Digital Social Hour - The Sleep Expert’s Secret: Gain 2 Extra Hours Every Day | Michael Breus DSH #576

Episode Date: August 11, 2024

Unlock the Sleep Expert’s Secret to Gain 2 Extra Hours Every Day! 🌙✨ In this mind-blowing episode of the Digital Social Hour, Sean Kelly dives deep with renowned sleep expert Dr. Michael Breus to reveal how you can transform your nights and gain more productive hours each day! 🕑💡   Dr. Breus breaks down your chronotypical schedule, discloses how genetics impact sleep quality, and unveils personalized strategies to optimize your rest 🌜. From decoding DNA to determining your perfect sleep duration, this episode is packed with valuable insights you won't want to miss! 📊   Dr. Breus also gives practical tips on managing sleep environments, caffeine consumption, and even the right time to work out for better sleep. 🏋️‍♂️☕️ You'll discover how small tweaks can lead to massive improvements in your sleep quality and overall health.    Don't miss out on this eye-opening conversation! 🎥 Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets. 📺 Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more exclusive stories on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🚀   Join the conversation and unlock the potential of better sleep with Dr. Michael Breus. Sweet dreams! 🌟 #DigitalSocialHour #SeanKelly #Podcast #SleepExpert #MichaelBreus #ApplePodcasts #Spotify #SleepOptimization #BetterSleep #GainTime   #OptimalSleep #SleepTherapy #SleepHacks #NightmaresPtsd #SleepingPositions   CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:41 - Breaking down my sleep data 04:48 - Do you need more sleep if you work out more 05:00 - Babbel 07:58 - Overdosing on melatonin 09:37 - How Temperature Affects Sleep 10:42 - Alarm Clocks 11:25 - The Snooze Button 11:47 - The 5 Stages of Sleep 13:07 - Dreaming 15:25 - Lucid Dreaming 16:55 - The Importance of Sleep for Athletes 18:05 - Wearables 20:15 - Snoring 24:28 - Why is it hard to sleep in a new place 27:10 - Best sleeping position 29:25 - Can you make up for lost sleep 30:17 - How long before bed should you eat 32:57 - EMF Sensitivity 34:23 - Where to Find Michael 35:03 - Michael's New Book APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail]   GUEST: Michael Breus https://www.instagram.com/thesleepdoctor https://sleepdoctor.com/ https://sleepdoctor.com/sleep-quizzes/chronotype-quiz/   SPONSORS: Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly   LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Within your chronotypical schedule, you don't need as much sleep from a quantity standpoint, and the quality goes up. So listen to what I just said. I can figure you out, and I can put you into a sleep schedule where you need less sleep and that the sleep that you get is better. I can literally give you more time in a day. Wow. That's worth a lot of money.

By sleep. It is worth a lot of money. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe. It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests, and it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot. Thank you guys for supporting, and here's the episode. All right, guys.

Sleep expert in the building, Dr. Michael Bruce. How's it going? It's going great, man. Good to see you, man. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, you got the results pulled up already. Oh, I've got your data right here on my computer. Can't wait to talk about it. All right. So what were the biggest things you noticed with it?

So first, I wanted to give everybody a little bit of background here. And so you provided for me your DNA by downloading your information from one of the services. I don't know if it was 23andMe or Ancestry. So you handed me your 23andMe data, and then I was able to put it into an algorithm and push it up against 78 different known genetic sleep markers. So what that does is that allows us to have a little bit of predictive validity and kind of understand what your body is actually capable of. So it's kind of like this. You and I probably, I love basketball and I heard you like to play basketball. My guess is you're probably better at it than me because I'm 5'8 and you're not, right? Because genetics are different. And guess what? People's sleep genetics are different.

Very few people sleep exactly the same. And that's where personalized medicine can come in. And that's when we can actually dictate and give people the real skinny on what's going on with their sleep. I kind of feel like I cracked the secret code book for people. Because if you know how to sleep and sleep well, literally every other aspect of your body works significantly better. But let's get to your data because it was actually pretty interesting. I am excited. So first of all, we looked at your overall sleep

quality and it turns out that the quality of your sleep is generally lower in general. So what does this mean? This means that you don't get this unbelievably super fantastic wake up and feel great sleep. Okay. What you get is a slightly lower quality sleep that's genetic. So when I've got somebody like you in my practice, the first thing I wanna do is say, what environmental influences could be making the situation even worse? Let's get rid of those

because we're only working with somebody like who's got a two inch vertical, right? And so if we need to get them to a four inch vertical, what's the training that we need to do? Or what are the things we need to take away? So in your instance, I might look at your caffeine consumption, which I don't know how much caffeine you consume. Or when do you have sugar? Could it be later in the day, which could be having an effect on you?

When are your workouts? That can actually have a pretty big effect as well. Oh, yeah. So the timing of when you do things throughout your day becomes incredibly important. And, by the way, I have a book called The Power of When. You took the quiz from The Power of When, and you'll learn something called your chronotype. So a lot of people haven't heard the term before, but they actually know what it is if you've ever been called an early bird or a night owl. Those are chronotypes. So if you know what your chronotype is and you sleep within your chronotypical schedule, you don't need as much sleep from a quantity

standpoint and the quality goes up. So listen to what I just said. I can figure you out and I can put you into a sleep schedule where you need less sleep and that the sleep that you get is better. I can literally give you more time in your day. Wow. That's worth a lot of money. By sleep.

It is worth a lot of money. People don't realize what I do half the time. And then when I sit down with like CEOs and athletes and people like that, which by the way, I like doing, and I enjoy working with people like that. So I'm always open for, you know, people getting in touch with me. It's amazing what I can do for them. Nice. Now you're again, your sleep quality is a bit low. And then another thing that we noticed here, which was interesting is your total duration is a bit shorter. So if somebody's turning to you, Sean, and saying you need eight hours, you don't. Okay? I'm here to tell everyone eight hours is a myth.

Okay? Very few people need exactly eight hours of sleep. Genetically speaking, what you would do best with is somewhere between six and a half and seven and a half. That seems to be your money duration. And if we put it during your chronotype, guess what? You get improved quality on top of that, which is very cool. And your sleep isn't bad to begin with. I want to be super clear. Like you actually do a lot of the good things and you're active and your nutrition looks pretty decent, but I can actually tweak it, tweak it, tweak it, and I can basically optimize you.

Incredible. So here's another thing that I thought was super interesting about your data, and then we can jump onto some other stuff, was you actually have the genes for somebody with something called restless legs syndrome. So restless legs syndrome is a kind of a creepy crawly feeling that people get when they lie down in bed,

and it's very disruptive. And the only way they can get rid of it is to stand up and walk around, which can be pretty tough to fall asleep when you're standing up and walking around all the time. So we know this also has to do with people who have potential iron deficiencies. So there's about a 35 to 45% of those people

have iron deficiencies. So one of the things that I'm going to recommend for you is we should probably do some blood work with your physician here in town and find out if you're anemic or if your blood is carrying a particular type of iron called ferritin. And if it's not, we'll give you a supplement, just plain old iron sulfate, and we could avoid you ever getting this. Wow. That is interesting. I used to sleepwalk a lot as a kid. So I'm glad you mentioned that because you're up for parasomnias in here as well. So it's, again, these genetics are fascinating and this is kind of weird, dude, but I think I'm the only

sleep doctor in the country that does this kind of testing, which I don't understand why. I mean, it's available. People could get it. Yeah, I've never seen any other doctors do this. I know, it's pretty cool, right? So what I do is I do the genetics, then we do blood work. And a lot of people ask me about supplementation. Like, well, what supplement should I take for better sleep? I don't really ascribe to that philosophy. What I ascribe to is I say, let's do some blood work first and let's see where your deficiencies are.

If you're deficient in vitamin D, magnesium, melatonin, or iron, those are the four things that I want to look at. And if you're deficient in any of those, let's fix those deficiencies and then see how this unit works before I add valerian root or whatever. I'm pretty sure you don't have a deficiency in ashwagandha, if you know what I'm saying. And so at the end of the day, I think the body can actually do a lot of great things if we let it. Yeah. Here's my one qualm with melatonin. I get nightmares on it. Yep. That's because you're taking too much. Oh, really?

So the number one side effect of overdosage of melatonin is crazy dreams. Interesting. And so most people don't know this, but the correct dosage based on the data out of MIT in order to bring plasma concentration levels up to the point where it induces sleep is only one and a half milligrams. Wow. Yeah, I was definitely taking whatever was in the pill is what I was taking. So here's the problem.

95% of the pills are sold in an over dosage format. Dang. Three milligrams, five milligrams, 10 milligrams. And the second somebody says melatonin doesn't work for me, it gives me crazy freaking dreams. I'm like, you're using way too much And the second somebody says, melatonin doesn't work for me, it gives me crazy fricking dreams. I'm like, you're using way too much. And why are you using melatonin? Like, to be fair, looking at you,

I guess is you probably don't have a melatonin deficiency. Right? And so what a lot of people think of as melatonin is the same as like Ambien or a sleeping pill. Nothing could actually be further from the truth. Melatonin's a hormone. Most people have no idea that. By the way, it interacts with other medications. So melatonin interacts with a big one, birth control.

So if you or somebody that you're with is taking melatonin and you don't wanna necessarily have a baby and you're being intimate, you really need to look at and understand how melatonin is affecting that. It also affects antidepressant medication and diabetes medication. Wow. Right. So people are just going into the drugstore and saying, give me some melatonin, throw me a gummy, and I'm going to go to sleep. And at the end of the day, it's a hormone. There's a reason we don't go down to the CVS and buy

testosterone, right? Because it's a hormone. Remember, hormones affect multiple areas of the body. So we really want to be thoughtful about inducing a hormone. Yeah. When it comes to temperature, I've heard it's better to be on the lower side, right? Absolutely. Cold is better, and here's why. Your core body temperature rises, rises, rises until about 10, 30 at night and hits a peak, and then it begins to drop. That drop is a signal for your brain to release melatonin.

If your body doesn't cool down, you ain't got no melatonin going. And melatonin is kind of like the key that starts the engine for sleep. It's not the only thing that you need, but you ain't sleeping if you don't have any melatonin on board. And so then what's really interesting is your core body temperature then drops, drops, drops. And then you're going to go hypothermic if you don't heat up. And so you start to heat up somewhere between 1 and three o'clock in the morning. That is the number one time that people wake up in the middle of the night and they can't fall back to sleep, which is kind of my bread and butter. That's what I really help a lot of my athletes, CEOs, folks like that, because a lot of people,

and I'm sure a lot of the viewers here, wake up at two o'clock in the morning, look at the clock, get pissed off, and then they're done. Yeah. Right. Then they're up for the rest of the night. I've got some great videos on YouTube that really describes the biological process and some stuff you can do. Are you a believer in alarm clocks or do you think you should wake up naturally? I love naturally waking up. Personally, I wake up when the sun comes up. And for me, I haven't used an alarm clock unless it was for like a flight, you know, or an early flight or something like that in probably 20 years. Wow. Yeah. I'm a big fan of that. Also, the way that you wake up can actually have an effect on your mood, right? So if you have some blaring alarm, there's no way you're going to be, you know, having the day, having fun. I had one patient who actually recorded

their baby's laughter and used it as the alarm on their phone. And they loved it. They woke up every morning listening to their baby laughing. Like, dude, that sounds pretty good. That's smart because my alarm clock pisses me off when I wake up. Yeah. Do you hit the snooze? Usually, yeah, to be honest.

That's the problem. Right. So remember, the average snooze is somewhere between seven and nine minutes long. Your body can't physically get back into deep sleep. So all you're doing is giving yourself light crappy sleep every time you hit the snooze is somewhere between seven and nine minutes long, your body can't physically get back into deep sleep. So all you're doing is giving yourself light crappy sleep every time you hit the snooze. Wow. So it's actually useless to do that. It is the worst invention in all of sleep by far. Because you can't get back to deep sleep, you're saying?

Exactly. Wow. So when you're in that phase, what is it then? So what ends up happening is you end up in this stage one, stage two, which is still sleep, but it's not the depth of sleep that you're looking for. Quality sleep has to do with which stages you hit and for how long. So stages three and four, which is now just considered one stage, stage three, that's the wake up and feel great sleep. That's the physical restoration. That's where growth hormone is emitted, kind of like bringing your car into the body shop and kind of getting the dinks kind of pulled out of it.

Also, there's this thing in there called the glymphatic system, which comes in. It's kind of like waste management. It pulls all of the extra proteins that have been kind of lying around your brain. People don't know this, but when your brain is really active, it produces these proteins. One is called beta amyloid. The other is called tau. When they wrap around a nerve, that's called Alzheimer's disease. And so sleep comes in and removes beta amyloid and tau.

So if you're not getting good sleep and you're not getting deep sleep, stage 3, 4 sleep, you could potentially be leading yourself down the path to cognitive decline and Alzheimer's. Wow. Right. So what are we doing? We've got to make sure that we're getting our physical restoration. And by the way, REM sleep is where the mental restoration occurs, right? And so that's where we move information from our short-term memory to our long-term memories, kind of creating like an organizational substructure inside your head for information retrieval, right? So that way,

because you don't want to retrieve everything. Like you've got a lot of data that comes in you every day from your eyes, your ears, your nose. So you want to keep some and then you want to throw the rest away. What REM sleep does is it kind of puts it into storage for you so then you can go back and forth. But something else happens during REM, which is kind of cool. They're called dreams, right? So dreams are really interesting. And a lot of people out there, unfortunately, there's a tremendous amount of misinformation about dreams. So I want to be very clear.

If you dream that you're swimming, it doesn't mean that you hate your mother, okay? Like, it doesn't work that way, right? You know, one-for-one dream interpretation is really, there's very little scientific data behind that. However, dreams are emotional metabolism, okay? So what does that mean? That means that any emotions that you had during the daytime, they get metabolized or worked through or processed while you're sleeping. And that's how you wake up the next day and you can make better decisions.

You are more emotionally stable and things like that. Wow. A nightmare is where that processing, you get so scared in the middle of the dream, you wake up. Processing stops. Then you go back to sleep, but you don't go right back into the dream.

You have to start at stage one and go to stage two, stage three, then back into REM. And then the processing stops because you get too scared and you wake up and you can see how this repetitive process of nightmares can occur. I mean, we were talking before the show that, you know, people with PTSD, right? They've got incredible nightmares. It's one of the most hallmark symptoms of what's kind of going on with them. And it has a lot to do with what's going on in their REM sleep. Oddly enough, I'm now getting trained to become a dream therapist. Really?

This is different than dream interpretation. This is where you could actually use like, because I'm a clinical psychologist by trade. And so I'm used to having a therapeutic environment. Right? And so I bring a client in and I say, here's what I want you to do. I want you to explain to me everything that's going on in your dream, right? You know, remember your dream, close your eyes. I do a small hypnotic induction, just get them to relax, become present. And then we drop into the dream. And then they start

describing to me what's going on in the dream while they're imagining it. It's amazing. And when we change the ending of the dream, like where they were getting killed by somebody bad, where they become victorious, they don't have nightmares anymore. Interesting. It's fascinating, dude. Like it's so cool. Some of the stuff that you can do. I mean, like it's not quite inception yet, but we're not that far off by the way. I mean, lucid dreaming is also another area of expertise of mine that I'm a – personally, I am a lucid dreamer, and it's a really cool thing to kind of play around with. But I think over the course of time, if we could combine lucid dreaming with some of these nightmare treatments, we might be able to really help veterans who are really suffering from PTSD, people from natural disasters, things like that. It's an area that's ripe for some cool stuff. I love that. How did you able, how were you able

to lucid dream every day? So I've been a lucid dreamer since I don't do it every day. I've been a lucid dreamer since I was a young boy. Um, but to be fair, it's a skillset and almost anybody can acquire it. If you want to, um, you have to be thoughtful. Um, there are now at least three research studies to show that there are three different known methodologies that you can go through. You can take glutathione before you go to bed. And then I actually had a mask that would monitor when I was in REM sleep and then flash a strobe light when I hit REM sleep. And it would pop me out right into lucidity right there. Wow. That is cool, man.

It's cool, bro. And you think, oh my God, is this Elon Musk? What's going on here? No, this is like real science. There's people out there that are doing cool science. I mean, me personally, obviously you can tell I'm pretty passionate about all this stuff. I'm excited about this stuff because I think there's a lot of new things that are going on in the universe, especially when it comes to sleep. But also there's kind of an idea here that sleep's just recovery, right? Like at the end of the day, you've got to get it. And if you don't get it, like mother nature's a, she's going to come after you and it's not going to be pretty

when you're not getting sleep. Yeah. It's cool to see you talking about this mainstream because growing up, no one really talked about this kind of stuff. Well, and especially like you had mentioned that you played sports as a young kid, like nobody's telling these high school collegiate athletes sleep is their secret weapon. Okay. Like if you want to perform your best, like I've worked with Olympic athletes and the difference between being on the podium and not being on the podium is how you slept the night before. Wow. Almost every time. That's crazy. Right. Like if you just think about it, like, because at that level, the elites are off by hundredths of a second. Right. Right. So what makes that difference? Better alertness. That's so crazy. And that's sleep, bro. Yeah. Are you

using any tracking devices? There's a ton out there. I do. I like the aura ring. I use that. And I hope that helps me track things. It depends. I like the Apollo. I know we had talked about it a little bit earlier. That's a wrist-worn haptic device that actually helps soothe you back to sleep if you wake up in the middle of the night. So it's kind of interesting technology. I think that wearables are going to get better and better. Right now, my biggest problem with most wearables, nobody knows what to do with the data except for somebody like me. And so what I'm going to start doing, I've started to publish videos on my YouTube channel. I'm going to actually like publish my own aura data and say like, here's what I'm doing and here's how I

changed it just to start educating people and like trying to get people interested. Maybe people will send me their data and then we could do videos and kind of cool stuff like that. But I think it's time. You know, I think we're getting there. I think that's a good move. Brian Johnson did it. I don't know if you saw his results. So I saw Brian doing some of those things. I think it was very interesting, some of the things that he did. The only problem that I have with somebody like Brian, and again, nothing against Brian

Johnson, but it's interesting because remember, he's an N of one. So what he does works well on his body. Right. And I got to be honest with you. They're not a whole lot of people that have a body like his body. Okay. I mean, have you seen the guy? Like, I mean, in all his videos, he doesn't have his shirt on the guy's super lean. He's pretty shredded. Like the world isn't like that. True. Right. And so what I think a lot of people should do is take a look. I, Brian reminds me of Dave Asprey. They're similar, yeah. Well, think about it. Dave has done the exact same thing that that guy did, but he did it 10 years ago.

Yeah. You know, he spent over a million bucks on his body and trying all these new biohacking things. I think this is kind of like another version of that. But I always have to be cautious because at the end of the day, neither Dave Asprey or Brian are physicians. Right. And so you have to really think through what's going on. Like there's a big difference between being a researcher and being a clinician, right? So you look at somebody like Andrew Huberman, right? Super smart dude out of Stanford, you know, circadian rhythms, you know, vision, light, all that cool stuff. He's never seen a patient in his life.

I didn't know that. Right. So people are taking advice from researchers, right? And so you've got to just be, you've got to be a good metric for your own data. You've got to be a good filter. You can't just believe something because, hey, somebody's at Stanford, not picking on Andrew Huberman, but at the end of the day, you want to get your medical information from people who practice medicine, right? You know, like, perfect example, Gary Burka, right? So he's all over the place with hydrogen water, and he has a BS in biology, right? I have a PhD in clinical psychology. I took the medical boards without going to medical school and passed. I'm one of 168 people in the world that have ever done it. Like I know sleep. I know the biology. I know the psychology. If you want to come to me, I can definitely give you evidence

based, well thought out answers. I think what happens to a lot of folks out there is they're flipping through TikTok or on social media and they see a sleepy girl mocktail or something fun, and they think that's going to cure them. And look, at the end of the day, I believe there's two categories. There's sleep disorders, apnea, narcolepsy, restless leg syndrome, and then there's what I call disordered sleep. That's just the, oh, I went to the back of the house. I closed my eyes for six, seven hours, and I came back, and I don't feel so great. That's what I like to fix. That's what I like to dig into. And that's where that optimization stuff

that we were talking about earlier. That's why I did the genetics on you because I want to know what I'm going to be working with in order to be able to give you the personalized advice for your sleep. Yeah. Is something like snoring genetic? It is. Craniofacially, it can be. And snoring's a big deal. By the way, you have a very high likelihood of snoring. My It is. Craniofacially, it can be. And snoring's a big deal. By the way, you have a very high likelihood of snoring. My girl says that. Your genetics say it too. Is that fixable? It is fixable. So here's the thing. When people think about snoring, by the way, we almost immediately start thinking about sleep apnea. Now, I want to be clear, you don't have the body type for sleep apnea. I haven't looked in your nose and throat, but I can after

the show if you want, and I can let you know if I think that there's any possibility of it. But snoring in and of itself is just air turbulence, right? So it's breathing air into a narrow pathway. So maybe you have some nasal congestion or some extra tissue, large tonsils, big adenoids. And so when you bring air down the throat quickly in a narrow tube, it goes fast and it causes a vibration, which causes the snore. It's just like if you were in the garden and you put your thumb over the end of the hose and you don't have the water squirts out faster. Yeah. Your nose is that hose.

Got it. Congestion makes it narrow, faster air vibration. How do you fix it? You just open up the pipe, right? So decongest for better rest is what I tell people all the time. So we might consider a nasal decongestant with you or maybe a saline spray. Understand if you've got any allergies in your room, maybe put an air filter in there.

Because remember, you're breathing that, that's the room you breathe more air in than any other room in your house. Your bedroom. Yeah, think about it. You're in there longer, right? That's the air that you want to be the cleanest. Right.

Right, so I would buy an air filter that just covers your bedroom, right? So you can have that clean air. I would also open up your windows every once in a while to get some fresh air in. Smart. And just be thoughtful about some of those things. You'd be surprised how much we can make these little tweaks that can end up making a big difference. Wow, definitely going to buy an air filter.

You got a company you use? I don't, but I'll find one for you that I like. I would say you want to have something that's got some type of a HEPA filter to it because in order to get the teeny tiny particulates out of there, that's what I would think about doing. And also I think, you know, some people could benefit from doing a sleep test, right? And now people used to think, oh, sleep test, what a pain in my ass. I got to call my doctor. Then they're going to refer me to a sleep doctor. Then that sleep doctor is going to send me to a hospital. I'm gonna have to spend 48 hours with all these electrodes on me. Good news. Ever since happened, we stopped doing a lot of that stuff. So it's all portable. You can actually go on my website, believe it or not,

click a button. I can have you talk to a physician. I can have a prescription written and tests sent to your house for under 200 bucks. Wow. What's the test? It's like a, it's a, it's a sleep apnea test. It's a, it's worn on the wrist measures your oxygen, and then it's got a cannula. Wow. And we know exactly what's going on with your sleep and we can diagnose you in your home. That's crazy, right? I mean, who sleeps well in a hospital with 27 electrodes all over them? Nobody. So sleep medicine is advancing. I want people out there to know this. Don't be scared of it. Talk to your doctor about it. Come to my website. Ask me some questions. I don't care.

Like the goal here is to get more people out there educated because dude, sleep is literally the secret weapon. Super important. It is. Why is it super hard to sleep outside of your own bedroom? Is that something psychological? It can be. So similar to babies, familiar surroundings make you more relaxed. And so there is something called the first night effect that happens every time you travel, no matter where you go. Even if you're traveling from one of your homes to another one of your homes, what ends up happening is you're not used to the sounds. You're not used to the light.

You're not used to the temperature. It's all just a little bit different. And so you're kind of like a dolphin. You end up sleeping with kind of one ear open. Many people don't know dolphins sleep unihemispherically. So half of their brain is asleep while the other half is awake looking for predators. I didn't know that. Yeah. You're a dolphin every time you travel. So as an example, when I work with somebody like Steve Aoki, dude, it's tough. So you know what we do is we bring his bedroom with him. No way.

So not the whole thing, but what we can do is I created a concept I call the sleeping bag. So what we can do is we can bring pillows, sheets, a topper. So we give a level of consistency, right? Very similar to what somebody might have at home. We can have that on their private jet when they're going from wherever to wherever. They can sleep there on the plane. But again, the smells are similar because it's their sheets. They smell themselves. Again, all of this leads to more relaxation over the course of time because when you got a guy like Steve Aoki,

he's a shift worker. He is a shift worker who works from about 11 o'clock at night to about five o'clock in the morning. Crazy. And there are studies on the graveyard shift and how it impacts your health, right? It's awful. It's awful. Higher suicidality, higher depression, higher anxiety, worse sleep. People shouldn't be awake at night at those hours on a regular basis.

You want to go to one of Steve's concert and have a good time. I'm all for it because I love his music and I think he's awesome. But at the end of the day, Steve himself and all of his crew, like that's whose health we want to manage. Yeah. And is that because of the circadian rhythm? That makes sense. Get some sunlight as soon as you wake up, right? My biggest thing that I tell people to do is three things when they wake up. When you wake up, take 15 deep breaths, just get your body present, get your respiratory system in gear. Drink 15 ounces of water. People don't know it, but sleep in and of itself is a dehydrative event. You wake up and you've lost almost a full liter of water. Full liter?

Full liter. Just from the humidity in your breath. Wow. Right. So what do people usually do? Grab coffee, which is a diuretic, which makes them pee. So it's probably not the best idea. So 15 deep breaths, 15 ounces of water, and 15 minutes of sunshine. That sunshine turns off the melatonin faucet in your head and sets a timer for 14 hours later when melatonin should start. And that's when you know when to go to bed. When it comes to sleeping positions, I've seen some interesting graphs where it's like

if you sleep on your right side, your heart rate is high or something. Correct. So what's the best position? So what I always tell people as far as sleeping positions is right is wrong. Okay? Left side sleeping, if you are a side sleeper, is more than likely the best side for multiple reasons. If you're a pregnant female, you get more nutrition to the fetus. If you have asthma, it's easier to breathe. If you have gastroesophageal reflux,

the sphincter isn't sitting on top, the stomach isn't sitting on top of the sphincter, which would make things leak. So left side is almost always the best side. But you can't just stay on your left side the whole night long. Otherwise you kind of get those pins and needles. So remember, everybody moves around.

I tell people, look at your starting sleep position and that's really what you want to have an effect on. What's the best? Probably sleeping on your back, right? Because you can displace weight across the skeletal frame most evenly when you're lying on your back with your head facing up. Stomach sleeping is the worst because you got to basically jack your neck all the way to the left. I'm a stomach sleeper. It's awful. So why do you do it? Well, I've been training myself. Now I happen to be a left side sleeper. Okay.

So it took me a while to do that. By the way, if people want to change the position of their sleep, now you're probably too young to remember this, but back in the 80s, we had these things called ankle weights, which you could strap to. And then people would do aerobics while they were doing it to get a little extra weight. But if you go to one of those play it again sports places where they have all the used sports equipment, they're everywhere. Grab two three-pound ankle weights, and you put them on your ankles, and you get in the position that you want to be in, you ain't going to move. You're not going to move. Wow, that's smart.

I'm a right-side sleeper, but I'm going to make that fix tonight. Go left side. Start going left side, and don't give yourself too hard of a time. It's going to take you a couple of days to start to get used to it, but that's where you want to be. Now, if you're a side sleeper, pillows become important. Okay. So you want a pillow that's going to make up for the space between your ear and the outside of your shoulder. Because what happens is if it's less, your head's going to, and you're going to feel tension in your neck. And that pain is going to prevent your brain from getting into deep sleep. Interesting. You want your nose in line with your sternum as best you can.

Do you use body pillows and leg pillows? I love body pillows. I love leg pillows. I put pillow between my knees. My wife calls me the MacGyver of pillows. I've got like four different pillows that I use. You've got four up there. Oh, dude, I have a good time. That's funny, man. There's this theory that you can make up on lost sleep on the weekends. Yep. So every couple of years, scientists start to debate this idea, okay? And they say, can you make it up? Can you not make it up? Is there such thing as sleep So every couple of years, scientists start to debate this idea. And they say, can you make it up? Can you not make it up? Is there such thing as sleep debt?

Is there not such thing as sleep debt? Here's what I can tell you is if you are an adult and you're consistently getting five and a half hours during the week, and then you conk out and you get eight or nine on the weekends, that's not healthy. Now, if you're at the six and a half hours, that's probably a little bit better for you, right? Five and a half hours is right at the lower level limit of sleep in terms of being able to drive a car,

you know, well, without reaction time problems and things like that. So I'm always talking with people about, hey, you need to really start to look at that lower level limit and always be above that if you possibly can. Yeah. And when it comes to eating before bed, this is probably one of my worst habits. How many hours should you have before that? So what I try to do is what I call

the 3-2-1. So three hours for food. I'm sorry, three hours for alcohol, two hours for food, one hour for water. Got it. Right. So 3- two, one. Now, to be clear, if you're diabetic or your doctor wants you to have water before bed because you have pills to take, please take your pills. OK, like you don't have to be super duper duper strict on this. But if you kind of lay it out that way, your body is not meant to digest food lying down. It's meant to digest food sitting or standing. So better to have that food a lot earlier. Now, I didn't finish answering the question of can you make up your sleep? And I want to get back to that if you don't mind for just a second, which is you don't want to have such a humongous sleep debt from the week that it would be impossible to make it up on the weekend.

And so the size of the debt, I think, is really where the big issue here is. So let's say that your body normally needs seven hours and you're only getting six and a half. And so by the end of five days, you've got about a two and a half hour deficit. I'm okay with you sleeping in on Saturday, but here's what's going to happen if you sleep in on Sunday. Monday's going to suck. Because here's what happens. If you stay up late on Friday, sleep in on Saturday, stay up late on Saturday, sleep in on Sunday, what do you think your body wants to do? Stay up late and sleep in. And that's why Mondays are awful. So if you're going to sleep in, only do it on Saturday. And I wouldn't do it more than maybe 90 minutes longer than you normally would sleep in. But if you really want to do one thing for your sleep,

if everybody out there only got one piece of advice from me today, it's make your wake-up times consistent seven days a week. So if you wake up at 6.30 during the week, wake up at 6.30 during the weekends. Now I know that sucks, okay? But let me explain to you the biology and why. So when you wake up in the morning and you get that 15 minutes of sunshine that we were talking about,

melatonin faucet turns off, but a timer gets set for approximately 14 hours later. So if you're waking up, let's make the math simple, at six, 14 hours later is eight o'clock at night. Melatonin kicks off. It takes about 90 minutes. Now it's 9.30. You're gonna start to feel sleepy.

You'll fall asleep around 10.30. But if instead of you waking up at six, you woke up at eight, 14 hours later is 10 o'clock at night. So when you sleep in on Saturday, your melatonin schedule has now slept in. Wow. And so your body won't even go to bed earlier if you wanted it to because you don't have enough melatonin there for it. That is crazy.

Yeah. I think that's something I need to work on this year is wake up at the same time or around the same time every day. Well, we're going to have you do sleep diaries. Yeah. And then if you get the aura ring, I'll monitor you, and then we'll figure you out. Maybe I'll come back and we'll do a show where we talk about your results. Yeah, we'll do a part two, man. Sure. Lastly, I want to talk about iPhones, because a lot of people sleep with them next to their head. There's studies about the EMF phrase.

How do you feel about that? So here's what I'll tell you is, I've been in practice for 24 years, and I've had three patients who were EMF sensitive. Okay. And it was real, but in 23 years, I've only had three. So I think it's a hyper specialized scenario. And there's a fairly easy way to figure it out is you go to your breaker box and you just pull the breaker for the whole night. And then you monitor your sleep with your ring. And then you see what the changes in your sleep would be after doing that for, let's say a week, compare a week of, you week of breaker on versus a week of breaker off. Now, there are

other things that you can do. You can get a grounding pad, but some people love those. You can even get special paint, and you can create a Faraday cage in your bedroom. Whoa. What's the paint do? The paint actually has a metal shielding in it, and it helps shield any of these EMFs from coming in. And I saw a bed in Spain that reports that it actually has some mechanism that pushes all the EMF away. Interesting. So do I believe it? I believe there's something there.

I'm not sure we know how to measure it, and I do believe that there are some people that are very sensitive to it. But as a general guideline, I don't think people need to worry about that. Wow. Yeah, only three people in 24 years. And you've seen tens of thousands of people. I have quite a few. And I like it. Nice.

Doctor, it's been fun, man. Anything you want to close off with or promote? Well, I wanted to tell everybody a couple of quick things. Number one, if you want to know what your chronotype is, which is kind of the basis of everything in the big cheat code, check out chronoquiz.com or head on over to sleepdoctor.com. One of the big things that we discovered was lots of people don't know how to buy a mattress. Really? Yeah. And they're expensive. And by the way, they all look the same. They're all freaking white rectangles. So we went and did reviews on over 150 beds, like by my standards. So that way people don't have to do all of that. So if you want to check

out mattress reviews and things like that, I think that's going to be something that people will find super duper valuable and fun. And then also I'm available on all the social stuff. So I'm the sleep doctor on all of that. And then finally, I'm coming out next month with my very first fiction techno thriller. Whoa. Yeah. Well, it's not a movie. It's a book first. We're hoping, you know, if somebody wants to pick it up as a movie, anybody out there who wants to pick it up as a movie, please let me know. It's gonna be called The Sleeper and it's a techno thriller about,

let's see, I don't wanna, it's about the protagonist is a sleep doctor, surprise, surprise, and they have a patient that does really crazy stuff in their sleep. Surprise, surprise. So it's based off a true story? Here's the truth of the matter.

It's all real science. So you know know, like, uh, Michael Crichton. No. So Michael Crichton wrote like Jurassic Park and Andromeda strain and things like that. And so what's cool about him as an author is he was formerly an MD and he writes things that are medically accurate, but then he kind of goes into the fantasy and the fiction of it. That's what we were doing for this one. I'll check it out, man. We'll link all of it below. Thanks, bro. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for watching.

Sweet dreams, everyone. Sweet dreams.