins have got just a little bit of obsessive compulsive disorder. So they're kind of focused in on the different things. Like if I ask a dolphin to do a project, generally speaking, they're never finished with it until I say, can you just give me the project back now? Because they're always working on a little detail here or working on a detail there. But dolphins are my favorite. They're the people that I actually wrote the book for. They're the ones that I enjoy working with the most because
24:06 they're actually the easiest to work with because once I explain to them how their hormones can be up and down and sideways, it starts to make a lot more sense for them. And for anyone trying to figure out which one of these they are, where do they go to do the test and how long does it take? Yeah, you can go to my website. chronoquiz.com. And it takes about three, four minutes. It's not very long at all. It's going to ask you a bunch of questions about your sleep, about timing, things like that. Okay, I'll put that in the description. So after you finish listening, you can all go take it. And let me know your thoughts in the comment section as well. So once you figure out what your chronotype is, come back to the episode and let me know below. Please. And does my sleep change with age, Michael? It does. Absolutely. So do my... Do my chronotypes change with age? They do, actually. So believe it or not, you've gone through all the chronotypes already. When you're a nitty-bitty baby, you're a lion. You go to bed
24:55 really early, you wake up really early, right? Then you're a toddler, right? In like grammar school, you're a bear. You're going to bed around 7.30, you're waking up around 7.30. Then adolescence hits, right? What do you want to do? Stay up until midnight and sleep until two, right? You become a wolf. Then at about 23, 24, your chronotype has a tendency to set, into one of those three or four things. And then you stay there for an extended period of time, like 25, 30 years, until you hit my age. So I'm going to be 58 soon. And right when you hit in the mid-50s, what we see is melatonin production can either slow down or get earlier. So as an example, if your parents are still alive and you said, hey, mom, dad, I want to go for dinner, what time would they want to go for dinner? Ali. Right. Four o'clock in the afternoon, 4.30 in the afternoon. You're
25:40 like, what is wrong with you, mom? What's going on? That's her chronotype is going backwards. And your sleep changes over the course of time. To be clear, once you hit like age probably 50, 45 or 50, we start to see a slowdown in production of melatonin. We also see an increase in what are called EEG arousals. So things that break up your sleep and make it so it's not so continuous. That can be problematic as well. So there's a lot of things that can happen as you age. So do I start sleeping less as I get older? You start sleeping a poor quality. I'm not convinced that it's always less. And is that going to make me grumpy? Yes, it is. Really? Absolutely. Poor quality sleep is, I would argue, is much worse than poor quantity sleep. I would rather I've got somebody who got five hours of really great sleep versus seven hours of really light crappy sleep every
26:25 time. Does that mean that as I get older, I'm going to be more grumpy? It depends on the quality of your sleep. So what I can teach you is how to not get poor quality sleep as you age. Perfect example. A lot of Folks who are a little bit on the older side are used to drinking coffee late in the day. Well, if you change that habit, then you don't have as many sleep problems. And I shouldn't be having coffee late in the day at all. Probably you want to stop by about 2 p.m., right? So if you stop around 2 p.m., the half-life of caffeine is between six and eight hours. So eight hours later is roughly 10, which is roughly when people are kind of wanting to go to sleep. So I would say that that would probably be the time to do it. I think about my siblings and us all being woken up for school, and I think about my performance in school, and Of all my siblings, there's four of us, I was the one that always struggled with being woken up in the morning,
27:12 in part because I'd gone to bed later, but then I was also the one that struggled with school the most. Yeah, that characteristic of a wolf, characteristic of this night person. If I'm honest with you, dude, most kids should not be waking up at the time they're waking up to go to school, right? I mean, so many kids are waking up at 5.30, 6 o'clock in the morning. They have an hour-long bus ride, then they get there. And if you're an adolescent, I don't think anything could be worse, right? So we have to really start to try to be a little bit more thoughtful and look at like, what are some of the activities that kids are doing? How can we get them to maybe take naps during the day if they need them? Athletic performance can depend on sleep. Academic performance can depend on sleep. It's unbelievable, all the different things. Yes. Has there ever been any research done? There has. Different chronotypes academic performance. There has been actually. They have been, they labeled
28:01 it directly as chronotypes, but they've looked at it based on age range. And we know that, for example, here in the United States, there's a big push to change school start times. So that way high schoolers aren't starting at seven o'clock in the morning because high schools shouldn't be starting at seven o'clock. Preschoolers should be starting at seven o'clock in the morning because their body naturally wakes up at that time. So we've actually seen, there was a great study that was done at the University of Minnesota that discovered that when they just had people come in one hour later from their first period, they've improved by one full letter grade. Meaning they went from being C students to being B students or from B students to A students merely by changing the timing of their first class. So that should give you pretty good insight as to sort of These big areas, and all children are vulnerable to this.
28:51 I'm not telling you anything that's new. These are studies that have been going on for quite a while. And there's actually a whole movement trying to get school start times to slow down now. Looking at some of the research here, it says research consistently shows that morning types, which is the- Lion. The Lion, earn higher grades, not due to higher IQ, but because exams are scheduled during their peak alertness windows. You got it. That's crazy. Sometimes wolves turn out to be much smarter, but because they can't perform at those early times, nobody knows. Remember, wolves are my creatives. Where do you think some of these great creative innovations and ideas come from in the tech world, right? These are the wolves that are out there that are up late at night coding and trying to figure out what's going on. It's pretty cool when you think about it. And there's this thing called the synchronous Synchrony effect from a
29:40 study in 2020 where nearly 800 students found a clear synchrony effect. Students performed significantly better when their class schedule matched their chronotype. Exactly. Those morning people dominated in morning classes, and the owls, or the wolves, often caught up and outperformed the morning people when tested in the afternoon or evening. Exactly. It's pretty fascinating. Now think about it like this. Could you imagine a school system where if we identified children's chronotypes during their particular age range, and then we changed the testing so that they got tested when they're at their peak hours? Yeah. They'd actually do better. People don't know this, but I never do podcasts in the morning morning. I don't blame you. You shouldn't. Yeah. It's not your time. Yeah. Right? Like you have a very specific subscribe time that I think works well for you. So I think you should abide
30:27 by that. Duration of sleep. There's lots of conversation around how long you're supposed to sleep for. What's the truth here? Eight hours is a myth. Let's be fair. We came up with that from the 30s. There was a great study at Stanford that came up with eight hours and 13 minutes plus or minus, and that's kind of where we came up with that as an idea. The truth of the matter is somewhere between seven and nine hours really is kind of the amount that people should be looking for. But some people don't have that luxury. Some people don't have that much time that they can put towards sleep. And so they get a little bit less sleep. But for the lower level limit, I don't like anybody getting less than six hours. When somebody gets less than six hours sleep, their driving is off. And so you can't operate machinery. So if you're driving to work or, God forbid, carpooling your kids to school, and you only got less than six hours of sleep on
31:15 board, it's probably not going to go well. We do have to stop here and talk about parents because, listen, you're either a parent now, you might be someday. Absolutely. Maybe you won't be For those, I've just got a huge amount of respect for parents because, you know, I'm not a parent yet. I hope I will become one. But when I see what my brother, who has three kids under the age of seven now. How much sleep has he lost? A lot. And his wife as well. But... You must get parents coming to you all the time being like, what the hell do I do? Like, I've got to wake up when the kids wake up, but it's destroying my relationship, my marriage, my sex, whatever it might be. Yeah. So parenting children and sleep are difficult to coexist, but they're not impossible. It really has to do with discipline and kind of thinking through some ideas for yourself.
32:03 So I have a 23-year-old son and a 22-year-old daughter, so I'm a little bit out of the realm of having to deal with them every day. But I was, like I said before, I was in charge of mornings at our house waking them up, and it's a lot, right? And so the very first thing that I try to explain to parents, especially if they have a child who has an irregular sleep pattern and is really causing chaos for the rest, like one child who won't go to sleep and it's keeping the whole house up, first thing you wanna do, educate the kid. A lot of kids don't know what they're doing is causing a lot of problems. They're just kids. They're just hanging out, having fun. They've got energy. They want to be awake. So you want to educate them and say, hey, now is a particular time to wind down. This is where your body recovers. This is how you get to do sports the next day or theater the next day or whatever your computers, whatever your thing is, you can tie it to sleep and performance pretty
32:54 easily. And so getting them to understand that becomes very, very critical. Number two is have some guidelines, right? Have bedtime. have wake-up times, and follow them as quickly, as closely as you can. For parents, oftentimes what I try to tell them to do is like, look, after your child goes to bed, if you've got a child that has problems for sleeping, take turns. Do what I call the on-call method. So as a doctor, sometimes, you know, you get a call in the middle of the night because you're covering patients at the hospital for your buddy or something like that. You're on call. So when you've got two people who are managing one child, One person handles Monday night, Wednesday night, Friday night. The other one handles Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. You flip a coin for Sunday. So if the kid wakes up at two o'clock in the morning, both parents aren't awake. One parent has that responsibility. The other one can
33:40 keep their eyes closed and go to sleep. Interesting study was done looking at men and women in bed when a child cries. So women take care of the child, whereas men lie there and fake sleeping in order to be able to stay asleep. Right. That's problematic. How did they know in the study that they were fake sleeping? Because they asked the men afterwards, what were you doing? And they all said they woke up and they were faking it. It's pretty crazy when you think about it. But this is a big deal for parents, right? A lot of parents turn to me and they're like, this is killing our marriage. Like we haven't had sex in three years because we've got a child who maybe the child has special needs or maybe the child doesn't have special needs, but has other things going on, or maybe it's just normal development and they're worried about it. And so what I like to sit down with parents and do is number one, let's figure out when your kid
34:27 needs to sleep and let's set some guidelines and rules. But number two, let's do the same for you. But a lot of parents, when they're super stressed out, one of the first things they do, grab a glass of wine. Wine's about the worst thing you could possibly do for sleep, to be fair. Now, I'm gonna teach people how you can still have a glass or two of alcohol and not completely destroy your sleep, but I wanna be very clear about something. If you're using alcohol as a stress relief tool at night before bed, it's messing up your sleep probably pretty bad. You might be asleep, but the quality of your sleep is- Is shit. It's awful, right? And interestingly enough, during the one stage of sleep that alcohol knocks out, which is stage three and four sleep, what's the most interesting is that during that particular stage of sleep, there's something called the glymphatic system that comes in and scoops out these proteins that have a tendency to accumulate in your brain. And when proteins
35:15 accumulate in your brain, they wrap around the nerves and that's called Alzheimer's disease. So stage four sleep is imperative to avoid Alzheimer's disease. And when you drink alcohol, you destroy stage four sleep. So, it would be great if nobody drank alcohol, but I'm not so stupid as to think that. Plus, I like bourbon, I like whiskey, I enjoy a glass of champagne every once in a while. So, how can you successfully still drink alcohol and still get a decent night's sleep? I'm gonna give you a quick one, right? Let's say you're having dinner at 6.30. Have your first glass of wine, then have a glass of water, right? Then your second glass of wine starts at, let's say, almost seven o'clock, right? Then you have your second glass of water, then you stop everything by 7.30, you wait three hours, which would be 10.30, and then you can go to bed. Why the water? Why the weight? So the water
36:03 helps wash it through the system, also fills your stomach up so you don't have too much— so you've got more fluid in there, so that way you don't drink extra wine. And it makes you have to pee, which flushes the system out as well. The three hours— And it hydrates you? It does. Okay. Absolutely. Because remember, wine pulls both magnesium and most water out of your system because it makes you have to go pee. Helps with the hangover? So there's a couple of different things that I would say. Number one, this definitely helps with the hangover because you've got water going in. For a lot of my patients, what I tell them is the very last thing that you could do is have a little bit of coconut water. So coconut water is loaded with zinc, magnesium, and vitamin B, and those are some of the things that get pulled out of your system when you're drinking. By the way, did you know that there are happy hours specific to your chronotype? Didn't know that,
36:48 no. Yeah, so it's kind of interesting. So here's what's cool about it is your body produces something called alcohol dehydrogenase, which is how you metabolize alcohol, but it does it at a particular time, and the time is different for each chronotype. So your body is most efficient at drinking between basically the hours of four and eight happy hour, as a lot of people know it. And how do you think about what time you eat at nighttime? Such a great question. Three hours before bed, you want to stop fluids, including alcohol and food. You want to just stop it all three hours before bed. Why three hours? So it takes your body about that level of time to, number one, digest, clear all the food, and then have all the mechanisms that are working towards digestion now be able to be refocused onto the recovery process
37:35 of sleep. However, I will tell you that there's this, I've seen a couple people, and there are people out there that are claiming that if they stop eating at 11 o'clock in the morning, that it helps their sleep dramatically at night. And it turns out it has to do with your heart rate. So one of the big metrics that is very important that all of our viewers and listeners wanna know is you need a heart rate of 60 or below in order to enter into a state of unconsciousness. And when you've got food in your stomach, your heart rate is up. That tracks. So, right? So the longer you can wait, the lower your heart rate is, the easier it gets into sleep. And so when we're talking about, so a great example, let's get back to parents for a second, right? You feed your kids at an earlier time, and then what do you do? Oh, then you go back and have dinner with your spouse, right? Maybe that's not the best idea because
38:22 you're having dinner so late. Maybe you should have dinner with your kids, right? And enjoy that time with them and eat earlier because that gives you more space later on to be able to relax and go to bed. I said that tracks because I remember, I've told this story once or twice before. I remember when I was doing some podcasts over here in LA, and we had Seth Rogen on. Sure. And the day before in the hotel, before I lived here, I had a cookie from the mini bar. I'll get over a minute. I had the cookie. And then I went to bed pretty quickly. Oh God. We were just terrible. And I was looking at my whoop the next day. Yeah. Hashtag ad. And my heart rate was like 75 or 80 for the first two to three hours after I got into bed. Isn't that crazy? And I woke up feeling like hell. Terrible day the next day.
39:08 I was terrible during the conversation. And I looked at my whoop and go, oh my God, it was that cookie. It put my heart rate high. So also on top of that is sugar. Yeah, I mean, fuck me. Right? So sugar actually slows production of melatonin. Remember, melatonin is kind of the key that starts the engine. Yeah, the key that starts the engine for sleep. So is there anything else that I can do to make sure my heart rate is low as I get into bed? Absolutely. Meditate. Okay. Breath work. All kinds of things. Brings my heart rate down. Yeah, absolutely. So... What a lot of people don't realize is just because we're breathing doesn't mean we're actually breathing in a way, shape, and form that can be helpful for us for sleep. So in my most recent book, Sleep, Drink, Breathe, I talk a lot about breath work and what is it and how does it work for you. But I'd love to teach you my favorite form of breath work and meditation that
39:56 I think you'll get a lot out of. And I do this before bed? Exactly. And you can, by the way, you can do it in the middle of the night if you wake up as well. So let's talk about how to fall asleep and do some relaxation exercises for that. And then I'm gonna give you some different ones for in the middle of the night. So let's talk at the beginning of the night. So number one, you need runway to land the plane. Okay, so many people think they're just waiting for their head to be bobbing in front of the TV and then they go brush their teeth and they get in bed and then all of a sudden they're wide awake and they don't know what's going on, right? So you need time for your system to shut down. It's not an on-off switch. It's more like slowly pulling your foot off the gas and slowly putting your foot on the brake. There's a process. It should take you about 12 to 15 minutes to actually fall asleep, okay? So number one, what I ask people to do is
40:42 take the last hour before bed and chop it up into three 20-minute segments, right? So let's say you're going to bed at 11. starting at 10 o'clock, and by the way, set an alarm on your phone to tell you that it's 10 o'clock because it's really easy to slide by your bedtime, and then all of a sudden it's like all bets are off. So set the alarm, 20 minutes for shit you just gotta do. So in our house, it used to be getting backpacks together for school, for our kids, finding sports equipment, maybe laying out my stuff for work the next day or getting the last email sent, something like that. 20 minutes for hygiene, right? brush your teeth, wash your face, maybe take a shower or something along those lines. And then 20 minutes for some form of meditation, relaxation, prayer. I don't care what you do, but it has to be something that's calming to get you there, okay? So one of my favorite techniques to do is meditation. Now, I'm gonna
41:32 be honest with you, I'm a terrible meditator. I have never been able to do it. I've actually gotten kicked out of meditation retreats, because I'm the guy that's like, what's going on? Like, am I doing it right? You know, I'm kind of that person. And so I was told about this tool called a Muse headband. We have one right here. So this is my personal Muse. I actually brought it from home. And you'll notice on the inside there are sensors and there are sensors along the earpiece here. And so what happens is, is you wear it on your head, right? And it's measuring your brain waves. And so when we're, yeah, check it out. And so when we're doing it and we're measuring brain waves, yep, exactly. And that goes on the back part. Yeah, there you go. So what's cool about this is it's attached to an app. And then while it's measuring your brain waves, you're listening to a particular music. It could be a guided meditation. It could be any of those
42:19 things. And while you're doing this, the volume gets lower. And then you know you're getting closer to a meditative state. The volume comes down when? On the app, when your brainwave starts to relax. So you're immediately getting feedback. We can try it if you want. But it's pretty interesting. And then when you get to the alpha state, little birds start chirping. The alpha state. Yeah, the alpha state is when your eyes are closed and you're at the most relaxed state of your brainwaves. It's called the alpha state. And that's really what people are trying to get to for meditation. And are you affiliated with this company anyway? I am not. And how much does it cost? I think it's around $275, I think is the headband. Okay, interesting. It's pretty fascinating. I've been pretty impressed with them. So that's meditation. Mm-hmm. You talked about breath work as well before? Yeah, let's talk about it. So one of the
43:06 other things that I do is I do something, well, this isn't breath work. This is called progressive muscle relaxation. So this is where you tense and relax muscles, starting from your feet and going all the way up your body. And as you tense and relax the muscles, you feel that relaxation from releasing that tension, and it helps you fall asleep. Actually, you know what I can do is I can send you an audio file that has me walking through progressive muscle relaxation that we can make available for everybody if you want. free. It's no big deal. Amazing. I'll put that in the description below as well. Yeah, people will really dig it. I think they'll really enjoy it. So that's another thing that we do. But now let's talk about the middle of the night, right? So by the way, do you have this as an issue? Has this happened to you before? It happens sometimes. And it's typically when like my sleep is somewhat disordered or disruptive or when there's really something on my
43:53 mind. Yes. So that that precipitory anxiety, like before flight. Like if I have an eight o'clock in the morning flight, like I sleep like shit the night before because I'm constantly worried about that, right? But a lot of times what people do normally is they just wake up in the middle of the night and they can't return to sleep and they're really not sure why. So number one, there's biology involved. So your core body temperature rises, rises, rises, and when it hits a peak, it drops. That drop is then a signal to your brain to release melatonin, right? Again, the key that starts the engine for sleep. However, your core body temperature continues to drop, drop, drop. By the way, this is the reason why we tell people you want to sleep in the cool, not the warm environment. Because again, your core body temperature is dropping. If it's too hot, your core body temperature can't go down and you can't get to sleep. Which tracks with evolution. Exactly. So here's where it gets interesting,
44:39 is it keeps going, going, going. And then at some point in time, your body has to heat up. And if it doesn't heat up, you go hypothermic. Guess what time that is? Between one and three o'clock in the morning. Oh, your body starts heating up at one, one and three o'clock. Every single person's body on earth does this. Everybody on earth wakes up between one and three o'clock in the morning. However, most people burp, roll over, get comfortable, and fall back asleep in 30 seconds. However, there's a select group of people who end up being my patients who don't have that, and herein lies the problem. So here are the steps you want to take in the middle of the night to be able to solve this issue. So number one, don't go pee. I know, I know, I know. People are like, what? What are you talking about, Michael? So here's what ends up happening is when people wake up in the middle of the night, they say to themselves, well, I'm up, I
45:26 might as well go pee, right? Here's the problem. Remember, I told you the big metric was in order to enter into a state of unconsciousness, you need a heart rate of 60 or below, right? What do you think happens to your heart rate? You go from a lying position to a seated position to a standing position, you walk across the room, your heart rate goes straight up. So what we wanna do is keep your heart rate down. So if you don't really have to go to the bathroom, don't go to the bathroom. 75% of people sleep on their sides and they kind of squanch up, which means they're putting pressure on their bladder. So my guess is, is that most of those people, if all you did was when you woke up is lie and get on your back for about 25 seconds and see if you still need to pee. If you don't need to pee, stay in bed and keep your heart rate down. If you need to pee, please go pee, right? If you're gonna go to the bathroom, Have a strategically placed night light along the
46:11 way so you don't have to flip on the light in the water closet because if you do that, you just told your brain it's morning and it stops producing melatonin. But let's say you don't have to pee. The second thing, don't look at your phone. Now, this turns out to be very difficult for 99% of the people out there because the first thing they do is they grab their phone and they head to the bathroom, right? And they're either checking emails, looking at Facebook or Twitter or whatever social media they're on. Or just trying to figure out what time it is. And that's where the problem is, is as soon as you see the time, you instantly do the mental math and now you're pissed off, right? It's 3.30 in the morning, I gotta get up at six, sleep, sleep, sleep. And you try to force your brain to sleep. Dude, in the history of time, nobody has been able to force their brain to sleep, okay? Because your heart rate's going in the wrong
46:57 way, right? It needs to be coming down. So if you can, don't look at the clock. All right, so you haven't peed, you haven't looked at the clock, but you're still awake and nothing's going on. Here's where the breathing technique comes in. It's called four, seven, eight breathing. I did not develop this technique. It was developed by Dr. Andrew Wild, Harvard trained natural doctor, super smart dude. And he did it for the military to teach them how to lower their heart rate during stressful situations. We use it because it helps lower our heart rate past 60 and it's super simple. I'm gonna get you to try it. So go ahead and sit up straight, okay? And so all you're gonna do is breathe in for a count of four. You're gonna hold for a count of seven and you're gonna breathe out for a count of eight, and I'm gonna walk you through it. I want you to have your eyes closed, and what I also want you to do, you're gonna go in through the nose, out through the mouth, and then what I also want you to do
47:43 is picture the number in your head. So when I say breathe in two, three, four, you should picture the two, the three, the four in your mind's eye, okay? With my eyes closed? With your eyes closed. You ready? Yep. Breathe in two, three, four, hold. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, push. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Good. You don't want to get through about 20 cycles of that. It's incredibly relaxing. I actually did it before I came out here to do the pod because it helps lower my heart rate and gets me centered. It's pretty remarkable. Now, there's some problems with the technique. Number one, Sometimes it's hard to hold for
48:30 seven and sometimes it's really hard to push for eight. So I tell people you can do this four, five, six, four, six, seven, or four, seven, eight. So just work your way up to it, right? If it's too hard to hold your breath for seven seconds or it's too hard to push your breath for eight, you can do a little bit less just while you're getting used to it. And then the other big thing is, it's hard to figure out where the 20 cycles is, because you need to get to 20 cycles of this. So what I have people do is take their hands and make light fists while they're doing this. And when they do one cycle, they put out a finger. Another cycle, put out a finger. And before you know it, you got 10, and when you bring it back, you've done 20 cycles. It's funny, I just did two and I started yawning. I know. I just saw that. I'm telling you, dude, this thing works, right? And so I have people do this technique. Here's the best part, is it avoids monkey mind, right?
49:16 So what is monkey mind? Monkey mind is I'm thinking about stuff that I have no business thinking about in the middle of the night for absolutely no reason. Like what's on the grocery list or what did I say to my spouse or did that podcast go okay or any of the things that might be floating through your head. You cannot count and worry at the same time. And why does it work? What's going on in my physiology? You're distracting the brain from the thing that's stressing you out, and it's lowering your heart rate, and then the natural sleep process comes in after it. So all these are our distraction techniques, to be clear. Now, there's several of them out there. One of the other ones I use for some of my patients is I tell them, hey, count backwards from 300 by threes. It's mathematically so complicated you can't think of anything else, and it's so damn
50:02 boring, you're out like a light. On that point of distractions, a lot of people go to bed listening to podcasts or movies. Jack was just saying that he needs to listen to something to fall asleep. I'm the same. I listen to like serial killer stuff, which is- That's interesting. Don't judge me. Wait till we get to the dreams part of the podcast. I can't wait to hear what you dream about. I think I always try and figure out why it is. My sister's the same. My sister Amanda, and she listens to serial killer stuff to fall asleep. I think it's because, this is just hypothesis, my mom, would always ask me to put on forensic files, which is this like serial murder documentary thing. When we were younger, because she couldn't use the remote. So my mom would say, she'd pass me the remote, she'd put on forensic files, and I'd like put on the number for her. And so that was always playing in our house at that time. And we all had TVs
50:51 in our bedroom that just mirrored what was playing downstairs. Of course. So when I got into bed, I'd watch forensic files and I'd fall asleep. This explains a lot about you. I know, right? When you say that to people, they think you're... So let me tell you what it's like in my house. And actually, you and I have a commonality. So in my house, we have a big screen TV. It's on all night long. In which room? In my bedroom. Okay. Okay. When I met my wife, she said to me, Michael, if you ever happen to spend the night, I want to let you know that I sleep with the television on. I said, don't worry about that, Lauren. I'm going to be a sleep doctor. I'm going to fix that. We met when I was 30. So I've known her for quite a while. And you ever tried to change something in your bed? Good luck. Good luck. So I took the TV out. She said, if you ever want to come back in here again, I suggest you put the TV back in. And then I studied her
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