Dhru Purohit Show - #203: My Step-by-Step Sleep Protocol

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

Welcome to The Big Idea of the Week! Quality sleep is essential for human health, yet 1 in 3 adults in the U.S. report getting less than 7 hours of sleep per night necessary for optimal health and well-being. Sleep is regulated by our circadian rhythm, or “biological clock,” that synchronizes with our surrounding environment. Today’s fast-paced world has disrupted the circadian rhythm of millions resulting in poor immune health, increased risk for type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, cancer, obesity, depression, and so much more. On today’s episode of The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru shares his personal step-by-step sleep protocol that has helped him transform his sleep.  In this episode we dive into: -Mindset and setting an intention for sleep before your day even begins (6:02) -Getting sunlight early in the morning (7:08) -The biggest disruptors when it comes to getting quality sleep (9:38) -Creating an evening routine and wind down ritual (26:19) -Supplements to support sleep (31:23) -Splurge items for sleep (42:10)  Also mentioned in this episode: -Dr. Mark Hyman’s Sleep Masterclass - https://courses.drhyman.com/sleep-course-own -Oura Ring - https://ouraring.com/ -Broken Brain Podcast Episode #194: Could This Simple Hack Reduce Anxiety and Panic Attacks? With Dr. Kristen Allott https://drhyman.com/blog/2021/02/18/bb-ep194/ -BiOptimizer’s Magnesium - www.bioptimizers.com/brain (use the code BRAIN10 to receive 10% off) -Herbatonin Plant-based Melatonin - https://symphonynaturalhealth.com/products/herbatonin-0-3mg -The Five Minute Journal - https://www.intelligentchange.com/products/the-five-minute-journal -The chiliPAD Sleep System - https://www.chilisleep.com/products/chilipad-sleep-system -Letsfit White Noise Machine - https://www.amazon.com/Letsfit-Machine-Sleeping-Fidelity-Soundtracks/dp/B07WHY5DBT For more on Dhru Purohit, be sure to follow him on Instagram @dhrupurohit, on Facebook @dhruxpurohit, on Twitter @dhrupurohit, and on YouTube @dhrupurohit. You can also text Dhru at [phone].  Interested in joining Dhru’s Facebook Community? Submit your request to join here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone, Drew Prode here, host of this podcast, which is now called the Drew Perot podcast, formerly known as the Broken Brain podcast, new title, same great content. And today is big idea of the week episodes. Big idea of the week episodes are where I present a thought, a distinction, an idea. That's radically transformed my life for the better. Normally we talk about mindset, but today we're diving deep into health. Specifically, I'm going to watch. walk you through my step-by-step sleep protocol that I've continued to update over the years and fine-tune. And I've written it down. And by the way, we'll make this PDF available to the community soon. It's going to be available in the launch of my new newsletter. Stay tuned. In the

meantime, here's a preview today. We'll be making this PDF available soon, but I've written it down with my team to talk about how to get the biggest bang for the buck. And buck just doesn't mean money. It means time. There's so many things that you could do to improve your sleep. But what actually significantly moves the needle forward? Well, I put a protocol together for a lot of my friends and family, and they've tested it. I've shared it with many of you that have listened on the podcast.

And I've gotten great feedback. So I'm going to share that now with the larger community. Let's jump in starting off with this little background. sleep is so essential for human health, yet one and three Americans in the U.S. report getting less than seven hours of sleep per night necessary for optimal health and well-being. And it's not just the total amount of hours you get, it's the quality of those hours. There's so much tossing and turning. There's people that tell me that they get 10 hours of sleep, but wake up in the morning

and don't feel rested. You know, if you're tossing and turning at night or you're doing certain things that disrupt your sleep, even if you get a lot of sleep, you won't get the benefits. What happens during our sleep? You know, this podcast started off as a brain podcast. Well, sleep is important for not just the body, but important for the brain in the repair mechanism. A few years ago, and we've had many guests talk about it on the podcast, there was a discovery of glial cells and the glomphatic system, which is a whole intricate system that's in the brain that is way more active and does its job at night. Google it. You can look into it. The glymphatic system is a process of which our brain at night,

when everything's kind of quieted and we are not using as much brain power and our eyes are closed and we're not digesting and we're not running around and we're not reading and focusing and on social media. When everything is calm, our brain turns this system on to be able to detox and even process memory. clean up. Imagine like a bunch of dumpster trucks that are floating around the brain, picking up trash, putting it away, and cleaning things out so that we're fresh and new the next day, which is why sometimes when you take a nap, that's another way of activating the system or letting the system turn on. And when we get good quality sleep, not only does our body go through

the repair process, but our brain goes to the repair process as well. Sleep is a good quality sleep. is regulated by our circadian rhythm, as we all know, our biological clock, and that synchronizes with our surroundings and environment. And one of the biggest mistakes that I see people making still, even if they're pretty hip to the fact that sleep is important and turning off, you know, blue lights and all those other things that we'll get into in a second, they don't use external lighting, especially we live in this day and age of COVID where not a lot of people are spending a ton of time outside.

Well, some people are spending more time outside, but the vast majority of people are locked inside. are not using the natural circadian rhythms and processes that have been developed over millions of years to regulate our biological clock. Today's fast-paced world has disrupted the circadian-canadian rhythm. I was about to say Canadian. Circadian rhythm. And that has resulted in all sorts of challenges. Poor immune health, increased risk for type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, cancer, obesity,

depression, and so much more. This evidence-based protocol that I'm going to share today on today's podcast is broken down into baseline suggestions that anybody can try to enhance their sleep and health by focusing on the things that are the biggest bang for the buck. And buck just doesn't mean money. Buck means time. We have only so much time that we can put into improving all areas of our health. You know, sometimes I read books on wellness and they just,

go on and on about a list of things that we should be doing. Now, you and I could be doing a lot of different things, but if you're like me, you have other things that you want to focus on besides just directly working on your health each and every day. So we need to know what is valuable and is deserving of our time and attention that's going to deliver the best results that are there. So these suggestions that I've put together here, you can try them out, right? In fact, I'm starting a new newsletter.

It's going to be called Try This. And the reason I'm calling it Try This is because these protocols that all suggest in there, which are all based on the latest science that my podcast guest and my team researches and puts together, the whole idea is that you can try it and you can see within four days to a week if you see noticeable improvements. And if you don't see noticeable improvements, awesome. I have plenty of resources to direct you in different directions where you can get those improvements. Let's jump into the protocol now that we have some baseline and background information. The first thing that I want to share, the first big idea that I want to share on the topic of sleep is mindset.

And mindset really, when it comes to sleep, is setting the intention that, one, sleep is a priority because it allows you to be supercharged for all the things that you want to give love and attention to the next day. But the second thing when it comes to sleep is the mindset of setting an intention. Setting an intention to sleep way before your day gets fully charged or even you start with your evening routine. People always say, what's your evening routine? Say, well, my evening routine starts well before my evening routine actually starts. It starts early in the day that I set the intention for when I want to fall asleep. This helps prepare the body and the mind to know and psychologically get ready for when it's time to rest. And then we can work backwards from there.

So on the iPhone, if you guys have an iPhone, there is a bedtime feature, and you can set that intention on there. And the iPhone has a great reminder system that lets you know like 45 minutes before it's your sleep time that it's time to wind down, which is an important process. Now, going back to circadian rhythm and spending time outside, light, as you've heard for many of our past podcast guest, is one of the most powerful drivers of our circadian rhythm. getting sunlight early in the morning. And there's so much evidence on this, and I have a bunch of references in my detailed newsletter and protocol that we've put together for you. Stay tuned.

That'll be out soon. We've got a bunch of references on how getting sunlight early in the morning and avoiding light at night has extraordinary effects on sleep hormone regulation, sleep quality, and emotional well-being. Now, this doesn't mean that we have to spend the entire day outside. or our entire morning outside, if we can set ourselves up for just a simple thing, waking up in the morning and seeing the sunlight

within an hour of that time that we've woken up. What does that look like? Even 10 minutes can make a difference. For me and my fiance, sometimes it'll look like us waking up, getting a little settled, you know, brushing our teeth, using the washroom, drinking a little bit of water,

but within an hour going for a quick walk. even if it's a 10-minute walk, just going outside and seeing the sun, not through a window in your house or your apartment, but being outside and seeing the sun. And even if it's cloudy, just being outside and being out there with the sun, because even when it's cloudy, there's still a lot of lumens that make it through the clouds. And it's part of the process of us waking up. This is powerful enough to start to program our circadian rhythm and has all sorts of, of influences on how our biological clock works throughout the day. All we're talking about here is a quick two to 10 minute walk. Even if you can just go outside for a few minutes, it still makes a difference.

And if you've ever listened to any of our episodes on tiny habits, even one minute outside, two minutes outside, gradually you'll spend a little bit longer of a time period. And there is some evidence to say that even just 10 minutes, outside is enough of a dosage to start setting our biological clock up for success for the rest of the day. Now, in addition to light, and we'll get to evening light in a second, I feel like pretty much most people on our podcast are aware of blue light blocking and other things like that. We'll cover it again, though, later on. I want to talk about the biggest disruptors. The biggest disruptors throughout the day, well before your evening routine starts, that significantly impact

your sleep. Let's talk about the number one disruptor to quality of sleep, and that is caffeine. So caffeine is consumed by over 80% of the population here in the U.S. I don't know what it is worldwide, but I'm sure it's pretty high as well. And regardless of individual variations of caffeine metabolism, the research shows that drinking caffeine later in the day can significantly disrupt our sleep, even if you can follow. sleep easily for years. I never really thought I didn't grow up drinking caffeine and I really didn't get into coffee until probably my later 20s early 30s and when I got into caffeine because I've never really had trouble sleeping I would drink coffee later in the day just for like that buzz

effect that we're all looking for and I thought you know what caffeine's not bothering me because I can still fall asleep at you know 10 o'clock like I normally fall asleep but I didn't really realized it until a little while later on when I started tracking my sleep that my sleep was disrupted when I had caffeine a little bit later in the day. Now we'll get to what later is, but first we need to understand this. Caffeine has a half-life. That means it has a length of time that's available and present inside the body. And that half-life for caffeine is about five hours in healthy individuals. So an 8 ounce cup of coffee, which contains about 100 milligrams of caffeine, that means that if you have two cups of coffee in the morning, let's say at 8 a.m., like most people do, starting off in the morning, and another cup of coffee in the afternoon, say 2 p.m., that 100 milligrams of caffeine that came in at 8 a.m. times 2, so that's 200 milligrams of caffeine. that means that the half-life of it, which is five hours,

means that there's still about 100 milligrams of caffeine in your system at 1 p.m. Right? So 8 a.m. you drink two cups of coffee. That's 200 milligrams of caffeine. It takes five hours for the half-life. So later on in the day, at 1, you still have 100 milligrams of caffeine in your system. And then fast forward later on at 11 p.m., you still have 25 milligrams of caffeine in your system.

And depending on how sensitive you are and whether you are a fast metabolizer of caffeine or slow metabolizer, which there seems to be some sort of correlation with genetics, you know, 23 and me and different reports like that can give you information on genetically if you're a fast metabolizer or slow metabolizer. Then, again, you still have 25 milligrams at 11 p.m. And that's with those two cups of coffee. If you drink that cup of coffee later in the day, like two or three, Let's say you had at 3 p.m.

3 p.m. You have another cup of coffee, which is 100 milligrams of caffeine. That means five hours later, at 8 p.m., you still have 50 milligrams inside your system. And then at 1 a.m. you still have 25 milligrams inside the system. So combined, if you had two of those cup of coffees, one at 8, 1 at 3 p.m., you still have about 50 milligrams of caffeine in your system around midnight. 50 milligrams of caffeine in your system at midnight, no wonder so many people have an issue falling asleep at night. You know, the research shows that there's a stimulatory effect of caffeine on the nervous

system at levels that are low as 32 milligrams and decreased melatonin production into the following night after evening caffeine consumption. So even 32 milligrams is enough to impact the nervous system. So what do we do? So what we want to do is, just like we said, sending an attention makes a difference, getting morning sunlightline makes a difference. We want to have a caffeine curfew.

So if you have more than a couple cups of coffee in a day, generally speaking, the advice for most practitioners in the doctors at our medical clinic is stop having coffee, prior to 12 noon, right? Have 12 noon be the last time that you're having any kind of coffee or caffeine consumption, sometimes a little bit of green tea later in the day if you need it. Now, what do you do if there's days where you break this habit?

There's always days where there's days for all of us where it's a little crazy with the kids, right? It's a little crazy with work. We might need a little bit of crutch. We're having a hard time staying up. Now, we don't want to be doing that every single day, and that's probably a sign of something deeper that's going on. But if there is a day where you end up going off the caffeine curfew, one thing that you can try is you can supplement with 100 milligrams of L-theonine

to counteract the stimulatory effects of caffeine. There's a bunch of research in this area. This doesn't mean that you go and purposefully drink caffeine and just supplement with L-theonine, which you can find a good quality of caffeine. altheonine at Whole Foods or other places, it just means that sometimes when we break those rules, altheneanine, again, could be something in our back pocket that we could do and bring in to subside some of the stimulatory effects, the jitteriness that comes with having a lot of caffeine.

All right, that's caffeine. What else on the topic of disruptors are there that start well before our evening routine are things that we have to pay attention to that affect our sleep? Well, here's the other big one in all of my research is meal timing. Meal timing is so key. Your circadian rhythm is designed to digest, metabolize, and absorb food best earlier in the day because cortisol and insulin sensitivity are highest in the morning. And again, if you just think about this, if you were out in nature and we were living together

on a tribe in the Sahara, which I'd be honored to have you as a tribe member, and I'd be honored to be part of your tribe, should we be so lucky? If we're on the tribe, tendency is that when light is available is the time that we're going to be eating. So our biological clock, including digestion and all the different organs that we have, which have their own internal rhythms, biological rhythms, it's not just our general circadian rhythm, Dr. Suchin Panda, who we've been trying to get on the podcast for a while, hopefully we'll have him soon. He talks a lot about this, and he's been very well recognized for his

work in this area. So if we were out in the Sahara, we would tend to follow our eating structure, would follow the sun. We would have our biggest meal when the sun was the brightest and available out there, and we'd start to wind down a little bit later on in the evening. Naturally, as the sun goes up, our digestion or our ability to digest, process food, other things is maximized. So that gets us out of the habit of eating a heavy evening meal and starting to focus on eating a bigger lunch meal if it's possible to do that in our life. So the goal here isn't to be perfect. The goal here is to shoot for having, ideally, the bigger meals earlier in the day, where traditionally right now we eat dinner as the biggest meal.

And when we do that, again, it's not about being perfect. We're maximizing against our circadian rhythm and the different rhythms, biological clocks, for each individual organ. Now, another big tool that we want to have in our toolbox is having a cutoff time of when we're generally shooting for eating, which is incredibly difficult to do when it comes to being social and hanging out. But on most days when we're eating at home, what people mostly find,

and there's data and evidence to support this, we outline it in this newsletter that we're going to be coming out with and also our sleep masterclass that we put together with Dr. Mark Hyman, which is at DR.hyman.com slash sleep, is there's a lot of evidence to support that eating earlier dinners.

So if your dinner is lighter and now you're eating it earlier, that's also going to contribute to your sleep. If you have an aura ring, which I use, or if you have another sort of app that helps you track your sleep, you'll find that when you eat earlier meals and you give your body time to digest when the sun is still up, that will significantly have an impact and help regulate your circadian rhythm and gene expression for all sorts of things, including your sleep help, but it's also good for weight control if folks are paying attention to that. Now, that's not always possible again, you know, because of social life and everything like that.

So here are some ways to curb the effects of late night eating if you have to eat later at night. So number one, if you're going out for dinner, have a bigger breakfast or lunch and eat a lighter dinner. Even if you're eating out with friends tonight or tomorrow night, I have dinner with friends that are in town visiting from Austin. And I know it's going to be a little bit of a later night. So typically where I have dinner at 7 o'clock or even. sometimes six o'clock where I feel best, I know that I'll be having dinner that night with them at 8. So that means that I'm going to shoot for a bigger meal earlier in the day. And in the evening, because you still want to be social and you still want to hang out with people and there's a lot of joy

that comes from life from doing that, I'm going to eat a lighter dinner and I typically feel better than. Now, if you do overdo it, you can take digestive enzymes, which help improve digestion, but also a lot of people anecdotally report that it improves the quality of their sleep because their body isn't spending all this time at night on its own just trying to break down this food and this heavier meal. So a good broad spectrum digestive enzyme or if you end up eating gluten or dairy or other stuff, a digestive enzyme that helps break those down actually can have an impact on your sleep. The next one.

Pick a meal. low in saturated fat and refined sugar, as these can produce, both saturated fat and refined sugar can produce less slow wave sleep, causing night arousal and reduced overall sleep quality. There was an article that came out in the New York Times just a few weeks ago quoting a study by a few researchers talking about how saturated fat, especially really late at night, can impact the level of sleep quality that we have, as well as having a lot of sugar at night can impact that as well, too. Last time I'll say is that there's a lot of nuances when it comes to people who are on the blood sugar roller coaster,

if your sugar's going up and down throughout the day, one thing that affects sleep quality, just as a little bonus section for you to look into a little bit, is hypoglycemia-induced panic attacks or anxiety that comes from having your blood sugar drop really low. And there are some strategies and tools like eating protein, eating protein or a high-quality fat like almond butter in the evening before you go to bed to make sure that your blood sugar doesn't drop super low. Now, the best overall approach when it comes to blood sugar and anybody who has a continuous glucose monitor that's tracking like levels, which is what I use, knows that the more balanced your blood sugar is throughout the day, the better off you're going to end up sleeping at night. If you're on the roller coaster of ups and downs throughout the day,

because you're having a lot of carbohydrates that are refined, that are spiking you up and down, that's going to lead to more likelihood of that hypoglycemia-induced panic attacks. We have an episode on this. It's what Dr. Kristen Allett, I believe her name is, and we will link to that in the show notes. Okay, so that is around meal timing. Biggest takeaway for meal timing. Eat your biggest meals earlier in the day, breakfast and lunch.

Pick a time, which is your cutoff time that in your normal schedule, 80% of the time you eat before or have a targeted time. Just to give a targeted time of when you want to go to sleep, you can have a targeted time of when you want to have dinner. Because my fiancé and I have been spending a lot of time at home, and not going out as much during the week, although that's starting to change a little bit, now that things are opening up in Los Angeles,

we often feel best if we're eating at 6, 6.30, and I think for some people that are listening, that might sound crazy, but for others, it won't because you'll see the difference. Again, four days to a week is enough to see the difference of this. All right, let's switch topics and let's talk about artificial light. I feel like this is an area around sleep that everybody knows, but I'll add in just a quick summary of a lot of the evidence that's out there. So reducing your exposure to artificial light of any kind at night is helpful.

You know, blue light blocking glasses can be super supportive in it. But really the overall goal in Dr. Andrew Kuberman, who was on the podcast previously, really put this on our map and radar. It's not just about having blue light blocking glasses. That's fantastic. and there's, you know, different brands. There's a brand that I recommend, and there's a lot of really great solutions that are out there.

But it's about reducing the overall light exposure. So we just don't want it very bright. As the sun starts to set and it gets dark outside, we want to make sure that we're minimizing light exposure inside, not just with our screens, but we're dimming the lights. And where we can turn off overhead lights, will find that that is an extremely important part. To the degree that at night, if it's dark outside and I'm brushing my teeth,

getting ready for bed and starting to wind down a little bit, I actually put a little night light in my bathroom so that I don't have to use the overhead light. Now, that sounds kind of crazy, but I find that if I can dim the lights in my living room, if I can slowly start to make things a little bit dimmer, even if I don't have fancy orange lights or anything like that that people talk about, that just overall dimness starts to support the process of winding down. Now, different people are sensitive to light in different ways. I actually am not crazy sensitive to light, but my partner, she is extremely sensitive.

So I used to work on reducing her light exposure, dimming the lights in the living room. I used to really support her in the process of doing all these other things, eating earlier because she said that she wanted to improve her sleep. And every so often, I'd notice that she'd come to bed. after, you know, we have separate bathrooms, when she would go use the washroom and brush her teeth and everything, she'd come back to bed a little bit wired. And I started asking and thinking like,

hey, babe, what's going on actually? What do you think is going on that you are sort of getting stimulated? She said, I don't know, you know, I took magnesium, I took this supplement, we ate early. And I'm just kind of watching her one day, I realized that the lights in her bathroom are so bright. They're so bright. that we just tried an experiment.

We turned those lights off, the overhead lights that tend to fill out the room, and instead we put a little juve lamp, right? Jove, which is the red lamp in her room so that she could, in her bathroom, so that she could see enough and still brush her teeth and get ready and shower and everything and have the routine before bed. And I noticed that when we did that, she wouldn't come back to the bed completely wired again after we already had toned things down. Let's talk about a winding down ritual.

A winding down ritual is key. It's not just about doing these things and then completely falling asleep, although I tend to fall asleep pretty easily. A lot of people do need the support of a ritual, a ritual of starting to wind things down. Just like we do with kids and we bathe them and we get them ready and we prepare them

and we sing them, you know, a little nursery rhyme. That is very soothing to the system. So having your own version of that can move the needle forward. Everybody has different versions. But here are the things that I've seen. There's four things that I've seen that are crucial for winding down right before you're actually about to fall asleep. So we already talked about the dimming of the overhead lights.

Another tool that you can put in your toolbox when it comes down to your wind down ritual is taking a shower before bed. Anytime you have a ritual process, this is my process. You know, we're out and about during the day. We get a little bit dirty. You get a little sweaty. A lot of times people take showers in the morning. I find that taking a shower before bed is part of my wind-down ritual

and gets me in the headspace, especially. I know this sounds crazy, but I have a nightlight in my bathroom, and I kind of make the lights dimmer in my bathroom, and I'll take a shower, and it's a relaxing period. I'm not really into baths, but I know that people really enjoy those. And that's part of my process of winding down. And there's a whole bunch of research around core temperature regulation and how a shower at night can support lowering core body temperature,

which is helpful and leads to favorable sleep. Something else is very helpful for a lot of people when it comes to the wind down ritual is just simply having herbal tea. Camomile, passion flower, lavender, valerian root. These are all clinically proven to aid relaxation and sleep onset. I drink often sometimes ginger tea at night after having dinner. And again, these are all just small things, rituals that we can do with other people to bring a sense of structure, joy, and again, ritual.

You know, there's something powerful about ritual and having those things. Not that we're trying to be perfect and do 30 different things to improve our sleep at night, but it's something that if you enjoy it, you can start including. it inside of your routine. Now, the last one that I want to touch on is temperature control. Our body temperature is naturally lower at night. So sleeping in a cool environment can be super supportive for that. And the biggest thing that I see that disrupts people's sleep at night when it comes

to temperature control is especially if they have a partner. If they have a partner and they share a bed with somebody else and they share the same duvet or comforter, I find that it's very rarely that both partners enjoy sleeping at the same temperature. So a simple hack, and I've given this to so many of my friends who are married over the years, it's a little weird, but hey, if you want to sleep well, then it's worth trying. First of all, we have to remember, sleeping in the same bed is kind of like a new phenomenon, right? Sleeping in the exact same bed right next to your partner, sharing the same sort of exact space. that's a little bit of a new thing.

You know, in the past, people would sleep in separate beds or if we went back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, they'll sleep right next to each other, but they'll have their own little section. It's easier to sort of mitigate and control your own individual temperature for your needs when you are not sleeping and sharing the exact same space with another individual. So because that's such an important part of the story, what I notice is that if two partners enjoy different temperatures at night and if you're tossing and turning at night, that's one example that you probably enjoy a different

temperature than your partner. One person runs hotter. One person runs colder. The easiest thing is using separate blankets or duvets or comforters to account for differences in temperatures. Sometimes just this little hack alone is enough to improve the quality of the sleep. The person who likes it warmer has their own comforter that's maybe a heavier. The person who likes it colder has maybe something lighter. I like it colder. If it's too hot at night, I cannot sleep properly. That's why it's so important for me that I have a little blanket of my own. Yes, it's important to snuggle and all these beautiful things that we get a chance to enjoy and share in bed with our partner. Awesome. And then when it's time to sleep, it's time to get down to brass tacks, so to speak. It's like, do whatever needs to be

done so that you both wake up feeling rested. And just having two separate comforters can make a significant difference for folks. I'll get to the splurge section in a second. There's obviously tech and devices and other things that we can help out, and I have some that too, but a low-tech solution is just sharing two separate comforters. Let's talk about supplements. Supplements is a category that naturally people want to go to. Even into the wellness world, we want to go to a pill to supportive, but luckily,

there's great pills that have, you know, no side effects when taken at the appropriate dosages that can be very, very supportive for sleep. So let's talk about the first one. The first supplement that we're going to mention here is magnesium. Magnesium is something that is so crucial and plays a role as a co-factor in over 400 enzymatic processes in the body, not to mention that 75% of Americans are not meeting the RDA requirements for magnesium, which the RDA requirements are so low. They're not optimal requirements for magnesium inside the body. So in addition to supporting with sleep, magnesium is also just supportive overall.

It's a lot of evidence on it and its role that it plays when it comes to relaxation and sleep. So our recommendation and what often the practitioners at the ultra wellness center, the clinic that I'm affiliated with, what they'll share with patients is if they're looking to explore, supplementation with sleep. First, the goal would be to have it, you know, at least an hour or two. You know, you don't want to drink a lot of water before bed. So at least an hour or two before bed, you can take safely, you know, 300 milligrams to 500 milligrams.

Bio-optimizers, which is an advertiser on this podcast, how I ended up reaching out to them to be an advertiser on the podcast is that I had heard a friend of mine, Dave Asprey, talk about their... They have a really great magnesium product, and I gave it to my brother-in-law, who's a cardiologist, because he had some challenges winding down. And it's a magnesium supplement that has like seven different types of magnesium. There's all different forms of magnesium, and they all play a different role in the body. And my brother-in-law tried it, and he swore by it. I started using it, and I really enjoyed it.

So I started giving it to my fiancé as well. And then we ping them, and we said, hey, listen, you know, we're fans of the product. It feels like the most natural fit if you want to advertise on the show. and boom, it all worked out. So you can go to biooptimizers.com and you can check out their magnesium blend, which is a really great blend. Another product that is really useful,

and I have a slight spin on it, is many people use melatonin. Now, melatonin is responsible for initiating that sleep. It also plays a role in blood sugar regulation and has anti-diabetic effects as well. Now, taking melatonin every single night, there is, when I talk to a lot of practitioners in the world of functional medicine, they generally get concerned when somebody has to rely on melatonin every single night

to fall asleep for bed. Not to mention that melatonin is basically like taking a hormone, right? And anytime we're experimenting with taking something like that, melatonin operates as almost like a hormone inside the body, people get worried if that's always coming in the form of supplementation. Does it downregulate your body's own ability, to do and produce melatonin. So if somebody is using melatonin, which can aid, especially if some of the other rituals

in the day, the winding down ritual wasn't followed that day, or we ate later in the night, or we had trouble the last few nights sleeping, or something's been on our mind. One of the melatonins that I love that people can use pretty regularly without having to worry as much is a product called herbotin. They're not a podcast advertiser. I'm just a fan. I know the gentleman that started the company, and they have a really great product, and it's called herbatonin. There's two versions of it.

There's a 0.3 milligram plant-based melatonin, and that's what makes it different. It's a plant-based melatonin. So it's the world's first plant-extracted melatonin, which they call phytoanmelatonin. and it's made from a combination of rice, alfalfa, chlorella, and it's all vegan if people care about that. And it's a little bit more gentle on the body, but still effective. So again, if you have to rely on melatonin every single night where magnesium supplementation is pretty broad spectrum approved, there's not really a lot of concerns, especially at the 350 to 500 milligram dosage that would aid sleep. if somebody's using melatonin every single night, that might be a sign that something deeper needs to be addressed, and it's worth looking into.

So for anybody who's a shift worker, the erbitonin, they also have an herbotonin that is for shift workers. And when I travel international and I have a hard time sleeping because of jet lag and I need to get back on schedule, I use their higher dosage herbotonin. And you can find that. I believe the website is symphony natural health.com. Symphony natural health.com if you want to check out that herb plant-based melatonin. Let's mention another one on the topic of supplementation, and that's CBD. So CBD has been used as a safe treatment for anxiety, insomnia, and other sleep disorders. And proper dosage depends on.

on weight and metabolism. So it's better to start off with a lower dosage and start slowly until you increase and reach your desired effect. There's a bunch of studies out there that have shown that people who take CBD have reported beneficial effects on sleep. And the dosages range, and it's not an area where I particularly take CBD to aid my sleep, but I just want to remind people, especially people who are a little bit more old school and don't know the difference between maybe hemp and marijuana and CBD.

and is it okay? Just remember this. Your body has natural endocannabinoid receptors. We have receptors inside of the body. And CBD hemp, which has, you know, no THC inside of it, right? So this is not the psychoactive component of the marijuana plant. This is the hemp plant and it's the cannabinoids. And sometimes they're concentrated and sometimes they're broad spectrum. Our body has receptors for these inside of them. And we produce our own cannabinoids inside of the body as well. So if you haven't explored CBD, it's something that a lot of my friends swear by and you can look it up and look for trusted resources that are out there. So that is the core protocol that's there. If we do a summary, it's paying attention to morning light as simple as waking up in the morning and getting

two to ten minutes of light in the morning. Significantly makes difference. Next, next to you. Next up, caffeine. Caffeine has a half-life. We want to have a cutoff time, especially if we're more caffeine-sensitive. 12 noon at the latest, even if you can get your caffeine intake in by 10 a.m., that's going to aid your process of sleep. Meal timing. Meal timing is so key and so underrated, eating an earlier dinner significantly improves your sleep and having your bigger meals earlier in the day, which takes a shift and you're not always going to be doing it. doing it. Dinner is such a sacred time for us to connect with family and friends and be with people and break bread, so to speak. You know, we're not typically doing that at lunch and breakfast where we're on our own or just with our families. So don't worry about being perfect. Just focus on doing that whenever you can and see how it impacts your sleep. I didn't get into alcohol, but I feel like we all know that alcohol has an impact negatively on our sleep. Maybe

I'll throw that in as a bonus in the future, but there's a lot of content that's out there. Artificial lighting. It's not just about getting your night shift mode on for your phone or your computer, minimizing blue light. It's just minimizing overall light, bright light exposure in the house. Think about doing something crazy like I do, which is put a little night light in your bathroom at night, especially when you're winding down. If you have really, really bright lights, these things can be stimulating and they can keep

you up. Have a wind-down ritual. Think about taking a shower or a bath at night to sort of rest and relax your body. Have a cup of decaffeinated tea. Create a little bit of a ritual. Some people journal or they write down things that are on their mind so they can say, you know what, I gave my day the best shot. These things are still on my mind that I haven't addressed and they're sort of bugging me. But you're going to write them down on paper and say, tomorrow's a new day. all addressed in the future. By the way, if you do this, write it on a paper, fold it up, and put it outside of the room, outside of the room and say, you know, tomorrow's another day, I can deal with it. Temperature control. If you share a bed with another partner,

think about having separate blankets if you aren't using fancier tech that's out there to help with temperature control at night. This way, also too, in the summer months where people's sleep can be off, you can open the windows. You can turn on the AC. And actually, when I turn on the AC in the summer months when it gets hotter in Los Angeles, I keep the windows open as well so I can get fresh air in because too much AC at night without any sort of ventilation can be very drying. And sometimes you need a humidifier or you need to open a window to balance out that temperature. But dial in the temperature. For whoever needs it warmer, give them extra blankets. Whoever needs it colder, get a lighter blanket or open the window or do anything else like that.

I have some other recommendations in splurge section that we'll get to. Supplementation. Magnesium, plant-based melatonin, CBD. There's plenty of other things you can do, but this is the minimum viable sleep protocol that significantly makes a difference. I'm trying to give you enough things that will make a difference, but not too much that you won't do it. Feel free to pick and choose appropriately.

when you add in all these things together, right? Then you can see the difference. And that's really what it's all about. It's add enough of these together so you can find and pick and choose. Do this for a week. I find if you do this for a week, it's enough to start then maybe pulling things out or experimenting with adding things in

so that you can create your own version of what your sleep schedule would look like. Now, really quickly, while we have a few minutes here on the podcast, I'm going to talk about splurge. I'm going to make it quick. These are things that are bonus sections that you can do,

but it's not required. So the first thing on the topic of splurge is a lot of people swear by taking a bath. I don't take a bath. I take a shower at night. Helps me get ready and clean for bed and it sort of sets that mood for me. But Epsom soak, pure Epsom salt bats,

there's a lot of research around them about how they can optimize relaxation using this blend of magnesium sulfide and Epsom salts, which are best absorbed through the skin. It's another form of getting magnesium in the body and having a calming effect on the body. There's a lot of garbage Epsom salts that are out there

with fragrances and other things like that. If you're going to get them, make sure they only have essential oils or no fragrances. Guided meditation, that can be very helpful. Again, going back to Andrew Huberman, who was on the podcast previously, he kind of got me back on the topic of using Yoga Nindra, which is a sleep meditation.

Yoga, Y-O-G-A, Nindra. sorry, Nidra, Nidra, NIDRA, NIDRA. Type that into Google, and that type of guided meditation on your phone at night can be very supportive. Journaling. One of my favorite journals is the five-minute journal. It has a section inside of it that you can fill out. It only takes five minutes. You practice gratitude.

You practice gratitude for your evening entry, and gratitude is a way to sort of solidify the day and be thankful and reduce some of the anxiety that's there. So you could splurge and you can get a journal. Temperature control. If the duvets or leaving the windows open or playing with temperature doesn't work on its own, the thing that I recommend that I have is the chili pad. The chili pad is basically a system that you put under your bed

and they have one for either one person or two people. It's a pad that goes under your bed and it pumps in water. You fill it up with water and it has sort of a unit at the bottom. bottom, you fill with water, you got to plug it in, and it pumps either cool or warm air underneath your mattress to better help temperature control. It was a game changer for me, and I love it, and I still use it today. My fiance swears by it as well, too. So that's been incredibly helpful for us. It's expensive. That's why it's on the splurge list. It's not for everybody because not everybody has set aside the money for it at the moment, but it could be

something that you could save for in the future. Another gadget that's can be very helpful is a white noise machine. We use white noise machines for babies to put them to sleep. It's very soothing, very calming. I find it works for adults as well. There's great white noise machines that are cheap that on Amazon, there's one called left, let's fit. Let's fit wise noise, white noise machine. You can find that on Amazon. So that is the splurge list. I'd love to hear about your own recommendations for your sleep routine. Maybe I can play with them and I can add them into what I'm up to and try them out and then recommend them out to the audience if it's helpful.

If you have some other ideas or things that you incorporate into your sleep routine, text me. 302-2005643. That's 302-2005643. I hope you've enjoyed today's Big Idea episode on my step-by-step-by-step. Sleep protocol. Sorry for fumbling around with my words and being tongue tied. Maybe it's because I had caffeine this morning and I'm a little bit parched.

So I apologize about that, but I hope you found some value in this podcast regardless. And stay tuned for the newsletter where we'll publish this protocol and all the references. We have over 52 references in putting this sleep protocol together. so you can know that it's supported with the evidence and the literature that is out there. Give it a shot. If it works, let me know. Thanks, everyone. This is Drew Prode here. Signing off for the big idea of the week episode.