Barbell Shrugged - 113- Increase Testosterone Naturally w/ Sleep

Episode Date: April 16, 2014

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we interview Doc Parsley, and we talk about sleep, testosterone, and how to optimize your hormones. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bletzer here with Doug Larson. We have traveled to Austin, Texas to attend the Paleo FX conference and to grab speakers, experts in their field, and talk to them about what they know.

Right now we have in front of us Dr. Kirk Parsley. He is, from what I understand, so wrong fitness. If you follow that guy on Twitter or Instagram, he introduced me to Dr. Parsley here. And he said he is an expert on sleep. And you're a former Navy SEAL, so you kind of have a unique perspective on sleep deprivation and burnout and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So, can you give us a little bit of your background like just a short bio yeah uh so starting back at the beginning so i obviously like we talked about i

was a i was a former seal enlisted seal um did that up in until about 94 and then decided to get out and move on and do other things. Eventually decided to become a doctor. Originally I was planning on doing something like physical therapy or maybe athletic training or something. I just knew, always kind of had a passion for performance, human performance know athleticism and anatomy and physiology and all that shit was cool to me so uh started uh heading down that route became decided to become a doctor i was married already had kids already and so uh going back into the the military wasn't the most attractive idea to me because uh well you've been in the military you know like there's there's some downsides to that uh but the idea of like them paying me to go to medical school

and having no debt uh was was pretty attractive and i said all right i'll like i'll just owe him like eight years of my life so i'll go back to the teams and be their doc and everything will be cool yeah um so that so that's what i did and the whole time I was in college, I worked at San Diego Sports Medicine Center, which is like the biggest sports medicine center down there. And, you know, we had like every kind of health care professional there, this imaginable. So I really got to sort of figure out what I wanted to do. Sports medicine seemed really cool. Orthopedic surgery seemed even cooler. So I'm like, that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to be an orthopod, right? So I went to the military's medical school, which is called USHA. It's just the abbreviation in uniformed services. University of the Health Sciences, just flows off, rolls off your tongue, right? Easy thing to say. Most things in the military do. Yeah, like all these acronyms in the military.

You can't be a military organization without a ridiculous acronym. So I did that, and then the way the military, or not all branches, but primarily the Navy works, is that you do your first year of residency, your internship year, they call it, and then you have to go out into the fleet and be a regular doctor. And that's the way they can keep general practitioners

in the military, right? Because everybody specializes, everybody wants to specialize. So you can just get thrown out there wherever the hell they want to send you, and that's a shorter gig. Or you can choose to do dive medicine, or you can choose get thrown out there wherever the hell they want to send you, and that's a shorter gig. Or you can choose to do dive medicine, or you can choose to do flight surgery, and then you go to flight school if you're a flight surgeon.

And if you want to do dive medicine, you go through dive school and some specialized hyperbaric training and all this type of stuff, which is what was needed to go back to the SEALs, which was obviously the route that I was going to do. So I went back there. go back to the seals um which was obviously the route that i was going to do so yeah uh i went back there uh i i did the the dmo training is what they call it umo training uh actually didn't end up going back to the seal teams initially i went to a submarine rescue unit did that for a couple years and then went to the teams got there at like the perfect time right like i still was set on being an orthopedic

surgeon um and got there at the perfect time to build the west coast first uh sports medicine center like you oh cool you would never believe this you know seals have been around for 50 years you know we never had a nutritionist we never had a strength and conditioning coach we never had like physical therapists like we had one athletic trainer there. That's shocking. It was, it was, it was a great dude, but he's literally working out of a trailer. Like we had a trailer that he worked out of. So we, so I perfect timing, it wasn't my initiative, but I got put in charge of it. And I, you know, and I, and I helped, uh, I get to be a big contributor to building this great program that we called the Tactical Athlete Program. And there's a sports medicine component and a performance component where you may be familiar with guys like Josh Everett.

So he's the sports medicine, or he's the performance guy of it, right? So there's a gym. They program a lot of their workouts out there. Yeah, so there's a gym component of this program. And then's a sports medicine program and there's what we call this bridge which was like right in the middle so you rehab them they're not quite ready to go back you do this bridge where they're kind of in between and then they send them to the performance and so it's this great initiative and like i give props to all the guys who developed it like it was brilliant perfect uh the perfect idea for treating seals like professional athletes

right yeah the problem was that in building the center we hired more athletic trainers and physical therapists had ortho rounds coming through at sports med docs coming through uh had these athletic trainers had or had these uh strength and conditioning coaches had nutritionists had exercise physiologists and now i was the dumbest sports medicine guy around at this point, right? Like I, I, now I have the least training of anybody here. Um, well then you should be in charge. Yeah. So I was in charge. So I managed it. Right. And so what happened is, uh, you know, the guys from my genre of, uh, seals and maybe a little younger than me, they would come, they'd come to the sports medicine center to do their rehab, but then they'd come in, they'd come in my

room, they'd come in my office, shut the door and say, all right, dude, let me tell you what's really going on with me, right? You know, the military, any kind of specialized training, any kind of specialized job, if you don't have, if you're not medically cleared then you you know you lose your job for a while right so these guys don't want to admit to a ton of the stuff that's going on there can't be on certain medications they can't right and then they don't want to be uh you know the seal culture you don't want to be perceived as any weakness and all this so guys would come and they'd say like i'm suffering from all this stuff which is what all

of us think of when we think of people who over train right big surprise seals over train right so you run into sleep issues and run into motivation issues emotional issues anxiety issues body compositions exercise tolerance like chronic fatigue memory like all this all this shit but the one thing that really stood out to me when i was in the seal teams uh you know when we called uh motrin that was 800 milligram motrins that were like the orange the orange coated 800 milligram motrins we called it bud's candy or seals candy right because that fixed anything right like you like this broken motrin you know whatever you got herpes motrin like it didn't matter there you go take motrin so um when i got back to the seal teams what i

quickly realized is the the new candy was ambient right yeah and i'm like i'm like ambient i i i why is there so much ambient use going on right so i i uh i started looking around talking to some people you know there was some some uh you know anecdotal reports from like um uh you know officers over you know there were four deployers so like 85 of my staff is on ambient like this seems to be a problem right wow um and general medicine was okay with that, right? Like if you look at your standard Western practice, people can't sleep, you give them a drug to help them sleep. So I'm like, it's probably not the best idea. And it's probably related to some of these other complaints these guys are having. Right. But I literally learned nothing about sleep in medical school, nor did

any other doctor. Like if there was a class, was one class, and I slept through it or something. That's a couple things I've learned when I talk to doctors. There's a couple things they don't learn about. One is sleep, and the other one is they don't learn about nutrition either. Yeah, absolutely. You might learn about what vitamins do in the body, but you don't learn like- Yeah, well, you learn the biochemistry of that, but you don't learn the application of it. It was ridiculous, right?

And, you know, I had always educated myself on that. So I was okay with nutrition already. I've always sort of followed that scene. But the sleep, I just said, well, shit, I literally know nothing about sleep. Like, I have no idea, right? So let me pull out the medical literature and start seeing what all right what what's the standard of care what do you do about sleep how do you diagnose sleep disorder not we're not talking about sleep disorders really right we're talking about guys that don't sleep

well uh which is different than say something like obstructive sleep apnea or restless leg syndrome and this is the type of things that medicine deals with it's disease-based these guys don't have disease it's's suboptimal performance, right? Right, right. Suboptimal sleep. I'd imagine they want to sleep. Are they just too busy to sleep? Is that the problem?

So there's a multitude of things going on. So this is how the whole thing unraveled for me. So I look through all this medical literature. It's like the first thing they say is, well, you teach your patient to relax. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's good. Hey, hey, hey, relax hey hey relax dude yeah just relax you'll be fine uh don't worry about like you know going to combat people shooting at you all that just relax just you know loosen your muscles when you do that it'll be fine um so it's like teach

teach them to relax if that doesn't work then uh you know you do a little bit of sleep hygiene stuff which is like you know tell them to go to bed at the same time and donate donate a lot of carbohydrates before you go to bed and some basic kind of crap like that. They don't really know what they're talking about. And then you start giving them drugs, right? First, you give them sedatives. If that doesn't work, you give them hypnotics. And if that doesn't work, then you give them antipsychotics, right? You essentially just drug these people into like submission and okay probably not the best idea to give a seal you know uh you know an antipsychotic and then

say hey take this machine gun and go out here and make some really good decisions during combat not right not a good idea so um and you know the other problem of course is that as a as a dive medical umo undersea medical officer so asAL physician, it was my job to say whether or not they were qualified, medically qualified to do their job. And most of that's beyond my control. It's not my assessment. It's, you know, big bureaucratic decisions. Here's the book. You've got to go through this checklist.

You've got to go see these five different docs, and they all get to sign off on you. Yeah, and if you're on this drug, that's disqualifying. If you have this problem, that's disqualifying right you have this problem that's disqualifying right so i can't even give these guys the drugs that they're telling me to give them if even if i wanted to go down that route so so is everyone kind of going away from prescription drugs at that point and they're all seeking something that's that's illegal or prescribed by their buddies no so they were actually getting ambient somehow ambient slipped through the cracks. I don't know how. They could get that

and that was not on the checklist of things that would disqualify you. It actually is on the checklist that would disqualify you, but for some reason that was completely overlooked. There's a category of drugs that they

call psychotropic. If it affects your psyche, it's a psychotropic medication, which is a disqualifying medication, unless you get a waiver or clearance for it. Ambien falls into that category, but for some reason they just said, well, you know, that's not really that. And so they just hand it out and it's no problem. So I started looking through this and going, well, how am I going to fix this? Well, the first thing I need to do is figure out what actually happens in order for us to sleep. Like what makes us go to sleep? I didn't have a good answer for that.

So I'm literally going back to very basic college-level physiology books and then working my way up. And then I started working with and consulting and training with functional and integrative medicine docs and all this stuff. And that was one of the really cool aspects of my job is that being a physician for the SEALs, kind of like a quasi celebrity status working with the SEALs for these docs, they were happy to help and they didn't consider me a competitor for their functional medicine practice because I'm in the military, so they'll share their information with me.

You're segregated from the general population. Yeah, we'll be happy to train you, right? So I started learning all this. I started learning about all the cascade of events. And then when you start understanding the physiology and what's supposed to happen, then you can go in and you can actually measure some serum and urine. You can even do performance testing, things that I didn't necessarily get into that. I would farm that stuff out.

But you can start looking at markers to say, you know, is this off on this guy? Is this a contributing factor? Things that people all heard about, like cortisol, right? Cortisol is a major regulator of alertness, right? Nephinephrine, norepinephrine. But interestingly enough, so are all of the androgenic hormones, right? So like testosterone is a huge player. And one of the things that we found with some research in the teams is that there's a great correlation. It's not quite a one-to-one correlation, but there is a great

correlation between total testosterone and total time in bed. But you go, whatever, they're seals, they're 28 years old. Of course, they have testosterone through the roof. So like, that's not the issue, right? But then when you actually test their testosterone, it's like, no, actually they have the testosterone of a 95-year-old guy 16 year old girl you have something in that range just the less you sleep the lower your testosterone yeah so so then i started digging in this i'm like oh you know looks like in deep sleep that's when you secrete testosterone that's when you secrete growth hormone right right um these are anabolic stuff uh and this allows you to recover and this changes your cognition and this changes your prefrontal cortex, your decision-making abilities.

This affects the chronic pain they're complaining about because of the inflammation that's occurring if you don't get adequate sleep. And then you start looking at what do sleep drugs do, right? So you look at the Z drugs, they call them, which are essentially, it's like Valium or something, but it works on a more specific receptor, right? But if you start looking at the sleep studies on these guys, not the studies themselves, but you convert that to something called a polysomnograph, which looks like this very linear kind of deal where it tells you what stages of sleep you're in

and how long you're in each stage. Yeah. Sleep drugs do not allow you to sleep. There's no sleep involved. You're unconscious when you're taking sleep drugs, right? So to sleep there's no sleep involved you're unconscious when you're when you're taking sleep drugs right so you lose your deep sleep your slow wave sleep cycle and that's unconscious and not recovering right from exercise whatever you're not producing that testosterone you're not producing that growth hormone right and there's probably some hormones

that we don't even know and there's a lot of hormones tied to those hormones right so there's all there's all sorts of stuff going on when you start looking at the sleep physiology um you know dan parties here and he like he's a neurobiologist who you know knows infinitely more than i do about uh the you know the neurotransmitter changes with sleep excuse me but um you know all the downstream effects of that is what i was really what i was really uh concentrating on but we know things like memory consolidation, actually your motor learning. So like if you, say if you do jujitsu or you box or you go shoot or something like that, that muscle memory that you learn, that happens when you're asleep. Right.

It doesn't happen during that day. It happens when you sleep that night. That's when you consolidate that. Kind of like when you train. Right. You don't get stronger when you're training. Right. Stronger when you're recovering.

So when you take a sleep drug, it looks, and you do a sleep study on that, people are unconscious. So if I hit you in the head with a baseball bat and you fell on the ground, nobody would go, oh, look, you fell asleep. Oh, Mike fell asleep right here. They'd be like, he's unconscious. And when we do a study on your brain, it would be like, yeah, he's unconscious. There's no sleep architecture there. Right. That's what happens with sleep drugs. Some of them, uh, I won't get into all the

details in there, but there's minimal, minimal stuff in there. So, uh, you know, all the good stuff is supposed to happen. All of the anabolic activity happens, uh, when you're in deep sleep. So what the metaphor that I use, or I guess the analogy that I use in, uh, in my lectures, if you look at the cortisol curve right um and you know that's a good representation sort of of what the adrenals are doing it's an easy hormone to measure that fall you know that follows or what are the adrenals doing what the adrenals do is they keep you alert in proportion to what's going on in your environment right so at the beginning of the day you're supposed to have elevated cortisol yes you wake up you have a boost and then yeah so cortisol is actually what's going on in your environment. So at the beginning of the day, you're supposed to have elevated cortisol.

You wake up, you have a boost, and then throughout the day. Yeah, so cortisol is actually what's supposed to wake you up. Right. Now our alarm clocks wake us up, but that's what should wake you up. Right. And if you wake up in the morning and you're laying around on your couch and you're reading a book, there's not a whole lot of adrenal hormones going out there, right? Like you have this basal level and this is normal. Then somebody kicks in your door with a machine gun and your freaking adrenal hormones go way up

because your environment now says you better be really alert. Yeah, I hate it when that happens. So now you're in fight or flight mode, right? So we know what happens in fight or flight mode. When you're in fight or flight mode, essentially your entire existence depends on this moment, right? So your body optimizes you, makes you superhuman, right? You're stronger, you're faster, you're more coordinated,

you have a higher pain threshold, like your lungs dilate, you're taking in tons of oxygen, your pupils dilate, you're taking in tons of peripheral vision, like all your glucose is being mobilized so that your limbs have plenty of energy, neuromuscular coordination is going up and like you are ready to fight or flee. What, but, so that's a great state. So why don't we run around like that all the time, right?

Like why, like why can't I just be all the time like that? Cause then I'd be like this, I'd be Superman, right? Like I'd be always faster, stronger, right? We can't do that because it's energy expensive. Like it takes away from other things. And what are you taking away from? Well, you're taking away from digestion. You're taking away from, right?

You're taking all the blood out of the core here, right? And you're sending that out to your limbs. You're shutting down regions of your brain so you'll be more impulsive. You don't want to be thinking when you're in fight or flight. You want to be completely impulsive, right? Completely reactionary. If you stop to think about it, you're probably going to die, right? You'd be dead, yeah. Yeah. So it doesn't matter if you can reproduce. It doesn't matter

if you can fight off infection. It doesn't matter if you can repair the damaged tendon. It doesn't matter if you can digest the food in your stomach. None of this stuff matters unless you get away from this situation. So all of that goes away. Now, when you're in deep sleep, it's exactly the opposite. You don't need to respond to anything in your environment. You don't need your lens. You don't need your eyes. You don't need a lot of respiratory volume. You don't need it. So it's exactly the opposite. So the exact opposite things happen. Your immune system is awesome while you're in deep sleep, right? You're repairing, you're restoring, you're fighting off infection, you're becoming anabolic, you're releasing growth hormone, you're releasing testosterone. You're doing all of these

things that are going to allow you to repair and be better. You come up into these other areas of sleep and a lot of the neurocognition stuff comes into play. You're categorizing emotional events that happen during the day. You're consolidating memories. You're putting things together. Like if you've ever taken a college course or something and gone to sleep not knowing something and wake up and the answer's in your head, right? You didn't learn anything. You consolidated some ideas.

So like staying up till 2 a.m. Yeah. And studying for a test that happens at 8 a.m probably not a great idea not a great idea probably better just go to sleep yeah exactly so uh so so what my guys were missing out on was all of this repair because they were taking ambien to sleep almost every night. Some of these guys were literally taking four or five Ambien and a couple of alcoholic drinks and only getting three hours of sleep and deciding, well, the solution to that is I'll go into the gym and I'll work out really hard and that'll make me super tired. And then I'll sleep better tomorrow night. And then you say, well, how long have you been trying that?

Well, you know, five years, six years, like probably not going to work. Maybe we should adjust the plan. Right. It hasn't worked yet. So you see this over and over again. And then you do the labs on these guys and they look like 85 year old guys with metabolic syndrome. Right. But military heavy bureaucracy, you know, very conservative. They're not, they're not ready to talk about hormonal treatment on 28 year old guys, right? We're, we're not going to let you go muck around with these guys hormones and they don't have hormonal disease, right? They don't have, you know, they don't have Addison's disease. They don't have Cushing's disease. they don't have hypogonadism like they don't have these disease technically they're just way way way suboptimal right so the safe way to talk about this was to talk about sleep gotcha so they would let me present on sleep they would let me lecture

talk to everybody about the sleep and it worked out great because it gave me a really conservative version of how to how do i optimize people right when i did the functional functional integrated medical stuff and anti-aging certification all the stuff they're just like boom give them the drugs and they'll they'll be better true but now they have to take the drugs for the rest of their life maybe not the best idea for a 30 year old guy say oh you know you're to have to take testosterone for the next 50 years. Like, let's try some other things first. So I, you know, I, I did these really extensive lab panels that, you know, actually pissed everybody off because they were too expensive and too robust and I needed to cut these down. And what was I doing? This is voodoo and all this type of stuff. But I found things like, so what I track now,

what's more important is free testosterone. Total testosterone really doesn't matter. I don't know sort of your population, how much people know about all that. So what's the difference between free testosterone and total? So your total testosterone is just essentially, we're testing,

we're finding every testosterone molecule that's within a certain volume of your blood, right? Right. And it's a density gig. So some of that testosterone, however, is bound, right? So it can be bound, what we call loosely bound to albumin, or it can be strongly bound, tightly bound to something called sex hormone binding globulin, which you may have heard of. Now it's irreversibly bound to sex hormone binding globulin so that means that testosterone will never be used it's going to go back to the liver it's going to be broken down it's going to be used to make something else right the loosely bound stuff can be mobilized under

certain conditions but the way testosterone works is it actually and this is true for all hormones right all pretty much well all cholesterol derived hormones is they just diffuse right through the cell wall and then they bind a protein inside the cell and they go into the nucleus of a cell and they change the dna expression and an mrna comes out and then that cell changes what it does like it produces more proteins or produces more receptors it makes more energy like whatever whatever that hormone does that's what happens right it's mainly, this is what we call anabolic, is building. It's taking small stuff and building bigger stuff. So when you talk about free testosterone, the free testosterone can get into the cell with no effort.

It's just floating around. It goes right into the cell and goes into the nucleus and it does anabolic activity and there's no demand signal. Like you don't need the cell to say, hey, I need testosterone. It just happens, right? So that's the important number. Now I would literally see in 25 year old guys, 30 year old guys, I would see a free testosterone that were in the lowest 10% of the normal range. But if I send these guys to an endocrinologist, they say, well, he's within the normal range. Like, what's the problem, right?

I'm like, well, the problem is he has to carry 200 pounds and jump over walls and kick in doors and fight guys and shoot people. And I'm like, you probably need a little more testosterone than that. But what I found is that if I got guys to sleep now i did tons of different interventions right but if uh but and even in the simplest case where all i did was get these guys to sleep naturally and get off of the sleep drugs which i would do through sleep hygiene i could do through nutritional changes i could do by getting them to not do high intensity training seven days

a week you you know, like some sleep hygiene stuff, talk about alcohol, talk about darkening out your rooms, all these things that everybody talks about that are pretty well known now, five or six years ago, this wasn't like mainstream stuff, but it's pretty common knowledge. Now get guys to sleep 300% increase and free testosterone. Right. So, so that's a big difference sadly a lot of those

guys that wasn't enough right so the 300 now took them up to like average like uh like average for all comers you don't want to you don't want to be still to have be average in anything right right so uh so that's really how i got into this whole world. And then I started doing a lot of lectures around the support groups for NSW. One of, yeah, well, anyway, so I started doing a lot of these. And that's where I met Rob Wolf. And he was like this nutrition guy who talks a lot about sleep. And I was his sleep guy who talked quite a bit about nutrition. And we both talked quite a bit about hormones and I was his sleep guy who talked quite a bit about nutrition and we both

talked quite a bit about hormones and sort of the anabolic activities and how to optimize performance and that's what this was all about was optimizing the performance of the seal nothing matters to seal more than his performance at his job right like it's for 99% of them I would say that's more important in their relationship with their wife and kids yeah they're obsessed with their job it's like this is it this is how they measure themselves this is who they are right it's their identity if you underperform you die yeah and if you underperform you look like a shit bag to the guy next to you and that's like the worst thing that can happen to you in the teams right like yeah if if the other team guys don't respect you you're like yeah like that that is like hell for a SEAL.

That's the worst thing that can happen. So everybody wants to be the highest performing guy they can possibly be. It's a super competitive group. Everybody wants to be. And that's where CrossFit started in the SEAL teams, right? It's a perfect thing. You bring in a bunch of 100-pound chicks that beat a bunch of SEALs my size and Fran, and they're all just like, oh, shit, we better start doing crossfit because this hundred pound chick's beating me so and it's uber competitive and so

it was all about this performance optimization um and it just kind of kept spiraling i kept learning more and more um i you know the the navy was still a little too conservative for me to do a whole lot with a with the guys you know i developed over time when i started understanding sleep physiology the first thing i thought of is vitamin d3 right everybody knows about this now uh was not nearly as common commonly known in those days but one of the things that happens uh when you work at night and you sleep during the day and then if you are outside in the day you're covered in camouflage and body armor and helmets and you know like all sorts of stuff and you're in vehicles and these guys weren't getting any sun exposure right um

and so i'm like all right well maybe it's just this vitamin d thing right because if i give them vitamin d then it should allow this pathway right so you So you guys have all heard of and probably experienced, you eat turkey and you want to take a nap, right? Absolutely. Right? And why do you want to take a nap? I'm usually eating like potatoes and cranberry sauce. And I'm not at work. You guys know what's in turkey, right?

Was it tryptophan? Yeah, so tryptophan, right? So the tryptophan coma, they call it, right? Was it tryptophan? Yeah. So tryptophan, right? So the tryptophan coma, they call it, right? Well, why that pathway works is because when you ingest tryptophan, it accelerates this pathway, right? So what happens is tryptophan becomes something called 5-hydroxytryptophan, which you've seen, right? 5-HTP, you see on the shelves, it's a calming agent, neurocalming agent for anxiety and so forth. And it's a calming agent because 5-HTP then becomes serotonin. And we know that serotonin is like this mood enhancing thing, right? Took some 5-HTP last night. Right. Yeah. So what do we call people with low serotonin? We call them depressed, right? They're

depressed. So we give them drugs to to people we don't hang out with yeah exactly exactly um and then the serotonin becomes melatonin and one and melatonin does a ton of things like it's insane how many uh things melatonin does but one of the major things it does is it shuts down your adrenal function allowing you to be in the opposite of that fight or flight right so you have to have adequate levels of vitamin D3 to make 5-HTP into serotonin. Right. So if you're vitamin D3 deficient, you're serotonin deficient. There's our mood issues, right? You're melatonin deficient, which there's our sleep issues, right? Right. And then there's also now you're not getting quality sleep, inflammatory cascade, your chronic pain, like all this other stuff. So I'm like, all right, I'm brilliant. Like it's vitamin D3 and we're done. Right. And then there's also, now you're not getting the quality sleep with your inflammatory cascade,

your chronic pain, like all this other stuff. So I'm like, all right, I'm brilliant. Like it's vitamin D3 and we're done, right?

So I give him vitamin D3 and it works pretty good. You know, like people are sleeping a little better, but not probably quite there. Then I learned, well,

actually every vitamin D3 reaction requires magnesium. Oh, okay. Let's put some magnesium in this formulation and so, you know

break out the natural column so added that in there um starting to sound like my bedtime ritual yeah and then you just and then you just start backing it up backing it up and you're like all right well let's give them some 5-HEP let's give them some tryptophan let's uh you know let's give them a little bit of melatonin like and so you so essentially just by giving all of the substrate and I always tell people this is not going to make you make melatonin what it's going to do is it's going to ensure that you have the materials to do it i'm bringing the substrate right it's like i'm bringing lumber to the construction site but if there's no there's no workers there's no crew it's not going to do anything right um and then

vitamin d is the only fat soluble one of those so that'll get stored but everything else you'll just pee out so if you don't need it big deal it just goes away yeah and everybody's vitamin d3 deficient so i didn't care so i get people to sleep um there's a baby right there about to pull our plug out there the uh so so i get people to sleep well their their total testosterone goes up their free testosterone goes up their Their free testosterone goes up. Their cortisol levels normalize. Their inflammatory markers normalize. Their thyroid normalizes. One of the big things that happens with poor sleep and chronic stress is thyroid dysregulation.

You've probably heard of that. Like cortisol interferes with the conversion of T4 to T3. T and thyroid is actually an anabolic hormone, right? So I tell my patients testosterone is like the horsepower of your car and you know the uh your thyroid hormone that you know that's that's the rpms right that's your drive train right so you can have a ton of horsepower but if you're idling it's still not that great and you can have a ton of rpms but if it's you know a 90 horsepower car you're not you're not you don't have a lot of power so um so yeah that i mean that's pretty much it that's how i i got to that place um

i started doing some over-the-counter stuff to increase testosterone further uh by uh like zinc citrate which is an aromatase inhibitor because the feedback loop to your brain is estrogen it's mother nature's biggest joke, right? Say zinc. Yeah, yeah. And zinc citrates specifically because that one just absorbs really well. So if you think of guys with excess body fat,

there's this estrogen picture of them, right? Estrogenic picture. So one of mother nature's biggest jokes is this so you are a certain percentage of our testosterone becomes estrogen right and then that estrogen has exactly the opposite effect in the nucleus of those cells as the testosterone does right so they compete for the same receptors and it's complete a completely different effect. Lots of estrogen makes you a woman, and lots of testosterone makes you a man.

That's why guys with lots of testosterone could get bitch tits. Right, right. So what happens is you get these high levels of estrogen because the enzyme that does that conversion is in our body fat. Right. So if you're getting fatter, you convert more of your testosterone into estrogen. Right. If you're not sleeping well and not producing testosterone, you're not producing growth hormone and you're chronically inflamed, you're getting fatter guaranteed. Right. Right. You're getting fatter, which means now you have less testosterone, but because you're chronically inflamed, you're getting fatter. Guaranteed, right? You're getting fatter. Which means now you have less testosterone,

but because you're fatter, more of that testosterone is going to become estrogen. And then the feedback loop to the brain is the estrogen. Your brain knows how much testosterone you have by how much estrogen is hitting your hypothalamus, not the testosterone. So then your estrogen levels go up, tells your brain, oh, we got a ton of

testosterone. Let's start shutting down this testosterone production. And then the luteinizing hormone decreases and you don't stimulate your testicles to make any more testosterone because estrogen's high and then just spiral down gets worse right because one of the big drivers of that sex hormone binding globulin i was telling you about right is estrogen so sex hormone binding globulin goes up now you have a lot of your testosterone you don't you don't have much what you do have a lot of it's becoming estrogen and what you what testosterone you have is largely bound to sector my body because this is through the roof so you're so your androgenic effects there's nothing left to build yeah and you said it never unbind it's

stuck there you can't get it back yeah and so and so you can calculate that all out and it's called the free androgen index so how much how much anabolic androgenic activity you're actually getting from a testosterone these guys like none like it was just it just sucked right now then i talked about the thyroid thyroid also affects sex hormone binding globulin and then elevated chronically elevated cortisol leads to chronically elevated insulin which also increases sex hormone binding and globulin. So I'm sorry, the lower insulin from these guys being like trying to fix themselves with the paleo diets and all that stuff raises sex hormone binding and globulin as well. So now these guys are just an absolute wreck. So try to block that.

You block the estrogen so you can increase their brains. So you're blocking that with zinc. Blocking that with zinc. Now the brain's saying, well, let's put out more luteinizing hormone, right? And then luteinizing hormone's going to tell my testicles to make more testosterone. Now you've heard of when you work out,

you get this anabolic effect, right? You get a testosterone surge when you work out. That doesn't come from your brain, right? You're not secreting luteinizing hormone and your testicles aren't like pumping out a bunch of testosterone while you're lifting weights what's happening is inside of your cells dhea is being converted to testosterone but only under demand right so if you don't exercise intensely it doesn't happen but these guys are dhea deficient largely because they have adrenal

fatigue because of their job and dhea comes from the ad. So DHEA and zinc, now we've increased, you know, two pathways to producing testosterone, getting them to sleep. We have three pathways, great anabolic activity. People get better, their moods get better. Like all this stuff starts improving. Uh, some of the older guys, like they've been living this stuff so long, it wasn't enough. You have to do, you have to do more interventions with them. You know, uh, the Navy gets really skitzy around, you know, starting to do too many things with that right uh but you know that i mean that's essentially you know where i came from and you know the message i preach now so it's really that uh you know i'm only talking about a few aspects there but like in my lecture yesterday

i talked about all of the anabolic effects of sleep. The most powerful anabolic activity or tool we have is sleep. Like if you sleep well, that is the optimal anabolic state. Like I could give you each three grams of testosterone injections per day and not let you sleep and it's not going to make any difference. Right. Like you're not, you're not going to be anabolic. Your performance is still going to suck. So sleep is the key. You have to have all the hormones in place, but sleep does that. And then while you're sleeping, you can actually get bigger, better, faster,

stronger, smarter, better looking, all that stuff. What would you recommend is the right amount of sleep for an athlete that trains two hours a day? Yeah, so... You know what, let's take a break real quick, and we'll get back to that question. Okay. I'll totally take the day where I should be recovering and I'll ruin it by going out and drinking tonight.

Yeah. Yeah. No, no. I definitely did that back in the day a lot. No ergalitic effects of alcohol whatsoever. I can't think of any. Makes me a better dancer. And we're back. We're here with Dr. Parsley talking about sleep, hormones, testosterone, vitamin D, estrogen, all that mess.

And so we were just joking around about, you know, I've got a rest day tomorrow. It's some big numbers. Today in the weight room, I should probably go out and pound some beers. Could you tell us why that might not be a great idea well beers beers specifically probably a little worse right because you have um you know you're gonna have the the inflammatory issues around around the around the beer but you know alcohol cider cider i'll be drinking okay so you know alcohol itself is is a reasonably potent uh ergolytic agent right so like it essentially you know it essentially raises or lowers your ph your your serum ph right so you're when you when you drink alcohol you become acidemic right so you have acidic blood

not not a great thing right because that's perceived as the same as a bacterial infection or a parasite infection or something and what that leads to is what the big cortisol spike and cortisol is catabolic not anabolic and you don't want a cortisol spike no right before bed because you usually drink and then pass out right yeah yeah yeah so the other sleep the other thing that happens uh you know with your big drinking night is the same thing that happens with Ambien, like we were talking about, right? Right. There's no sleep architecture there. You lose all your slow-wave sleep cycles, so then you don't actually recover that night.

That sleep is pretty much useless. Again, it's unconscious. That's why I feel worse after a night of drinking than even if I had gotten knocked out. Exactly. Yeah. So right before we, right before we came back on, I had a question for you about my testosterone is like four 65, which is kind of on the lower side of things. And I was, I was saying I get eight hours of sleep every night and you were, you started telling me that was more about the quality of my sleep, which you'd already kind of mentioned. Yeah. I could kind of go more into that for everyone

that didn't hear that conversation. Yeah. So it, it, it's possible. I mean, there they're yeah everything i'm talking about right now is like a gross oversimplification there's nothing more complex in in medicine than endocrinology and neuroendocrinology and they start adding into their nutrition and the neuropsychological you know endocrine access it gets insane uh but so a couple of things a couple of things that come to mind so it could be the quality of your sleep right um that could be from i i don't know enough about your training regimens but you know maybe maybe you're over training a little bit right so if you're over training a little bit you have excess cortisol you don't get good quality sleep that could happen you could have a depletion of dhea just because you're overtraining a little bit, you have excess cortisol, you don't get good quality sleep, that could happen. You could have a depletion of DHEA just because you're essentially DHEA deficient because of whatever reasons.

Low adrenal function, outperforming sort of your cellular ability. And as I said earlier, DHEA converts into testosterone. So if you don't have enough of that, then it's not going to be converted and you're not going to have enough so when you're working out um your cells are you know your cells want this testosterone they want the animal effect because they're under stress and they want to be anabolic to be able to produce these hormones right these proteins so if you're if you're low on dhea and you can't do that cellular conversion it's going to come from your free testosterone, which means it's going to pull more of your serum testosterone out and that's going to go into your cells. And so then when I measure your serum testosterone, who like, who knows?

The other thing that matters is what time of the day did you get your testosterone tested? That was probably about 10 o'clock after not eating at all that morning. Okay. So the testosterone peak is, uh, you know, and, in the wee hours, like right before you wake up, that's when your testosterone peaks. So it can fluctuate by about 30 or 40 percent, okay, during the day. So if you had, say, like a circadian shift, if you'd traveled or if, like, you'd been off a couple of nights for the way you're working or any type of thing like that, you could actually have 40% higher testosterone if you would have tested at a different time of the day. But again, what really matters is the free testosterone and something called DHT, which is the dihydrotestosterone, which is the most anabolic form of it. So some guys have a huge number of free.

So you could have a total testosterone of 500, right? And with that 500, you could have a free testosterone of 30, or you could have a free testosterone of 120, right? It depends on how much of it is bound. So that gets into blood protein. It gets into the sex hormone binding thing that we were talking about. And then the other thing I mentioned is the quality of your sleep, like how much slow wave sleep cycles are you getting? And that's, that's driven a lot by adenosine. I think

you said you work out like once. Right now it's just once a day. Once a day. Yeah. I thought you said once a week. I'm not overtrained on once a week. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, once a day, what you're doing could be a little too much, right? You could... I doubt it. I doubt it. You could be... Right now, I doubt it. You could be not doing enough, which also causes the same problem, right? Because one of the major things that pushes us to go to sleep so

that and that's a bit of a misnomer so there's really no switch all right oversimplification so it is yeah dan don't let dan party hear me say this uh there's really no active mechanism to put you to sleep there's a lack of wakefulness that allows you to fall asleep which hence the language of like we fall asleep you dropped it off to sleep. There's not like this clicked and I went to sleep. My wife thinks that that happens to me. It's like, you son of a bitch. You fall asleep so fast.

So one of the things that causes what we call sleep pressure, which is your drive to want to go to sleep, is adenosine. Adenosine is the byproduct of the breakdown of ATP, right? So if you exercise a lot, you produce a lot of adenosine, you have a lot of sleep pressure. And what we found is that the higher the sleep pressure, the more slow wave sleep cycles you get, the longer that is. That's when you produce testosterone and growth hormone, right? Now, with that said, you know, there are some variations in sort of what's normal for the age range,

but looking at you, I imagine you're in between 19 and 40 years old. And so the average for your age group would be about 720 something for a total. So, I mean, it's something to investigate, but there, you know, there's lots of little things that could be there. You could have a thyroid function being off. Like hypothyroidism really messes with testosterone production and performance of testosterone. Yeah. And, you know, that's a possibility.

So you'd really just need to, like, get into it. If you wanted to figure out what that was, you'd need to get the right labs done at the right time, get in with a functional medicine doc, you know, evaluate things. Chronic inflammation crushes testosterone. So if you're eating inflammatory foods, something that's not quite right for you, which could be anything, right? You can really have a food sensitivity to anything, right? So as far as practical advice for anyone listening to this that wants to have as much testosterone as possible and as much usable testosterone as possible, what's three easy tips you could give them where they could, they could make a change in their daily routine or their training or their nutrition to help

get, have the best possible chance at increasing what they produce already. Yeah. So I only get three, three. Okay. Three things. Give me three quick. We'll give you five. Okay. Okay. So here, so here's, here's your guy you go like the the first intervention always always is sleep right so good quality sleep and that's not sleep with the television on and that's not sleep with the lights on and that's not you know uh all you know all of the sleep hygiene stuff feeling it completely dark room a cool room, comfortable room, like, uh, no electronics in bed. I making sure your melatonin is high by not having a bunch of light going into your eyes on a deep sleep,

deep quality sleep, like blacking out the curtains, wearing it, wearing an eye mask or earplugs or anything like that. All of that stuff. Anything that causes you to feel like you were in a coma last night and not asleep. Right.

If anytime you can wake up and go, dude, I think I had a mini death last night. Like that, that anytime you can wake up and go dude i think i had a mini death last night like that that's the best sleep that's the highest anabolic sleep so that's my number one intervention the number two intervention is to get rid of all the inflammatory stuff in your diet right make sure that you're getting adequate amounts of protein and make sure that you're getting adequate amounts of fat and probably a lot more fat than most people are willing to eat that's a big issue.

And then the supplements would be the next thing I would talk about, right? So block the estradiol production, take some DHEA. So you would suggest supplementing with DHEA? Yeah. I mean, I would only suggest doing that if you're going to follow it, if you're going to do the labs on it, right? Because you have to make sure you're not going like crazy super physiologic. So go get a blood draw. Get tested.

The AGA is banned by USADA. So that's something that can make you pop, just so you know. Yeah. So if you – I'd say kind of on par with that, the next thing is just to make sure that you're doing your high intensity training right so that whole tabata principle that came out and the reason that cyclist that one cyclist group just crushed the other ones from the deadlifts had nothing to do with the deadlifts right it was anaerobic threshold training under high tension that does that conversion we were talking about right not only does that do the DHEA to testosterone production right then,

but that intermittent lactic acidemia actually causes growth hormone spikes. Those growth hormone spikes actually affect liver functioning, decreases the sexual binding globulin, and it makes you build up adenosine, makes you sleep more. So super lactic heavy workouts help with that? Yeah, but again, you can't overdo that, or then you build up cortisol and then you reverse everything. So at least once a week, getting after it to where you feel like you almost killed yourself. At least once a week, twice a week, probably most people.

Three times a week, probably not most people. And then keeping everything cool on top of that. probably most people three times or probably not most people right okay um and then you know um keeping everything cool on top of that like you know the stress reducing stress levels and you know making sure you're getting good recovery and relaxation and all that stuff taking some d3 and zma yeah i mean uh the you know the zma is great for your zinc source right there right yeah um the d3 is always good to improve the sleep quality. Any of the things I mentioned for that, natural calm, you get your magnesium,

you get your tryptophan. If you're going to take melatonin, take super, super, super low doses of melatonin. What would be a low dose? Two. So you want like 300 micrograms, right? Or like 0.3 milligrams. It's a lot less than the pills that I got on my bed stand.

So I don't... I only take it like when I get to bed, I'm like... Which actually, lately, I've been sleeping great. But it used to be like if I get in bed in 10 minutes, then I'm like, no, I'm not going to fall asleep. I just pop like a three... Maybe it's a three gram. Three milligram?

Or three milligram, yeah. Yeah, it would be three grams, but um so if you're using it intermittently it's not that big of a deal to do that right okay if you're gonna if if you say like put me on an anabolic regimen one of the things i'm going to do is i'm going to say sleep supplement every night like do this every single night so like a melatonin and magnesium and zinc or zinc's not really part of the sleep is it no that that's not part of the sleep that's more of the testosterone protection so we're talking about tryptophan 5-htp magnesium d3 low doses of melatonin so your brain from the time the sun goes down and that's your cue for your brain to start producing melatonin right sun goes down

light in your eyes goes down your pineal gland starts secreting something called melatonin. Melatonin shuts down adrenal function. Eventually, you feel sleepy, you go to sleep. So from the time the sun goes down to the time you get up in the morning, barring electric lighting and all of this other type of stuff, you would produce about 300 micrograms of melatonin over the night, right? Gotcha. So if you take one milligram, that's three times more than your brain would ordinarily produce, just like anything else, you're going to desensitize yourself to it, right? You're going to down-regulate the receptors for melatonin, and you're also going to shut

down your own melatonin production. Your body's a smart machine. If you're getting something from the outside in, why are we going to waste energy making it, right? Right. Which is why taking testosterone shuts down your testosterone production. I'm getting it from elsewhere. Why is my body going to bother making it?

It doesn't make any sense. Right. It's an energy expenditure that's not necessary. So a super low dose of melatonin, right? And then you get, like, you know, I say eight hours of time in bed. If you're sleeping, if you feel like you can sleep nine hours that's cool if you get if you start kind of getting up in the nine and a half ten hour you might want to look into something being wrong like maybe there's some obstructive sleep apnea going on there that could be an issue

for you maybe one of the reasons you're not getting deep sleep you know uh obstructive sleep apnea makes you hypoxic which then makes you acidemic, which leads to that whole pathway, like the alcohol they talked about. Same type of gig. Yeah, so the supplementation with all that stuff every night would ensure that you get the deepest possible sleep that you can get. You're bringing all the substrate there. When I put people on melatonin, I actually get it from a compounding pharmacy. I actually do all my supplements through a compounding pharmacy so that I know I'm actually getting what I want. High-quality shit. Yeah.

And I get it micro-dosed and I get it sustained release. So I get anywhere from 200 to 300 micrograms that's released over 12 hours. Yeah. So you do something like that and you're banging it out. Like you're going to get some good quality sleep, get your total time in bed of somewhere around eight hours. Even if you're waking up after six hours, stay in bed. Eventually, practice your relaxation techniques,

progressive muscle relaxation, breathing, whatever kind of chills you out. Eventually, you will sleep more and more. That's actually how I learned to sleep eight hours. I actually got out of the Navy and I started working and I was listening to Rob Wolf and he goes, you know, you need to be sleeping eight hours. And what I did was I just wouldn't let myself get out of bed until I hit that eight hour mark. And at first I was like awake for two hours going, this is stupid.

And then after a month I would sleep for eight hours and then nine hours came fairly easy. Yeah. Um, and, and, and like I said, like that's one of the things we know there's a direct correlation in between how much time you sleep and how much testosterone you have. And if you, if your testosterone goes up, you sleep more. And if you sleep more, your testosterone goes up like, right. It goes hand in hand. Um, so the, you know, the total time in bed is the easiest way to do it you pick a bedtime and you stick with that bedtime and then you pick a wait time and you stick with that like this and we're talking about people who maybe have difficulties sleeping

and staying asleep um you know some some guys usually younger guys too that work out a lot they can just kind of crash whenever they want to sleep eight, eight, nine hours. Cool. Yeah. Uh, but, uh, you know, the American sleep Academy or society of sleep medicine or something, I can't remember. They, you know,

the consensus about seven and a half hours seems to be the norm of actual sleep. And this is like, you know, registered sleep. Like we're actually doing an observed sleep study, uh, which means that probably,

you know, eight hours in bed would lead to about seven and a half hours. Now, if you go 30 minutes each side, seven and a half hours plus or minus half an hour, that encompasses about 95% of everybody we've studied. So there's not a whole lot of outliers. You hear about these guys that say, I only need three hours of sleep and then I can build room in a day after three hours.

Okay, well, we've just never seen that in a lab. We don't have any objective evidence of that. Just mostly talk from what you can tell? Yeah. Well, I think people, too, they may do that for three months. I think a lot of people talk about what they're doing, like they've been doing it for five years. Yeah, as though that's their lifestyle, right?

It's like they think they've been trying, you know, I'm doing it this week. And then they talk about it like that's what they do. Yeah, yeah. It's like, no. Yeah, I actually, I was actually guilty of that like a couple of weeks. But I do it too. A couple of weeks ago,

I was like on, I was on a, I was like, CTP in the breakfast. I was being, I was being interviewed or doing a lecture or something and I,

and somebody asked me about my workout routine and I'm like, well, you know, I've been about my workout routine, and I'm like, well, I've been doing kettlebells lately. And I'm like, well, actually, let me clarify that. I did kettlebells yesterday. You know? I saw a kettlebell from a crossfit room one time. Yeah. You battle them sometimes.

Yeah. I'm a crossfitter or a weightlifter, depending on the week you talk to me. Yeah, exactly. And then what guys will find is that if they get the good quality sleep and they get the nutrition in tune and then they do some reasonable programming around their exercise, like 90% of the time, that's all you need. The biggest problem is getting people to value sleep. We live in a culture that just doesn't value it it's like some sort of it's a sign of weakness or laziness or something like you're supposed to be out there being productive getting after it time is money you're wasting money you're wasting you know

you're wasting time you're wasting money you should be out there cranking all the time what we find though is that your performance decreases so much when you deprive yourself of sleep that you're making less money because you're less productive right yeah absolutely your gains aren't there you're wasting your time in the gym you're wasting your time doing your sport or whatever and what what use is money if you can't have a six-pack and get chicks exactly yeah it doesn't make any sense and what use your chicks if you don't if you can't get an erection dude and if you don't sleep you can't get an erection right actually one night of short sleep if you decrease if you decrease your your sleep by two hours less than what you need.

Right. 30 percent decrease in libido. Right. 30 to 40 percent. So you you want sex a third less just because you didn't sleep a couple hours. So this is kind of how I've learned about sleep to some degree is you go through sleep cycles and you cycle through like some deep. You go through that deep phase and that's when you produce growth hormone and testosterone. And then you, you go through cycles of that. And so for like, I guess you cycle every 60 to 90 minutes. And so if you can get for every 60 to 90 more minutes you get, you get another sleep cycle. So you get that much more testosterone. So in a six hour period, you might get like what, three or four sleep cycles, uh, or four or five. So if you get more cycles in, is it sleep cycles uh or four or five so if you get

more cycles in is it is that what's happening and if you wake up because i wake up with lights right uh to try and like wake up during the optimal time of sleep cycle what's important there yeah so so what happens your your sleep cycles actually range from about 90 to 120 minutes right so from the time you lay down and you're kind of in this pre-sleepy kind of alpha brainwave state, you go down through stage two, you go into your deep sleep cycle. It's the first thing that happens, right? You come out of the deep sleep cycle and that's your longest cycle, right? That's your longest slow, what we call slow wave sleep cycle, right? That's when the growth hormone and testosterone is secreted.

That slow wave sleep cycle is your deep sleep. The first one of those is the longest. And then you have a short period of REM. And then you drop back down again. And you do another sleep cycle. That slow wave sleep cycle is shorter. Progressively throughout the night, that gets shorter, REM gets longer right there's this whole

idea of uh dual sleeping where like our ancestors slept in two periods right so we're suspecting middle something what's it called middle they would get up in the middle of the night and do something for like an hour and then go back to sleep so so what what you know what and nobody knows for sure right but right you know ancestrally we know this there's journaling on this all this stuff we know that what makes sense logically though is that you're getting all that anabolic stuff at the beginning of the night right and then you're you're kind of coming out of that you're staying awake and this is seasonally dependent right the way we evolved sometimes darkness was 12 hours and sometimes darkness

was eight hours so like if you're if the darkness is 12 hours you're not sometimes darkness was 12 hours and sometimes darkness was eight hours so like if you're if the darkness is 12 hours you're not gonna sleep 12 hours yet all right right so it's going to be broken up so you know the suspicion is that the you know slow wave stuff is predominantly in the in at the beginning of the night and then the stuff at the end the rim that's mainly the the neurocognitive stuff we're talking about so now you're talking about executive functioning your working memory your action time your problem solving ability like all the types of things that make us the smartest guy like our frontal lobe functioning um and then uh you know consolidating memories all that type of stuff that's happening in the in the hippocampus and all that type of

thing that that's all happening we think more during REM. The neurotransmitters are being more replenished during the REM sleep. Gotcha. The body's hormones are primarily being fixed during that anabolic period of the slow wave sleep cycle. So if I want to take a nap in the middle of the day and try to get an anabolic response from that, I'm shooting for 60 to 90 minutes? Yeah, you want a 90-minute nap.

So a nap between 90 minutes and 120 minutes is like a full minute nap, right? So a nap between 90 minutes and 120 minutes is, is like a full sleep cycle, right? Over, over 120 minutes is just sleep and it's not in a nap anymore. And now you're going to screw with your ability to sleep. So you could get like two high quality anabolic sleep cycles at 24 hour period. If you get a nap in the middle of the day and then that first, that first cycle at night. Yeah. I mean, ideally, if you can sleep seven and a half hours and still take a 90 minute nap in the midday, you'll get another big gluteal surge and higher testosterone and more anabolic activity. If you don't have time for that and say you're a graphic artist or you do something that requires a lot of creativity. Yeah.

A 20 minute nap restores creativity pretty well. Yeah. That's what I've heard. About somewhere around a 30 to 45 minute nap will restore executive functioning pretty well. Okay. So like you can't like, you know, you're just burned out on like whatever work you're doing. Cognitive kind of work is just like, it's not.

Making decisions. Yeah. It's not working anymore. I can't make decisions. I can't read. I'm not absorbing what I'm learning whatever 30 40 30 to 45 minute nap great you're probably set you're gonna you're gonna recoup a lot of function you want to just say hey i want to be better at everything like uh i right i need to be i need to be more alert more

more attentive more creative and i'm going to get after it like three hours from now i'm going to go get after it in the gym. A 90-minute nap is the way to go. You'll get a full sleep cycle. All right, now I've got to ask this question for those folks in California, Washington, Colorado. If you smoke weed right before you go to bed,

what does that effect have? Marijuana works on a couple of different pathways that help with sleep. So it works on serotonin, which we talked about serotonin becoming melatonin. Serotonin is also sort of a calming agent. It also works on GABA receptors, just like benzodiazepines like Valium in the sleep drugs do.

It has some dopamine effects as well as some mood issues but also dopamine affects some of the neurotransmitters marijuana actually has the most normal sleep architecture of any sort of drug that you're going to use to help yourself sleep now with that said it's not my recommendation to use marijuana as your first choice but as your last resort if you need like a sleep aid that like i've done everything i can possibly you're doing the 5-htp you're doing you've done you're doing melatonin you've done and now you're still like kind of on edge yeah well i mean if it if it's anxiety related or you know edginess uh then then i say you know you work through all that you need to you got other problems you need to deal with those problems you do heart rate variability training you do biofeedback like

you do everything else but you know uh pharmaceuticals and i throw i throw um you know i throw marijuana and pharmaceutical right i mean it just is uh you know marinols of a pharmaceutical version of of that it ironically doesn't work at all um but uh gotta smoke it yeah yeah well you don't actually have to smoke it right like you like you can eat it you can use tinctures on yourself like you can rub it on your skin like there's lots of ways to get marijuana in but you know what they did when they made marinol is they extracted like what we always do in science is like well this huge thing works but it's only this little piece that matters, so let's take this one little piece and put it in here, and that wasn't

right. It turned out that we have a lot of cannabinoid receptors, and like, Marinol was just like one, right? And it didn't really do the job. But yeah, I mean, as sort of your last resort pharmaceutical intervention, marijuana's probably better

than anything else. Like, it's better than alcohol, it probably better than anything else. Like it's better than alcohol. It's better than Z drugs. It's better than sedatives, hypnotics. Better than Ambien and all that stuff. Yeah, it's better than

all that stuff. Yeah. You heard it from the doc. Yeah. Go smoke some weed. No, I'm just kidding. There goes my medical license. Maybe you guys can hire me.

You'll have to move out to California. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I actually live in California, so it's not a problem. There you go. It wouldn. You'll have to move out to California. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I actually live in California. This is not a problem. It wouldn't be a problem for me right now if I wanted to do that route. There you go. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for joining us. That was a lot of helpful information. I think people are going to love it. All right. Cool. Got anything you want to plug blog or you got anything going on where people should check you

out more information? No. You know, I've,. You know, I've been one month away from launching my e-book for the last year. I know what that's like, yeah. So, you know, I've finally hired some help, so that should be coming out pretty soon. I have a website fully developed and ready to launch. It's some corporate and tax structure stuff that I'm holding up on. So, within the next few weeks, you know, check it out.

Doc parsley.com. Doc parsley. Doc. It's DOC. Doc. Doc parsley.com. Uh, though,

uh, I give it away. I'm giving away the free, the first chapter of the ebook for free people to check it out, doing some blogging, uh, doing some information products and that, and then I'm actually,

uh, close to what I talked about with the sleep supplement for you guys. There's some variations of that, but I'm launching sort of a powdered version of that. Excellent. Cool. What was the title of the e-book? The e-book is just called Optimize Your Sleep.

Kind of a lame name. I think it's great. Yeah. All right, guys, make sure you go to barbellshrug.com, sign up for the newsletter, and we'll notify you whenever we post up these podcasts. Thanks, Kirk. All right, cool.

Thanks.