EverydaySpy Podcast - CIA Sleep Cognitive Techniques | EverydaySpy Podcast Ep. 18

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

I am a total sleep-geek. I love sleep, respect it, crave it, and obey it. I know that makes me a lame date and a bit of a party-pooper, but it's worth it! Join Jihi and me as we dive deep into what makes sleep work mentally and physically, and how you can transform your sleep habits literally overnight with a few CIA sleep hacks for a great night's rest. And if you've ever wondered what Jih and I did for our first jobs, come sit with us and find out! Find your Spy Superpower: https://everydayspy.com/spyquiz Learn more from Andy: https://everydayspy.com/ Join the SpyTribe: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EverydaySpy/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everydayspy/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/EverydaySpy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you take a nap, 15, 20, 10, 7 minutes, whatever it might be, you feel energized, but you don't necessarily feel optimized. You don't feel sharp necessarily. You don't feel focused. You just feel like, okay, I can keep going. Yeah. Right? I can make it to the nighttime. I can make it. Yeah. I can make it. So what CIA taught us is that if you are going to rest, choose whether you are resting for physical reasons or for mental reasons. If you're resting specifically to benefit the brain, you need to give yourself at least enough time for a full REM cycle. Oh my gosh. Why do fire alarms tell you that they're running out of battery only at night? Only at night.

They never, I don't think I've ever had one go off during the day. I know I never have. Yeah, because the beeping, it intrudes in my dreams. And then after I'm like, what is that? that sound because it's not, it's like, it's spaced. So it takes you a few minutes to be like, what is that? And then you have to think to yourself, yeah, can I sleep through this? And I cannot. So I can. And that is exactly what happened last night because I also was roused from sleep by the beep of the fire alarm running out of batteries. And I thought to myself, I can sleep through that.

And you sounded like you were dead. You sounded like you were dead. You sounded like you were dead. So I just kind of rolled over and I was like, I'll just, I'll resist the urge to even focus on that. And then it went away. And now I realize it probably went away because you got up. I got up. Yeah, 145 a.m. I got up. I found the flashlight.

I pulled something out of the wall and then realized a few minutes later it was not the smoke alarm when it beeped again. So I went back to the wall, pulled the other thing out of the wall, and then yanked out the batteries and controlled. myself from throwing something. Well, that also explains why I woke up this morning and sitting on the kitchen table were two somethings and drywall. Absolutely. So, I mean, the last time I recall having that kind of weird, disembodied wake up was really when we had very young children.

Yeah. Because young children have a way of always waking up in the middle of night. They're like the persistent smoke alarm. Yeah. Because they eat and they cry and they cry and they eat and they just, they're always growing. Their brain is growing so fast. Yeah. They just, they don't sleep through the night. Yeah. And I would say that, you know, even now, you know, they're like elementary school age now, but even now they have their wakeups. Like our son's sleepwalks and that's really like this combobulating when he comes in because he's not even awake. He just comes in in a panic and then you touch him and you realize he's sweaty and he's sleepwalking. He is asleep.

and you have to get them back. And our daughter comes in every once in a while still with some kind of like the half awake, half awake, some kind of request. I'm itchy. I need lotion. My model ship is broken. And you're, you are asleep. You're like, I don't know what's happening, but I'm going to fix this.

And in both cases, all you have to do is kind of steer them back towards their room. And then they find their way back to sleep. And sleep is one of those things that, you know, we've talked about it a lot because it was a very, it was a very humbling moment in our marriage when we had the conversation about your priorities. Yes. And priority one was food. No. Priority one was sleep.

It was sleep first. Yes. Food second. Yes. And then caring about me. And you were like, you pulled no punches. You were like, these are my priorities. You are not the number one priority.

And I was, I was being honest with, I was like, my number one priority is making sure that you're taking care of. making sure that you're safe and you're and you're comfortable and I want you to be happy. I will put you above all other things and you were like, oh, that's so sweet. I put sleep above all the other things. If I don't get eight to nine hours, I'm not pleasant. And like I can do it one night, just fine. I can do it two nights. Okay.

Three nights and I'm just a beast. And so it's really in your best interest to get me sleep. So, you know, I feel like we've just naturally stumbled into this conversation about sleeping. and sleep was something that was so difficult at the agency. And it was difficult because you never really knew what days you were going to get home on time. You never knew what days you were going to be up late. You never knew what days you were going to get a call in the middle of the night. And sleep was so difficult to anticipate or predict.

So for you and I, when I learned that sleep was your number one priority, and then I knew that I couldn't, like if I woke you up, you'd be pissed. If the job woke you up, you were pumped. It was not fair. It was not fair. And the other thing with sleep with the agency was we started traveling worldwide more. So I traveled as a kid, but it wasn't the same. And, you know, when you're traveling all the way across the world to Asia, you know. Across the world is a long way. A long way. And you have to report for duty the next day. So a lot of times you're landing at 2 a.m. and you're reporting to the office at 7 and you are jet lagged and you have to work and you have to, you know, you have to maintain these good habits to help you get good sleep and maintain your energy even though you. I remember one work TDY I did. I went all the way to Southeast Asia for two weeks in two different places for Southeast Asia. And then I flew back for three days to D.C. And then we went on vacation back to Asia. And I was...

Tor up. Yeah, and I didn't feel tired, but you made fun of me the whole trip because I kept falling asleep mid-conversation, I would just doze off while people were talking to me. I didn't even realize it. So this was actually, it was one of the things that one of my field officers at the agency taught me. He explained that there are two types of drive inside us, right? There's a sleep drive and there's a hunger drive.

And the difference between the two drives. isn't necessarily how they feel. Like we both feel driven to get sleep or driven to get food. You know exactly what I'm talking about when you're like, I want some sleep. Or when you're like, I need some food. That's your hunger drive and your sleep drive. But he said the difference between the two is that your body will never make you stop to eat.

But your body will make you stop to sleep. And I remember seeing that. I remember seeing you in that exact state where we would sit down. It was shocking, girl. Like we would sit down for a conversation with somebody. We would sit down. We were in Kyoto at like a beautiful, what was that place that we went to where they had like, we had this homemade rice dish on a, on a. Oh, I don't remember that name.

It was a Tommy mat with the door open over the Zen Garden. It was gorgeous. We sat down, crisscross, criss-closed, and like they brought us tea and they brought us rice. And then they cracked the raw egg on top of the rice. And I looked over at you and you were like. It was insane. It was like seven minutes after sitting down and you were gone. It was the strangest thing.

But it's so true, right? And in the field, that can be dangerous. When you can't control your sleep because your body just shuts you down. And that was really the learning point that he was trying to get across to me is like, you know, you can skip meals and it's bad for you, but you can always control it. Yeah. You can't skip sleep and remain in control. Right.

Eventually, your body takes over. Right. And at the agency, we were young and we didn't have responsibilities outside of each other and outside of the job. So I found it easier, and I was younger, I found it easier to push myself with less sleep and then catch up on a weekend or a day off because I was able to take that time to catch up on the hours of sleep that I had lost during work. It was when we had kids that shifted for me because.

there suddenly was no time to just take a weekend and sleep it away. Yeah. So one of the interesting things about actually physically having a baby is that when the baby is born, they wake up every two hours to feed. But you have all these hormones in your system that boost you. It's when those hormones start to lay off and your baby is still waking up. So our daughter had undiagnosed eczema that was keeping her up the entire first year of her life, yeah. And so she used to wake up every two hours. And I was so exhausted. And I remember

when she was finally diagnosed and her sleep got better. And a year later, I was still exhausted. And you were like, you just spent almost two years, not like sleep deprived. It will take time to catch up. And that was the first time it really dawned on me, you know, that sleep deprivation takes time to readjust to be normal again. I think it took me almost four years. And so I know that you had, you know, you had been doing some research and stuff because it's in your best interest, like I said. So I'm curious to hear, you know, what was it that you read that, you know, you used to

help me, you know, relax and catch up on the sleep and kind of get normal again. Well, I think it all goes back to when we were at the agency because you have all always been like the pit bull of the family. Yeah. When something presents itself to you, you latch on to it and then you just, you gnaw, right? But it takes a lot before you bite. So unless something is really like a pressing threat, you just kind of look at it and then lay back down in your dog bed and go to sleep.

But if something poses a threat, then you latch on and you go. And that's exactly what you were like at the agency. So, you know, opt to op, mission to mission, asset to asset. Yeah. It wasn't until they were an imminent threat or somebody put it in your lap and then you would jump on it. Yeah. Whereas for me, I've never been that way. I've always been much more of like the pain in the ass little like chihuahua dog.

Like I sniff around, I bark around, I jump around, I look around. Like I'm curious about it even before it's a threat because I kind of want to understand what it is. And as soon as I started understanding the relationship between sleep and operational performance, that was when I started researching and understanding or trying to understand sleep better. where for you, you didn't. You were like, I'm just going to do it until I can't do it anymore. I'm not going to sleep until I can't sleep. Yeah, because I was raised by a mother. I don't know if your mom was like this, but my mom worked two different jobs.

She did night shifts. And her motto is always like, I'll sleep when I die. Yes. Yeah. So both of our moms, I think, in hindsight, were perpetually. Sleep deprived. Oh, yeah. Yeah, perpetually sleep deprived.

And the United States has a tendency to lean in that direction anyways. But I think that's really where you and I started diverging in terms of our studies, respect, appreciation for sleep. Yeah. Right? Because sleep is a very real factor in optimizing your performance. I think people understand that at a base level, but I don't think they understand it enough to be able to implement it day to day.

And some of the metrics, I think, really show that. The United States has all sorts of terrible sleep habits. Starting at age 13 or 14 is when we, you know, usually start a behavior of under rest, of under sleep. And it affects high school students, it affects college students, and we carry it on into our adult years. Did you know over 70% of Americans actually sleep with a pet? Oh, that makes sense. It makes sense. As an American in culture, it's horrible. Because every movement your pet makes rouses you out of whatever level of sleep that you're in. And there's four levels of sleep. There's non-R-E-M sleep, stage one, two, and three.

And then there's REM stage sleep, which is your fourth stage of sleep, right? So three levels of non-R-A-M sleep, one level of R-A-M sleep. And that REM stands for rapid eye movement. We've all heard that a thousand times. So when your pet moves, it bumps you down whatever slot you're in. Plus, you're doing it to yourself whenever you move, whenever a bird goes off, whenever a freaking smoke detector runs out of batteries. Those are all things that move you down the ladder of sleep when you need to be moving up.

the ladder of sleep. So as bad as the United States is, we're actually not even the worst country in the world. You know what some of the worst countries in the world are for sleep? Just guess. Just guess. Third world countries where it's too hot to sleep. That might be true, but nobody's- They weren't studied. Nobody's running studies of third-world countries. That's exactly right. So first world countries, UK? UK is bad. UK is, I think, the fourth worst-rested country. on the planet? Germany? Germany's like pretty well rested.

I know. I was saying they like their vacation. Most of Europe is actually very well rested with a few exceptions. I'm not sure. You have to tell me. So the worst rested country in the world is Japan. Oh, yes. That makes a lot of sense.

They actually have those little pod beds for the office workers that, you know, you can go and take an app. Take an app in the tiny pod. So as bad as they are at getting a full night. night sleep. They're one of the best in the world for napping for exactly that reason because it's culturally acceptable. It's actually considered respectful and a compliment to both the company and the individual to sleep on the job. So what is the science behind napping? Because I've found that as I get older and as the kids get older, I still have my days where my body is like I'm just

going to shut down. I need, you know, 30 minutes to an hour. I'm going to go lay down. And something I've learned that has been really beneficial to me is I'm, I always thought of myself as not a good power napper. It takes me some time to fall asleep. But if I just lay down, whether or not I fall into a deep sleep or not doesn't seem to matter. It's the rest itself. My eyes are closed. My mind is blank. I'm just laying there, whether I fall asleep or not. So what is the science on recouping your energy, you know, through napping? So remember how we were saying there's three stages of non-REM sleep? Yeah.

So there's two, there's different kinds of naps, right? There's the naps like you see in Latin America. Right. Ciestas, which is like a two and a half to three hour nap. Yeah. Right. And then there's the naps that you see across Asia and through parts of Europe, which are much shorter naps, right?

15 to 30 minute naps. So the difference between the two naps is really what level of sleep you get to. All rest is rejuvenating. Stage one of non-R-R-A.M. sleep is when you just start to slow your heart rate. You start to increase your body temperature. You start to just relax your muscles, right? That is rejuvenating, much more rejuvenating than being engaged and being intellectual. Stage two is when you actually start to move from that state of alertness, but relaxation, into a state of relaxed, distant alertness, right? Before you move into the third phase, which is basically like you're drowsing, you're dozing, you're drowsy, you're actually asleep, but you're not necessarily in a deep rest yet,

and then, of course, REM sleep. So when you've got your siesta's that last two to three hours, they're actually going all the way into REM state sleep. The full cycle. The full cycle. Whereas your nap, what we traditionally consider a nap in the West, is a much shorter-term thing. So it's actually just there for physiological benefits. And this, I think, gets to the heart of your question.

When you take a nap, 15, 20, 10, 7 minutes, whatever it might be, you feel energized, but you don't necessarily feel optimized. You don't feel sharp necessarily. You don't feel focused. You just feel like, okay, I can keep going. Yeah. Right? I can make it to the nighttime.

I can make it. Yeah. I can make it. Yeah. So what's happening there is that your brain, the brain only has two stages. It has a learning or absorbing stage and then it has an indexing stage. Yeah. The two things the brain can do.

It can either learn or it can index information that it has learned, but it cannot do both things at the same time. And it can't do neither thing either unless it's not a neurotypical brain. Right. So while you're awake or while you're in a level of alertness, stage one, non-REM sleep, you're still an alert alertness, you're learning. That learning means that you're not indexing what you've learned in the past. In order to have creative thought, in order to have like problem solving and ideas,

you need to be able to index what you have learned. And that's what makes it so that your brain can do what it does and all the neural links get creative. Once you move into stage two and stage three, non-REM sleep, now you've shut off the learning and your brain is actually indexing the information that's learned throughout the day. What's wild, though, is that when REM kicks in, that's actually your brain being very awake and alert again. Interesting. But the reason the world that your brain is living in during REM sleep is all within your brain.

It's all within the indexed information of your brain, which is why dreams can seem so real, but they're all so wonky. They're creative. Right. So your brain, it's similar in terms of energy and electrical inputs and electrical energy to when you're awake, but you're actually a lot of. sleep and that's what creates all the dreams. So what CIA taught us is that if you are going to rest, choose whether you are resting for physical reasons or for mental reasons. If you're resting specifically to benefit the brain, you need to give yourself at least enough time for a full REM cycle. So it's a minimum of 80 minutes. Target 90 minutes. If it's more than 110 or 120 minutes,

you start getting to the place where you're sleeping too much. I'll explain that in a second. So your optimal time for a periodic rest, according to CIA, when you're in the field and you can't sleep for like nine hours is somewhere between 80 and 110 minutes. That gets you a chance to go through all three stages of non-R-AM sleep into REM sleep where your brain is indexing what it's learned, optimizing and entering into REM rest, which is the deepest state of rest and connecting disparate ideas. That's what you want to do if you're resting for your brain. If you're resting for your body, anything for anything less than 90 minutes is essentially fine. You just have to understand which level of non-R-A-M sleep you're going to get to without letting yourself get to REM sleep. Because if you let yourself get to R&M sleep and you don't give yourself enough time for

REM sleep, then you run the risk of an alarm going off or something waking you from this deep rejuvenating slumber. So you want to stay in that place where you're kind of dozing, fading, or lightly sleeping. So that's really interesting because I had a... a really good friend when I was in college who was under a lot of stress and couldn't sleep. So I had the same issue when my anxiety was like at an all-time high when I first met you. The anxiety and the stress prevent you from calming down enough to sleep. It makes it really difficult. But she used to take sleep aids like Ambien. And after that time, I was reading that, you know, the sleep aides

don't actually ever put you into REM sleep. You stay in those first three stages. So everything you're saying makes sense because she would wake up and physically be rejuvenated, but her stress and her anxiety weren't, like she wasn't indexing and processing what was going on day to day. And so they just continued, right? It didn't, in theory, it helped her feel like she was sleeping,

but it wasn't really helping her get the kind of rest that she needed to mentally improve. Yeah, you know, it's funny is that, I mean, you're really seeing my sleep geek come out, I guess. But I was actually just reading an article earlier this week about a recent study that was done measuring something that they're now calling social jet lag, which is what happens when you change your sleep habits from day to day, meaning you go to work on Monday. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you generally wake up at the same time, generally go to sleep at the same

time. Friday comes along and if you have a social life, you stay up late, a couple extra hours late, maybe you drink, maybe you eat late, who knows what else. You roll into Saturday, you sleep in. I remember those days. You roll into Saturday night, you stay out late again, maybe even later than Friday night. It comes to Sunday, you sleep in, and then Sunday you try to go to bed early, you can't really fall asleep, and then Monday you start the day and you don't feel so good. Yeah. That change from Thursday to Monday is just, like what you talked about when you traveled across the planet, right? You're actually literally changing time zones, creating a lag in your circadian rhythm. It's the same thing that's happening

throughout the week when people have what's known as social jet lag. And there was an awesome study that was done talking about how coming out of COVID and especially in the Western world and especially as people seek to find opportunities to re-engage each other as human beings, not in the cyber digital world. We're entering into this phase of social. jet lag again that's decreasing our overall productivity. That's interesting and you know I normally I would think of social jet lag as something that applies to night shift workers. It's not social and it's the same concept yeah but it's not for social reasons. Right and I bet that most people don't think about the fact that they're doing that to

themselves like they're like oh I work a regular job and I go out on the weekends and I have fun and what's the big deal although I do remember one of the I think it was one of our pediatricians told us that Mondays at school are usually tough for kids because kids go through the same social jet lag, right? The parents are excited to have them home. They let them stay up late all in the weekend. And then Monday morning, they come to school wrecked because they couldn't sleep Sunday night. It's true. And then it takes them the whole week to readjust before on the weekend they do it all over again. I do the same thing to our kids too. I'm not going to lie. They don't have to go to a school,

but like when I come back from a work trip or when I've been gone shooting for a show or when I come back and it's just me and the kids. It's like, oh, kiddos, the clock is an irrelevant thing. Their bedtime shifts like two hours when you come home. And none of us like it, but I always get excited to do it to them again. It's totally something we're susceptible to, this idea of social jet lag. Yeah. And you were asking about meds. This is super interesting. One in five adults in the United States, 20%, 1 in 5 adults will ask their doctor to prescribe them sleep meds. Really? Isn't that amazing?

Prescription, strength, sleeping pills. One in five adults will ask their doctor for that. That's really interesting. So when my anxiety was spiking, the first psychologist I saw, who was at the agency, the agency has this really great support system with doctors and psychologists because they needs you to be at the top of your game. So the first psychologist I saw was at the agency. And the most important thing she told me was your bedroom is for sleep and for sex. Absolutely nothing else. If you have a TV in there, take it out. Don't read in bed. Don't do anything in bad

except sleep and sex. And I implemented that right away. And it was it was really life changing. And since then, I have kept that steady. And it's really been been. beneficial to my sleep and to, I mean, I don't know what you... To our sex? Yeah, to our sex? I mean, I don't know what your sleep habits were like when you were younger. I don't know if you kept the TV in your room, but I used to fall asleep to the TV. It's really common. My dad does it too, just dozing off with the TV on 11 o'clock at night. Yeah, along with about 40% of Americans. Wow.

Yeah. So, so I love that I get to finally use this ridiculous bar room trivia knowledge, right? So it, my whole sleep journey started when I went to the Air Force Academy. I was a prep school student in 1999 because I didn't qualify for the full-blown Air Force Academy. So as a prep schooler, I basically still carried all of my good habits from high school, right? But then the prep school year was rough for me and getting into my freshman year, it was a whole different ballgame. And I had a senior varsity athlete peer of mine, right, somebody who was a junior at the academy, pull me aside and he was like, look, you know, cadet, there's only one thing you have to do if you're going to succeed here. And for me, that's all like, I hated the academy. So I was like, please tell me

the one thing I have to do. So I don't have to waste my time doing anything else. And he was like, all you have to do is sleep. He was like, respect your sleep. Don't be the asshole who pulls the all-nighters. Don't be the idiot who waits to the last minute. Don't be that guy who gets hooked on caffeine or cigarettes to stay up, just sleep. Sleep and you'll remember your class is better. Sleep and you'll be attentive during class. Sleep and it'll replace all of the need to study or everything else, right? Just sleep.

Yeah. And that's kind of what started me on the whole, let me respect sleep. And it worked. It worked my entire time at the academy. It worked when I was in the military and when I was a nuclear missile officer, I was, I was the guy pulling those ridiculous shift hours. Sometimes you're on the day shift. Sometimes you're on the night shift.

underground in the actual capsule, we did 72-hour shifts, three days underground. And then when I moved on to being the commander of the command post for the missiles, then I was on a 12-hour shift. And that 12-hour shift would shift, right? So sometimes it was noon to midnight. Sometimes it was midnight to noon. Sometimes it was 3 to 3. It would shift depending on availability for other officers.

But my point is, like, long before I ever sat down for training. at FTC at the farm. Before I had that speech from an instructor who was like, you know, hunger drive and sleep drive. I had already been geeked out about sleep long before that because it's so, there's so much, it's so infinitely more complicated than anybody gives it credit for. And it really is like this miraculous little thing that our bodies do. I wish I'd known you back then because I was doing all those things.

I was smoking and drinking coffee and staying up too late. Partying started on Wednesday and went through Sunday, and then I missed my 8 o'clock class almost every time. We would have had kids a lot younger. Oh, yeah. If we would have been a very different life. It would have been a very different, difficult life. Glorious with their six children.

And no money. And no money. That's what it would look like, for sure. We would have loved each other now. And I know that we like. to think that that's enough, but a little bit of extra comes, it goes a long way. That's fair. On top of love. So before we get too far into what life would have been like without, without sleep or with cigarettes or cigarettes or whatever, right? One of the things that I think

is super interesting that nobody talks about. Yeah. Is that when you sleep, there are physiological changes in your brain, right? Now, I think everybody understands that there's like electrical impulse changes in the brain. There are actual physiological changes in the brain, meaning the physical body changes inside your brain when you sleep. How's that? So in 2019, neuroscientists actually discovered that there is a cerebral fluid that is no shit secreted over your brain and it actually washes the brain and then pulls the waste product that was washed off the brain, pulls it down through your system so you can actually excrete it through feces or urine later on in the next day. That's crazy. Because the cellular process of actually transmitting electrical information

from cell to cell, that impulse electrical send actually creates a waste product. which makes total sense. So your brain actually creates its own form of waste product on a cellular level. And depending on what you're doing, creates different levels of waste. So when you're intellectually, rationally thinking through a process or a problem, it creates the most cellular waste. When you are creatively imagining something, it creates a lesser level of waste. and when you are meditating or just trying to synchronize your brain, exercising, yoga, running, something like that, it creates a waste product also, but the lowest level of waste product.

So essentially, any activity that you're doing during the day that requires your brain's attention or engagement creates a waste product and then sleeping, specifically hitting REM sleep, allows the brain to relax enough and triggers the secretion of this. fluid that then washes your brain. So you mentioned physical activity there and you know it's been shown that good diet and exercise actually help you to sleep. So have you read about, you know, is there, what does that what does that connection look like? Because you were saying that creates the least amount of secretion. So is it the least amount of waste? Of waste, sorry. So is it that those activities make your brain work less hard to cleanse itself or, you know, what is the relationship there? It's about the level of effort that your neurons have to actually put into the brain's activity. So how much mental effort goes into

walking? Not much. Not much. How much mental effort goes into geometry? Depends who you're asking. For me. A little bit more. You could actually feel the difference in mental effort just between those two questions. Right? So that's... exactly what's happening. So it's almost like, you know, starting a fire and burning it hot versus starting a fire and burning it low. It creates a different amount of smoke. It creates a different amount of ash. Yeah. And that's essentially exactly what's happening in the brain. So the kind of ideal concoction that I was taught for sleep. And I say that it's the ideal, but it's ideal. So it's almost impossible, right? But the ideal concoction for sleep is to have no chemical

uppers in your system. No caffeine, no cigarettes, no, you know, nothing that... Whatever else you might take. Whatever else you might take, right? No sugar. No chemical uppers should be in your system. You're looking at between 20 and 40 minutes of exercise. You're looking for a minimum of six hours of sleep, a maximum of nine hours of sleep. Why six and nine? Because the REM sleep cycle, the REM sleep cycle, is about 90 minutes. So whenever you plan to sleep, you should always be sleeping around those REM cycles. So imagine the REM cycles as like building blocks. Right. Minimum sleep that you should try to pursue for mental recovery is 90 minutes.

If you can't do, if you have more than 90 minutes, you should actually wake yourself up at 110 minutes. You should actually wake yourself up after your REM cycle rather than go out. halfway into the next sleep cycle. So if you only have two hours, you should really only sleep for an hour and a half and then wake yourself up. But if you have two 90 minutes segments, right, if you have 200 minutes, then it's better to go into two REM cycles. Right. So while many people will argue like, oh, I need, you do it all the time. I need to have nine hours of sleep. Nine hours. You actually don't. What you need to do is just stick to within these 90 minute REM building Yeah.

Right? So 120 minutes gets you, gets you one full REM cycle, right? What is it? 90 and 90s, 180 minutes. So 180 minutes gets you two REM cycles. Yeah. So then four REM cycles goes above that. So you see how it starts to build from there?

So you got 369. And so does it matter if they're all in a row? Because I had another friend in college who experimented with these 90 minute rim cycles throughout the day. Right. So he didn't sleep eight hours. Right. He's had these 90-minute cycles spaced throughout the day and night.

And I thought it was fascinating. So what I was trained is that the ideal is you want them, you want them sequentially between, what would that be? One, two, three, four REM cycles, sequentially between four REM cycles and two REM cycles. Right. That's the ideal. Yeah. If you can't do that, and this is where it starts to get really helpful, if you can't have the ideal, and let's face it, most of us can't. Yeah.

We've got businesses that we're running, careers that we're building, families, we're dating relationships. We can't do the ideal. We can't go without caffeine. We're already addicted to cigarettes. We drink beer, right? We can't find 40 minutes every day to exercise seven days a week, right? There are people we just can't do it. It's not realistic.

Yeah. That's where your friend was right on the money. Really? You actually can maximize your brain's ability to rest, recover index, and learn. Yeah. by simply spreading out your 90-minute cycles. Sleep 100 minutes in the morning, work for three or four hours, sleep 100 minutes in the afternoon, work for three or four hours,

sleep for 100 minutes in the evening, or maybe even sleep for 180 minutes in the evening. Start again. I can't imagine. It's hard for us to imagine because we're used to these traditional sleep cycles. Yeah, that's fair. Right? Yeah. Now, it's also important to understand that, like I said, it's super complicated.

we have a circadian rhythm inside of our bodies that makes it so that we are very sensitive to things like light, noise, temperature, and we expect a certain cycle with all of those things. So the big challenge there is that your rhythm can get off cycle with Mother Nature. Yeah. So you'll be ready to go to sleep, but the sun will be bright. So you have to have a way of making sure you can block out the sun. Right. And then you also have the challenge of the fact that if you try to sleep at noon,

it's the highest, the hottest part of the day. So you're going to be trying to sleep. Your body's going to be trying to cool itself down, but it's the hottest part of the day. And then you'll be trying to stay awake at the coolest part of the day. And there's all sorts of, it gets complicated. Yeah. But it is possible. I think the circadian rhythm is a really interesting point as well because I can tell what

time it is by how tired I feel. My energy levels are very clear, you know, throughout the day and in the evening. And I know exactly when it has turned 8 o'clock because I suddenly start to feel tired. You know, and there has been, you know, there's a lot of information out there about how if you start paying attention to your body signals, right, then you can optimize your sleep because everybody's creating in rhythm is different. So if you're forcing yourself to go to bed at 8 because you have to wake up really early the next morning, but it's out of your rhythm, right? You're going to have to make some adjustments because you're not natural. going to be asleep at 8 o'clock. And it's important to understand our circadian rhythms are all different, but they're only like

12% different. Right. Nobody is 180 degrees different than somebody else. Right. We're just a little bit off from one another. So the hack to good sleeps, right? So we talked about the ideal good sleep, the hack that we were always taught for good sleep, right?

If you want to immediately transform your sleep cycle. Yes. And this was incredibly valuable to me when I went through the farm because. like when you start day one at the farm yeah it's full speed and we're all coming off of social jet lag because we were all celebrating something before we went to the farm yep so you get to the farm and they like indoctrinated you the first day and you're like oh shit I am in over my head yeah so they give us this hack right away right first no caffeine after 1 p.m. they can't keep you away from caffeine the hack is you're going to drink it we're not going to stop you don't drink

anything with caffeine after one. So after one, if you want to drink tea, go to herbal tea, go to non-caffeinated tea. If you want to drink coffee, go to decaf coffee. It's not going to be pretty, but it's going to work. Yeah. Right? That's hack number one. Hack number two, you want to go for a walk after dinner. Why a walk after dinner? Because you want to get that 15 to 20 minutes of exercise in. Yeah. Right. Plus, when you do it after dinner, you're keeping yourself away from screens. You're keeping yourself away from work. You're de-stressing. And that's a big part of what you have to do. you plan on getting decent rest, you actually have to distance yourself from the stressors of the day. Yeah. Because you have to let your body come down. Heart rate wise, anxiety wise,

pressure wise, you have to distance yourself from all the activity of the day. So after you eat the last meal of the day, which is dinner, 15 to 20 minute walk, that gets you away from screens. Being away from screens is a big part of what you have to do. Staying away from the TV, staying away from the phone, both of which you mentioned yourself, right? If you can imagine 41 I think it's 41% of Americans are still sending text messages on their phone after they've turned off their own lights to go to bed. Yeah. It's not a surprise.

It's nuts, right? It's nuts that we're doing it to ourselves. And as soon as you pull out that screen and engage that intellectual part of your brain, you've got the blue screen, you've got the critical thinking, you've got the introduction of new stress. Yeah. Right. So go for the walk, avoid caffeine, get your time away from, away from.

stress, away from activities, and then the last Benny that they gave us is that when possible, have sex. Really? Those are your four things. At the farm. At the farm, which they knew we couldn't do, so you know what they were telling us to do instead. They want that dopamine rush to end the day to kind of cleanse the cycle and then be ready to go on and get a full rest.

I think that's really good advice. So if you want to hack your way to sleep like tonight, that's the thing to do. Yeah. So we'll try and go for a walk after dinner. We'll try and go through. I'm happy. We have. I'm happy to dedicate myself to this full experiment tonight for you.

We have a very solid caffeine rule. We do. For sure. And we've learned it, but we learned it at the agency. Yeah. Well, and we've just, it's been so important to us that we've implemented it and we never go past that ever. I do sometimes when I'm traveling and I always regret it because that's how you end up sitting

there at 1 o'clock in the morning with like your feet twitchy. or something, right? And you're like, what I did you do this to myself for? The thing that you're so bad at is definitely staying away from screens. Yes. You're supposed to not look at a TV screen. You should not engage television. So one thing that you do really well is you read. Yeah. Like there is, I have yet to come across any study that says anything bad about reading a paper book before bed. Everybody, everywhere always says the fastest way to de-stress, the fastest way to disengage your mind from the stressors and the activity of the day is to actually pull out a physical paper book and read it. Yeah. It does depend. And you can read it right up to the moment that you turn

off the lights and go to sleep. It depends a little bit on the book because I have definitely closed my book and then had dreams all night about some kind of like wheel of time war battle scene. But you still slept. Yeah. Right. And if you were dreaming, you were in R.E.M. sleep. That's fair. Yeah. So you had a lot of good things going in the middle of that battle. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for letting me geek out about sleep. I love it. I love this topic. And that's why I don't stop. Like for me, sleep is one of those things that I take very, very seriously. We've taken it very seriously for the kids. Last point. And then we'll get to the question. The last one I want to make. Sleep is not the same for any human being as they go through the cycle of age. Yeah. So up to puberty and puberty lasts for a long time. Yeah. Puberty actually ends when we're like 23 years old. Yeah, 25, I think. because when your brain finally stops growing. So throughout that entire period from zero to 25,

sleep is actually a required part of brain growth and brain development. So if you want to give your teenager or your child the best opportunities for future learning, future memory, future critical thinking, you've got to give them sleep. And you have to encourage them and police their sleep. They need to get it themselves, especially during those puberty years, 13 to 25 because they start to not understand that sleep is valuable and that social interactions will come later. So they start to choose social over sleep. But then you can teach them,

you can teach them the good sleep habits, the ideal, and then you can teach them the hacks. Maybe not the sex part. But, you know, the alternative. Yeah. So then from like 25 to I think it's around 38 or 40 during that phase, sleep is really primarily there for physical, rejuvenation to help you build muscle, to help you recover from injury, to help you do all sorts of things. The primary purpose of sleep until you're about 40 is really just healing. Healing from the previous day's activities. From 40 to I think it's like 60, the primary purpose of sleep is brain health. So you want to sleep because that's what's going to keep your brain functioning at higher order cognitive capabilities for a longer period of time. Right? And that's the

when you start to see people decline mentally. Memories start to go. You know, we've seen all sorts of mental brain degradation that happens between 40 and 60 because people aren't sleeping. It means they don't get to remove the waste product from their brain. They don't get to rejuvenate the brain. They don't get to index old information and create pathways for new connections. That's up until you're about 60. And then from 60 to termination, 60 to terminal death, right? Now all of a sudden you're back in a maintenance phase. Now, just like you were from 25 to 40, your primary goal was just to heal. That's the same thing you're doing from 60 on. Your primary goal with sleep is just to heal because your brain is in steady decline. Interesting. Yeah. Depressing, depressing thought,

but all along your life, sleep is super valuable. Do you have any idea how much, in how much percentage of your life you will spend sleeping? Not enough. That's the exact answer I would expect to get from you. So the number is about 30 to 33%. That's awesome. One third of your life you will spend sleeping. That's awesome because I have really awesome dreams. For people who don't remember their dreams, maybe not so much.

I'm happy to be there. You already don't remember most of the sleep that you had because it happened when you were younger. Right. When you slept like 50% or 60% of the day. When you were a baby. And a teenager. Did you sleep a lot of the sleep? Oh my gosh.

I slept so much as it's a little. teenager. My parents would wake me up in like 2 o'clock in the afternoon with music. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well, I'll get us off of the sleep topic. We had a great question come in today from our spy tribe. And the question was, what was your first job? Like literally, what was your first job? My first job was the drive-through cashier to Taco Bell. Was that your first job? Wow. You tell me stories about that all the time. Yeah, so when I was 15, I wanted to work because I wanted to be independent, make my own money and all that. And nobody would hire me because I didn't have any experience. I was always so mad. CBS was actually the first place I tried to get a job. There was a CBS drugstore

right by my house, walking distance. And I was like, I can learn how to work your cash register. I can definitely stock your shelves. I can do something here. And they were like, no, like, you don't have any experience. So I ended up with a Taco Bell job because my cousin worked at a different Taco Bell and he was friends with the manager and I networked in Taco Bell. But it was a fantastic job. Like I loved it. I loved working. I loved the pace. It was at at the time when Taco Ball had this like if we don't get you your food in under two minutes, it's free or whatever. So I loved like this fast pace of like getting the food out the door. And like I should. So when you tell me stories about that place, you always tell me about the people you worked with.

And that sounded like a bit of a rowdy crowd. Yes, it was. I had my first love worked at the same Taco Bell. He had actually been my second grade boyfriend who I had lost touch with. And then when I started working at the Taco Bell, he was there. And I was madly in love with him. And so he dated that whole time my senior year of high school. And then the other people.

the Taco Bell. I bet it's not that rare actually now that I think about it. Yeah and there was you know a lot of the people there were high school age and we would hang out after work and it was great. That begs for a taco burrito joke. I'm just saying. Oh so funny enough I was a vegetarian at the time. So the only thing I could eat was like a rice bowl and then the guy in the back used to custom make it for me. It was great. Wow. Good times when you're like 16. So my first job, was actually also in food services. I was a dishwasher. I was a dishwasher at a country club restaurant.

Sounds nice. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't bad. And it's funny because I also got networked into that role. And I started, actually, I started when I was 15. So I was actually too young to work, according to Pennsylvania state law. Oh, interesting. So somebody who was a friend of a dad, I think a friend of my dad, I'm pretty sure the way this story goes. And again, like, I don't have a lot of very fond memories of my dad, so this could be,

who knows what. I feel like my dad wanted me out of the house. And he was like, you've got to find a job. And I was like, I'm too young to work because it's actually illegal for a 15 year old to work. And he said something about how that was baloney and it wasn't like that when he was a kid. And then he called up somebody or talked to somebody or somebody. And they were like, sure, we can hire. him under the table in the back in the back as a dishwasher at the country club and it wasn't like a fancy country club it was like a rural pennsylvania country club so yeah a place it was a place that actually had the word shack in the name right like it was a shack burger shack golf shack whatever else so that was my my actual first job and what was interesting is i i really enjoyed working there

for a lot of the same reasons that you mentioned because you're doing it. something like you're being productive, you're working with a team, you're important enough to actually be needed at a certain time. That's something that never happened in my house. Yeah. And people said thank you and I got a paycheck and it wasn't very much, but it was more than when I was getting paid at home to do the dishes. Yeah. Right. But I also hated the job because it was so incredibly boring. But I learned, oh, this is so interesting. I learned in that job that there's always more to do. And I started learning how to accept that there will always be more to do. Because you know what it's like when you work in a

dishwashing capacity for a restaurant? Always more dishes. There's always more dishes. It doesn't matter how fast you clean them. It doesn't matter how nice they are. It doesn't matter what your equipment is. The faster you get it out, more will be coming in. Yeah. Right? So it's just, so you really do learn to live according to the clock. Yeah. So it's like, oh, my shift is over at five. There will be more dishes tomorrow. Yeah. I don't need to try to finish off the pile because if I finish off the pile, someone's going to bring one more dish in or two more dishes in. Yeah. And we we struggle with the same concept in our business life all the time, probably a topic for a different day. Yeah. And then did you tell me that that job had a hand in getting you into the Air Force Academy? Yeah.

Yeah. So the owner of that, that country club restaurant, the owner of that restaurant became a big fan of mine. And I don't know why. I don't know if it was my work ethic or whatever, right? But he became a big fan of mine. He ended up co-owning a much nicer restaurant in a different part, but in the same city, just a different part of the city. So then when I became a legal age to work, he actually moved me from this dishwasher position in the shack, the Gulf Shack, and he moved me into his restaurant as a dishwasher there. And then from there, just I kept climbing up from the back, right? And I went from being a dishwasher to being like a bus boy, from being a bus boy to being like a prep person, a prep person to being a cook, a cook to being a waiter. You know, and then that's what I did.

I only really ever worked for one guy. Yeah. From the time I was 15 until the time I was 19. Interesting. Yeah. And the restaurants where I worked at with him when I was a waiter became the go-to restaurant for both of Pennsylvania's senators. And he became friends with the senators. and when he found out I was going to apply to the military academy,

he would actually like pull me out of off the floor to go sit with the senator at the bar and have a conversation. That's amazing. I mean, you never think about how, you know, your first job can lead you down the road to where you are now, basically. I mean, yeah, it's true. It's incredible. It is.

And I don't, because it's my story, I never realize that it's special to other people. Yeah. because I feel like it must be that way for everybody. But that's, I think, how we all feel about our own story. It's so common and trivial to us. We just assume it must be common and trivial to everybody. Yeah.

So no first job's a bad first job. No first job's a bad first job. And they're all better and you're going to make more money than doing the exact same thing for your parents at home. That's true. Thank you very much for joining us. We had a fantastic time talking to you. Thank you for letting me geek out about sleep.

And thank you for understanding that my wife, loves her sleep more than she loves me. I've had to accept that as well. If there's anything, if you were interested in the deep dive on sleep, if you're interested in any of the sleep topics that we covered down on today, make sure you check out the links below in the description. If you take our spy quiz, you're going to fall right into a quiz that's going to help you understand more about your personality and your own sleep habits. And if you visit our website, you'll see all sorts of instructional manuals and cool courses and cool e-books that will help you tap into how you can optimize everything from your sleep to your sex life as a matter of fact. We have all of that on

the website waiting for you. So take a moment, expand the description, click on your favorite link in there and come over and see what we have to teach you. Also leave a comment somewhere, leave a question, tell us what you want us to talk about, tell us what was too much. Tell me if my metrics or my statistics were wrong. I don't know. I'm pretty sure all my stuff was still pretty accurate as of 2019, 2020. And of course, if you want to have a bit of fun for yourself, cut off the caffeine early, get to bed, have some sex, and leave a comment and tell me how good it was. Take care. Sex.

Especially that.