Barbell Shrugged - Physiology Friday: [Chronotype] The One Thing More Important than Getting 8 Hours of Sleep w/ Dr. Chris Perry, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

Dr. Christopher A. Perry, an Assistant Professor at Eastern Kentucky University, began his fitness journey at Penn State University, where he developed a robust background in Strength & Conditioning leading to 17 years in the industry to date. His academic path, leading through a PhD at Arizona State University, deepened his expertise in Exercise Science & Sports, Sleep & Circadian Rhythms, and Nutrition. Chris's current research focuses on sleep, movement analysis, and CO2 tolerance, particularly in tactical populations and collegiate athletes. His work aims to enhance performance, wellness, and longevity health outcomes, demonstrating his commitment to advancing the field of exercise and sports science. Beyond his academic pursuits, Chris is an executive performance coach, weight loss consultant, fitness entrepreneurship mentor, podcast host, and enjoys engaging in coffee culture and movie discussions. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Links: Work with Dr. Chris Perry Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug Physiology Friday is back. We took a little break, team, through the holidays. This year for Physiology Friday, we're going to be highlighting not only all of the lab work from Mr. Dan Garner, but all the work that our coaches and team and nutritionists and physical therapists and behavioral health coaches inside Rapid Health Optimization, the work that they've been doing. We've got, yes, Dan Garner is a mad genius behind all things lab work. But on top of that, we've got many PhDs, lots of people with continuing education that are published authors in our space. And we're going to be highlighting them on the show, getting them into the Physiology Friday episodes and really building

a database, a library of work that all of our people are doing. We've got a really special thing here at Rapid Health Optimization. And like I said, many, I want to say inside, not just Dr. Galpin, Dan, but four or five PhDs in the exercise, world nutrition supplementation. We've got experts in behavioral health, physical therapy, and a whole team of complete savages. And we're going to be getting those as well as getting many of the shows from Dan Garner mixed in here as well on lab work. But we're excited to bring you today, Dr. Perry. He has a PhD in sleep, and that's why we have so many episodes with him about sleep. So we're going to be digging into all of the rapid health optimization team in 2025,

getting everybody more comfortable with the voices, the brains inside our company. And we're really excited about it because we built a team of complete badasses. This is actually like the coolest company in that when we go to hire people, we are literally able to go and look at the very top of the top when it comes to nutritionists, when it comes to behavioral health, all of those subject matter experts, we're able to go find true experts in their field and bring them in. And it is an absolute pleasure to not only be on the same team with them, but to learn from them as well. And you can access all of that lab lifestyle, performance, the analysis, the lab work, everything that we're going to be doing with you inside Rapid Health Optimization over at rapidhealthreport.com. So head over there right

now, rapidhealthreport.com. You can schedule a call with me. We will get you started. And friends, Physiology Friday. Let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Anders Warner. Doug Larson. Coach Travis Mast. Coach Travis M Mash is over there smiling to his wife being cute at the beginning of the show. I was just then. Oh mom. Professor Perry. Dr. Chris Perry in the house today man. You came all the way from Rapid Health Optimization. I don't know how we found you. I don't know. I don't know how we got you on the show today. It's a lot easier to schedule shows when we just hit you on Slack and go, Hey, let's do this.

It's a, it's a pleasure. I appreciate you guys having me. You know, I was listening to you guys long before I was even a part of rapid health optimization. And I had a whole bunch of friends who used to talk about barbell shrugged. I'm like, who was barbell shrugged? And lo and behold, end up working for him. There you go. Today's episode of Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be talking a lot about sleep. That is really your wheelhouse. And I'd love to kind of dig straight into it. Yeah, man.

Why do I need eight hours of sleep? Because guess what? I don't really get that many. Would you do more? I might need more. I might need nine. Could could use 10 probably you also shouldn't get too much that's also something i've recently learned from really too much yes there's such a bad for mortality right like you sleep too much that's also a negative there's a u-shaped curve there dude does this be any more like this is what if if uh if this was like CNN delivering that news,

they'd be like, no, no, no, fake news. You have to sleep too little now or too much. You're going to die is the end, right? People just want absolutes and there just aren't any. This binary, it's too much or too little. And if you don't hit the exact number, you probably die at the end of the game. Is that what happens? And people freak out.

Well, then let's go. What is the optimal number of minutes I should sleep? And get this down to seconds maybe by the end of the show. So first, I got to preface this. And, you know, when I first got into sleep research at Arizona State, you know, I have a big strength and conditioning background. I didn't want anything to do with this level of sleep, nor did I ever get enough sleep. And then lo and behold, you know, dive into that rabbit hole with my mentor at the Phoenix VA hospital, working with individuals with

PTSD, just truly opened my eyes to, wow, sleep is one of the most important things, especially in tactical populations, which I specialize in. And the more and more I learned about it from my mentor, Dr. Sean Youngstead, he's still at Arizona State. He does tons of research in circadian rhythms and long sleep duration, really showed me how important it is. And I'll always remember one of my favorite quotes from Matthew Walker, if you guys have heard his podcast and read his book, Why We Sleep. There's not one aspect of your health that is not positively impacted when you get a good night's rest. And there's one, there's not one aspect of health that's not negatively impacted when you don't get a good night's rest. And so when it comes to exactly what you just asked, what is the sleep recommendations?

Anyone above the age of 18, right? At least seven to nine hours a night, right? But when you look at the majority of the lifestyles of individuals we work with on a daily basis, who comes close to that? Or as or the bigger question now is, well, what's the risk of mortality when it comes to that? And part of my research through my dissertation was looking at long sleep duration. You know, short sleep duration is so sexy in the literature, right? You're like, oh, sleep deprivation, it meets the highlights of the reels. And it's all over Instagram and social, right? You're like, oh, sleep deprivation, it meets the highlights of the reels. And it's all over Instagram and social media. And it's like, okay, we know for sure that

if you're getting less than five and a half hours of sleep per night, you're probably not going to feel good when you go to work that next morning. And so when you look at all the epidemiological research, and you look at the U-shaped association, it's absolutely true. Anything less than five and a half, your mortality risk of all causes goes through the roof. Same thing if you're getting way too much sleep as well. And long sleep duration doesn't get enough love. And when you look at the literature behind this, it's mainly older adults who are usually at risk of this, but it increases sleep fragmentation, which results in less sleep efficiency, more daytime sleepiness. It has comparable effects to that of bed rest that you'll see with individuals who spend

too much time being sedentary, lying in bed. But you also see increased inflammation. And so you'll see increased cause mortality across the other side of the spectrum with all the same ways that you would with short sleep duration. And so usually anything that's constituted as long sleep duration is anything more than nine, which I don't know anyone who's doing that right now. That sounds like vacation. How do they tease out the other lifestyle factors there?

Like if you spend 12 hours in bed every day, chances are the rest of your life is not like a normal life. Like you don't have like a real career and a wife and three kids and you train every day, et cetera. Like something else is going on, like you are depressed, like something else is happening there. And we know that 100% that there is not one psychiatric disorder that is not linked to some sort of sleep related issue or sleep related disorder as well. And so, and you see, you see this across the board. And so most of the, most individuals with psychiatric disorders have insomnia, have great degrees of sleep fragmentation, real low REM sleep. And so, however, as much as we

know that short sleep, short sleep duration and long sleep duration is an issue for sure. You see dysregulated hormonal profiles, you see dysregulated glucose tolerance and glucose regulation. You see hormone levels are off the charts as far as being dysregulated, particularly cortisol and sexual reproductive hormones. But that's actually no longer what sleep doctors are starting to recommend as the most important thing. And this is something that's going to be nice and sexy for everyone out there listening to the podcast. It's actually sleep regularity that might be more important now than sleep duration because the circadian rhythm component of the equation far outweighs the effect it has on the body compared to duration. Yes, we know sleep short

duration is terrible for our health, but misaligning your clock might be worse. And so there was, oh, sorry, go ahead. Yep. No, no, no. And so I don't cut you off, you're going to talk for the whole hour. I love him. He's awesome. Yeah. See, I need to learn from you when I'm on a podcast. But you'll get a lot of kickback from people we work with as far as, well, how can I get eight more hours of sleep per night when Dr. Nelson goes through my aura data and tells me to get more? It's damn near impossible. And so there was a recent paper that was just published in this year, 2024, that looked at sleep regularity as the highest importance now when it comes to your overall health.

Because individuals that have higher sleep regularity have, in comparison to individuals who get the right amount of sleep duration, have 48% lower cause of mortality, 39% lower cancer risk, and 57% lower risk of cardio metabolic mortality, which is insane when you look at the overall effects of that. And that's as simple as staying within a half an hour to an hour of your sleep wake time every single day. Individuals who stay with at least 80% compliance to that have better health all around. And there are so many mechanisms underneath that, that I'm prepared to share with you all. So you can, you can have very consistent sleep, wake times, six days a week. You can go out on Saturday, stay out a little later, sleep a little in a little bit on Sunday. And you're still kind of in that window. Is that what I heard? You can go out one day a week. You got to be careful because how long are you going to stay out? It's within that one hour timeframe, right? So if you

go out an extra hour, yeah, maybe if you're still keeping within that window of going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time, but even one, even staying up late one night a week and sleeping in one night a week is going to push you into what's called social jet lag. All right. Which is the difference between your biological term. I like that. Really? Yeah. Turned by till rohenberg he's a researcher overseas who published the book uh damn i forget the name i'll have to look it up um but it's i hope it was social jet lag i would buy that immediately that way everyone would know why i'm not their friend i'm already gonna have to like listen to this whole podcast i can't keep up it's so so good all right keep going and so but social jet lag is a terrible thing right this is something that you can I'm not going out ever. I can't keep up. It's so good. All right. Keep going.

And so, but social jet lag is a terrible thing, right? This is something that you can probably allure to everything that's happening in our society. What do people do every single week? All right. Monday through Friday, they wake up around five, 6 a.m. All right. They got to go to work, go to bed, eight, nine o'clock. All right. And then thirsty, thirsty Thursday rolls around.

So I talked to about to my students. All right. And they all go down to the paddy wagon downtown in Richmond, Kentucky, stay up late, get the deals on the booze. And then they're staying up late and drinking all weekend long. Well, staying up late and sleeping in is going to shift your circadian alignment. And what ends up happening is when you try to wake up again on Monday, when you're trying to wake up at 5 a.m., this is why Sunday scaries were invented.

Yeah, that anxiety. wake up again on Monday when you're trying to wake up at 5 a.m. This is why Sunday scaries were invented. And the anxiety, you're trying to wake up at 5 a.m., but your body's still chilling at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. All right. And so and what a lot of people don't understand is it takes at least 24 hours or more to just reentrain your circadian rhythm. All right. There was actually a study that looked at how can we improve this? And we can talk about that more later. But sometimes it takes up to four days, even one to two weeks, depending upon how much you shifted your body clock just to get it right again. Is that an age-related thing too? Because that's kind of like that hangover thing where it used to be a day and now it's like a week. Right. So it depends on the degree of how you did it all right and whether or not you also are conducive to other health behaviors that could potentially mitigate the risk that comes

yeah and so like when you look at different chronotypes and how people are usually segmented younger and older people like to go to bed early all right and wake up early whereas individuals who are adolescents and middle-aged adults have a more morning slash evening chronotype to where they can wake up a little bit later and stay up a little bit later. No big deal. All right. But they're also more conducive to behaviors that are not relatable to optimal health, which is what is going to push them out of alignment even further, put them at higher

risk. And so what we're starting to now, you know, start to recommend individuals. And if you read any sleep book or talk to any sleep doctor they'll always say this the number one recommendation to helping someone get better sleep is to tell them to go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every day hands down so there isn't an optimal time it's just do the same time do the same time every day and wake up at the same time every day but i'm glad that you asked that travis because it also depends on your chronotype.

And everyone has a different chronotype. You have the morning larks. You know who they are, the morning people. They're your crazy ass group fitness instructors who wake up at 4 a.m. and do crazy Jane Fonda work and are just 100% on. I was that person. Roy Gregory.

But then you have the other outliers who are the night shift individuals and having an eveningness chronotype or night shift chronotype actually is associated with a higher degree of negative health outcomes compared to either the other two types. And so luckily, the majority of people are in the middle. But, you know, those individuals who are night shift workers who just gravitate more towards staying up late. However, because of that, the social norms do not are not conducive to a night shift schedule for most people. And so the more evening chronotype individuals, you see a 2.5 fold increase in diabetes risk due to the issues with glucose regulation that's usually caused by that. You also see a reverse hormonal effect when it comes to cortisol. And so when people are stressed out or you misalign your circadian rhythm, in a normal adult, cortisol is at its highest in the morning, right? It's what is in charge of getting you up.

And then cortisol, it goes down during the course of the day. It's flipped in individuals who have a circadian misalignment, which is why if you're ever dealing with someone who goes to bed at all altering times throughout the week, well, what might be a contributing factor besides being misaligned of why they have trouble going to sleep at night? Their cortisol is jacked up and it's all really, really high up late in the evening when it shouldn't be. And that's causing issues either from the influence of certain Zetgabbers, which are just time givers, things that influence your circadian clock, light, time that you're eating, and even nighttime exercise can potentially do that as well, depending on your chronotype. And so this is where we have

to get a lot more surgical, as it were, for lack of a better word, when we're working with individuals and trying to optimize performance, we have to figure out what is your chronotype? Because if nothing else works, when it comes to sleep hygiene, could be the fact that we're doing the wrong approach based off of your particular chronotype, if you're a morning person, middle person, or if you're a nightlark. So lots of interesting potentials here when it comes to performance health and coaching. When you look at the aura ring, that's what we kind of use as the baseline. Mine says 3 a.m. And my goal, whether I'm actually thinking about it or not, is to really have like the middle of my sleep kind of align with that 3 a.m.

number, which is why they have those that kind of like scale on there, correct? Like as a way for people to kind of look at their own data and figure that out. That's what that looks like on the Oura Ring, correct? Yes. And that's also trying to dictate where your temperature minimum is. And so because there's a point during the night where your body reaches that temperature minimum and then starts to go up again. And then usually you're up and awake 90 minutes to two hours later. And this comes more in handy when you're trying to figure out how to advance or fix your circadian clock.

Because we know if you get in light mealtimes and exercise after that point, that helps advance your clock, which is a good thing. It makes you able to get to sleep at an earlier time. Whereas if you have that exact same exposure to any of those three activities before that time in the six hours before that will delay your body clock. This is exactly why staying up late on your phone and getting any type of light exposure, even if it's not from a phone, even it's from your bathroom lights, if it's too bright, or even it's from your TV, anything in the house could negatively influence your ability

to fall asleep again. And it'll delay your circadian rhythm phase. Can we talk times like how like how far away from sleep should you should your last meal be when should you cut the light yep and so i i tell most of the individuals that i work with you need to make sure that things start getting dim right after sunset and so especially in the summer times and that's difficult to do right and you can entrain to the seasons and your circadian rhythm will adapt but if if you're getting bright exposure of light right before going to bed, you are suppressing melatonin. The brighter light wavelengths, so bright blue light that comes from your phones and your

television sets and your computers, all right? Even green lights and bright white lights. So the really, really bright LCD, LED lights that a lot of people have in modern time homes now, destroying sleep if you keep those on late at night. And so I usually tell people at least an hour or two before bed, you gotta cut the light brightness as best as you possibly can. And so worry about the color first

and then worry about the brightness, all right? Because even a, so slower wavelength lights, this is where they get into the red light therapies and the hal light therapies and the halogen lights and the candle light, the best thing you can do for sleep. But if they're bright enough, even then they will negatively influence melatonin. And so you have to be very, very careful because if you're lying in bed and you're getting ready to go to sleep and you pull up your phone and that thing is bright as all creation, it'll delay the overall release of

melatonin and take another 45 minutes to an hour just to rise back up to natural levels again. And so you can start to experiment with what works best. I don't know many fiancees of mine that's going to allow me to have red light bulbs in the house after 7pm, but I have been trying it out myself and it does have a significant impact. But if you can't go red light for that reason, dim lights as best as you possibly can try to keep them at eye level rather than on top on the ceiling. Yeah.

What about eating? So when it comes to eating, that's fascinating too, because everything, every process in the body circulates on its own circadian rhythm, right? Most organs and all your cells function off of 24 to 25-hour rhythm. And we know when they're dysregulated, they kind of start to run free.

So when it comes to eating, most people do have a specific time of the day where they're better able to assimilate nutrients. And then with a certain process such as the release of insulin and glucose regulation. So Dr. Sachin Panda is really, really big on this area of time restricted eating. If you've ever seen any of his podcasts or read any of his research, and it's very fascinating. When you regulate the times that you eat based off of the circadian rhythms, the body tends to do much better with absorbing nutrients and not having any type of dysregulation with, the body tends to do much better with absorbing nutrients and not having any type of dysregulation with how your body handles it, either hormonal or nutrient-based. And so when you look at, I love, he gave a talk a while ago when I was a doctoral student at ASU. He came to our PhD student RAND conference and he gave an example like this. And he's like, okay,

let's say you have an individual who's right smack dab in the middle. OK, let's say they start eating at 10 a.m. and then they stop eating at about six or seven. Right. Normal circadian rhythm for most people. That gives you enough time before going to bed around 9 p.m. to allow your body to fully digest and not be worried about nutrient assimilation. And you can allow the body's processes for sleep to do what they need to do the right way. But let's say that we go outside of that circadian rhythm and we eat a little too late, right? Think about cars getting on a highway during the day, right? Cool. All right. All the cars that should be getting on to get on the highway during the daytime that are labeled for daytime are doing what they need to do. Pretend that these cars represent daytime processes,

right? Then nighttime comes, daytime cars come off the highway, and then nighttime cars get on the highway. Cool, right? Everything's working hunky-dory the way that it should, bodily processes. But what happens if you do an activity such as eating too late at night outside of that zone, outside of that circadian rhythm? What's going to happen then? Well, you've got the nighttime cars that are already there getting on the highway, but then you've got the daytime cars that all of a sudden try to jack up the highway, and then you have a traffic jam. And so to think about what's happening in physiology in that way, things aren't going to function as they should at that time. And so there was a big study that

Sachin put out with his graduate student, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the study, that looked at what happens when we take nocturnal creatures. So they took mice and kept them on a schedule that was restricted. They were only allowed to eat food at nighttime and not allowed to eat food during the daytime. Then they had a second group of mice that were able to do whatever they want ad libitum. They were able to eat during the day. They were able to eat at night. Fascinating research. What they were able to find is that in the individual mice that were allowed to eat whenever they want, we saw greater degrees of issues with insulin resistance. We saw obesity-related outcomes. We saw dysregulation of coordination. We saw tons of issues with the liver. We saw dysregulation of coordination. We saw tons of issues with the liver. We saw

dysregulation of cognitive function as well. When you took a look at the other ones who were time-restricted, everything improved the opposite direction. Higher cognition, stayed lean, no issues, no leptin resistance. They had no issues with satiation, completely fine. Showing Sachin that, oh my goodness, there's some sort of circadian rhythm component to consumption of nutrients. And so what they ended up doing, they've now started to do this for the last few years in humans now, doing the time-restricted diets. And you'll see, especially in individuals who have diabetes and are overweight, significantly

improved health outcomes, reversal of diabetes, and even reduction in visceral fat in individuals who have diabetes and are overweight, significantly improved health outcomes, reversal of diabetes, and even reduction in visceral fat in individuals who start practicing time-restricted eating practices. In my own practice and coaching before I came to RAPID, working with individuals, I have done this with individuals with diabetes. All of them improve HbA1c levels when it comes to practicing a time-restricted feeding diet. And it's not like intermittent fasting, which is what people get wrong when it comes to practicing a time-restricted feeding diet. And it's not like intermittent fasting, which is what people get wrong when it comes to this. It's just simply waiting an hour after you wake and stopping eating two to three hours prior to going to bed.

That's it. No calorie restriction. So that is matched for calories in any way? Or to what degree is just simply having less time to eat, reducing calories, et cetera, and then they're losing weight and having positive health outcomes just because they're not as obese as they once were, et cetera. So they were naturally led to potentially not eating more, which of course was one of the limitations of the study.

But because of the fact that we weren't going against the circadian processes, it didn't dysregulate their hormones, ghrelin and leptin specifically so they felt more satiated and ghrelin was more normal ghrelin is that hunger hormone and so what you'll see with individuals who their circadian misalignment occurs you'll see it go the opposite direction you'll see leptin is lower the satiation hormone and ghrelin is higher and so this especially happened with individuals who stay up too late all right your late night netflix watchers and your late night video game Fortnite players, right? They'll be staying up way too late past the time that they need to, which is already a

metabolic compromisation type of position when you're staying up too late and combine that with sedentary activity, which we know has negative health outcomes. And ghrelin starts going through the roof. Well, you're going to be more likely to jump in the fridge and grab the most savory, salty, high-fat product that you can eat. Because we see that as well, when you stay up later, cognitive function is also in disarray. Executive function goes down. And the higher your stress level is, the less access you actually have to those executive

centers in your prefrontal cortex. This was actually part of my thesis in looking at the bidirectional relationship between sleep, physical activity activity and cognitive function. And so you're going to be less likely to make wise choices at night and potentially over consume calories, which is what more than likely happened in the other mice. So are you saying like, you know, two to three hours before bed? No, no snacks. No, just don't eat. For most people, I try to tell them not to. But then when you have someone who is conducive to healthy behaviors and is physically active and taking care of themselves, having a little carbohydrates in the evening ain't going to hurt anybody. Having a little protein in the evening ain't going to help anybody. And this is where you have to just the art of coaching. What's going to work specifically for your client or what are their needs? If you got someone who is low by 600 calories, you know,

they haven't hit their macros that particular day. And their goal is to potentially build muscle and gain weight. Then having a little protein shake in the evening might not be a bad idea. All right. As long as they can keep up with what their needs are and still get a good night's rest is what's going to be the absolute best in that particular equation. But you got to think most people aren't doing that. Most people who are not physically active, not doing those things, what are they usually having for dinner? Really, really high fat, right? Potentially processed, right? And then going to bed right afterwards, their thermic effect of food is way up, their body temperature is way up, right? Their body is focusing on getting rid of the food

rather than focusing on sustaining their resting heart rate, which is going to negatively influence their sleep. They're going to be tossing and turning all night. Is there any research kind of like on how that food is used as well? I've heard, and I'd love to just kind of like know the validity of it. When you eat, if you immediately follow that with some sort of walk, some sort of physical exercise, that it's kind of like you're telling your body, hey, we just ate. Now we need to go use it in this direction where if you sit down and eat a bunch of, not me by any means, dried mangoes right before you go to bed because they're delicious, you're essentially just putting a bunch of sugar into your bloodstream and just not directing traffic.

It just kind of sits there, which I would imagine has some less than optimal outcomes when it comes to like glucose levels. You just took a jab at Costco specifically. You're like, those Costco mangoes are too good. They really are too good and they should not, I don't know how many mangoes they have to dry to get into that bag, but it must be at least a hundred per because it's a lot.

It's so good. I can't take it. Diabetes in a bag. Right. I call it fruit. But Anders, a hundred percent. If you go for a walk or you do some exercise after you consume a meal, you will see a reduced postprandial response. You will see improved glucose regulation from that meal, especially if it was in a one-to-one ratio, at least a protein to carbohydrate as well will also improve that. Think back to cultural norms. You know, most people, you know, I come from an Italian Hispanic background. Most people

from those cultures, that was their, that's the culture for them to do. That's what they do. That's those behaviors. After they eat a real big ass meal, they'll all go for a walk. They'll all go chat. My grandmother did that after every giant Italian pasta meal we had when I was growing up as a kid. And I'd be like, where's grandma and all my aunts? And my dad would be like, oh, they went on their walk. They'll be back. And then we went outside and played wiffle ball. All right. And we never had any issues. And so you'll see that in a lot of cultures like that, where and when you do the research on it, you will see yes, glucose is far more regulated when you go for a little bit of exercise after your meal is a really, really great strategy. Yeah, the couch will kill you. That's terrible. It really does.

You mentioned chronotypes earlier, like who are like the morning people and the evening people, like very similar to that concept regarding how hungry I am at certain times of the day. I wake up in the morning and I'm never hungry in the morning. I love the weekends, especially because I can just like wake up, sip some coffee for like an hour or two, maybe longer, and then eat when I actually have actual hunger, driving that behavior rather than like force feeding myself like I do on most weekdays where like I gotta just get some breakfast in me

so I can get out the door so I can get on with my day. And then in the evenings, it's the opposite. I'm like famished in the evenings. And as busy as I am with all the things these days, like I'm more concerned about not getting enough calories than getting too many calories. And so like I naturally, if I don't think about trying to intentionally eat as much

food as I can throughout the day, then I tend to lose weight. That's just where I'm at in my physiology at the moment. So in the evenings when I'm actually hungry and like, you know, especially after I like put my kids to bed and all that, like I'll just sit in my kitchen and eat until I go to bed. And I have the debate in my head all the time of like, should I really be eating all this food right before I go to bed? I'm not worried about getting fat, but is it disrupting my sleep? I tend to feel like I sleep pretty well. I rarely have sleep issues, no complaints on that end. So I feel like it's probably okay. But is there any legitimate

research out there that looks into people that are naturally more hungry in the morning versus naturally more hungry in the evening and how that affects their physiology while i don't know any any study specifically i can intuitively think what might be going on as far as a could be your chronotype b also potentially could be the fact that cortisol is highest in the morning and most people aren't hungry as soon as they wake could potentially also be done to the behaviors you had the previous night could also result in that whether or not you have enough stored glycogen, whether or not you did a hard workout that previous day. But what it could also potentially be an opportunity for you to look at the fact that maybe this could be a time-restricted type of thing here where we wait

for cortisol to come down more naturally. Maybe it's best for your particular chronotype and physiology to wait and eat at 9am or 10am anyhow, and that might be better for you. And so and that's why I try to, I try to educate my clients and everyone else about this, and especially my students as they're, you know, building into this industry is individual differences is a real thing. You know, everybody is different. Everyone's not always going to react the same.

Usually, if it's if you were starving, if you were not hungry all day long, then I would say, Doug, there's a problem there. You know, maybe there's some issues with cortisol being way too high. Maybe you have some stress on your physiology. But if you're naturally getting hungry on during the day anyhow, then most likely everything's OK. I would advise you try to not have a huge meal before going to bed. All right. But if you haven't had any issues so far and you sleep soundly throughout the night, then do what you can tolerate and keep it up as long as you are keeping your macronutrients where they need to be for your own goals and your own health.

What about temperature and like noises at night? So that's also interdependent for most people, but most sleep hygiene related protocol state, you want to keep things quiet, right? And you want to keep things as dark as possible. You'll have some people who do really, really well, which is that constant wavelength of sound. So us fan people who really like the sound of a fan. And that's more related to the research of like the binaural beats and the wavelength of sound that allows us to stay calm and be more in that beta state but some people can live in new york city keep the window open and hear guns blazing and tussling all over the place and that's for them comfortable no chance the only reason they say that's comfortable is because they don't know uh

that you can live out by mash right Right. No. What about temperature though? Like what, what temp is optimal? Temperature is a real thing. And so, and that's because temperature has a significant rhythm, right? Temperature is at its lowest during the evening.

And then it reaches its highest point about that late afternoon. And it's that turnover. That is one of the major signals to the body that says, Hey, we're shifting over to nighttime now, it's time to go to bed. All right. And it's very, very important to pay attention to that because for and then this is actually there's some individual differences here too. And I'll talk about that. But most people you want to keep that bedroom, you know, 68 degrees at least.

All right. I actually sometimes go as low as 65. And drive my fiance nuts. And so, but you want to keep it chilly and then you want it to slowly rise as you come to the morning times to naturally occur with the natural rise of temperature in the morning that helps to wake you up. So if you're trying to get to sleep and you're having issues with sleep, definitely consider temperature as a potential factor that could be resulting in what's going on. Keep the temperature low. I do that with my eight sleeve, which is really convenient for this where

maybe this is related to chronotype as well. If I compare myself to my wife, she's a morning person. I'm an evening person. When we go to bed, I'm always too hot. I will kick the covers off of me. The same temperature, I'll be kicking the covers off me and she'll be adding extra, to get warm enough to go to sleep. And I'm like, I'm like sweating in my bed. And then in the morning it switches where I wake up

and I'm just like, I'm like shivering and she's kicking all the blankets off of her. So is that, is that, is body temperature related to chronotype? Is there any research on that? Yeah. That can be different as well based off of the person to person changes and there's there's also sexual differences we could talk about and there's also depending depending upon the misalignment of someone's circadian rhythm that also negatively influences certain gender specifics um and so that's honestly a big thing you guys have to work on together when it comes to being a couple and this is people things i have to tell a lot of people oftentimes because having a completely different sleep pattern from your spouse or your partner can be one of the biggest issues that causes so many

related issues. So and it's where I actually talked to people, they utilize the eight sleep beds for that reason, because their temperatures are different. And so this also brings into question. So So when working with particular clients, mainly you would advise to help someone get to sleep to do something that causes some amount of heat stress, whether it's getting in the bath or doing something like the sauna, because it will drive your body's core temperature up to that highest point. And then as soon as you get out of that environment, body's radiation effect radiates out the heat and your body core temperature plummets, which is a great way to help send that signal to the body to fall asleep.

However, there are some people where it's the opposite, where for some reason that will make them worse and feel more agitated and cold will have a negative impact. And I've actually found that this is actually true for those individuals that have those really, really, really, really, really low HRVs, where we really got to do something to help get rid of their energy. So our high anxious, high performing people. And so I've experimented, I won't say his name, all right, with one of our individuals with this and doing cold exposure at night in the shower has given him the best night's sleep ever versus ever doing anything that's heat related in the evenings instead. All right. So that can also play a significant role in identifying that individual variation and what their chronotype could be contributing to in that factor.

Oh, wow. Yeah. I often wonder about that. Like I have a sauna and when I when I use a sauna in the evenings i i do fall asleep and sleep very well i also i also feel like there's like a kind of a solitude just calming down aspects to it where i i have that that 30 minutes of quiet time to kind of think through my day and take notes about you know what i need to do the next day etc and then when i fall asleep i don't have my mind racing because i kind of already took care of all that but but the rationale of you get really really hot in the sauna And then when you go to bed, because your body's hot, your body's trying to dump heat, your body's trying to cool down. And then when your body gets all the way sufficiently cool, you can fall asleep. Seems to contradict the eight sleep that I have where I'll put my eight sleep on really,

really cold. And I'll lay there with it cold underneath me. And then I often wonder, is this making my body cold so I can fall asleep asleep or is my body trying to counteract the cold by heating itself up which would be the opposite it would be detrimental to falling asleep and so i have these like two these two models that seem to contradict each other yeah yeah it happens all the time in exercise science it's a pain in the butt it was the answer no answers we don't know it's up in the air. What's the answer? No answers. We don't know. It's up in the air. And see, that's the beautiful question about exercise science too, and that's why we

continue to investigate and ask those questions of what could potentially be going on, and what is the effect of that individual variation. I don't know what that says. They both seem to work great. The sauna seems to help me sleep wonderfully, and eight sleeps are fucking awesome. We get no kickback from saying that.

My eight sleep, I think, is amazing. My wife loves it, too. You can be cold if you want to be cold. You can be warm if you want to be warm. It's different on both sides of the bed. That thing's a fucking game changer. I really, really like it. I have a question on the tracking side

or the metrics that you find to be the most important. Like personally, I wake up and I turn that little aura thing on and all I really look at is what's my HRV and what was my resting heart rate? And I know that if the HRV is like closer to 100, great job. And if my heart rate is above in the 40s,

I feel like I just did something awful like there was just an amount of stress or something going on that like really screwed me up um are there things that like where do you kind of put like the most important metrics on a night to night basis so i i agree with you hrv and heart rate are the first two i do look at after i have gathered at least two to three weeks of data on a person because there are individual variations with hrv and temperature and heart rate as well even andy goppen talks about this right he's like you can hrv is one of those weird things where you'll have those individuals that you know clinically state all right if you have a a high HRV through the roof,

you are very, very parasympathetic. And then if you have a very, very low HRV, that that's sympathetic, but you can have someone that has, you know, an HRV of 40, but is absolutely fine. And when it comes to levels of stress, whether or not they know it or not physiologically, and then you've got someone who's got, you know, 100, 120 HRV, and they're absolutely mental and out of their mind. And so you have to look at, all right, what is the consistency of this person? And what are their subjective outcomes from this? And then that'll allow me to see, all right, when they jump down from that, and then can I detect a difference? Okay, now I can see that a five point or 10 point degradation to their HRV resulted in this, that more than likely is indicating that something's going on, their behaviors are not

conducive to their overall health. Same thing with heart rate, right? And so, but in addition to those things, because I'm big into sleep, I love looking at the time in bed, how many times they've actually woken up in the middle of the night. And this is why I also wish we had some form of actigraphy measure. And so, because actigraphy is something that I... Speak English here for a second. Go ahead. So, actigraphy is what we utilize. People are going to be Googling that on their way to work and getting car wrecks looking up

at antigraphy. And so, an actigraph is something that's able to measure movement during sleep at a clinical level. We utilize this for sleep at a clinical level. We utilize this for sleep research and clinical research. And there's even variations of them that also allow them to detect the light that comes on during the day as well. And so the actigraph company makes these. They're very expensive.

But they're able to show us the overall sleep rhythms throughout the night when someone is really waking up. I know the Oura Ring does that too, but it's more fine-tuned with an actigraph. And you can also sense physical activity levels with this as well. And so we utilize this in my dissertation research. And so when you utilize the actigraphs, you can really see, oh, wow, they had a great degree of sleep fragmentation. And so the Oura Ring functions on this as well, just not to as a fine-tuned degree as I would like to see. But it does allow me to ask the right questions as to towards what's going on with my client.

Did they stay up really, really late? Were they consistency? How was the consistency from day to day? That is a big one that I'm really paying attention to now. Because especially when certain clients just continually tell me that I can't seem to get this sleep thing handled. And then I go through their schedule and I'm like, well, dude, you keep going back and forth and back and forth the timing of your bed from Monday to Tuesday. And then Saturday, it's all over the place. And then you drank that one night

and that's gonna negatively influence your sleep. And so I really like to look at the timing each and every night. And I like to see how many times they've been waking up. And then I also take a look at their heart rate too, because if I can see that their heart rate rose all of a sudden, right before they were going to bed, okay, that tells me they're either doing something very, really stressful in the evening, or maybe they had a really, really late meal. And it took a while

for their resting heart to stabilize. And so when your aura ring will tell you that too, they'll say, hey, your readiness is kind of low because your resting heart rate took a while to stabilize the night prior more than likely had to do with the fact that you were probably doing some sort of behavior that wasn't conducive to sleep hygiene, such as eating a really, really big meal or even doing really, really late night exercise can do that as well. What about late night sex?

Yeah. Well, I'm going to take the hit on that one. Well, subjectively speaking, that would make sense. You've got to have boundaries. You've got to have boundaries.

I would like to do that recently. Would you rather live a couple of extra days, increase my mortality, or is it just a fair, you just shake hands with the devil at the end and you just go, yeah, I'm just going to do this. Right, and see, but that's when you're splitting hairs at that point. You're just like, okay, well, let's look at how I feel psychologically.

If you're doing certain activities that make you feel good psychologically, that's more than half the game that's going to make you feel better and have a good night's rest. And we talk about this all the time. If you do everything right right buddy you'll be all right i feel like i sleep better afterwards so i feel like it's a wash me too yeah you have that rise of prolactin it puts you to sleep that's why guys fall asleep immediately and our fiancés are like hey it's like we can't help it it's male biology give me 10 minutes give me 10 minutes here

makes you think i want to talk but anyways all talk. But that's a real thing, right? You can take care of yourself physically to the max, but if you're not taking care of what's up here in the mind, psychologically, it's not going to matter. And so doing the things that make you potentially feel better, as long as they're healthy behaviors, can be an absolute plus. And I would never tell my client to abstain from anything that might make them feel psychologically better. Oh, listen.

Yeah, I'm done. Time to find a new doctor. What about wearables? Exactly. Quickly. What about wearables? Is Oura Ring the best? I mean, if you're going to get a wearable or what?

So actually, and that's funny that you asked that question. Before I left Arizona State, I had colleagues who were actually researching the validation of these things. And they actually found that compared to polysomnography, these are actually pretty damn good compared to any other wearable that you have. And that comes down to the Apple Watch, which I'm not wearing currently, your Garmin, and even the Whoop. The Oura Ring tends to be on the top when it comes to health. Get one. Really?

It's awesome. I have a question kind of about the drugs that we put in our body as a society on a regular basis. Definitely not talking about himself. Just other people. Society. I have no bias towards any of these that I will bring up. Let's just call it that. I've actually like, I'm like no drinking guy in the neighborhood because it, it is so bad for your sleep.

So bad. Every time I will have, if I, if I have like two drinks at dinner and that alcohol does not clear my system. By the time I go to bed, I will look down at my aura ring and it looks like I just, I, I, I didn't sleep at all. Like it is the,

your HRV will just drop down into the teens. Your heart rate will go into the fifties, sixties. And if that's where you're normally staying, it's probably up in the seventies, eighties, almost if like, there's like a 20, 20 beats per minute swing sometimes, but there's still boo 20, 20 beats per minute swing sometimes. Um, but there's still booze in the system. Um, I've also noticed that, um, if I have like a cigar or something with friends and nicotine, I'll just be laying in bed and my brain will just not like there's,

there's no calming down. Um, is that's really like the extent of my, marijuana seems to be not a problem at all. Are there, is there like- Not good for sleeping either? No, it's terrible, yeah. Maybe you're asleep. I don't know. I'm pretty tired when my head hits the bed. N equals one here.

But are there like categorically things to stay away from or is it just all the things stay away because your body is going to have to process those stressors in a way that you're putting in and there is no good way to casually have a drink. There isn't. You make that sacrifice when you consume that product. And this is how I teach my, my, my students about alcohol. First of all, and you know, I, I'm sure they're listening to you by the way. That's why they went to college. Okay guys, your sleep's going to be bad. And they're like, yeah, I don't have class until noon. What does it matter? My chronotype, the middle of my sleep is 6am. So I like having a drink now and again, you know, I'm definitely in that camp. I'm not

an anti alcohol person. But alcohol is terrible. Absolutely terrible for every aspect of the human body. All right. I'm actually in, you know, how the CDC World Health Organization Oh, yeah, you know, man, you know, one to two drinks a day, women one drink a day. I'm starting to be more in the camp with Dr. Huberman and saying one a week, if you're lucky, with the negative influence it has not only on your liver and levels of muscle protein synthesis, but also what it does to you cognitively. When you drink alcohol before you go to bed, my best allegory, my best representation visually about this is think about putting your key into the ignition of a car and you're trying to turn the engine on, but the engine won't turn

over. That's what's happening when you're drinking alcohol. All right. It significantly fragments your sleep. So you have lower deep sleep, lower REM sleep. And while you think you are getting a good night's rest, and this is what a lot of people used to say, oh, I sleep like a baby when I have six beers. The issue is that's basically making you unconscious. It's knocking out your prefrontal cortex. And therefore, you're not getting restorative sleep when you are drinking. Same thing with sleeping drugs and sleep prescriptions. When you look at all the research on individuals who use sleeping drugs to get to sleep, their

mortality rate goes through the roof. And so that was something my mentor was big on as well, is trying to get people off sleeping meds as best as you possibly can try to holistically correct your sleep without drugs because sleeping all sleeping drugs do is knock you out. They don't actually allow you to get through the sleep stages that you need to naturally. And so consider melatonin to be a part of the sleep drugs. So, and I'm, so I, when it comes to melatonin, you got to be careful with this as well. All right. It's think of melatonin as just the getting the start, getting the guy to walk up to the starting line of a race with the starting pistol. It's not actually something that's going to help you get to sleep. It's going to modulate your circadian rhythm in

the opposite way that light exposure does. And so this is why utilizing melatonin supplements, oftentimes when people claim to feel better is a placebo. All right. It's melatonin is better used when you know you're going to travel. All right. And you know, you're trying to advance your phase in one particular direction. And so when it comes to actually improving your sleep, you got to make sure that your light exposure is on point and your behaviors are on point.

All right. No amount of melatonin pills going to help that. And then when it comes to marijuana, well, although CBD has been found to be okay and help with inflammation and potentially help individuals with sleep, especially in populations I work with, with PTSD, THC, however, is bad. No bueno. When it comes, I think you just said more fun than CBD, right? That's what you said. Every time I hear people talk about CBD, I go, go what why would you take all the fun out of this this makes no sense exactly i thought he was still listening i thought he was i thought he

was just gonna mute you and put his fingers in his ears and go la la la la la la that's like decaffeinated coffee like what's the point oh it makes me pee a lot that's great yeah where's the fun wait so joking aside go down the thc route like what how how does it negatively impact sleep what are the what are the outcomes thc does the same thing thc does the same thing it makes it more difficult to get through your sleep stages and because of its effect its effect on long-term memory as well also has degradatory effects and so i i never recommend to people don't don't don't drink and sleep don't smoke and sleep don't drink coffee and sleep because that's another thing too you you've heard of these individuals who say that

they can have a pot of coffee before going to sleep that and so and you'll have these high metabolizers of coffee that will react just fine and fall asleep however if you were to take their brain scan and compare it to that of a 70 to 80-year-old, you would see as high amount of sleep fragmentation as you would in the individual who drank coffee as that 70 or 80-year-old. And so although these people think that they can fall asleep just fine, nowhere near getting as much restoration as they could be. Do you know what the distinctions are here between drinking at 7 p.m. versus having a drink over lunch versus same with cannabis or any other drugs like beer with alcohol wake and bake person versus like you smoke right before you go to bed

does it does it so I will be you heard that Matt I will be 100% honest I do not my buddy I hear it a lot he does that a lot I don't know I don't know the decay rate of thc i would have to look into that to see what that is but when it comes to alcohol however long it takes

your body to fully process it out and so most of the time i'd recommend if you know you're going to want a better night's sleep but you know that you're going to go have a drink and watch the game or do something try to keep it at least two to three hours prior to going to bed. Give your body time to process the alcohol, get your resting heart rate under control before you go to sleep and you'll usually be okay. But that's also dependent upon how much alcohol you've had. Because if you're day drinking all day and you've had six to eight drinks, good night, Betty, you're not going to get much sleep that night. I think it also takes a significantly longer, like we get like the half-life of whatever alcohol or THC or whatever. I think that the actual clearing of that stuff takes significantly

longer than we really anticipate. I did like a 48-hour fast for, I'm 40. It's fine. I'll call it colonoscopy. I had to do it. So you have to fast and you got to clean your whole system out. So literally there was like nothing in my body. And that night I came home and had like 10 milligram edible. Yo, at like noon the next day, I was like, what is going on with me? It's because my body, like it takes that long, but I'm usually, I have a bunch of food in me or I have coffee or something along those lines. But that was the first time that I ever just kind of like on a very empty, like the most empty stomach that you can have like um had thc and it was like holy crap this stuff sticks around for a very long time that i had no clue edibles are crazy yeah you don't know what you're gonna get don't do it no but that's the same thing

i talk about with caffeine you know people are like but isn't the half-life of caffeine six hours it's like yes but you re-say that word half-life yeah it's still sticking around your bloodstream for an additional six hours and even if you had your last drink of coffee or energy drink at noon it's still going to be circulating in your bloodstream around 11 o'clock at night or to midnight and so that's you have to be very very careful especially if you're drinking a lot of it, more than just one or two cups a day. Oh, wow. So you should really be done with energy drinks. I'm just going to work out in the morning then.

All right. Yep. And so you got to be careful with pre-workouts because people will never anticipate the effect of their pre-workout. And you'll have those individuals who take it in the afternoons because that's the only time they have to work out. And they'll pump 300 milligrams of caffeine. And don't do that. That's why I honestly try to stop drinking caffeine by 10 AM at the latest. This is a great podcast.

Yeah, dude. Yes. Boom. Where can people find you, sir? They can find me at Dr. C Perry, zero zero one on Instagram. All right. They can find me everywhere. I have my own podcast kicking at the E-Way podcast that I do here for the

university. And I do nothing but try to give out good content and inspire others to have permanent lifestyle changes. You're the man. What's up? Smash. Mash. You can read my articles on gym wear,

just gym wear block. Hey, mash. Was that a, a two, two scoops of pre-workout you took mid-podcast here as we're talking about sleep it was it was one scoop it was one scoop one scoop as my coffee coffee put us the pre-workout i love it no no that is my coffee yeah no i don't really like

coffee that's c4 gotcha But it's a sport It's not ultimate So I'm getting better It's early enough It's like decaf Doug Larson Right on I'm on Instagram Doug C. Larson

Chris, Dr. Chris Perry Love having you on the Rapid team Chris is one of our coaches Does very very well with our clients I knew you'd do a great job on this show Dr. Chris Perry, dude, love having you on the Rapid team. You fucking smashed. Chris is one of our coaches, if we didn't already say that. Does very, very well with our clients. So, dude, I knew you'd do a great job on this show, especially talking about sleep, which is like the center of the bullseye in your wheelhouse.

So, really enjoyed it, dude. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. I had fun. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged at barbell underscore shrugged. If you would like to see a free lab lifestyle performance analysis from Dr.

Andy Galpin and Dan Garner, and potentially have Dr. Perry over here as your coach, head over to rapidhealthreport.com and you can access that free report over there. Rapidhealthreport.com friends. We'll see you guys next week.