Barbell Shrugged - The Importance of Sleep For Performance

Episode Date: January 4, 2017

It's officially 2017 and many of you are setting goals for the upcoming journey around the sun. Whether your goals are fitness oriented or have to do with your relationships, we encourage you to take action on them. We also think that you will get some useful take aways from this week's episode with Doctor Kirk Parsley when it comes to your 2017 intentions.    This week we had Doc Parsley come by to talk to us about the importance of sleep. You might be asking yourself, what sleep has to do with your new year's resolution? Well it turns out sleep has everything to do with most developments in our life. Everything from physical adaption, to skill acquisition, to emotional development (i.e. relationships) happen during your sleep cycle. Shitty sleep equals shitty performance gains, mood, sex life, and anything else you want to get good at.    Doc Parsley works with some of the top performers in the world ranging from Navy Seals, CEO's, and Professional athletes, however you don't need to be in the NFL or lead a company to get some gains from this episode.    If you want to learn more about Doc P's work and his sleep product, you can find it here http://sleepcocktails.go2cloud.org/SHR

You know, what people don't appreciate is that everything you get better at, you get better at while you sleep. That's it. You don't get better at anything while you're awake. So if you're not sleeping well, and if you're not sleeping and lining through a circadian rhythm, you just don't do that as well. I agree. What the fuck do I know? Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson, and we have Dr. Kirk Parsley. And you're a former Navy SEAL. You now specialize in sleep, or have specialized in sleep.

You work with a lot of people that have traumatic brain injuries you work with a lot of people who you're just trying to get people healthy and some of the work you do is with hormone replacement therapy and doing it in an intelligent way

what else should we know about you that i may have missed i'm a hell of a square dancer uh good with legos i don't know yeah i mean like uh your your point is exactly i think the message i'm trying to get out uh you know i completely unintentionally became the sleep guy that was never it was never a goal of mine to be this world-renowned expert on sleep. That's usually how it happens, though. You just start doing something, and all of a sudden people are like, oh, you're that guy. I'm like, am I?

Oh, weird. Do I want to be that guy? I never tried to be that guy. I didn't want to be that guy, but I guess I ended up being that guy. Interestingly, when I came back was the SEALs, when I came back to the SEAL teams as their doctor, you know, they were having all these problems that I couldn't really explain any other way.

But the one thing that I was finding when I did these huge panels on them, I did these huge serum panels of, like, 98 different serum markers, largely because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Like, I'm just like, I can just shotgun it and let's see what pops up. And all their hormones were fucked up. And so I wanted to fix their hormones because I'm a doctor. I'm a medical doctor. That's what they teach me.

It's like, hey, this will help. This is this. You give this pharmaceutical intervention to fix that. So we need to bring them to normal. Right, right, right. But unfortunately, the other downside of medicine is that normal has nothing to do with optimal, right? It's just like it's quote-unquote normal. So normal is you normally – this is my understanding.

You can correct me if I'm wrong, but – You're wrong. You're probably wrong, but go ahead. No, but like in the medical community, the normal is kind of like the average versus what you're saying is optimal. Yeah. I was like, okay, the average person. The average nationwide, right? Right.

Not even like the average in Southern California, which would look totally different than the average in Northern Texas or whatever, Iowa or whatever. I don't know. Not that I'm bashing any of those places. I live in Texas. My dad lives in Iowa, so it's all good. But things like – He can say that. I can say that.

He's lived there. It's like being a minority. You can make fun of a minority if you are one. So I can make fun of people in the Midwest because I'm from the Midwest. Kind of the South Midwest. Shit, I don't know. I never claim to be smart man uh but uh i mean if you look at something like we'll just take a random number like total testosterone which by and large

is a stupid number doesn't mean a whole lot but the normal the normal range for this is 250 to 1100 nanograms per deciliter pretty fucking big range man so what do you do if the experience at 250 to 1100 are two completely different completely different world yeah right it's like saying one drink or three bottles of jack like you know what makes you you know what's what's that what's intoxication huge range right range. That wouldn't even be close. Total testosterone comes from Framingham data. If you're not familiar with Framingham, it's a little town in Massachusetts.

It was filled with all northern, white, European immigrants. This was only 50, 60 years ago. It didn't have a lot of flux, right? The people who lived there tend to live there their whole lives. So it was an easy population to study.

It was close to the Ivy League schools. And so that's the population they studied. When they decided to do total testosterone, what's normal? And that's all they could measure at the time was total. The criterion for being normal was you had to be 19 or older. Okay. You had to have testicles and you had to be alive. You met those three.

Rigorous. Yeah. You met those three criteria. You were part of the story. Like you were part of the normal range. So the 82 year old guy at the nursing home when the most physical thing he ever does is this is 250 right the 19 year old guy who's out getting after it is 1100 i feel like if you if you take this out of the the intangibles of like what what

are my blood markers and you you put it into the physical world like if you said like if you're older than 19 and you're a male and you alive, what is the range for your mile time? What's the normal range? It's like 5 minutes to 25 minutes. What's good? Well, my mile time is between 5 and 25, so I'm normal, so I'm good. Great metaphor. Even if your mile time is like 18 minutes, as far as athletes are concerned.

How do you know my mile time? That's like a slow walk almost. So to be normal is not good at all in that example. When you pull it out of the intangible and put it in the physical real world, then all of a sudden it's like, oh, okay, this doesn't make sense at all. What's good for me? What's optimal for someone that's my age and is relatively healthy? Right. And that's exactly how I got into this

because, like I said, I wanted to fix the hormones. I wasn't the military medicine, most conservative kind of medicine. It's way worse than just academic medicine. This is big government-controlled medicine policy. They weren't about to let me give seals hormones because within six months, there'd be an admiral on CNN having to explain me give seals hormones because you know within six months there'd be an admiral on cnn having to explain why all seals take steroids right seals are on anabolic steroids

if what i've heard that's been a little bit of flux on what's there's been times where it's been more available and less available yeah well i mean i, you know, probably 15 or 20 years ago, along with probably 15 years ago, when organizations like Cinegenics really started marketing this low-T, you know, concept, this manopause, andropause, whatever, those types of clinics started becoming available to everybody because, by and large, they were – I wouldn't say they're snake oil salesmen, but they were kind of irresponsibly treating people. They were just going, we'll put you at the high end of the range and you'll feel great, so I must be a great doctor.

It's like, yeah, well, if I gave you cocaine every day, you'd feel fucking great too, but that wouldn't make me a good doctor, right? So you need to be responsible about how you treat it. They're siloing this one thing, looking at one marker, not paying attention to the system as a whole. Yeah, and I actually trained with them maybe 10 years ago, and I'd already been training under brilliant guys who'd been doing this stuff for 40 years. But I needed some kind of plaque I could put on my wall that proved that I had been through some certification, you know, certification. And I, you know, I said in this three day

training, which was by and large teaching me how to be a telemarketer to try to get people into the program. But the little bit of actual medicine hormone replacement they talked about, they were just fucking wrong. Like, they just didn't know what the hell they were talking about. Like, I knew way more than the instructors. The one guy who came in and did female hormone replacement, he was pretty smart. But synogenics, like 90% of their population were males.

So anyways, like, you know, if we take testosterone as one of the examples, and that I'm just taking it because it's familiar and everybody talks about it. There were 20 other markers that I wanted to fix on these team guys because they didn't have disease. You know, the medical system, one of the screwed up things about the medical system is if you don't have a disease, I can't treat you, right? I have to have an ICD-10 code to put on there to say, this is why I'm giving you this medication. And there's a book or course or algorithm somewhere to say, this is why I'm giving you this medication. And there's a book or course or algorithm somewhere to tell me that's what I'm supposed to do. If I, if you hit this lab value, then I do this. And if you don't hit that lab value, I don't do anything, right? Like you don't even have diabetes. If your blood fasting blood glucose is one 24, I go got nothing for you,

man. Work on your diet, I guess. Like exercise more. But once you hit 125, oh, dude, you're pre-diabetic. Let's get in here. Let's start giving you some pills. But anyways, I didn't really have the option of treating these guys. And the other thing is when you get into an organization like the SEAL teams or professional athletes or pilots or whatever, a lot of medication is disqualifying from your job,

which is the worst thing you can do, right? A guy comes to see you because he's having problems performing in his job and you disqualify him from his job. You're the hero now, right? Like probably going to end up dead in a parking lot somewhere. So, um, but you know, the guys trusted me because I'd been a SEAL and they, and I had a good reputation as a SEAL. And so they came and they would chat with me about it and i found all these things off and i wanted to fix them and kind of the one unifying theory i could talk about was sleep because you know all of your anabolic hormones are produced while you're

sleeping and now your anabolic behavior is happening when you're sleeping your thyroid is getting balanced out and your stress hormones are getting balanced out and vitamin d3 is important for sleep and magnesium is important for vitamin D3 reactions and for sleep. And so that kind of allowed me to talk about hormones under the guise of sleep, right? It was a total sleight of hand. Like, here's my sleep lecture. And it was like 90% hormones. Gotcha.

You're like scooting around the system a little bit. But I had this kind of unique perspective on sleep, which most people weren't saying then, which is the mainstream story now, right. About photo period, you know, light saturation, um, you know, sleep hygiene, how nutrition affects sleep, how sleep affects nutrition and appetite and mood control and all this stuff. And then I also talked about, you know, sealAL specific training and operations, right? Obviously they work at night because that's when we have the advantage. We have, we have nods that they don't. So, you know, why, why wouldn't you fight at night? Like,

so they need to train at night. So they're oftentimes working at night, sleeping during the day. Right. So that's screwed up circadian rhythms. And then you can explain a lot of maladies with that. And again, these guys didn't have disease. They weren't coming in clinically depressed. They weren't coming in suicidal. They weren't coming in with diabetes or even pre-diabetes or whatever. They were coming in with poor insulin sensitivity.

They were coming in with low motivation. They were coming in with labile mood, just meaning they flip-flopop back and forth with their mood without even really knowing why and you know that's all that just a result of just intense training for years and in very very low amounts of sleep well we're talking about sleep yeah i mean a lot of it has to do with the chaotic sleep cycles right because you know what what people don't appreciate is that everything you get better at you get better at while you sleep. That's it. You don't get better at anything while you're awake. So if you're not sleeping well, and if you're not sleeping and lining through circadian rhythm, you just don't do that as well. So these are super high performing guys, right?

Top of the top, right? Crème de la crème, as they say. And these guys are used to performing here. And 10 years later, when they should be peaking their performance is dropping off to here and they're like why the hell is my performance dropping off like i've you know i've trained vigorously i you know i do with the exercise you know with my strength and conditioning coach tells me to do i eat what rob wolf tells me to eat you know like whatever they totally geek out about their health and their performance starts declining. Those are the guys who came to see me.

And I would have, I mean, I guess at that time I would have hoped that they had something that I could diagnose and then go, here's that pill and I'll fix it. Because that's how I got trained in medicine. I have subsequently learned that traditional medicine is not healthcare at all. Right? It's disease care. If you don't have a disease, I got nothing for you as an MD. I mean, what what makes somebody healthy? What makes somebody high performing? Sleep, nutrition, exercise and stress control. Right? You have

to optimize those four pillars. It's like the four tires on a car. Your buddy pulls up in front of your house with three wheels on this car gets out and it's like dude this thing's performing like shit i think the fuel injectors are clogged are the fuel injectors clogged could be but let's put the tire on first and then see how it performs right yeah so you know you optimize those four pillars. And that really gave me the perspective in medicine that I was like, well, I have to optimize these guys' lifestyle, which required me to, you know, lobby and try to change certain aspects about training as well. Because they had to have the right environment to be able to optimize their lifestyle. And then we do things to mitigate.

Because I can tell you, especially if I'm doing labs on you and talking with you regularly, like I can tell you what ideal is. But there's reality, you know, reality and ideal very rarely meet each other, no matter how motivated you are. and things like napping and things like stimulants for long night ops or whatever, or whatever, nutritional supplements or sleep supplements or whatever, just giving that one category. But you can do that kind of for every category. So you're talking about just picking the low-hanging fruit first. Yeah. And this happens with everybody.

I mean, I went up to – I have a lot of friends in the entrepreneurial space who are not necessarily health or fitness oriented. And they are doing a lot of the bulletproof. Yeah, man. A lot of the biohacking. Of course. And, you know, I go over to a friend's house and he's like, dude, you got to get on this vibration plate. And this is all the stuff it does. And I'm like, oh, cool.

He's like, you should get one. I was like, no, I'm good. I just exercise. And I'm like, oh, cool. He's like, you should get one. I was like, nah, I'm good. I just exercise. And he's like, why? I was like, well, all this stuff that you just mentioned is good for us. I achieved that with movement. Plus I get all these additional benefits from moving. Way more benefits with the movement, yeah.

And so it's funny to me. I think Kelly Starr, I went to the Bulletproof Conference, and I think he did a really good job of addressing this because if you go to Paleo FX, you go to that conference, you got one type of crowd. And if you go to Bulletproof, it's a different type of crowd. And there's some crossover there too. The perspectives are similar in a lot of ways,

and then the type of person it attracts is very different. So what I've seen is the Paleo crowd is like everyone's in the movement and just like right and like i don't know kind of being in their bodies and being here and with bulletproof it well they're performance oriented around their physical body whereas the entrepreneurs c-level executives all those guys that ashbury attracts they're when they want to optimize their you know the neck up of the cognitive performance or decision making ability they're you know how long they can work without collapsing like all that stuff is what they're really focused on and then you know there's a little bit of ego and aesthetic shit going on below you know below the below the neck but for the most part it's like they don't

care how much they bench press or how fast they run a mile or yeah what their fran time is like they don't care yeah it is comical, though, buying a $5,000 machine that shakes you. Yeah. When it's like, well, you could just go spend 30 minutes crawling around outside and get something just as good. I work with these guys. It's more fun, too.

Yeah, it's way more fun than me. I work with these guys now. That's who my clients are now. My clients are serial entrepreneurs, C-level executives. These are the people who call me and want to be like my private client that I work with for – I do an annual program. They're 30, 40 pounds overweight. They traded their health for wealth 20, 30 years. They just sold their company, returned a million dollars.

They don't give a shit about money, right? Money doesn't motivate them at all anymore. They don't care how much my program costs. And if I tell them to go buy a $5, vibro plate they're fine what they care about is time right they care about their time and so you go you can use a vibro plate for five minutes or you can go outside and exercise and like we most people we know would be like yeah i'm gonna freaking go out and like you know walk through the trees or go surfing or have some fun while I'm getting my movement in. But the person who's still grinding the entrepreneurial axe

and trying to get in there and make their mark, they'd rather do the vibroplate, man. Yeah, totally. That's actually a really interesting perspective that I hadn't fully considered until you said it just now where actually some of that's making a little more sense at the moment. Yeah. Doug's being blown away right now. Yeah, I'm like, wow, there's a real rationale for doing that.

I got it. It wasn't a terrible idea to bring me on after all. I know you guys were regretting it when I first got here. I could see the look in your eyes like, oh, shit, what are we going to talk to this guy about? I mean, I'm all about trying to find each little thing. If the vibration plate was not so expensive, I would probably throw in the corner for warm-ups and cool-downs. It would be awesome for that.

There's obviously benefits to it. But it is funny to me when somebody is not moving at all and they're relying specifically on that. Right. Or what do you think about the glasses? The blue blocking glasses. Well, you have blue blocking glasses and now they have these glasses that shoot lasers into your eyes or something. Yeah.

To do light therapy. Yeah. The retimer, right? Yeah, the retimer. When you put these glasses on and it shines light in your eyes, I'm going... You could use that, but... I'm going, hmm. You could use that. I'm like, hmm, this doesn't seem like the right thing to do. Yeah, I mean, the right time to use those things is when you have a circadian shift.

As most people know, this body is somewhere around 200,000 years old. There's been zero upgrades. It would be the same as whatever you know a 1980 honda civic being exactly the same today right there's been zero upgrades whatsoever um we didn't involve in a world where we could cross 12 time zones in a day just didn't happen so how the hell would we have any mechanism for fixing that we don't like we have this very slow mechanism that takes days i've noticed like you're crying you cross one time zone and you're heading

east to go you cross one time zone it's at least a day before your body can capture that but how long would it have taken you to walk across the time zone multiple days right so it was never a problem until the last hundred years or something yeah so things like re-timers and you know that put the light in your eyes or even totally different mechanism but a similar idea the human charger where they put the light in your ears have you seen that uh-huh yeah oh yeah um you know things like light therapy to what light therapy does is it pushes your bedtime away and then you can do things that pull your bedtime i'm sorry light therapy in the morning pulls your bedtime towards your light

therapy late in the day will push your bedtime away or exercise late in the day will push your bedtime further away you know so depending on where you've traveled and when you need to sleep and when you want to be at your optimal you can put little tricks in again this is like here's ideal don't travel okay here's ideal. Don't travel. Here's reality. I travel. All right, so how do I bridge that gap? Well, first, we do some stuff over here to kind of preload and get you ready to travel.

Then once you travel, in order to get back to that area, to get back to that ideal, there's little biohacks. I hate that term because I think the original biohackers were the pharmaceutical industry right and they're just like we'll make a molecule that like your molecule but it'll work better right yeah kind of where biohacking is in some respects to me right like obviously we know that the movement therapy would have way more benefits than the vibroplate but if the vibroplate is all we can do all right let's do that or if you can get like 25% or 50% of the movement you need and we add the vibroplate in, okay, great. These are all realistic things.

So the light therapy would be beneficial if I'm flying. Yeah, if you're changing time zones or even if you're a shift worker or if you know that you're going to have to stay up late for, say you're doing an event or something, you know that event's going to go to like 2 o'clock in the morning or whatever, and you're normally in bed by 9 p.m., you're going to be freaking wiped at midnight trying to be on stage running an event or something. So you do things to push your bedtime further away. That's kind of whatatonin is about. And that's what the heart rate variability training and bringing your stress levels down, bringing your stress hormones down, all of that type of stuff, light therapy, all of the sleep hygiene stuff. Sleep hygiene is really two things. It's how much light's going into your eyes and how stimulated you are.

It's really all it is. If you Google sleep hygiene, you'll find 5 million pages with 300,000 different things on it. But if you just explain to somebody, here's the concept of sleep hygiene, it's really simple. Decrease the amount of blue light going into your eyes

about three hours before you want to go to bed. Try to eliminate it completely if you can. Turning off your electronics. Or just wearing gaming glasses or shooting glasses that block blue light. go to bed try to eliminate it completely if you can there's turning off your electronics yeah tv or just wearing like gaming glasses or shooting glasses that block blue light i mean that's what i do i put on these glasses at home at seven o'clock every night they had this little titanium rims they're frameless don't even know how to on they hardly have any tentum at all they're

slightly yellowish but they block blue light it it would be the same as me living out without electricity, because now I can have the lights in my house going on, and I can have my television on, I can use my computer. But the other part of that sleep hygiene is how stimulated you are. Because what happened ancestrally, again, this 200,000 year old body, when the sun went down, there wasn't a hell of a lot to do, because you couldn't see very far, right? It was kind of dangerous to be running around at night. And so people weren't super stimulated they didn't have rave parties didn't have loud music for strobe lights i don't know you know so they didn't have all this stuff going on uh so they just like we never developed sort of any mechanism for handling that and again

just that's probably only in the last 50 years that we've really started well probably post industrialization when time became money and people wanted to be able to work in a factory all through the night or something like that. That's kind of when all that started happening to us. So what is it about blue light? Like, why isn't it just light? Well, because my guess, pure speculation, is that it's because the sky is blue and that would be a really smart cue if we were trying to figure out when sun when when the sun went down right because we've had fire for a long time right so you know you still would have gotten light without electricity um but you have

some ganglion in the back of your eyes and even a lot of blind people have these ganglion have nothing to ganglion just means like a cluster of nerves stuck together right so you have all these nerves stuck together uh neurons stuck together um and they're in the back of your eye and they sense blue light that's all they do and when the blue light goes down they start this pathway that goes down through something called the master clock or the super charismatic nucleus a lot of people have heard the master clock phrase really long circuitous route and eventually hit something called the pineal gland, which secretes melatonin. Melatonin does tons of changes in your brain, but it also decreases stress hormones and your sensitivity to stress hormones,

which starts winding you down, getting you ready for sleep. Your brain, the SCN or the master clock also changes a lot of the neurochemistry of your brain. And it starts slowing down certain brain regions and decreasing your interaction with the environment. One of the main neuropeptides for that is something called GABA, which you've probably seen in health food, sort of, right? Gamma-aminobutyric acid. And what that does is it lowers the resting potential of a neuron, right? So a neuron's like a battery. It's ready to fire. The lower the resting potential is, the harder it is to fire that neuron.

So it lowers that resting potential, makes it harder for those neurons to fire, which means you don't move as much. You don't feel as much. You don't hear as much. We've all had that pre-sleep phase or post-sleep phase where you wake up you're really in stage one sleep or it's still a form of sleep but you're aware of your environment but not really right like you know what's going on but you're not really interacting and when i get in the middle of night to pee yeah and it's kind of like yeah and it can

kind of blend with your dreams or thoughts you were having during your sleep. And it's not, you're not quite all there. That's what's supposed to happen. And that's what ordinarily happens if you just take away light and you take away stimulation. So if you take away light and then you go, I'm going to go to bed at 10 o'clock and then you get on your computer and you fricking grind on your business or your PowerPoint presentation or whatever the hell you're going to do. And you work till nine 59 and go get in bed. Guess what's going to happen. You're not going to sleep, man, because you've kept your brain awake.

You know, happy hour is a great example of that. When, you know, probably all three of us have had, you know, schlep jobs where we're 9 to 5 kind of time clock kind of job. And you wake up some mornings, you're like, I'm so exhausted. I'm going back to sleep as soon as I get home from work. As soon as work's over, I'm coming home and getting to bed. And your friend's talking to you going to happy hour. You have a couple of beers, which should make you more tired.

And what happens? Wide awake, man. And that's because you've overcome that GABAergic system that's slowing down your brain. You've just wiped it out. Overpowered it by weight- weight promoting neurotransmitters. You're seeing members of the opposite sex around, assuming you're heterosexual. I'm not judging anybody.

You know, whatever you're, you're talking to your buddies, you know, there's loud music around, there's lights, there's televisions, whatever.

And that's all sleep. It's all sleep hygiene. It's those two things. With that knowledge, you can figure out anything on your own, right? You can take your own lifestyle and go, oh, I have to get the light out of my eyes, blue light out of my eyes three hours before bedtime, and I have to decrease my interaction with the environment an hour or two before bedtime.

Yeah, I kind of set my house up that way, which is – Yeah, I can see all the skylights. I get a lot of natural light, but when the sun starts going down i don't i don't blast right my my whole house with light as soon as the sun goes down like if i do i use just enough light yeah uh to get there and none of it's actually it's actually good for the health of your eyes as well like to keep your your focal length right it's to it's that it's to operate in a dim light environment as well so yeah we have rules around we just try no electronics after eight yeah because we want to be in bed and asleep by 10

right yeah yeah super easy yeah i mean it's not rocket science man yeah it's not rocket surgery even so regarding alcohol um i noticed that i don't drink very much anymore, but when I used to drink a lot, if I went to bed even 2 o'clock in the morning, I still wake up at like 6, 7 in the morning, like 3, 4, 5 hours of sleep, and I'm like wide awake. Why is that? Yeah, so alcohol is actually processed in a couple of different systems, but one of the main systems is through your liver. Alcohol dehydrogenates, shifts alcohol essentially to formaldehyde, but we involve people with. That floats around in your bloodstream as a toxin. You have your immune system, right? Your immune system fights off bacteria, parasites, viruses, pretty much, and repairs damaged

tissues and damaged cells your adrenals are really designed to help defend you from what's outside of your environment right guys with machine guns or tigers or snakes whatever like that's your immune system for what's outside of your body that's your stress hormone system when you're poisoned your adrenals go let's ramp this shit up and metabolize all this and get it all out so you process all that poison yeah so you poison yourself and then your body you know converts all well you drink alcohol your body converts all that to a poison while you're asleep you also pretty much destroy deep sleep which is where all your anabolic hormones are produced i track my sleep every night and i have like i basically track what I did that day and alcohol is on that.

Yeah. And I deal and I don't drink a lot, but every once in a while I'll have a couple of scotches on a Friday night. And I definitely noticed that my, my sleep's just not, it's more disrupted. Yeah. Every time. And it does other things. I mean, it dehydrates you. Um, you know, it, it has some neurological activity, especially with the frontal lobe. Um, you know, it, it has some neurological activity, especially with the frontal lobe. Um, you know, but it does, it definitely causes an increase of stress hormones. Now for, for all of us, like for men who are relatively fit and have a reasonable, reasonable amount of muscle mass, we produce a lot of, um, um, a molecule called adenosine, which is the breakdown of ATP, right? ATP, ADP, AMP, and then just A, and the A is adenosine.

That causes sleep pressure. That's what makes us feel like going to sleep. When you drink alcohol, you run a bunch of redundant cycles that produces a lot of ATP and produces a lot of adenosine, so it makes you more tired as well. But if you have a reasonable amount of muscle mass and you're fairly active, or even if you just use your brain really intensely, your brain can produce, there's astrocytes in your brain produce adenosine as well. And that actually makes your brain feel sleepy. Like it increases all those sleep promoting neurochemicals I was talking about earlier,

along with the GABAergic system. There's other things that kind of slow down those neurons and make you want to go to sleep. So men can usually go to sleep kind of during, under any circumstance because they have so much adenosine. Now, a woman who is maybe the same height, right, or, you know, they have less muscle mass for about the same size brain, right? Like a 5'6 man and a five foot six woman brain size, maybe 10% difference. How much muscle mass is different? You know, it could be 300% different, right? So they're not producing much adenosine. So women oftentimes have problems going to sleep,

but men usually crash out from a lot of sleep pressure. As soon as their brain flushes all those neurotoxins out, their stress hormones are there, especially if they poison themselves with alcohol, stress hormones actually ramp up and they wake up. They feel like shit, right? Because they didn't get any real sleep. If you did what we call a polysomnograph where we put all the electrodes on your head

and we looked at your brain waves, we should be able to see like certain brain waves and clusters and synchronicity that we expect to see, like certain waves going through your brain when you sleep, and that's how we define the stages of sleep. These things like sleep watches, the actigraphy, it's an approximation of that. But the concept is that we should see these kind of patterns going around your brain, and we can say you're in stage one, you're in stage two, stage three, stage four sleep.

You were in that for that long. You came back up, you did REM sleep, you came back down, whatever. When you put drugs in there, all that gets destroyed. All right.

And that can be an over the counter sleep drug. It can be a prescription sleep drug. It could be alcohol, like whatever. So if you take something like, like not alcohol, not like you got blacked out drunk and then you passed out, which I think if you get on the show, last time you were on the show, you made the point that you're less sleeping and you're more just unconscious and you made that comparison.

Right. So if you take something more normal like you take a Benadryl or something like that, a lot of people, I know that they can't sleep and they take a Benadryl and they go to sleep. How does that really affect their sleep waves and the quality of their sleep? Yeah, so if you do, you know, the sort of stage one, stage two, three, and four in a predictable pattern for predictable time frames, and not everybody's exact, right? I mean, think of it like personal training. You know, programming isn't exact.

But, you know, approximate your sleep architecture. That's what we call that. Your sleep architecture looks good. All sleep drugs distort the sleep architecture. Some are more impactful in the REM sleep, which is where your brain's actually recovering, where you're actually making things that you learned that day, putting them into durable memories or being able to compare that to other stuff that you already know and work with it and form like creative ideas all that's happening during REM sleep even muscle memory stuff right so if you screw with REM sleep which sleep drugs are like

prescription sleep drugs totally destroy REM sleep you get like 20 percent of the REM sleep you essentially just don't learn as fast and you don't form memories as fast and that leads to a lot of the ptsd type symptoms as well because one of the things you're doing during rim is you're emotionally categorizing an event so if you have a fight with your wife over something totally stupid like leaving your socks on the floor or something never happened classic well you don't wear socks but i I'm talking about the Midwest again. She shouldn't leave them on the floor.

So if you have, you know, if you have a, if you have an argument like that, that that should be in nothing, right? Like you might get really heated and be super pissed off. And 10 minutes later, you're like, that was stupid. But if you don't sleep that night, next day that would be like a raw nerve man and it would be so much easier to flip out on your wife or anything right let me you'll be like so much ready but if you go to sleep that night you go okay um dying of you know dysentery uh you know get my car stolen like you just keep going into like, oh, well, the socks on the floor, like way down there, right? At the floor, ironically.

Still on the floor, where they should be. Where they should be. What the hell are you going to do? Put the socks on the ceiling? Makes no sense. I mean, so if you don't emotionally categorize events, then those things turn out to be more stressful and easier to react.

And you react more emotionally to them and then the more bad sleep you get the more that gets reinforced and reinforced and reinforced and we know that there's a huge correlation actually between any type of psychological disease like you talk about an oppression depression bipolar you know mania psychosis any like anything you've ever heard of, we know is heavily associated with sleep. There's a branch of medicine now called chronobiology and chronotherapy where they're using things like the light therapy we were talking about

to help people realign their circadian rhythm. And there's a pretty good chance that we're going to find out that every single depressed person who's ever been depressed, that depression was preceded by a poor period of sleep. And if you remove that poor period of sleep, would it relieve the depression? Would they ever get depressed? We don't know the answer to that,

but it's looking pretty promising that that's it. And then it increases your risk for psychotic breaks, which is the reason for something like the military doing the sleep deprivation during boot camp, getting you up super early. They're actually trying to break people. They're trying to see who's going to break. Then you get in a higher level, you go to SEAL training, you go for a week without sleep. They're trying to see

who's going to have a psychotic break. They're trying to see who's going to flip out, who can't handle operations and that. And guess what? That's genetic. You could be a great dude but it's just not going to work out for you if you know if your brain can't handle that and that's you know well it's genetic it's environmental you know there's some other issues involved but um you know it not not everybody has the same tolerance for anything right none of us have the

same stress tolerance the same exercise tolerance the same sleep deprivation tolerance or even the same nutritional tolerance right like some like we all need same sleep deprivation tolerance, or even the same nutritional tolerance, right? Like we all need to do six-pack abs, maybe it's McDonald's every day. I'm like, how the hell do you do that? It happens. Probably this guy right here. Not that you would eat McDonald's, but he loves McDonald's.

I think you could eat whatever you want to probably, and I stay ripped. I got away with a lot for a while. Yeah. The physique hasn't changed like the look hasn't changed how i feel there's a difference right for sure yeah yeah so earlier we were talking about how sleep affects nutrition nutrition affects sleep it's all interconnected intertwined in a million ways and and you had mentioned uh you know vitamin d3 magnesium

you mentioned melatonin at one point you Do any of these things specifically increase the amount of REM sleep someone would get? Sort of all of those things do. So what we find in the sleep literature really is that if you initiate sleep properly, it probably keeps going. Like there's a really good chance it's gonna it's gonna come out looking just fine if you kind of set everything up so for example like the supplement that i sell is an initiator it's an initiator that's all it is like everything in there is out of your bloodstream within a few hours but a lot of people come and go man i slept 12 hours on the stuff and i haven't slept one in

six hours ever like since it's 20 like, that didn't make you sleep 12 hours because nothing in their last 12 hours, but they initiated the cascade really well. And their brain kind of kept going down the pathway that it should do. Um, so, I mean, really just having solid nutrition affects that having solid stress control affects that having appropriate levels of movement and exercise affects that, you know, everything affects everything. You know, I tell people we learned, you know, as doctors, all healthcare providers, if you want to call it, I don't think doctors,

again, are healthcare providers or disease care providers. But we all, we all learn the body and systems, there's a neurological system, right? There's a nervous system, there's a cardiovascular system, there's a pulmonary system, there's a musculoskeletal system. It's a nervous system there's a cardiovascular system there's a pulmonary system there's a musculoskeletal system it's all right like there are no systems we figured out a way to to break it into learnable chunks right things that seem to be associated that was a clever way to learn it but it's not how you should think about it afterwards right that's why your neurologist doesn't know anything about cardiology and your cardiologist doesn't know anything about your brain, right?

Unless it's directly affecting cardiology, which is, you know, everybody gets more and more and more specialized as information grows and grows and grows. You just become more and more screwed because, you know, now this guy is like, you know, you go see a specialist who only does one type of surgery on females less than 36 years old and only in the left eye on Tuesdays. And like, that's how specialized this guy is, right? Yeah. And, but health has to be thought of as holistically, right? And even though I say sleep, nutrition, exercise, and stress, all those things are the same, right? They're all so completely intertwined. It's a, it's a way for me to help teach you how to think about it and to help coach you so that we can say, you know, sleep is a big component, but does your nutrition affect your sleep? Hell yeah. Does your sleep affect your appetite? Hell yeah. So that therefore affects

your sleep, right? Or affect your nutrition the next day, right? You get poor sleep, hormonal changes, appetite regulation changes. What you want to eat is different that day than if you would have got a good night's sleep. Does exercise affect your sleep? Of course. Does sleep affect your exercise? Of course, right? Same thing with stress. You want to stress somebody out, take away their sleep. Nothing will increase stress hormones faster than sleep deprivation. That's why we use it as a tool to break people down. There's a reason we use it for interrogation. Nothing stress hormones faster than sleep deprivation. That's why we use it as a tool to break people down. There's a reason we use it for interrogation. Nothing breaks you faster than sleep deprivation.

But we're not affecting your nutrition or your exercise status. We're affecting your ability to handle stress. And to be stress resilient, you have to not only do things to train yourself to be stress resilient, like meditation or mindfulness training or whatever, introspection through plant medicine or heart rate variability training or breathing exercises, whatever it is that you do, or even exercise, right, like sort of repetitive exercises like swimming and distance running. Those things can be sort of meditative,

and those all can affect your stress levels, and they make you more, they inoculate you against stress so that when you do have a stressor like a car wreck or a big fight with your spouse or sleep deprivation, it affects you less. But you take away your sleep. You can't. Your stress mitigation ability is lowered. But if you're stressed out all day, how well do you sleep? You sleep like crap when you're stressed.

Your stress hormones actually wake you up, which then makes you more stressed and now you're sleep deprived so that's affecting your nutrition right and actually not even what you eat but it affects your gut biome like within six seven hours affects your gut biome and your ability to absorb and break down what you eat and actually get the nutrients out of that exercise something like exercise, a single single bout of exercises changes how many glucose the four receptors that are actually bringing glucose into the cell. And other

trans, like there's all sorts of cellular membrane transporters that are affected with one bout of exercise. So you don't exercise one day, you're physiologically different the next day. And when I use the word exercise, I don't mean you have to go run a marathon or do a CrossFit workout or whatever. I just mean really activity in proportion to whatever your physiologic or physical goals are. The stress piece is interesting to me because, like what you're saying, when someone's in a stressful situation,

that's when they might go eat something they shouldn't eat like you know what fuck it i'm gonna have a drink or fuck it i'm gonna eat a hamburger instead of you know whatever something that doesn't include so much bread or whatever uh eat a bowl of cereal yeah what you, they start making poor decisions around that. Back when – Very simple science as to why that happens. Back when I let stress impact me more, I had a hard time sleeping. Right.

Like, oh, I'm having – I lay in bed and I think about all the stuff that needs to get done or what happened earlier that day or what I have to do tomorrow. And you also worry about shit that you have no control over, but mostly you're just like, I'm going to worry about it anyways, because it's really bothering me. Even though I can't do anything about it, I'm going to lay here for two hours and worry about it. Yeah. And in my experience, in my personal experience and the people I've worked with is if we can

disrupt the sleep or disrupt the stress, then everything else starts falling in line. So the stress, you know, even if, even if lack of sleep or bad nutrition or whatever, no matter what the cause of the stress is initially or emotional stress, um, is, is commonly the culprit. You know, we, we figure out a way to disrupt that, that stress. Now people start sleeping better, eating better. All of a sudden, all the things that they've been working on, it's like, oh, I've been exercising and I've been eating right and I still can't achieve the level of health I've been looking to get because I still have this stress that's disrupting my sleep. And even if I have the willpower to accomplish these other things, it's still completely

jacking me up. So what are your favorite ways of, I guess, disrupting stress cycles? So, I mean, and you could make that same argument about any of the pillars, right? Yeah. Once I get you to eat a good diet for 30 days, are you going to sleep better? I've also heard that, yeah. And like the same thing with exercise. I get you to be active. Like you're a completely inactive person. I get you to be that. Yeah. And like the same thing with exercise. I get you to be active.

Like you're a completely inactive person. I get you to be active. Right. Does that affect your stress levels? Of course. Does it affect your sleep? Of course. Does it affect your food choices?

Of course. But stress, like stress mitigation, I really listen to the person's language. I figure out what their priorities are. You know, some people are really religious. Some people are really spiritual. Some people are sort of really into, you know, the more esoteric kind of mindfulness stuff. And they really want to get on that rabbit hole to try to, you know, get introspection as to what their trigger is for stress and learn how to control that. And, you know, like as I mentioned earlier, there's plant medicines and all sorts of ceremonies and things that can help people do that and even pharmaceuticals that help people do that. So if that's your bag, okay, let's figure out a plan to do that. If you're a really gadget-oriented guy, you know, like I have people who sleep on the,

you know, have like the grounding mat on their, on their mattress. Like, do I think that works? No. But if they think it works and it matters to them, cool. Right. I don't really care. Like we, my goal is to get you to sleep better or, you know, control your stress better. You know, so some people do the heart rate variability training, right? They get a little device, they put an EKGg on and then that tells you like your autonomics as we're talking about your stress your stress hormones are part of your autonomics and they're they drive the sympathetic tone which is the fight or flight pathway which impairs your prefrontal cortex your decision making ability and your motivation and your willpower and your ability to make right smart choices and predict what if you do this now what

does it mean for the future me if i do this now, what does it mean for the future me if I do this now? All that kind of goes away the more stressed you get because it impairs your prefrontal cortex. Sleep deprivation also impairs your prefrontal cortex, and primarily because of the same reason, the stress hormones. If you look at the symptoms of ADHD and you look at the symptoms of sleep deprivation, they're identical. They're identical for a reason because it's doing the same thing to your brain. So the is really about decreasing uh the stress hormones in your prefrontal cortex and allowing this big part of our brain like this part it's kind of like you know from our temples above our eyes all that forehead area that's the prefrontal cortex that's what makes us the

smartest animal on the planet that's that's kind of what makes us human yeah versus there's other animals that have prefrontal cortex, but it's a smaller percentage of the brain. Right. It's not as well developed. Right. And so,

as far as we know, no other animal on the planet has the sense of self-awareness to plan for its future or to think about the consequences

of this action other than, like, getting eaten by another animal if they come out of a, you know, cave or something,

obviously. But, you know, they're not thinking about you know their retirement plan or how many kids they should have or anything like it like life's just happening to them some would say that's not a good thing yeah the fact that we're that concerned about right something that's probably not going to happen but retirement Anthony Sapolsky or Zapolsky however you say his name he's a researcher at Stanford he wrote the book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers and he calls this our simulator which I think

is a perfect metaphor just like a flight simulator a pilot gets in a flight simulator you can throw crap at them and they can crash. No harm, no foul, right? Because they figured it out in the simulator. Okay, I won't do that next time they practice.

We can do the same thing with our prefrontal cortex. When you look at the decision matrix for anything, like how you're going to run your business, what are you going to do in your relationship, what choices you're going to make around finances, what choices you're going to make around your nutrition, like wherever, like all of that stuff. We can use our simulator to figure out what's the best choice. We're not always right. Of course, we suck at being right. Like we're not good at predicting the future, but like the immediate future, we can predict pretty well.

A lot of people would say that the issue is the simulator is fairly new. Yeah. And over the last, say... But it's still a couple hundred thousand years old. Yeah, but I would say over the last few hundred years, there's been this overemphasis of developing the simulator or overdeveloping it in such a way that we now associate that as who we are. Yeah. over developing it and and in such a way that we now associate that as who we are yeah i mean for sure that's where the ego you know that's where the the ego is primarily located in our presentation um and that's where a lot of our self-judgment comes from right because

you know we notice patterns that's what this whole thing is about noticing patterns you know a lot of what people call um you know racism isn't racism and like there's no negative association with it's just like i've noticed this pattern about you know people who dress this way or behave this way like they tend to be more dangerous than people who don't dress that way so like i'm going to stay away from them oh that's racist no that's a pattern right you're just recognizing a pattern you recognize a pattern of know, drinking whiskey every night before you go to bed and you don't sleep as well. That's a pattern that you recognize. So your simulator can go, hmm, I wonder if I don't drink alcohol tonight, what would happen? And then you can observe the results of that. But if your simulator is broken, you don't even have that level of introspection. I would say a lot of people, the simulator is broken.

It is. It is. And just being stressed, just being stressed breaks the simulator, which is the crazy thing about it. But if you think about fight or flight, right, the stress hormones, adrenal hormones, adrenal hormones secrete adrenaline, right? You get in fight or flight, all sorts of things happen, right? You really become sort of superhuman physiologically, right? Your pain threshold goes way up your reflexes increase, you put you mobilize all your glycogen stores to your limbs, you can exercise longer, you have more

strength, your respiratory system opens up so that you can take in more air, your heart rate goes up, you have more strength, your respiratory system opens up so that you can take in more air, your heart rate goes up, you put more blood pressure to all sorts of regions, you know, your pupils dilate to take in more, take in more light to focus on whatever the danger is. And then you fight, fight, you fight, flee or freeze and you try to get your out, get out of that situation. If you don't get out of that situation, it doesn't matter. So nothing else matters.

You actually want to be really impulsive during that. You don't want to plan it out systematically. So if you try to plan it out systematically, you're going to screw it up. You're going to be dinner, right? And so it actually shuts your prefrontal cortex off to be in purified or flight. Turns you into an animal. Right. If you're in pure fight or flight, if you're in a gunfight and I came up next to you and said,

Hey, Mike, what do you think about adding this supplement to the site? You'd probably shoot me, right? You'd be like, definitely. Get the hell out of here. Or even if I said, what's your phone number? Anything sort of human cerebral is gone. It's out the window. That's fight or flight.

So if we say fight or flight is here, adrenal-wise, and deep sleep is exactly the opposite. You have almost no adrenal hormones when you're in deep sleep. That's when you're the most anabolic. This is the most catabolic. You're actually using your body as a fuel to get your body away from danger. So you're using your muscles, your glycogen stores. You're breaking yourself down to a fuel to get your body away from danger right so you're using your muscles your glycogen so like you're breaking yourself down to be able to get away from that deep sleep you're repairing everything fighter flights here deep sleeps here we should live

around here but in our information age la traffic you know assholes on you know social media all of this crap that comes in our lives. And we're just constantly, constantly, you know, needled and prodded and, you know, demand, demand, demand, reaction, reaction, reaction, reaction. I mean, 300 years ago, how reactive was anybody? Right. I mean, just think about like, this is probably a new phenomenon and we don't know, we haven't learned how to, we haven't figured out how to deal with it yet.

Which is why everybody's striving for all these different stress control techniques. And that's why all these gadgets are coming out. And that's why there's a whole renewed interest in 2,000, 3,000-year-old medicine products that are allowing people to be more introspective and spiritual and connect with the world and not feel like, you know, they're so egocentric and that it's not about them and, you know, kind of let go of all the, you know, all of the bullshit that's crowding that space, allow you to be more open and be more you. I mean, there's a reason that movement's there. That's not, you know, that's not just, you know, freaking hippies, you know, and whatever

Burning Man kind of guys. That's like everybody, right? That's, we're talking Fortune and whatever Burning Man kind of guys. That's everybody. We're talking Fortune 500 CEOs are doing that shit now, like serial entrepreneurs. There's a reason for that. We know that stress is killing us. We don't want to admit it, though. It's interesting.

I'm actually doing a course. I've got the book right over there, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza. And I'm like in one of his courses. And one of the things he talks about is you're learning things in your conscious mind. And then eventually it becomes an unconscious learning, something that just happens automatically. And if you're over the age of 35, then 95% of what you do is unconscious. It's just automatic behavior.

And then if you're wanting to change any behaviors, you've got 5% of your mind fighting 95% to change a habit or behavior, whatever you want to call it. And so, uh, and a big part of that is, uh, that's, that's how much that, that 5% is prefrontal, prefrontal cortex. And now you're trying to use your prefrontal cortex to override this, the animal brain. And so, um, one of the, the primary thing that he uses and what his method is meditation. And meditation is learning how to shut down, like really light up the prefrontal cortex and shut down everything else

and even shut down the body. And so everything else slows down and then you can bring all these things. And one of the things he talks about too is how a lot of information is stored in the body, not even necessarily in the brain. Like a lot of the automatic behaviors, which a lot of automatic behaviors we want to build in.

Right. So like you were talking about, if you're in a firefight, like being able to be in a gunfight, there's a lot of things that you train over a period of time. So it is unconscious behavior. So it just happens. Right. So you don't have to like, oh, I need to go shoot this guy. But even just physical intelligence, you know, in a non-trained environment, like the reason a horse is such a smart animal is because they have so much neuronal tissue

in their fascial layers, and that's how they can walk over a log. They're going down a trail. Their eyes are out here. How the hell do they know where that thing is with their feet? How do they recognize faces in humans when they have proportionally this ridiculously small brain? But if you look at the overall neurological tissue in their body, and of course we have like 10% of our neuronal capacity is actually in our gut, the gut brain. But they have this like all throughout their bodies. That's what makes them so smart.

But keep going with your stuff. Yeah, so the idea is the way I've understood and I understand now is disrupting that stress a lot of times is we're living in that. We're not really living, like you were saying, we're not in that prefrontal cortex. We're just kind of operating back here, and we have just a small bit of consciousness awake trying to operate things but fighting this animal that's just way too powerful. Right. to operate things but fighting this animal that's just way too powerful right and so the the idea is to to do practices use methods to like basically turn on prefrontal cortex as much as possible and shut everything else down so he uses meditation but i've also seen um like with plant medicines they've shown that a lot of the blood like a lot of times they were thinking blood flow in the brain was uh being increased overall.

And when they end up finding out is it's being concentrated. Right. And so it is shutting down everything else. And glucose utilization through PET scans and stuff. They're doing a pretty good job of like functionally seeing what happens in your brain now. And this is only like literally within the last 15 years, we've been looking at people's brains when they meditate or when we put them under stress and we can say oh that's happening like we've you know most of biology you know in the history of biology is descriptive we've known for a long time that there's this thing called the

amygdala in your brain we had some idea kind of like i think it's associated with kind of these types of thoughts or behaviors. And then it turns out, oh, that's actually like the full alarm system. Like that's really kind of the trigger for the whole fight or flight and the decision making matrix and all this. We learned that through functional MRIs by putting people in stress and go, what areas of the brain? Well, it's these two walnuts like perfectly in everybody's brain. We go, oh, that makes a lot of sense. And now we can start mapping things out. But to the point of, you know, to the point of that book is, you know, every animal, every

mammal, well, not even mammal, like I think every vertebrae on this planet has what we call the lizard brain, which is all of that stuff, you know, the subcortical mass. So we have like the big wrinkly part of our brain, which everybody thinks of as the human brain. You pull that part off, which is, by the way, what sleep drugs do is they dissociate your lizard brain from all that. Your lizard brain is controlling all your automatic behaviors, right? But also, like...

What is going on? But it's also controlling sort of the automatic triggers. The interesting thing about the lizard brain is that it can handle and process like millions of bits of information simultaneously. Your prefrontal cortex can do like 10 or, you know, like a few things, like 10, 20 things you can process and kind of be aware of like right right now until i say it you aren't really aware of how your feet feel on the ground but now you are right but you weren't before or you know and we're just blocking

all that information out because our cortex can't handle all that information so the more the whole idea of getting rid of the human experience and just like this whole idea of like universal oneness and like blend and just realizing that we're all part of the same shit really means that we're just admitting that we're just like everything else on this planet and that's the part of us that we need to optimize because that can handle so much then we only need this prefrontal cortex to do like three things and then it's doing what it should. And then we're not as tired and we're not as stressed.

We can work longer, we're happier with our lives, like all that, all that type of stuff. You know, the meditation is one way of sort of trying to control it, which is a, I mean,

it's a great practice, but it's also a very difficult practice to get really good at and there's benefits immediately but to be outstanding at it and you know to be like a tibetan monk takes decades to get that way which is why a lot of the medications are coming on board to kind of help do that and these little biofeedback type devices and so forth is it like two different approaches you have the a little bit every day approach, right? Which is,

you know, meditate 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever. And you'll get, you know, 0.01% better every day that you do it and consistency and people who meditate every day for two weeks, notice a difference,

right? You're not going to notice a difference day one, but maybe day by day 20, right? There's a, there's a difference. And then, um,

I'm actually going to a Vipassana retreat at the end of January, which is 10 days, meditating 11 hours a day for 10 days in a row. And so then you have like the deep dive. Or like when Doug and I, or you could talk about plant medicines too. Some people might take small doses of magic mushrooms every other day or something like that and some people might do what doug and i did go to peru and do like ayahuasca like a really heavy dose a heroic dose a heroic dose of it and so i think there's benefits of both where one is like the big dose like a 10-day meditation or an ayahuasca retreat, is you're going in and reformatting a lot of what is stored in the lizard brain.

You're like, oh, we're going to clean house, change some things. Then you come out of that and all of a sudden all these things in your life change. It feels like automatic change. You went back and you changed it in there, rewired some stuff, came out, and now things in your life start, you behave differently and everyone else around you seems like they're behaving differently. Yeah. Cause that experience allowed you to be aware of that process, right? We aren't aware of our lizard brain. Like right now our lizard brain is controlling my respiratory rate, my heart rate, my blood pressure, you know, my balance, to some extent, um,

like all sorts of things are being controlled by that region of my brain. I'm not, I'm not aware of whatsoever, but also a lot of my emotional triggers and a lot of my decision making processes, a lot of my habits, like, you know, procrastination that's coming from the lizard brain. That's not coming from the cortex. Right. Um, so, but once you see it now you have a choice over it and that's what all the stuff is about is like giving you giving you the opportunity

to pull back and see yourself from a third party perspective and go oh look at mike running his whatever depression pattern like what what leads to me doing depression well let's you know i think of this and then i think of that and then this and then this happens and then I end up in this lower mood state. But if you don't realize how you're getting there, then it's just something that happens to you. You're just in it. It's like a fish in the water. A fish doesn't

know it's in the water until you take it out of the water and then it shows how it recognizes that it was in the water. It's like, oh, wow, I was surrounded by all this shit I never saw before. That's what all these things are doing. The meditation is doing you know even some of these little devices that are helping people um you know sort of like biofeedback and neurofeedback are helping people kind of get the right brain state similar to what you get in meditation meditative states those things are helping the plant medicines are helping you know there's you know uh you know

supplements out there even i'm not sure they're technically supplements but you know there's you know uh you know supplements out there even i'm not sure they're technically supplements but you know they're they're being sold to supplements that you know can help you with these types of things as well um and you know and of course everything matters again nutrition matters and movement matters and all that stuff but everything you can do to kind of um i guess automate that you know if you think of that as like the CPU, you automate that computer to run the right patterns. And that's a shitty analogy because the brain is way more powerful than a computer.

But anyways, you want to run that operating system as smooth as possible so that the cortex has to get involved as little as possible. Because that's why our brain can use like 25% of our fuel source. It's not because of our lizard brain. It's because of our big neocortex.

If you could learn to, I guess, if you could be more responsible or more, I guess, choosy about when you're turning, what you're using the prefrontal cortex for. Right. Are you using it to worry and have anxiety or are you using it to change the behaviors and learn how to get in that third person perspective, look in and rewire some things and go, oh, I see this. I can just change this right here. I just need to, for a few days, I need to choose differently.

Instead of eating this, I need to eat this. And then over time, it becomes an automatic, automatic, uh, behavior. Yeah. The whole concept of habit formation is really, is really that. But again, as you alluded to in the very beginning of that, um, metaphor is that you, if you don't realize you're doing it, if you don't know that you're using your prefrontal cortex to worry, you just say you're worried like it's just something that's happening to me right like i'm just stressed out today right you're fucking making yourself stressed out there's something that you are doing that is making you stressed it's not the environment it's your reaction to the environment right um you know there's nothing

good or bad about the environment we we're meaning making machines we make it mean something bad it's stressful yeah we mean we make it mean something bad, it's stressful. We make it mean something good, it's not stressful. It's good for us, right? And by and large, most of the time we're stressed, we're thinking about the future. And oftentimes we're thinking about the future shit we can't control.

And most of the time we're depressed, we're looking at the past. We're thinking about shit that we have no control over anymore. So why wouldn't we be depressed? Because all this bad shit happened and we didn't want that to happen. Can't fix it now. Yeah. So that's the point of the Zebra's Don't Get All Sourced book is that the zebra is purely present and experiencing. It's not thinking about the past.

It's not depressed. It's not thinking about the future. So it doesn't have anxiety. It's not worried. It's just kind of chilling right there where it is in that moment. As far as we know, every animal on this planet is just purely doing the present moment. Even a squirrel hiding nuts for the winter, it's like automated behavior. It's not something he's actually thinking about. How many nuts do I need?

My body mass is this and i want you know i want to keep my abs and like there i saw ripped squirrel once it's crazy but you know he's on some shit yes is it one of the things that dispensa talks about is uh the uh basically the reptilian brain or the body memory or however you want to uh about that is experiencing the past at all times. Right. And so everything is programmed from previous behavior. Right. And so –

To recognize patterns. Yeah. So you're in an automatic behavior and it's based on the past. Right. None of it could potentially be based on the future. Right. At all. Right. on the past. None of it could potentially be based on the future at all. So if

you are relying only on the automatic behaviors, you're doomed to repeat the past. So if you want your future to be different, you have to step out of, you actually have to engage with the prefrontal cortex. You cannot, every situation will turn out the same

forever. And that's why people find themselves in a rut, is because they can't use this part of their mind to imagine a future that is different. And that's where you have to go, okay, I want things to be different and this is how you start recognizing.

One of the things he talks about is using so you visualize the future and then also infuse a feeling of gratitude about the future that has not actually occurred yet. Because that makes it occur. Yeah, exactly. You infuse the emotional piece into that, and that's what allows the body. Like if you have gratitude about the thing you're visualizing in the future, it changes the body memory or the reptilian brain. Without the gratitude piece or without the

emotional side along with the, because a lot of people talk about, oh, visualize success in the future, visualize losing weight. But if you don't have the, if you don't tie in the emotional piece alongside that, it won't happen. Then your, then your neocortex is really telling you you're full of shit, right? Like you can be 300 pounds overweight and stand in front of the mirror and go i'm thin i'm thin i'm thin i'm thin i'm thin and your body's going bullshit all right your brain's like no you're not yeah but i mean the words are coming

out of your mouth but you aren't feeling it right when you really really start feeling that and start emoting it but you know to your point when you first started talking about that you run all these patterns based on the past which make you feel bad now you think about all of our veterans and you think about tbi you think about ptsd right so they're running patterns from the past that were shit right that not something they want that's making them feel bad right now what happens after they do that a hundred times i mean this is the way it's always going to be like why would you think anything else you're 100 in the past at that point. You're like, this has never worked before.

The more you relive it, the harder that pattern gets ingrained. So you just have this, you have like this super highway board, like board into your brain that things are always going to suck. That's where the hopelessness comes from. That's where the suicidality comes from. And then you look at things that affect negatively the neurotransmitters and their ability to do all of the stuff that we're talking about. One, they don't have any training for it. Two, the social structure sucks for it. You've been in the military.

You know how that is. It's like counter that. You suck it up. You pull yourself up by the bootstraps. You fucking go. You get it done. And you don't whine and you don't bitch and you don't feel bad. You got to talk to the chaplain and the chaplain yeah your chaplain is like chaplain says suck it up uh too um you

know but uh now you add in there okay let's damage our ability to do that uh how about staying up all night playing video games drinking red bull ding right all right there's one strike against you how about a traumatic brain injury right yeah what how much does it take to get a traumatic brain injury 1.02 g's right the acceleration changes on a roller coaster ride damages your brain what do you think the g-force is shooting a machine gun in a concrete room 35 g's what do you think the the G force is inside of a Humvee with a.50 Cal going? 60 Gs. Carl Gustav round?

Two 300 Gs, depending on where you're standing. Do we have any combat vets who don't have TBI? No. We don't have a single one. You take somebody like Special Forces, just their training, they're getting 20 TBIs a day. Now you put them into combat on top of that. And you've totally fucked with their neurochemistry.

They're also sleep-depriving them. They're also feeding them shit food a lot of the times when they're deployed. They don't have options, right? They're forward deployed. They're going to eat whatever you feed them. They don't have – it's not like they can bring all their food with them. It's all about getting the calories. Right.

It's all survival. Right. And now you live in a culture that doesn't allow you to feel bad, and it doesn't allow you to feel bad about yourself, and it doesn't allow you to whine, and it doesn't allow you to make any demands, and it doesn't allow you even the time or encouragement to try to figure out what's going on in your schematics.

It's just deny it, repress it, deny it, repress it, deny it, repress it. When the doctors ask you about it, when the psychologists ask you about it, when the chaplain, I'm fine, everything's good, because you don't want to lose your job. Yeah. And then when you get out of the it, when the psychologists ask you about it, when the chaplain, I'm fine, everything's good, because you don't want to lose your job. Yeah. And then when you get out of the military, what the hell happens? You have none of that culture anymore, right?

And then you have all this brain injury that's affected your ability to relearn all of this stuff. You don't have any of the introspection. You come from a culture that sort of disavowed introspection. And now you're living, you're living wherever, back in Oklahoma or wherever you came from, with just your old friends and your family, and none of them have the similar experiences to you. How do you get yourself out of that rut, man?

I think that's where the PTSD is really happening. And I don't even really believe that PTSD is really a syndrome. I think that's where the PTSD is really happening. And I don't even really believe that PTSD is, you know, really a syndrome. I think that's kind of bullshit. I think it's just brain damage. Like we've damaged brains and we've put bad experiences in people and all of us have had traumatic shit happen in our lives. You have a really traumatic emotional thing happen and we have no tools to

manage it. None of it's, and you're not resilient. You're not resilient yet anyways because we set them up to be fragile instead of anti-fragile. Even though they're big hulky strong guys with body armor and beards,

our culture sets them up for failure in this area. We don't give them tools to do this. No, I'm using that as a generalization and lots of soft forces are starting to do mindfulness training and trying to bring things in like that. But that's why float chambers work, right? That's why neurofeedback works. That's why near IR works. That's why hyperbarics work. All this stuff is repairing neurological damage. And then it's just

essentially revving this machine up. If you think about TBI, you think about insomnia, you think about chronic stress, you think about PTSD, you're talking about the brain. And essentially you have a dysfunctioning organ, right? No different than if your heart's dysfunctioning. Can you use a dysfunctioning heart to fix a dysfunctioning heart? Hell no, right? It's broken. You can't use something broken to fix a dysfunctioning heart hell no right it's broken like you can't use something broken to fix something that's broken your brain is the broken part and you're trying to use your own brain to fix it you're not going to will your way out of this you're not just going

to you know suck it up it doesn't happen and that's just going to make you feel bad about it like you talked about earlier you're going to run this pattern of failure after failure after failure because you keep thinking you keep running the pattern from the past. That just reinforces that pattern, and it just tells you, you know, you're 35 years old, and you're like, I've got 50 more years of this. That's when they go suck start their pistol. Yeah. Isn't that one of the rationales for MDMA psychotherapy where they may not help with the TBI specifically, but for things like PTSD, they can talk through these traumatic experiences and kind of repattern or, I don't know if that's

the right term, but like they can reassociate these negative experiences where they don't seem so negative anymore because they were able to do some type of therapy in a safe environment where they go through the conversations and have that discussion where at the end of it they they just feel differently about all the horrible things that they saw or experienced yeah they they take their ego out of it it takes their sense of self out of it you know and just like a lot of the plant medicines you get the ego out of it you get the sense of self out of it and then all of a sudden you aren't the problem and in fact there is no problem it's just a pattern. And once you see that pattern and you're like, oh, it's that pattern that's making me feel that way because I saw and experienced this and I processed it as meaning this.

But it doesn't have to mean that. I can make it mean whatever I want it to mean. Now you have the ability. And then really with all of these types of interventions, it's the talking about the experience is where the is, because you're actually processing things that you actually felt, right? Like you aren't, you aren't consciously thinking, oh, I'm looking at myself from a third party, from a third person perspective, you just are, you're just experiencing it. So you talk about what you experienced, you talk about your emotions, you talk about what you felt, and you talk about your revelations to what you're happening at the speed of thought, which is a billion times faster than we can talk, right? So you process all of that you felt and you talk about your revelations to what you're happening at the speed of thought, which is a billion times faster than we can talk.

Right. So you process all of that stuff and you, and you know, whether it's, you know, whether it's something like, um, an MDA or MDMA, MDMA, there's a, there's a neuro, uh, the neurological, uh, receptor called NMDA and I always get them confused. I told you I'm not very smart. But like all of these things that allow you to get rid of the ego, get rid of the sense of self and just look at it objectively. It's just like watching a movie. Sometimes we judge the guy in the movie and we're like cringing going, oh, you're such an idiot.

But most of the time you're just kind of watching the movie and watching people do whatever it is they do. And you kind of expect them to do that because you kind of know how their character behaves and works. You just do the same thing yourself. Idea why we're doing what we're doing or why we're feeling what we're feeling. It's all happening automatically at subconscious levels. And the subconscious brain is orders of magnitude

more power things like 10 to the 6th more processing power than our cortex but we try to run our world from here which leads to a lot of stress which leads to impairment of this and then we're still trying to you know run this with an impaired and then we damage it and we poison it and sleep deprive it and it seems like just a vicious cycle. And then there's just a handful or several ways to disrupt that. Yeah. But some of those. Probably endless.

There's probably endless number of ways to disrupt it and make it bad. And I've talked to people who, you know, they're like, how do I get out of this thing? And it's like, sometimes it's not predictable. Right. Like when you're, when, you know, something has to happen. A lot of people, you know, they may call it like rock predictable. Right. Like when you're, when, you know, something has to happen. A lot of people, you know, they may call it like rock bottom. Right. People get so, they hit rock bottom.

There's nothing left. And then that's when they become somebody else. Like they lose that sense of self. And once you lose that sense of self, then you can look at everything much more objectively and probably have a little more compassion right on who you used to be it yeah it's it's hard to it's hard to rebuild until you completely break down the facade right until it all completely crumbles you can't really see the picture that clearly so you know what we tend to do is um you know as we start breaking we try to shore that up and we sometimes we shore it up in good ways and sometimes we shore it up in a dysfunctional way but if you can just completely level it you know just just bulldoze the whole thing just go

like i'm starting from scratch now you have choice over how you behave around anything you have a choice about how you think about anything but you know we're running you know we're running patterns from shit that happened to us at seven years old yeah and most of us don't know that we're running those patterns all right when was uh when i went and did ayahuasca there was uh i went back to the age of seven and and yeah i dealt with things that somewhere around five to seven is like where most of us have conscious memory and start yeah i went back to that and i was like oh okay this is why i keep doing the things i'm doing at the age of like 32. Because you've made that mean this. At the age of seven.

Yeah. And now that that's solved, a few months later, all those behaviors kind of like faded. Right. Yeah. It was interesting. Yeah. The brain is a curious machine.

We plowed right through that. No break. We didn't do a break i was kept on wanting to do a break but then i was so interested in everything we were talking about how long do we go are we we're at hour 22 minutes okay yeah really good anything i think we should call it good here we can always i don't know if we actually talk about anything useful but it was interesting yeah it's interesting to me i don't know i we actually talked about anything useful, but it was interesting. It's interesting to me. I don't know.

I think people are going to enjoy it. You do have one product, which I do use, which is Sleep Remedy. So if you do have trouble sleeping, I mean, who do you recommend that product to? I recommend that to people who have difficulty sleeping. I recommend it to people for jet lag. You can use it episodically to kind of recalibrate your circadian rhythm um but i also recommend it and i i have i don't have a like a bonafide clinical trial to to validate this concept but um you know from from the sleep studies that i have seen on people who take

the product and from people's self-reported experience people who just routinely get poor sleep or not enough sleep should probably be on it because it improves the quality of their sleep it tends to improve the quality they report improved quality whatever i don't want to get myself in trouble with the ftc but um you know, I see this all the time. People come back and say, like I've had people come back and say they, like, it makes them not snore anymore. And, you know, people on CPAP machines are like, you know, after three months of getting good quality sleep, I don't even need my CPAP machine anymore. So anyone who's on shift work, I mean, shift work is, you know, the World Health Organization has classified shift work as a type 2A carcinogen, which means that we're pretty sure it causes cancer,

but we aren't going to do research on humans to figure out if it causes cancer or not, so we call it a type 2A. But really it's on par with smoking cigarettes, right? Yeah. So we call it a type two way, but it really, it's on par with smoking cigarettes. Right. Um, uh, so we know, we know it's really bad for you. Um, so those people, I just say, you know, mitigate everything, right. It's just like, if you aren't going to move at all, optimize everything you can possibly do, right. Like optimize your nutrition, optimize your sleep, optimize your stress control.

If you just refuse to move, then we'll make that the least impactful aspect as possible so if you're just not going to get enough sleep because you're hard-headed and you think that you know in order to succeed you can't sleep more than five hours get the best quality you can if you're you know law enforcement officer and you work night shift every single night for 25 years, or not every night, but for your whole career, you're working night shift, you should probably be taking the product. We're just improving the quality of what you do get. Just like if somebody were just going to exercise occasionally, you would want them to do the ideal, most optimal workout for them,

and that's really all it is. But again, nothing in there lasts very long. There's nothing sedating in there. There's no tricks in there. It's just what we talked about. You know, the melatonin production pathway, it's all the ingredients that lead to the production of melatonin. Your brain still has to do it.

There's a very small amount of melatonin to initiate the cascade. And then it has a form of GABA that gets into the brain and does that thing that we talked about earlier, just lower the threshold, the resting potential of all those neurons so that you're not as aware of your environment but if you like if we did this right now and if we drink right now and did the podcast we wouldn't even know we drank it right so you still have to right you still have to do something right you still have to have some sort of preparatory pattern for getting yourself ready for sleep. I take it with me when I travel.

I get in my room, hot water from the coffee maker, and then just mix that in with the hot water. And I do that before, like when I'm traveling, especially if I'm changing time zones. Or if I get home, I do it. Or if I was up all night dancing. It helps me. I really up all night dancing. It helps me. I really take it every night. Ironically, I run out of it a lot. I happen to know a guy who can get it for me,

but I run out of it all the time just because whatever. I just, I don't know. I don't think about it. And I live in two houses. So I have a house in San Diego and a house in Austin, and I go between the two. And just sometimes I get to the house and I'm like, I don't have any. I live in two houses. So I have a house in San Diego and a house in Austin. And I go between the two. And just sometimes I get to that house and I'm like, I don't have any. I'll order some tomorrow.

I'll order some tomorrow. I noticed that whoever owns that company set it up to where you can have subscriptions. You can have an auto ship to your house. It's weird. One could do that. Like a really smart guy would do that. But, you know, I remember I hadn't taken it for probably three months at one point. It was the longest period I went without taking it since I put it on the market.

Well, even before because I was just taking it. Like the seals were all taking it just in constituent parts. They were having to go out and buy all the ingredients separately. So I've taken it on and off for years. But once I made it into an easy-to-use product, I just started using it every night. A lot of it had to do with me starting the sleep supplement business, being stressed out of my mind. Cause I had no, no fricking idea what I was doing and trying to start a supplement business. Um, and then Rob

Wolf comes over, we're, we're, we're both doing a gig somewhere. Uh, I might've been seal fit. I can't remember what it was, but we're both lecturing somewhere. And, um, we, you know, we're, we're chatting like, you you know little school girls and then he's like all right uh i'm gonna do my sleep crackdown go to bed and he's like i got an extra one if you want and i'm like oh no i haven't had it like months and he's like are you sure i mean you know like he's a little drug dealer he's waving i'm like all right i'll do it and then i woke up the next morning and holy shit why don't i take this ever? Like, what am I doing? It's your own stuff. I'm like, how stupid do I have to be? But guess what?

I've learned that I'm that stupid in a lot of areas. Like, I've gone so many times in my life. I've gone, like, two or three weeks where I hardly get any exercise. And I feel like dog shit. And then I go exercise. I'm like, what the fuck was I thinking, man? Like, I'm a totally different person. And I've done that, like, 50 times in my life.

So, I don't know. I'm a totally different person. I've done that like 50 times in my life. I don't know. I need to get that programmed. I'm a low slurner right there. Awesome. All right, man. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Cool. We're back. If you want to find out where you can find Kirk, find the sleep product, you can definitely check out barbellshrug.com.

Go to the blog, check out the podcast, and we've got links in there. If people want to check out what you have going on, are you on social media? Docparsley.com is my website, and I'm on social media. I'm pretty sure as Doc Parsley on most platforms. I'm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. I have like five pictures up, I think, or something like that. Yeah, but docparsley.com is the easiest one you can do. All my little social media links are on that too.

Excellent. Cool. Cool.