Barbell Shrugged - The Science of Sleep and Recovery w/ Dr. Allison Brager, Anders Varner, and Doug Larson #703

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

Dr. Brager is a subject matter expert in behavioral genetics, sleep, and biological rhythms research. She is passionate about discovering new factors that promote resilience in extreme environments, particularly for military personnel. She also serves on the NCAA task force for mental health and sleep, contributing to the first edition of the NCAA student-athlete mental health handbook. She is author of Meathead: Unraveling the Athletic Brain, which debunks the myth of the ‘dumb jock’ and serves as a performance manual for functional athletes. Outside of the laboratory, Allison was a two-time CrossFit Games (team) athlete, a two-time CrossFit Regionals (individual) athlete, and a four-year varsity NCAA Division I athlete in track and field. Dr. Brager has an Sc.B. in Psychology from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Physiology from Kent State University. Allison Brager on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram  

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, we're hanging out with Dr. Alison Breger. She is a good friend of ours. We've had her on the show many times and she's a total badass when it comes to sleep and recovery. And one of the first sleep scientists that I actually met and I was like, dang, the world of sleep was so crazy and I need to get a lot better at it. Not just for feeling better on a daily basis, having more energy and recovery, but just performance in general. Like what happens when you actually go

and get consistent, steady sleep, how much better you can perform in the gym. And that's what we're gonna be digging into today with her. As always friends, you can head over to rapidehealthreport.com. That's where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are doing a full lab lifestyle and performance analysis in which everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will be getting. So you can head over to rapidhealthreport.com right now.

Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Stride. I'm Anders Varner. Doug Larson. Lesson breaker. Yo, what was it? Like three years ago we had you on here? Were we pre-pandemic talking about?

No, in the middle of it. It was in the middle of it. Yeah, because I was at my in-laws house for the month because that was free babysitting. We got to talk all about sleep and that show smashed. I'm really excited to have you back on. I want to dig into this. First off, for the people that didn't listen to you three years ago, can you just give us like a little background on everything, Allison?

Sure. So I am active duty military. I am a major in the army. But outside of that, I used to compete in the CrossFit Games on a team. My background is in sleep and circadian rhythms. I have a PhD in neuroscience. I almost became an astronaut and will reenter the pipeline next year and hopefully get all the way this time. And I'm a big lover. Who beat you out to be an astronaut? And why didn't they call me? Because I would have voted for you for sure. Oh, there are a lot of very impressive people out there. I'm not going to lie nasa knows how to select people i mean of every single 120 people that i went under selection with like everyone was deserving to be there we all had just very different backgrounds and impressive resumes so

i felt like an imposter i uh i have a really good friend that was a blue angel for three years and because i they had the covid year so they got to do an extra one and uh he was like yeah i might be getting out like i kind of like reached and i was like dude stay in you could go to space he's like oh yeah i'm gonna go to space and he's tucked into that little tiny tube going a billion miles an hour out in the middle of nowhere. And I was like, yeah, totally do that. That sounds awesome. Yeah, seriously. It's not for everyone. Um, you mentioned the coolest thing of all time. We're going to talk about testosterone and sleep and how are those two related? I'd love if we could just, uh, kind of start at the top of, um, how does, how does testosterone specifically,

I wouldn't even expect that those two are related together. Oh, absolutely. And in fact, if you don't sleep, you don't secrete testosterone. And that's a true story. Not the, yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. So this is like the platform that I use with athletes and soldiers to get them to sleep more. Because obviously, working with the military, you have to be very creative. You can't just get up on your podium and be like, oh, look at me. I am a PhD doctor neuroscientist.

You should listen to me because I know more about sleep than you. You have to actually show them all the devastation that can happen when you don't get sleep. What a word, devastation. Well, it's true. They're devastating effects. So a lot of this early work was done at the University of Chicago. There's this woman, well, she's still alive. Her name is Dr. Evvon Carter, and she used to recruit college students for these studies.

And so she'd bring in these really young, healthy males who were getting normal amounts of sleep. So, you know, seven, eight hours a night. And then she would sleep deprive these college guys for about, you know, instead of getting seven hours of sleep, they're getting five hours of sleep. So across the week, they get five hours of sleep. And by day three of only sleeping five hours, their testosterone levels go from the normal 600 nanograms per deciliter all the way down to 200, which is clinically significant low testosterone. And it wasn't until these college guys got seven or eight hours of sleep again that their testosterone levels went back to normal. Since EBSARDIS...

One night sleep or did it take like a week? Do you know what the recovery was? It was two nights. So for five days of five hours of sleep, it took two full eight-hour nights of sleep to return back to normal. Wow. But that's how quick the system is.

And that's how much it can fluctuate in a short period of a week. And I'd imagine if it does that to your testosterone, it probably does that to many other bodily functions or other hormones, other processes, receptors, etc. There's probably downregulation of many things, not just testosterone. We happen to care about testosterone. If you're talking to military guys, you tell them testosterone is going to go down. They're going to be like, oh, shit, I don't want that to happen. And that's going to be relevant to them. But I'd it happens to many many things no absolutely so it's not just

testosterone it's all the anabolic hormones and anabolic responses because basically what happens is when we enter um the deepest stage of non-rem sleep-wave sleep, the act of being in slow-wave sleep triggers the brain to release all those anabolic hormones from growth hormone to testosterone to factors related to insulin growth factor, like anything and everything, even the replenishment of ATP, like even down to the cellular level and all those cellular energy reserves, those are triggered by entering the deepest stages of non-REM sleep called slow-wave sleep. I'd imagine for military guys that are training like crazy, like if you're at BUDS and you're undersleeping, then your testosterone is even going to plummet even further because your activity level is so incredibly high. Yep. No, absolutely. going to plummet even further because you're just your activity level is so incredibly high yep no absolutely and i believe uh i don't know if it was doc parsley or one of the seal docs has

looked at that like they've looked at the time course of uh changes in testosterone and the guys going through buds um i know they've done this stuff to show why uh like ambien and lunesta are really bad and how that drops your testosterone. We've actually done our own studies within the Army with the Rangers. We found that it's all published work publicly available. But we did these studies where we found when they switch from daytime to nighttime operations, there's a huge decrease in testosterone. Pretty much they're secreting like next to nothing. And it's not until

they go get off those night operations, go back and then have at least two days of recovery that they return to normal. So it's for night operations, even if they're sleeping enough hours during the day, just the fact that they're on this like flip flop schedule, it's still crosses their testosterone. Yeah. And the reason for that is because it's not just the activation of being in a slow wave sleep that triggers testosterone. It also has to do with the biological clock too. So a lot of these anabolic hormones, they're pre-programmed to be released at a certain time, just like with melatonin. It's no different. And so if the

biological clock is skewed, then everything else is going to be skewed. So and that's why sleep is so complicated to understand, because there's two distinct biological processes impacting it, you have the biological clock. And then you also have this other process that's basically influenced by if you slept the night before or if you didn't sleep well the night before. Can you dig into what this slow wave sleep is? Because many people are going to look into their whoop and look into their aura and go, we're not tracking slow wave sleep. Yeah. How do I know if I'm getting it? Yeah, good point. So that is the point so that is they do though don't they they do so or does whoop does not so it's just your deep sleep you got light sleep deep sleep

and REM sleep and so stage one two light sleep and then stage three and four um slow wave deep sleep is what is what i thought we were uh that was a separate thing than the deep sleep reading. No. So deep sleep on whoop is actually slow wave sleep. I wish they would just call it slow wave sleep. I believe aura calls it slow wave sleep. But that's, I get it. You know what?

And that's messaging that I need to tell whoop about that. You know, well, I sit on their scientific advisory board, I was going to say you work with them, right? Yeah, I serve as an unpaid government liaison on their scientific advisory board. Yeah, I remember I hopped on there one time and you were doing a live Q&A on their app or something like that. And I was like, oh, no way.

I didn't know Allison was working with Whoop. I like those guys. Yeah, they've done a lot of really great work with the army um particularly around like improving sleep and using it to monitor risk for suicides um because there's like army bases up in alaska that have had historically really high rates of suicide as you can imagine because of the conditions they're living in and operating in. So by bringing in the loop and getting people to be aware of how they feel and how poorly they recover up there,

there actually has been a correlation to reduce suicide attempts and ideations because of that. So they've done some great work, probably more impactful work with the Army as a company than any of the researchers have over the last few years. Shrug family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean?

It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs

that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program. And we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidealthreport.com. And let's get back to the show. I know you work with fit ops and with whoop. Like, are they connected in any way?

I'm not sure I haven't. So I was involved with the early days of fit ops, they brought me in to give a sleep lecture when they set up that curriculum for people transitioning out of the military back into civilian life. We're talking about kind of military side of things and activity level. Pre-show we were talking about chronotype and figuring out our people, night owls, are they morning people? How do we actually know where, like what their chronotype is? And how does that affect like when they go to sleep, pre sleep routines, things like that. So chronotype truly should drive your life.

I'm a big believer in that I think people who pre select into certain fields and who are very successful in those fields have pre selected based on their chronotype. So there's this questionnaire you could fill out it takes about six or seven define define what that is real quick most people don't know what chronotype is i'd imagine so chronotype is your natural tendency to either wake up early or wake up late um so if you're a morning person you're gonna wake up early, independent of anything else going on in your life. So even if you have no commitments that day, say your own vacation, you don't have anything to do, you still want to wake up early, like you're that person who wants to go to bed early and wake up early. And you've always been like that. Somebody like me, I'm a freaking vampire. If I had my choice, I would stay up until 1230, 1 a.m.

and wake up at 830, 9 a.m. I used to be able to do that a little bit more when I was in graduate school and a postdoc, but I can't adopt that schedule as much now being in the Army. But at the same time, I will never be like, to be honest with you, I would never want to be in an operational unit of the Army that wakes up at 3 a.m. and has to be like on target and functional at 5 a.m. Like I'm perfectly fine being medical and part of a support element that just hangs out in the back and can maintain a normal schedule.

Because I know doing those early morning shifts absolutely breaks me and I get really sick afterwards. I've done it before and it's not pleasant. But a lot of that is determined by your genetics. So my parents are honestly, they're both night owls. And I also know I'm a night owl because I did my 23andMe and I have the naturally occurring mutation that shows I'm a night owl. But in addition to like getting a genetic screen, you can also take this questionnaire. And this questionnaire, it's like 19 questions, it will basically ask you, what times of the day are you most productive from doing, you know, cognitive mental tasks to what time do you train at your best? When do you

train at your worst, etc, etc. And so really, the wave of the future, and this is true in the army too, is planning your day around your chronotype. You know, we have this new program now called holistic health and fitness, where basically, all the Army has access to some of the best strength and conditioning coaches, nutritionists and training facilities in the world that are on par with like the Olympic Training Center and professional sports teams. So honestly, gone are the days where you have to do PT in the early morning. You know, if you have a good commander, he or she will let his or her soldier structure their schedules where they could do PT whenever they want. That's something I implemented as a commander. And that's also because I didn't want to be a hypocrite, right? Like, when I was a company commander, I worked out over lunch. And a lot of my soldiers ended up joining

me and went from working out super early in the morning to working out at lunch. And honestly, they were way more productive then than they were trying to fit in a workout before they came in early morning. Is that something that can be changed over time? Or do you just have like a natural rhythm that your body should be in? It's actually it's natural. And I say it's natural because it's genetic. So now to be fair, most people are, we call it the hummingbird type. I don't know who named it, but they're called hummingbirds. So like 80% of the population falls in this intermediate category where they like naturally want to go to bed around 10 30 11 and wake up around seven morning people so

the larks they're like bed at eight wake up at four and then night owls like me are fed at 1am wake up at nine. So but there's only 10, like 10% larks, 10% owls, and 80% hummingbirds. So most people fall within the general population. Yeah. But if you think about like, for example, general officers, I joke with people, but I'm dead serious. Like I will never ever be a general even if i wanted to because my body is incapable of waking up early like and that's a requirement to be any sort of high-ranking military officer just like it's 4 a.m make your bed perfectly i'm out yes exactly exactly i am totally out you know what i am finally reaching my deepest state of sleep at 4 a.m you know that's uh that's actually measurable on the aura ring they have the exact

midpoint of your sleep set up to whatever the suggested chronotype is yeah mine's 3 a.m and that's right when dan garner's getting out of bed to start training crazy lunatic yes and i agree his genetics are just weird you know no the reason i the reason i wonder if it i was wondering if it's adjustable is like last time we had you i was in the middle of pandemic and i was training at you know 4 35 a.m because that's just when i had time um and if you were to go back into uh like college years staying up till 2 a.m thinking that was like normal bedtime, the idea of getting up for an 8 a.m. class was like the scariest thing in the world. But now it's like 6 a.m. is kind of like my time.

Does it adjust over a lifetime or is it a pretty set in stone thing? You just happen to have environmental factors that like push and pull to figure out when you're going to bed and waking up. So it does adjust over distinct periods in your life. The most notable one is when you're a teenager. So I worked with a woman, Dr. Mary Kroskadin, who discovered this phenomenon. She actually almost won the Nobel Prize for it. Quite honestly, she should have gotten it because she's been directly responsible for changing school start times. I don't know if your kids have late school start times in middle school and high school. No, but the high school ones, I see them out

trying to catch the bus at like 6am. And I know that. Oh, God. Yeah, I know that's wrong. Yeah. Yeah. So what her research has found over like, literally the last 40 years is as kids are going through puberty, the biological clock naturally delays itself. It's this weird biological phenomenon, or like, I don't know, byproduct of human evolution. And so at your peak of puberty, your clock is actually delayed by like two or three hours. So most, you know, teenagers, young adults who are between 18 and 21, their natural bedtime is between like 1.30 and 2am. So even though you're staying up partying until 2am, you are actually listening to your biological clock more than likely. But then what happens is, is once become a full blown adult, so around the age of 25,

that's when our clock is stabilized again. And it usually is dictated by what are like natural genetics are. So I can tell you when I was an early like freshman, sophomore in college, I would stay up and I would have not because it was partying, but I would just like study until like three or 4am. And that was natural for me. But then towards the end of college, and then graduate school, like my clock finally like shifted back to like 1231. But then when you get old, when you become older, so usually it's around like early 50s. So when women, you know, we know this, women, when you start going through menopause, and then when you have that time point in your 50s, early 60s, where your testosterone levels are really dropping, that's when the biological clock now advances. So there's a reason why like, you know, your,

your in-laws, for example, probably like wake up super early now. Even if they didn't like, you know, 10 years ago. Yeah, I remember being when, in my teenage years, like, being able to sleep till like 2pm.m yeah no that's normal imagine how good you would feel right now oh my gosh i would wake up i would lift weights at like 3 30 it would be incredible yeah well we also i feel like our our childhood was a little easier than like your kids because we didn't have i mean we had aol but like that got annoying yeah logging on with the dial up yeah after like five minutes you're like fuck it i'm done it's not worth getting into this chat room um so there's a lot of schools right now that are doing delayed start times then it's becoming more

and more of a trend based on that woman's work yeah and the reason is because it's directly related to increased um test performance greater performance on test scores um decreased behavioral problems like there's a whole host of like really positive benefits just by delaying the school start time by 45 minutes to an hour and middle schoolers and high schoolers yeah i remember being in high school and having a zero period i had to be there like 6 or 6 30 or something like that and that was like also during wrestling season where i was like you know going to wrestling practice every day and was like really tired i remember like i couldn't drive anywhere without falling asleep yeah every time i drove anywhere i was just like nodding off at the wheel yeah no and that's uh i mean that's the terrifying thing that and the

sad part is is a lot of school systems don't want to make these logistical changes because it's a logistical nightmare like with scheduling the buses teachers like yeah teachers hate it while your parents are at work yeah yeah yeah teachers do hate it um how does this um affect we'll just call it optimal workout timing like are you training at like 8 p.m since you're awake so late oh yeah i do the very last crossfit class of the day so our last crossfit class is at 6 30 i always do that one. Yeah. I have a great training session. I remember those people coming in at like 7. And I had been at the gym since 5.30.

I'd be like, how? How in the world are you excited? I just want to go home and get in bed right now. This is terrible. Yeah. No, that's when I'm like ramping up for the night. Like I'm ready to rage around 7 p.m. I'm more like you are like i could be tired all afternoon just like god i can't wait to go to bed and then like

like maybe even falling asleep like at 7 30 sometimes but then once like 8 30 or 9 hits then i'm like i'm awake now i can stay up until until midnight no problem i have to force myself to go to bed at that point i have have like a second wind every day. Yep. No, I'm just like you. You must be a night owl too. Yeah. Does this show up when sometimes people may feel like they have some sort of disordered sleeping pattern, insomnia type thing when it's really just like you're a night owl and

you're trying to fit into everyone else's box? Yep. Nope. That's exactly. I mean, that's the major issue that we in the sleep medicine community have uncovered with the military is like for so long, the military has forced soldiers to be in this box of being a morning person that we've revealed that a lot of like, pre existing insomnia, which, or even if you didn't have like, diagnosed insomnia due to genetic reasons, like any sort of anxiety provoked insomnia is because of trying to fit into this box but it doesn't make sense if you think about it because the number one mantra of the military is to win our nation's wars at night like literally that's what every single general and admiral says is when our nation's wars at night

but so in the selection process it would like it would be nice to know who the night owls are yeah exactly but we pre-select for the opposite it's it's just i don't know again i'll never be in charge of the military one day uh that would be the number one change i would try to implement but yeah um staying on the on the working outside i think how does like your your daily energy expenditure um i think there's probably like a a a very logical answer, especially when you look at my two year olds, like, well, he ran all day and then went to sleep. But is there is there like a correlation as an adult of energy expenditure throughout the day? I know you're talking about some like step counts. How does that how does your daily actions kind of correlate to getting a good

night's sleep? Yeah. So I mean, it really falls along the lines of, you know, we use this term homeostasis. So returning back to baseline, there have been some studies, recent studies, and then like old studies that we've done at Walter Reed, showing that like, if you are pretty active throughout the day, not like doing training, right? So say your rate of perceived exertion walking around is like two or three. Someone who's fairly active throughout the day will have a good night of sleep at night. Someone who has been sleep deprived, they have this propensity the next day to not want to be as active and it makes sense right because it's all about balancing energy resources and conserving energy um the issue though with a lot of the field around when's the best time to work out

so that it doesn't impact your sleep is that a lot of the sleep researchers who are doing this work don't actually understand much about exercise physiology and training. And it's been it's it's huge issue. So I review for a lot of medical research journals. And whenever I see these studies, not a single study does like a questionnaire of rate of perceived exertion and i think that's really where they miss the mark is because in these studies they have people like walking on a treadmill for 20 minutes or like doing a light jog for 15 minutes so many hours or minutes before bed and you know for actual and they're trying to um extrapolate that to athletes well that's that is not a good comparison right you know so um i don't know my challenge to the

field is to to do more studies where we're looking at how the rate of perceived exertion uh directly factors into whether you have good quality or poor quality sleep yeah because as you know if you have like if you do a really hard workout like when i did murph uh gold star murph a few weeks ago and did it unpartitioned in like 90 some degrees like i slept like fucking shit the last night and my recovery the next day was 20 yeah yeah. Yeah. And that's exactly what I was going to get into because they don't take into account efficiency of like some people going and getting 10,000 steps, maybe like a whole day of exercise and congrats, like you're doing it, you're moving in the right direction. Some people may need to go run. Like if you're, if you're a marathoner and you're

putting in 10 miles a day or 15 miles, like there's an efficiency to that, that your body just gets very good at. So it's, it's gotta be very hard to track and actually be able to run a study to find out, is there an ideal step count energy expenditure, um, to get to what they want to be, which would be optimal for each person. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I am big believer of what the the mission of aura and whoop like it's so funny because like you can imagine in my field most scientists hate like these uh these industry partners because they basically have they've taken what research has always wanted to do and made it better and more accessible and can collect data at any time and do all these trend analyses.

But they're doing it the right way. They literally can just pull out data and look at ecologically know, ecologically valid measures whenever they want, based on the 1000s of users on their platform. And, you know, I'm sure whoop and aura have already done this, where they've looked at the rate of perceived exertion, because I think that is on both of their apps, and how it's related to sleep quality. Yeah, it asked me every morning how many walks I went on because it can, it can like gauge what your, what your daily, um, movement looks like. Um, it's very off every time on the type of exercise that you're doing, but Oh, I know. Yeah. Like you lift for an hour and it's like, did you go walk? And you're like, no, look at my heart rate. You think I was out for a stroll? I was in there dying.

Yeah, I know. I, I've used the new strength feature, but I'm not sure how much more, um, accurate it is because I've had a few training sessions where I'm like, damn it. They're going to, they're going to try and lump it into like a big bucket and it's a, and it's an efficiency thing of her for each person. So I, I totally understand what they're saying. It's just very funny when, when you, when you see it the next morning, like, did you work out? You're like, yeah, of course, of course we did. That's why it looks like that. Um, let's dig into, uh, supplementation. Yes. I have a secret, secret weapon that I give all my friends that don't know about magnesium. And they think I'm a genius when I just go, hey, take this. It'll help your sleep like half an hour before a little bit of water.

You'll sleep like a baby. What is so special about magnesium? I feel like there's probably many people have known about it for a long time, but, um, it's, it's, it's becoming, uh, very, very well known and its effects on how much it can affect your sleep. Yeah. So years and years ago, there was only one study to support its use. Granted it was published in the Lancet, which is like the world's top medical journal in the world up there with New England Journal of Medicine. But there was a recent magnesium supplementation study done recently. And basically, the reason why it's so effective is because magnesium is an essential element of the central nervous system. So it helps drive the connections

between nerve cells and the propagation of information from nerve cells. And so by supplementing with that, you're, you're, you know, pre feeding the neurons and the neuronal tissue with magnesium. It's super beneficial for athletes, because if you think about it, like how much load we put on our central nervous system on a given day, not just from training, but just, you know, everything we do in life too, like every time we're activating our sympathetic nervous system, that's going to trigger like a stress response to our central nervous system. So magnesium can serve as a protective factor under those times of high stress. But because it helps with the central nervous system, while sleep and in particular REM sleep and slow wave sleep are byproduct of the central nervous system, right?

Like your brain has to actively go into a very distinctive state in order to reach slow wave sleep and REM sleep. And so magnesium is, it's facilitating that process through keeping the central nervous system healthy. So it's not like a direct impact on like a particular brain system and influencing the release of a particular neurochemical or receptor it's just it's having a it's providing like a um uh a cushion if you will for the central nervous system so it could keep functioning properly yeah you've used that term slow wave sleep slow slow wave sleep a couple of times now. waking EEG is very, very chaotic. It's these very short waves that have a lot of squiggles, for lack of better terms.

And then as you transition from light state into deep sleep, these waves become higher and longer. So when you see, um, when you see a sleep record of somebody in a sleep lab, uh, and they enter slow wave sleep, it literally looks like mountaintops. Like as you can imagine, like tracing the lines or the outline of the Rockies, that's what it looks like. It's very, very, um, distinguishable and very like well-recognized. Um, and that's, that's why it's called slow-based sleep. Is that a mark of inactivity? It is. So it's really, so this has always been a debate in the sleep field, like whether sleep is a state of consciousness or unconsciousness. We argue it's neither.

It's like a subconscious state, if you will. But it is a sign of complete muscle inactivity and reduced brain activity. So what happens during slow wave sleep is that different areas of the brain take turns going completely offline. And so that's what creates actually the waves is because those neurons will take however many seconds to just completely shut down to replenish their energy reserves. And then once they've replenished their energy reserves another brain area will do the same thing um it's this so the phenomenon it's called local sleep where you'll actually have like neurons going off um in certain brain areas during this entire time the brain is in slow wave sleep the brain's a pretty cool thing. Turns out. I've heard with REM sleep in particular, so REM is like when you're doing memory consolidations, when you're dreaming, and you get a lot more REM sleep typically on the second half of the night.

First off, is that true? Yeah, it's true. And it's because the propensity and likelihood of being in REM sleep is determined by your core body temperature. So the lower core body temperature, the greater the propensity to be in REM sleep. unless you're a genetic anomaly right like jaco uh around 2 a.m that's when most humans start reaching their lowest core body temperature um and that core body temperature stays a few point i forget how many degrees low um before it rises around like 5 a.m or 6 a.m and it's during that time where the brain is pre-programmed to be in REM sleep because of it.

Okay. Yeah. So that kind of answers my next question was, I've also heard that you get more REM sleep kind of on the second half of the bout of sleep that you're getting. But also if you go to bed earlier in the night, then you're more likely also to get more REM sleep. So like the timing of going to sleep seems to matter at some level. But you were talking about chronotypes.

Like, if you're a person who naturally stays up later versus naturally goes to sleep earlier, then does that influence your REM sleep? Or is that all just kind of hearsay? Well, so, there is truth to that but remember the with the chronotype thing like really only 10 of the population are night owls and the other 10 of the population are extreme morning people the rest of the 80 are these intermediates and that's where most of these studies are done right they're sort of um done on these intermediate populations because we do we do screens for sleep studies and quite honestly i probably wouldn't qualify for like a sleep research study because i am such an extreme

night owl um but that being said yes going to bed earlier if you don't have a like anomaly in your chronotype is ideal one reason it's ideal is because in the summer, right? Like even if you have blackout shades, or I guess for people who don't have blackout shades, the sun's rising around, you know, 5am, 5.30am. And if you didn't do a good job going to bed early before the sun starts rising, then you're going to shortchange yourself on sleep because as soon as the sun rises, your brain wants to be awake. And so it's going to have a really hard time getting back into those deeper stages of sleep. The other reason why it's better to go to bed early to increase your REM is because the body wants to make sure it gets and replenishes all of its non REM sleep

first. So that's the first priority is in those 90 minute sleep cycles in the first half of the night, you're going to see a lot more non REM sleep than REM sleep. And then once the needs for non REM sleep have been satisfied, then that's when REM sleep starts being a priority. Oh, that makes sense. Like a logical framework that I hadn't really considered. Yeah, no, there is a there's a method to the madness. And that's why so for example, I literally I just came back from Australia, I was out there for two and a half days for work, I was on a plane longer than I was on the ground and it wasn't until last night that i finally started having like crazy rem episodes again because my body spent like the first two days since being back like comatose like making up as much non-rem as possible but

last night i had crazy ass dreams uh because your body goes basically is like just trying to repair itself from the damage. And it's just almost like 100% deep sleep. Yep. Two and a half days. You're so guaranteed to be messed up while you're there. And then obviously messed up when you get back. Well, I actually hurt my back too on the way there. I don't know what happened but like basically where my um thoracic

and lumbar like spinal areas it like locked up and my back was like violently spasming so i went to like sit back down in my seat with an hour left into our like 23 hour flight and i literally fell to the ground and could not get up for like 10 minutes. It was kind of embarrassing. But yeah, so I was like, I mean, I'm still not 100%, but I was like so fucked up last week. And I had to stay in barracks too, so that made it worse. Speaking of REM sleep, I've heard both with cannabis and with alcohol it it specifically will has a possibility of decreasing the amount of REM sleep that you get which again I mentioned like memory consolidation before like if it's if it's decreasing memory consolidation that that

affects learning and retention for people that that are friendly to those things is that how big of a problem is that? Um, and actually, so actually we mentioned whoop and whatnot, and like it measures, I wear it right here. I have aura and whoop on right now. I wear both of them. Um, and they both say that I have like a normal amount of REM sleep. Most of the time I'm usually between 20, 25% of my sleep and for both deep and REM sleep. Um, and then, you know, I, I partakeaken those things on occasion. And it doesn't seem to affect my REM sleep according to these devices. But I read that it does. I see research that says that it does.

I hear sleep experts say that it does. But on my devices, for me, it doesn't seem to truly affect it. Alcohol crushes my scores across the board, but not specifically my REM sleep. So what are your thoughts on specifically REM sleep and then any other effects of those substances? Yeah. So I, I did my dissertation on the impact of drugs of abuse on, I shouldn't call them drugs of abuse,

just drugs on sleep physiology. So we looked at alcohol, cocaine, and then actually we did a little bit of fentanyl work. It was like piloted by the National Institutes of Health soon after Michael Jackson died. And in all instances, those three drugs in particular decrease REM sleep. I know THC does as well. There's limited studies on it. But in all honesty, in most of these studies, they're having people drink and consume drugs beyond moderation, right? You know what I mean? Like, most of the time, they're not consuming like a normal moderate amount of this drug. It is a very high dose. So that's where you see that direct impact on REM sleep.

I can tell you alcohol in particular, if you have a lot of alcohol, you're going to fall asleep really quickly, but then you're going to wake up in the middle of the night and experience insomnia. And that's a direct indication of the alcohol being metabolized. And it makes sense. It's a homeostatic response, right? You have this central nervous system depressant that you're consuming at a high amount. So it's depressing your central nervous system. Well, after it's cleared, what happens? Your body wants to be awake and stimulated because it's been depressed for so long. Yeah. I know you mentioned Kirk Parsley earlier. He said on the show many times that when you you fall asleep when you're drunk you're not asleep you're just unconscious it's not the same

thing no and it's the same thing with the sleep medications too it's just like you're not even getting slow wave sleep you're like basically in those lighter stages of sleep um or like in a your brain goes into a weird electrophysiological state. And you're not going to get the restorative properties of growth hormone release, testosterone release, and all of that and get from slow way of sleep. Yeah, so you're talking about like Ambien and whatnot as well there. Yes.

You're not sleeping to the same quality that you would without them even if they help you get to sleep which is presumably why a lot of people are taking them yes yeah those drugs are awful and they're pretty much a band-aid and i know kirk has has done those studies um and we actually in the military too like we're not allowed to give soldiers ambien on their long haul flight over uh overseas now because of those reasons and we basically find that somebody who's hopped up on ambien if you wake them up they are their level of functioning is no different than somebody who's legally drunk so yeah i know somebody who uh who accidentally one time she thought she was taking her other

medication, which normally if she takes an Ambien, it's like, she takes like half a pill or something like that. And it's all she needs. And then she has a different medication that she needs for whatever reason. And she normally takes two of them and she mixed them up one time and took two Ambien. So like four times her normal dose. And, uh, um, her husband walked into the bedroom and she was just like totally naked on the bed and he was like oh what's going on in here hey and uh and then she was just like staring at the ceiling

kind of all loopy and he was like oh oh shit you okay what's going on and they didn't know what's going on for a while so he was like oh uh i guess we're going to the hospital like she's not functioning at all uh but, she was like totally, you know, some, some equivalent of, of quite drunk. Yeah.

That's wild. Oh, there's some crazy stories of, uh, actually. So my mentor, he was involved as a expert witness on a, um,

case in New Jersey where a woman took Ambien, got in her car and drove and killed somebody and so there's this question about like is she culpable for vehicular homicide or not you know yeah it's a scary drug yeah um let's dig into some of your work with the pre-divers. I'd love to talk about breath work and how it relates to sleep. And really kind of my experience, really there's like a performance side of it, which when you're working with pre-divers, they need to be able to breathe and go down wherever they're going very far. And then there's like the restorative slowing down to go to sleep, which is what I do right before I go to sleep. If I'm lucky, um, do those play together throughout the day and then maybe in some sort of nighttime routine so that you can optimize sleep? No, excellent question. Yeah, breathwork definitely plays a role throughout the day.

And the reason, so when it comes to sleep, it's a delicate balance between the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. So when you go from wake, which is mostly a sympathetic state, and you start transitioning into light sleep, and then in particular, slow wave sleep, your body in order to get into slow wave sleep has to be in a fully parasympathetic state. So there is no sympathetic nervous system activity going on whatsoever. If you are in slow wave sleep, when you are in REM sleep, it's actually both systems working at the same time. From a electrophysiological standpoint, REM sleep looks no different than wake on the EEG. But you have both the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic system working to create REM sleep. I say all of that because your body has to be extremely responsive and adaptive to these changes in sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system states.

And one way to train this system is through breath work um because if you think about whether you're doing box breathing or um honestly i do wim hof i love it but wim hof really gets and taps into these training the sympathetic and parasympathetic states um you know like through volition and control um and when we talk about free divers and and um divers in general like you have to be so consciously aware of your breath while you're doing any of that right like because if you're not it's gonna it's gonna fucking kill you um and i don't think i until i started diving that I realized just how much conscious control I could have over my breath, that then translated into having better workouts, and then better sleep. Because of that. I've, I realized before I started diving that I was probably the worst

kind of athlete in terms of breathing. Like I was that, you know, crossfitter you would yell at in the gym who would hold their breath in the front squat or like during a really high intensity workout, just like shallow breathe here and there. And now I do the opposite. I make conscious effort to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth to trigger that parasympathetic state as much as I can in the middle of a high intensity workout. Um, it, there's so much

power, like it's true. There's so much power in the breath. So I'm a huge advocate for it. Should I give hostage tape all of my money since they're spending all of their money targeting me on Instagram with great commercials, with great commercials. Absolutely. Absolutely. No, the mouth taping thing really has become like a real trend. I feel like would you, would you give that a nod people should give that a shot so i think if it's good at first to teach um the problem is is most people have spent most of their lives being chest breathers and mouth breathers yeah so i think having tape at first is a great strategy but i don't think you should do it during sleep i think you should do it during sleep. I think you should

do it during wake because during sleep, like you're not in a conscious state. And if anything, it's going to create symptoms or signs of like sleep apnea. You know, not to say you're going to get diagnosed with sleep apnea, but you're going to have like an apnea like episode. But if you're doing it during wake, you at least know, okay, I have to actively breathe in through my nose, and you have to engage your diaphragm. So you have that conscious connection of breathing and activating the diaphragm, you know what that feels like. And over time, you can take off the tape. And now you're doing diaphragmatic breathing instead of chest breathing um you know i would say like i said i learned that process through diving like having when i went through the army's dive medicine course which was like

the hardest month of my life even like harder than training for the crossfit games and competing in the crossfit games like i had to consciously learn how to do that so i would not drown you know in the depths of the ocean um but you're not gonna die at the crossfit games you just stop working out yeah exactly you gotta get to the top oh i remember like the first dive we did down to 130 feet and uh it's this area outside of um key west it was an old shipwreck and there was like barracudas down there too so i'm just you know at 130 feet hanging out with some barracudas and i'm looking up and i'm like oh fuck what did i get myself into yeah i don't want any of that yeah um where can people find you uh so i am on instagram at doc jock zzz um just so you know for the next three months i i won't be very active on instagram because i'm going on

special assignment i actually leave thursday so uh that's all i can say this thursday yeah i leave thursday i have to go down because you're're on my calendar Friday morning for us to train together. I know. So I was going to text you. That's messed up. No, I was going to text you. It's all good. I was actually going to tell you when we got off here that I couldn't make it either because

we have to go somewhere on Friday afternoon and I need the morning. No, it's okay. This is better because you're the bad person now. I'm the bad person now. I'm the bad person now. I was going to text you because I was supposed to leave to go down to McDill Air Force Base on Friday after we trained together. But now I have to actually be there Friday. So I have to leave Thursday.

We'll let it slide. We got three weeks. We'll make it happen when you get back. Yeah, exactly. Three months when I get back or if you're down in you know three weeks three months yeah it's gonna be you will be and i won't have a bad back so it's way but i don't want to train with you when you have a bad back we wouldn't be able to go as hard wouldn't be as fun exactly exactly um are you working on any cool projects that the people can get into a website

or check out um at the moment i'm working on cool projects i just can't tell people about them government funded different yeah well plus i you know i work with the community so we have a different level of stuff too i like it it is cool though my wife thinks I'm a spy, but I think you are, too. I'm on her side. Doug Larson. Right on. Yo, when's your next crack at being an astronaut? So next next spring is when the pipeline reopens. We'll see. Actually, we have at work tomorrow. We have a phone call with Frank Rubio up at the International Space Station. He's been up there for about a year.

Yeah, he selected me the first time I went through a selection. But I never actually got to meet him because he was getting ready to go up to space. So it will be really cool tomorrow to talk to him and meet him for the first time while he's in space but yeah but yeah i'm gonna definitely not be sorry i've been that many people that have been up there for a year what's the record i think the record is for i think he has it's i forget what the record is but he's very close either he has broken it or he's right there um and it wasn't his fault it was just like a logistical thing with getting the uh with nasa so i guess that's probably how it is right if you miss the window of opportunity you know you have

to wait for the next one yeah but once you've you've done it, once you get accepted once, then it's like, well, we've got people that can actually do this. Then you get to go a lot. I would imagine. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So I'm hoping next time it works out, I got to bring CrossFit to space. You know, this dude on that little deadlift machine, you could do like a thousand, a thousand reps. Oh yeah.

That's true. Every day. It'd be so crossfit of you every every day that's right we got no science done in space but a million deadlifts were done on that machine actually i would love to bring bjj to space that would be awesome oh that'd be hard just floating exploded talking about choking people out with no gravity. Yeah. That would be exceptionally fun, I feel like. Yeah.

Just wrapping people up. Yeah. Yeah. I guess, I mean, I guess she could still do a blood choke, right? I mean, yeah, it'd be hard to get into that position, but yeah. Yeah. You would just push the person away and all of a sudden you'd be so far away from each other they'd be like you'd have to kick back yeah yeah doug larson right on i'm on

instagram douglas e larson i'm anders varner at anders varner we are barbell shrug to get barbell underscore shrug make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com that is where dan garner and dr andy galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody gets inside Rapid Health Optimization. Friends, see you guys next week.