Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - The Key to a Better Night's Sleep | The Sleep Doctor, Dr. Michael Breus

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Michael Breus, a clinical psychologist, better known as the “Sleep Doctor.”Michael is both a Diplomat of the American Board of Sleep Medicine and a Fellow of The American Academy of Sleep Medicine.He was one of the youngest people to pass the Board at age 31 with a specialty in Sleep Disorders.Michael was also recently named both the Top Sleep Specialist in California by Readers Digest, and one of the 10 most influential people in sleep.Sleep is critical to just about everything we want to do with our lives and I feel like we’re at a point where more people are starting to realize its importance.The thing is, there’s a lot of information currently circulating on sleep and it can be tricky sorting out which is the right research to follow.Michael believes the key to sleep is not necessarily about getting 8 hours a night, but rather understanding how much sleep your body needs and more importantly, what hours of the day your body is primed to function optimally.This is a fascinating conversation on something every single one of us can relate to._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. Everybody doesn't need more sleep. What everybody needs to figure out is how much sleep do they need, right? It's different. Eight hours is a myth, okay? Very few people actually need eight hours of sleep. I go to bed at midnight. I wake up at 6.17 almost every single day without an alarm. I'm the sleep doctor for God's sakes, and I get six hours and 15 or so minutes of sleep.

How do you do something like that, Michael? How do you function? Are you okay? Do you have energy? All of these different things. If my wife got six hours and 15 minutes of sleep, she'd be a disaster. Understanding what your sleep need is becomes critically important along with things like your chronotype.

Once you know how much sleep you need and when you should be sleeping, chronotype is early bird or night owl, then everything starts to fall into place actually quite easily. All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm Michael Gervais and by trade and training, a sport and performance psychologist. And the whole idea behind these conversations behind this podcast is to sit across from people who have dedicated their life efforts towards mastery. And we want to understand what it is that they are searching for, what they're craving, what are they dedicating their life toward? Is it mastery of self? Is it mastery of craft? Is it both? We want to understand how do they organize their inner life? How do they explain things in their life?

How do they use their mental skills to build and refine their craft? Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort. It takes a real caring about your people. It takes the right tools, the right information at the right time. And that's where LinkedIn Sales Navigator can come in. It's a tool designed specifically for thoughtful sales

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that actually convert, try LinkedIn Sales Navigator for free for 60 days at linkedin.com slash deal. That's linkedin.com slash deal. For two full months for free, terms and conditions apply. Finding Mastery is brought to you by David Protein. I'm pretty intentional about what I eat, and the majority of my nutrition comes from whole foods. And when I'm traveling or in between meals, on a demanding day certainly,

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slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Now, this week's conversation is with Dr. Michael Brewis. He's a clinical psychologist, but better known as the sleep doctor. Michael is both a diplomat of the American Board of Sleep Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. And he was one of the youngest people to pass the board at age 31 with a specialty in sleep disorders. Sleep is critical just about everything that we're doing. So this is why I want to have conversations with leading experts about sleep. And it's so foundational to the lives that we

live and the way that we feel on a day-to-day basis. The thing is that there's so much information currently circulating on sleep right now, and it can be tricky to know what's grounded in research, what's an opinion, and there's so much information that it gets tricky. So that's why we want to have lots of folks here that are grounded in good science. And Michael has found that the key to sleep is not necessarily about getting eight hours a night, but rather understanding how much sleep your body needs. And more importantly, what hours of the day your body is primed to function optimally. So we get into those tactics and those approaches to maximize your ability to live with vibrance. And it's a fascinating conversation on something that every single one of us needs to understand better. And I think we

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us. And with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Dr. Michael Brewis. Michael. Hey, how are you? I'm well. How are you? I'm stoked that you're here. I'm stoked to be here. Yeah. When we first met, I don't know how long ago it was. It was like super stimulating. You were on it about obviously the science and the application of science to sleep. Yep. And so I want to make our time today really applied you bet and to do that though i think that we need some sort of level set to see where we are like on the same page and where there's some differences but how long have you been studying sleep oh so my entire career um so i have a phd in clinical psychology and my very first job was being the clinical director of a sleep laboratory in Decatur, Georgia,

which is where I'm from. So I've been doing this for a little north of 20 years. And the science of sleep is to me, like maybe it's mechanical to you and you got your arms around it and it makes a lot of sense. I think I understand better like the application of it and some of the science, but where I get tripped up is this thought that we really don't know what the brain is doing kind of period. We've got some sense of small pockets and networks and regions, whatever. Okay. But do we know what's happening with our brain during sleep? No, absolutely not. Right. And that's part of the problem. So when you opened with that statement, I was kind of thinking in my head, I don't understand that either. Yeah. And I've been studying this shit for 20 years, right?

So it's crazy. Yeah. Okay. So we have a sense. Tell me, chin check me when I'm ever out of whatever. You bet. Okay. But we have a sense that sleep is a little bit like the restoration period. Like we're

cleaning out some stuff, we're consolidating memory, we're recovering and repairing, right? Sleep is healing. That's how I think of sleep. And it heals on every single level, physical, emotional, spiritual, you name it. Everything you do, you do better with a good night's sleep. It affects every organ system and every disease state. It's impressive how infiltrative sleep is in our lives. Why are you in sleep? Why did you go this path? Was it an accident? Was it something that you were always attracted to? Complete accident. So honestly, I studied, I went to the university of Georgia, which is where I got my PhD and I did a specialty in sports psychology. Stop it. I did not. Are you serious? Yeah, dude, that's what I did. Who did you study with? Rod Dishman and Pat O'Connor. Exercise science, like classic.

Classic. Like these are the guys who wanted to know about exercise adherence. Why do we stick with an exercise program? Pat O'Connor does a lot of really interesting circadian research. And so I was working with these guys thinking, you know what? I'm going to be a sports psychologist. This is going to be the coolest thing ever. I'm going to work with teams. I'm going to do all this stuff. And there was one program I was dying to get into.

It was a residency program at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. It had a specialty program for eating disorders in athletes, which was really an interesting area for me. It's something I thought that could be something that I could do some really profound work in. But to be honest, I couldn't get in. Only the Harvard's and the Yale's and the Princeton's got in. Georgia top 20 program, but I didn't go to Harvard, right? However, they had a sleep track. So I said, just because you're not going to let me in, it doesn't mean that I'm not going to go into your

program. So I sold myself as a sleep guy because I had worked my way through graduate school in the department of electrophysiology. I'm the wonky guy that likes to take stuff apart and put it back together and that kind of thing. And the sleep machines were the same machines I'd been working on for years. So I said, I'll be your sleep tech. And so they accepted me to the program by the third day, because I had to do that program first. I was going to then transfer by the third day. I absolutely fell in love with clinical sleep medicine. Michael, I help people like this. It's unbelievable. I love this. Okay. All right. I want to get to the finger snap and change stuff in a minute. Okay. Cause that's, that's the gold, right? Absolutely. But let's, let's get the trail first. If we pull on that thread that I wanted to go somewhere, I didn't come from the

pedigree to get there. Right. Okay. Take that reverse engineer that just a little bit. So that's a really important, let's call it thought or framework that I think I relate to. And I think many people probably do. Yeah. But the idea that there's something out there, I don't have the chops for an easy entry. Exactly. Okay. Rewind that. Where did that come from? It's an interesting idea.

It's actually not something that I've unpacked personally in a long, long time. But I never quit. Like I'll outwork anybody out there. I come from a family. I'm an only child. and my parents separated when I was nine years old and I went with my father. It was he and I, and he was bankrupt. So my mom was completely out of the picture and I'm 52 years old. So imagine roughly 40 something years ago, what somebody had to do to lose complete custody of their child as a

female. Yeah. What happened? So it just turned out that it wasn't her, I wasn't her bag. It wasn't what she was looking to do. So how did you deal with that? You know, it was interesting. I never felt unloved every day that I have been alive. I know that I am the most important thing in my father's life. Always have. Never doubted that. How did he do that? I don't know. I think he just told me a lot. He incorporated me into his world. What does that mean? He incorporated me into his world. When I was nine years old and I would come home from school, I would make dinner and my dad would get home around eight o'clock and we would eat together. And he would say, what did you learn in school today? And I would say, what did

you learn in work today? And we were colleagues and we just did it together. And I never, ever thought there was a mountain I couldn't climb because my dad basically said, dude, you can do absolutely anything. And I believed him. Oh, okay. When, when you're telling this, cause this is, you're describing, I don't want my son to make me dinner. Like that feels like you became an adult a little early. To be fair, I made rice-a-roni every single night for three years. And I hate that stuff now. No offense to rice-a-roni. It was great at the time. Okay. So, but I want the same type of... No, it was Hamburger Helper. It wasn't Rice-A-Roni. It was Hamburger Helper every single night. Okay. I'm trying to be deep. You're talking about Rice-A-Roni. Okay. But I want that same thing,

that same type of relationship with my son, like for him to have this thought. Include him in anything and everything. With my son today, he and to have this thought. Include him. Yeah. In anything and everything. With my son today, he and I are super tight. And the reason is I bring him to business meetings and I, and we walk in and I say, this is my son Cooper and he's going to be our scribe and he's going to take the notes. And at the end of it, he gets to ask as many questions as he wants. And if anybody doesn't like that, we're not doing business. That's how I start my meetings. I've never had somebody refuse. And in every single case, they ask him more questions than they ask me. And at the end, about 50% of the time, people come up to me and they say,

how did you get your son interested in what you do? And my answer is always the same. Just bring him. How old is your son now? He's 17. He's applying to colleges. And when did you first start that practice with him? I started that practice with him probably by the age of six or seven. And what did you miss as a young boy? Like I see you got a lot. What did you miss? I didn't have a constant female presence in my life. That was difficult. I can tell you that personally, since that time, relationships with women have never been easy for me, just because I didn't have that kind of mother figure in my life. Incidentally, my mother is back in my life now and

has been for the last probably 10 years. And I helped take care of her now, as does my wife. So, you know, things go full circle. And I've never been mad at her for any of that. She just, she never wanted to have kids. And she did. And she really didn't know what to do with them my dad always wanted to have children and he was very involved i mean my dad went to every play he went to every ball game he coached every team that he possibly could but as an only child my grandparents would pick me up at school bring me to the house lock me in as they used to call us latchkey children and my dad would show up at eight o'clock and I'd hang out with my dog until then. Did you still carry the emotional tax from early stuff with you today? I guess I don't. To be honest with you, I'm pretty decent at compartmentalizing stuff.

As you're talking now, do you feel it? I don't feel sorrow. I don't feel angst. I don't, it's more factual to me. I kind of like having some of those hurdles in my life because to be fair, when life was really easy, I don't learn nearly as much. You know, the process of growth involves destruction. People don't think about that, but when a plant grows, it's literally destroying itself in order to get bigger and bigger and bigger. I think humans are the same way, right? The only way we grow is to break down what was keeping us at those parameters and then expand those parameters. It hurts, but I kind of think it beats the alternative, which is death. Yeah. Slow to care. I think people say like, what's your greatest fear? And first time I was asked that, I was like, it ain't death because there's far worse things

than dying. Absolutely. Living that life that you're describing, which is safe and shallow and, you know, lacking the kind of inner stuff to destroy the old patterns or at least to examine some of them. For sure. My biggest fears are the health of my children and hoping that they will have opportunity and being able to be around to see them have their failures and have their successes. That's really what I'm interested in doing. Okay. So let's, let me see if I get this right. Highly disruptive family structure, bankrupt.

Your dad was bankrupt. Multiple times. Loss of your mom, that relationship. Not death, but just the relationship for a while. For a long time. Didn't have kind of the normal structures that we would say are radically important for thriving, but had one key ingredient, which is the love and care from your father. I would argue that's correct.

Okay. Did you go without food? We at times didn't have a whole lot of dough. So my dad was actually a prolific dater. He was really good at dating. And we would show up at his girlfriend's homes about 30 minutes before dinner time, just as a drop in on numerous occasions during the week. So he did a pretty good job of making sure I got fed. Yeah, there you go.

Okay. So crafty. There's a craftiness that you learn from your desk. Savviness. There's a hustle. There's a hustle. Okay. I would argue I got a lot of hustle. Fast forward back to that. What I think is a really important statement, which is I wanted to go somewhere, but didn't have the cred or credentials. So what is it that allowed you to say, I'm going to figure it out? I don't know if I can pinpoint it to one thing, to be honest with you. I just, I had the confidence, like I know me, I know what I can do and what I can't do. And I knew I would benefit from being in that program. And so I was going to drive and drive and drive until I got there. I'm one of those guys that has to touch the stove sometimes to see that it's hot. And when I

was driving, driving, driving towards what I thought was my goal, I had an interrupt, right, to get there. And it ended up changing my path completely and going down to sleep. Okay. All right. Okay. So again, important statement, I know myself and I, I knew confidence or I knew I was confident. Okay. How have you learned who you are through failure? Primarily? Um, everyone says that, but like, what does that, what does that mean to you? I knew I started to really learn what my limits were. Um, and I, I, to be fair, I would argue I fail far more than I succeed. Um, but I really started to understand that I didn't have that limits were perceptions more so than anything else to me. I'll give you an example. I have a PhD in clinical psychology, but I'm medically board certified. How did I

accomplish that? 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. It's a special medical specialty board in sleep, not the general medical board. You can't be an idiot to do something like that. Right. But to take on that as a task, some people would say that you kind of have to be an idiot. So for me, I just like the challenge and I just don't really see a whole lot of limits other than the perceived limits that we put on ourselves. Are you trying to prove something? I'm maybe, maybe, maybe I'm trying to prove something to myself. I also have an insane curiosity as to how things work.

Sleep is the biggest mystery out there, dude. Everybody does it. You go into this room in the back of the house. It's dark. You hope for the best. You come out six, seven, eight hours later. What happened? That's cool stuff, right? I want to figure it out. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I

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And I think I had that for a long time. Definitely both of those ingredients. And if you would have asked me, let's say 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you know, you're trying to prove something. I would have probably said, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just, I really want to figure stuff out. And then when I really like double click under that, there is a part of me that comes from having a chip, not being included in certain things, not absolutely, you know, and I'm not sure it's healthy, but it is internally scratchy. And that scratchiness is just enough to have an unsettledness to do the stuff

that I think many won't do and to go to places that many won't go. Cause it's, I'm already uncomfortable and I wish it weren't, weren't the case. Are you an only child? No. Uh, see, I, I bet, I think that a lot of it came from being an, my being an only child because I didn't have a brother or a sister who was good at X. So then I had to be good at Y, right? Because like I have two kids. I have one who's my artistic musician creative. And then I've got another one who's my super academic. And I think of them as the, when you're an only child, you can be anything that you want to be, right? You don't get categorized like that. I think number one, number two, as an only child, my friends were more adults than they were kids my age.

Yeah. So my son is, does not have brothers and sisters. And so I recognize this pattern, like we speak to him, like we like an adult, like, you know, we don't do any of the Google Gaga stuff. So, you know, like, yeah. And so he's definitely an old soul. Oh my God. So is mine. Yeah. Right. So was I, I bet you were too. Yeah. I've got that my, my whole life. Yeah. You know, you were born 30, right? That's what my kids felt that way. Yeah. And sometimes I wish that I had a lighter way about me. I'm really intense. And sometimes like I've had to work on that lighter part. And I have a problem with that too. Yeah. I'm sure like if my Gary de Blasio, one of my most important mentors in my life, if he was listening or when he is listening, probably what's up, Gary, he'd say, dude, laugh more, you know, like have, have more fun, you know, like that part of it. But that internal scratchiness, this is what I'm trying to sort out with you. If you don't mind is, is that I think that it takes us somewhere and I don't want to lose it. And I hear this with athletes all the time. Is that going to take away the edge? And like, if I'm more peaceful and more settled in,

is it take away the edge? And I've become way more grounded and peaceful over the last, let's call it 15 years. That being said, having children changed the edge a little bit because priorities change for sure. Right. But you, you, you still have, and the easy narrative obviously is mom left. And then, so you work ridiculously hard to get the love of others, you know, through the extraordinary doing that you've done. And then, you know, and now you've got full circle. It's a happy life. Mom's back in the picture and you're world's best. You know, you've got both of them. Right. I think there's more to it than that though. Yeah. I think there is. I think it's more, much more dimensional.

So let's come at this a little bit different way, if you don't mind, is when was the last time you felt at peace? I feel at peace now in this conversation, even absolutely. Okay. And then, so you have a sense of peace on a regular basis. I think I do. Um, I have an intensity on a regular basis and I have a peacefulness on a regular basis. So for me, I feel like I've been able to find outlets for both. Um, but I, for some reason, sometimes I have to have a certain level of intensity to receive that peacefulness. Exercise is what I do, right? So for me, I'll do a 45 minute spin class on the weekend, and then I'll run a timed mile, right? Because when I run my timed mile, I don't want to have,

I want to be ready. I don't want to have this excess energy that's not going to allow me to have my form. That's not going to allow me to do what I need to do. So like I figured out pathways to my insightfulness or pathways to calmness that have allowed me to, to have peace. Um, but I feel like I have a different kind of peace than many people think about. I function at a super high level all the time. I'm ridiculously productive, but that brings me peace. So it's, it's, it's interesting for me. Yeah. You, you flirt right on the edge of, so multi-dimensional multifaceted you as a man, and you flirt right on the edge between, um between really high confidence, high competency.

And at the same time, like if we just took a snip, it'd be like, oh, arrogance. Like he's saying how great he is. So how do you flirt right on that line? And have you heard that before? Absolutely. One of the things that people like about me is when I say things, I say things with a decent amount of authority to them. I don't know if it's the resonance in my voice or what it is, but when I say stuff,

people believe it, right? And that's a good thing and a bad thing, but that's a responsibility, right? And so I'm constantly gut checking myself and I'm constantly saying to myself, okay, I need to watch out for arrogance. I need to, because some people won't hear my message because they think I'm arrogant and then they're not going to learn and maybe not heal. And that's not my goal. My goal is always to heal. So I'm always trying to keep that level of arrogance in check because I know that it curtails my message and my message

is super important to get out. Yeah. I can't wait to get into that part of it. Okay. I feel like I've got a nice little framework of how you're working and how you got here. And if you were to pass on some sort of insights and wisdoms to others that are where you were, let's say 20 years ago. Sure. What would you hope they would be able to learn from your arc to get where you are now? By Microsoft and Apple when they first IPO. That's the first piece of advice that I would give anybody 20 years back. Okay. That's classic. Yeah.

But for me, it's believe in yourself. Limits are perceptions more times than not. I'm not talking about physical limitations, although many people break through those as well. You deal with those athletes and those performers all the time. I think being cautious is worthwhile to a point. where I will put myself in an unknown situation just to see what happens, just what to shake loose. I think I'm a little bit addicted to that energy, to that indecisiveness, to that unknown, that mysterious factor. I'm kind of a detective in that way. I just think I like to get in there and mix it up. And so I believe that you're, we're doing it now. Like there's no chance that you knew or I, that where we're going to go in this conversation and you're in it, you know, and it's not like you're pulling out of it. I want to get to the sleep stuff too, but I also, I'm, there's mastery of craft and mastery of self and one without the other feels like a shame. And so I'm much more interested in mastery of self, but the craft is the thing that gets the attention. It's the laboratory that allows this conversation to take place. But I'm more interested, I think what people want from these conversations is both,

but they also want the tricks and tips. And I'm going to say out loud, there are no tricks. There are no hacks. There's no shortcuts. Like you've got to fundamentally organize your life to do the difficult work. Absolutely. And you're talking about it, like coming from a place to learn and know who you are to get on the edge, to be a detective when it's hard, right? That some sort of addiction, scratchiness that you've got. And opposition to be clear. Okay. What's that mean? Many people in my field don't like me. Oh, keep going on that. Absolutely. So I can't count the number of sleep scientists that have contacted me and said,

why do you get to be on television talking about sleep science? And this is at public forums. This is at meetings, professional meetings, things like that. But then when the conference is over and I'm walking out after somebody has kind of beat me up on stage, that individual almost assuredly walks up to me and says, hey, can you help me get on television? Happens every single time. So there's a professional jealousy that I think is out there. And I'm not saying that because I'm the coolest cat in town. I'm not the coolest cat in town. I work really hard. I hustle a lot to get on television, to spread that word and to do it. And my question to them is always the same thing when they, when they oppose the fact that, or

don't like the fact that I'm out and in the media and on social and doing things like that. I always ask them the same question. Did I get it wrong? It's really simple. Was I talking about your research? Usually I was. And then I say, did I get it wrong? Like, did I misinform people? Okay. I want to pause here because I want to know why you want to be on TV and why you want like what you're using that for. Sure. Is it for some sort of, um, there's the intersection that is important, I think, to try to sort out, is it like for recognition and, and fame and attention? Is it, is it pure mission minded? Is it some sort of mix between the two? It's surely a mix of the two, right? You have to have a pretty hefty ego to get on television and talk to 4.5 million people. Um, like I've been on Dr. Oz 39 times. I know it's ridiculous. Right. And I take that

responsibility incredibly seriously. He put me on the advisory board of the show because instead of reacting, I now get to implicate, I get to say, what do I want to teach 4.5 million people today? That's rad. Dude, that's cool. Nice work. Right. That's fun. Now, do you have to. I get to say, what do I want to teach 4.5 million people today? That's right, dude. That's nice work. Right. That's fun. Now, do you have to have an ego to stand on that stage? You bet. Right. I just got asked to speak on Tony Robbins stage, right? Unleash the power, 12,500 people, right? You've got to have a set of balls to be able to get on that stage, but you also have to have a purpose, right? It can't be ego driven. It can't be, I just want to be the center of attention because quite honestly, once

you get there, what are you going to say? What are you going to do? And how do you not look like a complete moron, right? So you got to know your stuff, which is what I pride myself on. That's why I read all the literature. That's why I'm constantly looking at this stuff. Quite honestly, that's why I like sleep because it's always changing. There's always cool new stuff coming out. I mean, literally there's 15 to 20 articles a month that come out about sleep. So I don't know how you keep up with that. Same in sports psychology. I have a clipping service. Oh, you do. Yeah. Yeah. I need to think about that because I'm, I'm definitely noticing the, um, the wave of research that I'm not able to keep up with. And you know,

it's like too, and I'm reading, I don't read, um, the pop psych current books. I don't read those, but I'm reading from journal articles to get to the core stuff. Right. And you know, it's dense and it's not really enjoyable, but when you're looking for a nugget and you're trying to figure things out, like where are they coming from? What are they trying to sort out in their life commitment? That part I find to be interesting. But see, I think you have the same superpower that I do. Oh, go tell me more. I think that here's what I'm really good at. I'm really good at taking incredibly complicated information and putting it into bite-sized actionable pieces. And that's why I'm good on air. I love that insight. You do that

too. You know, but I worked this out. I don't, you and I haven't had this conversation for 18 years. Every Saturday night I was in a nonprofit organization that pulled together a gym. And so it was kind of the vision that if I was high school and college aged or when I was, I needed something on Saturday night rather than partying and getting in potential trouble. Right. So opened up a gym, three courts, basketball courts, no entry, but the price to admission was to listen to me for like seven minutes, because that's all the attention I could muster.

Right. And it was alpha competitive males from the bottom of Los Angeles, heavily gang involved and infused. And I would learn something in graduate school and it was complicated and I distill it down to four to seven minutes. And I did that for 18 years. That was a work shed for me to figure out how to not lose the wisdom and fidelity of the research, but make it palpable to folks that are barely interested. Nobody said superpowers are just granted magically. Oh, there you go. You have to work for them. You got to work for them. Okay. All right. So when you're on like,

say Dr. Oz or, um, you've been on today's show, like what, what are the other ones? Dr. Oz and so I've been on the today show six times this year. Okay. I do Today Show, CBS Early Show, Good Morning America. I do Dr. Oz. I've been on Dr. Phil. I've been on Oprah. I mean CNN, Headline News. Last year I did 281 interviews. God damn.

So how do you prep for it? Like what do you do to get your... To be honest with you, I really don't prep a whole lot. I read journals every day. I have a pretty decent memory and I really like what I do. So I've been asked just about every sleep question I could possibly imagine. And to be fair, most people only ask me sleep questions. They don't ask me questions about myself or my life or my motivations or things like that. So this is actually a lot of fun. Um, I enjoy this type of exposure of myself, my raw self, if you will. Um, but you know, most of the time I know more about sleep than anybody in the room. So I usually have a pretty high level of confidence and I'm pretty good. Yeah.

And the eye contact to match it. I love it. Okay. So I don't want to go into this place with you, but where are the corners and recesses of your self that you don't want you, you're protecting in this conversation? I'm not going to double click on it, right? This is not a trap or a bait, but where are those recesses and corners? In terms of my knowledge of sleep? No, this is still on self. Oh, we're still on self. Sure. Um, well, I mean, look, uh, I'm not the easiest person in the world to have a relationship with. That's for sure. Um, my travel schedule is insane. Um, I'm on stages all the time and I have a little bit of an ego. So I would argue that there's that part of my universe where

I have to have a very strong person to counterbalance my strength. And I'm fortunate. I have that. And I have two children who are very willing to tell me when I do things wrong. The joke at our house is if you stack the IQs of all four of us, I'm one step above the dog. And it's the truth. You got a smart family. If you actually look at the numbers, I'm the dumbest one in the house. And I'm the guy that passed the medical board without going to medical school. So when we're at dinner, I get my, hey, dad, we'll explain it to you in a little while type of thing when the three of them are all going at it. It's quite fun. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't

just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature. I tend to run warm at night and these sheets have helped me sleep cooler and more consistently, which has made a meaningful difference in how I show up the next day for myself, my family, and our team here at Finding Mastery. It's become part of my nightly routine.

Throw on their lounge pants or pajamas, crawl into bed under their sheets, and my nervous system starts to settle. They also offer a 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty on all of their bedding, which tells me, tells you, that they believe in the long-term value of what they're creating. If you're ready to upgrade your rest and turn your bed into a better recovery zone, use the code FINDINGMASTERY for 40% off at CozyEarth.com. That's a great discount for our community. Again, the code is FINDINGMASTERY for 40% off at CozyEarth.com. FINDINGMASTERY is brought to you by Caldera Lab. I believe that the way we do small things in life is how we do all things. And for me, that includes how I take care of my body. I've been using Caldera Lab for years now. And what

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Let's get into sleep. So you can help people sleep. Yes. Based on many folks in your industry are really good at scaring us into why sleep is important. Yes. I think that that narrative is clear. And certainly for our community, it's like, yeah, I get it. I need more sleep. Okay. So I'd like to challenge just that idea if I can. So everybody doesn't need more sleep. What everybody needs to figure out is how much sleep do they need, right? It's different.

Eight hours is a myth. Okay? Very few people actually need eight hours of sleep. I go to bed at midnight. I wake up at 6.17 almost every single day without an alarm. I'm the sleep doctor for God's sakes, and I get six hours and 15 or so minutes of sleep. How do you do something like that, Michael? How do you function? Are you okay? Do you have energy? All of these different things. If my wife got six hours and 15 minutes of sleep, she'd be a disaster. Understanding what your sleep need is becomes critically important, along with things like your chronotype. Once you know how much sleep you need and when you should be sleeping, chronotype is early bird or night owl, then everything starts to fall into place

actually quite easily. Okay. Do your chronotype because you've renamed the traditional chronotype. I have. So the concept is the same, but I've renamed them. So it used to be that we talked about early birds and night owls. Well, to be fair, everybody doesn't fall into those two categories. So then science came up with early birds, hummingbirds, and night owls, right? And that was kind of the vernacular started in the seventies, kind of brought it up to the 2000s, 2010s. And I kept saying, what about insomniacs? What about them? They have a weird sleep pattern and not all of them are created equal either, by the way. So why aren't they being included in, into this whole thing? And so I started looking started looking at it turns out that these chronotypes are genetic right if you go in there's a actually a snip or a single nucleotide polymorphism

that is a variant in the period three gene among others if there's a variant there it makes you early or it makes you late right that in and of itself turns out to be one of the most critical pieces of information that any human can know whether you're interested in sleep or not. Because here's what happens. Can you study just that snip from the test? You can pull that snip out? Absolutely. You can pull your 23andMe data.

They have a report. Just click on morningness and eveningness report on 23andMe and you'll learn right there. To be fair, I think the report is a little bit too general because it only goes into those two categories. My vernacular is different. I have an online quiz. People go to chronoquiz.com. You can take the quiz. It takes less than two minutes and 30 questions long and you will discover fairly quickly if you're one of four chronotypes. Now, to be fair, I renamed them because I'm a mammal, not a bird. And I wanted to pick animals that I could really relate to. So early bird turns into a lion. I mean, come on, who doesn't want to be a lion, right? By the way, we decided not to use things like platypus and

porcupine because we didn't think anybody would relate to those. So on the marketing side of this, we had to really kind of think through that idea. Hummingbirds become bears, night owls become wolves, and insomniacs are dolphins. Now, each animal was chosen because they actually represent the same circadian cycle that the individual does. Lions actually wake up before dawn. That's when they have their first kill. So they are early birds. Bears, they like to get up when the sun comes up. They like to go to bed when the sun goes down. Wolves, and I happen to be a wolf. I'm a night person by far. We don't really kind of get our brain kicking into gear before like 11, 12 o'clock in the day. To be honest, this is a little on the early side for me. And dolphins are my insomniacs. Now, Michael, why on earth would you

choose dolphins? It turns out dolphins sleep unihemispherically. So half of their brain is asleep while the other half is awake looking for predators. And I felt like that was kind of this interesting representation of my insomniacs who are never quite asleep. So once you take the quiz, you fall into one of these four avatars, then it gets really cool, right? Because if you're an early bird and your partner is a night owl, right? When do you have sex?

When do you have a good conversation? When you wake up in the morning as an early bird, and let's say you wake up at 4.35 o'clock, your melatonin turns off, your cortisol and adrenaline pop up, and there's a very predictable hormonal cycle that will occur for the next 24 hours. And just to be clear, melatonin is the sleep hormone sleep hormone and cortisol is the stress hormone exactly so whatever your natural wait time is those two things take place exactly and and if your partner's different you're in just kind of like a weird little spot well so here's what happens is you're up at let's say five but your

partner doesn't want to get up until seven you got about two hours where your body is two hours ahead of theirs just on a hormonal perspective here's what's cool i've got over 220 studies to show that at certain times in that hormonal cycle your hormones will naturally be raised and it's just a better time to do things it's all about timing so will your quiz identify that? It does. And that would be, let's say you would be best to write at say four in the morning or four in the afternoon. Exactly. Oh, it tells you, I can tell you the best time to have sex, eat a cheeseburger, ask your boss for a raise. Literally you name it. Can you just tell my wife? Sure. So let's talk about sex. Everybody asks the sex questions. The first question that I get asked. So I'll tell you generally, and then I'll tell you more specifically. So it's quite

interesting in order to have successful sex, you need five hormones to be elevated. You need adrenaline, cortisol, uh, prednisone, uh, testosterone and estrogen all to be high, right? You need melatonin to be low. What do you think your hormone profile looks like at 1130 at night? Oh, melatonin's, you know, high and all the others are low. So that's instance number one. That's giving you a hint when you should be having sex. Question number two, what happens to 95% of men when they wake up in the morning? Oh, there's something that changes. Yes. Morning wood as it's been known to be called, right? If that's not mother nature telling you when to use that thing, I don't know what is. Morning sex makes a lot more sense from a connection standpoint, from a performance standpoint. If we've got people out there who are listening and saying things,

wow, I've got things like erectile dysfunction. Guess what? You might not in the morning. How about it? Right. Yeah. Kind of interesting. Now the question becomes, well, okay, Michael, that all sounds good, but what if I'm dating a night owl and I'm an early bird? How do I do that? I actually created a matrix in the book where you put your chronotype in one side, your partner's chronotype in the other. And we've delineated times of day, early evening and early morning when you would actually have a far greater likelihood of having successful sex. We also have forms for homosexual and for lesbian because the hormones are different. Come on, dude. It's awesome. That is awesome. It's incredible. And so could you replace sex with, um, any other action that you want to be skilled at?

Yeah. So like writing or surfing or fill in the blank. So I actually pulled 50 different activities. So for example, if you're talking about physical activity, I can tell you the best time of day to do yoga versus a team sport versus an anaerobic versus an aerobic exercise, all based on exactly when your hormones are going to be at the heights that you want them at that time. And again, your survey will identify the rhythm. My survey will identify the rhythm. You kind of got to buy the book to figure the rest out.

That's right. No, good. Yeah. Well, it's in fairness, like it's deeper than much. Yeah. And you need a visual with it as well. Okay let's let's flip over to a very applied question about the working with the seattle seahawks is that so we're tucked up in the northwest takes a long time to get to where we're going any other team and when we play on the east coast there's a significant disadvantage yes there is okay so actually vegas has figured that out as well like yes the odds change based on your travel. Yeah. All right. Oddly enough, if you look at some of the East Coast teams, Patriots, for example, this year, because on the East Coast, there's a lot of East Coast travel. They only change in one game, one time zone.

Smart. Yeah. Well, I don't know how that actually happens, you know, but we change time zones way more often than the other team. Okay. So is it, how do we get better? What would you suggest? So if we got at the rudimentary level, here's one of the first things I would do when you're at the combine and you're thinking about bidding on guys, figure out what their chronotype

is. You'll learn a whole lot real quick. Certain chronotypes are easier to flip-flop time zones than others. This is a very basic three or four questions you could be asking somebody in that level. Once you've established your team, again, figure out what you're dealing with. What's your demographic? I get it. They're all super elite athletes.

But again, this is a genetic difference that we could absolutely look at and be able to detail. We could change people's exercise schedule and training schedules based on their chronotypes, and we'll see higher performance and better results. That's number one, just during the training sessions, right? So pre-season, even during season. But once you start putting a body in an airplane and moving it thousands of miles, different things happen. And you need to take that into account. There's a system that I helped create, which we use light melatonin, napping and caffeine, and we obliterate jet lag. I mean, we get rid of it. And this is like, as an example, I've used your, I've used your stuff. Yeah. The time shifter app. Yeah. Yeah.

It's incredible. Right. And I go one step further than that. The time shifter app is basically commercially available for people. If they go to the app store, look up time shifter, you'll see it. It's really cool. But I actually bring jet lag management up to a higher level for my private clients. So when I'm working with athletes, CEOs, people like that, where, you know, here's a perfect example, right? The NBA went over to China and tried to play a game. Politicalness aside, lots of time zones travel, lots of time zones back. How do you account for something like that? Teams should be looking at this. People should be looking at this. If you're personally trying to up your game and increase your level of performance and you're traveling

time zones and you're not taking jet lag into account thinking, Oh, I'm just going to drink a little bit of alcohol to fall asleep when I get there. That's a bad idea. And it's bad because your brain doesn't totally shut down. Like when that happens, yeah. Well, restoration sleep is compromised. There's no question about that. And hopefully your brain never totally shuts down because then you're dead. Right. But here's the funny thing is people think that when they go to sleep, they put the car in park. Nothing could be further from the truth, dude. They're in third gear. I can show you data during REM sleep. If you look at EEG during REM versus wake, you can't tell the difference. Your brain is on fire during REM sleep. It's working. Yeah, it's working. Yeah. Okay. So sleep aids. Yep. Let's talk's talk you're not a fan i'm not a fan of

pharmaceutical sleep aids unless there's a real reason for it to be clear there are plenty of people who need drugs to sleep okay if you're a paranoid schizophrenic and you need ambient to help you sleep you should get it right what i'm talking about is I believe that there's a big difference between sleep disorders and what I call disordered sleep, right? Sleep disorders, apnea, narcolepsy, full-blown insomnia. Those are very different medical situations that need to be treated medically, right? But when we talk about disordered sleep, it's, I wake up and I feel like crap or I wake up multiple times throughout the night and I feel like crap or, uh, I wake up multiple times throughout the night and I feel like I'm not getting that rejuvenative feeling. That's the

area that I play in. And I think that's really the area that performance, we can really ratchet people up actually quite quickly. Okay. So what about is you would say disordered sleep is waking up midnight and I'm two, three, four in the morning and not knowing how to shut her back down, but still feeling like you didn't get any restoration. Sleep's a perception. When you wake up the next day, how you perceived you slept is exactly how you've slept, right? You don't need a tracker. You don't need a diary. When you wake up, how do you feel? If you feel good, you had a good sleep let's repeat that getting back to your question about pharmaceuticals and supplementation and what do we give people for

sleep the very first thing that i do is i do an assessment right it's an hour-long conversation and i'm looking for things 75 of the reason that people don't sleep is between their ears okay their mind is sorting out anxious stuff absolutely the number one complaint i hear is i can't turn off my brain at night it's the number one complaint i hear i guarantee anybody listening has been like yep that was me at some point in time in my life or multiple times in my life so i'm really looking for the core for that people don't understand there's a lot of flavors of insomnia, right? Think about Baskin and Robbins of insomnia, right? There's the, I can't fall asleep. I can't stay asleep. I wake up too early. There's insomnia associated with anxiety,

with depression, with pain. There's all kinds of different forms of insomnia. So my first goal as the detective, right? I got to figure out what the core root is, right? And by the way, it's almost always multifactorial. This is how we get into the supplement idea. Second thing I do is we run blood. Like what's in your system, right? Are you low on iron? Are you low on magnesium?

Are you low on vitamin D? All of these things have profound effects on not only your circadian system, but your sleep initiation system, what we call your hypothalamic sleep drive, right? Or your homeostatic drive for sleep. That's the thing that puts you to sleep. Circadian rhythmicity is what keeps you asleep. So we look for things that are there and we supplement with that. Then we start to look at, okay, body is good, right? What else is potentially going on? And then we look at the environment, right? Are you moving time zone? Is there too much blue light? Are you stressed out before bed?

What's going on, right? In that environment for sleep. I believe sleep is a performance activity, okay? I'm a runner, right? If I want to run a race, I can run a race in flip-flops with corn cutoffs at the t-shirt and a boom box on my shoulder right but my time's not going to be too good right but if i've got my a6 on my dry fit wear i've got the good tunes going i fucking move right that's because i know how to perform i have the right equipment for performance same holds true with sleep. We're in the gold now. And so classic cycle for me is somewhere around the second 90 minutes. Lately, I've been waking up. And in that second 90 minute wake up, sometimes I wake up and I go, Oh, okay. No worries. I don't check the clock. I just have

a sense right back to sleep. No worries. Fantastic. Sometimes I wake up and that's normal just so that you know. Yeah. And then sometimes I'll wake up and I'll go, Oh no, because I've started to ruminate about stuff I want to solve or something that I didn't like how yesterday went or whatever. And I, I find that pattern and I go, okay, Mike, I know, I know the way through this. And so I'll do some breathing work. I'll do some meditation. I'll put my foot to sleep or my feet to sleep, my asleep and then i'm like okay here we go and then 40 minutes later i'm like damn it like like what am i doing you know and so what's the timing of your last meal um i'm pretty good about it like about eight ish seven eight ish so you're done by eight yeah usually done by eight What time is the first awakening?

What time do I normally wake? 6.45. In the middle of the night awakening? Oh, about three-ish. So you stop eating at eight and you're waking up at three. Yeah. You're out of fuel. Seven hours.

You got no fuel. So what happens? Your body says, oh, there's nothing left for me to burn because I'm going into REM sleep and i really need the glucose so what do i do i spike my cortisol right to be able to produce insulin simple dude dude it's very straightforward okay so you need a snack before bed 35 of the cases that i've had where people tell me they wake up in the middle of the night if i give them a small nighttime snack they do better you know what the snack is raw honey a teaspoon of raw honey local raw honey number one you get the particulates so you start to lower your allergies things like that which is good for you anyway um but raw honey is difficult to metabolize and so it keeps your blood sugar stable longer now look if you're honey or yeah melaleuca is best yeah um well look at the end of the day if you're not a honey person

or you're diabetic or you're keto or whatever guava leaf tea does the same thing there's two clinical trials on it have a cup of guava leaf tea and it actually helps keep blood sugar stable that's the very first thing that i do with people is what time was your last meal what time are you waking up how much time period do i have there let Let's take a look at that. That's number one. Number two, you're a guy, right? So I don't remember how old you are. I think we're pretty close in age. I'm going to be 52 in February. So one of the first things I think about is could I have an enlarged prostate, right? I mean, guys wake up in the middle of the night to pee. Let's figure out what's going on there, right? So let's get that off the table. I'm not waking up to go to the bathroom.

I don't have to go to the bathroom. Perfect. So then the third area is exactly what you described. It's you woke up for an unknown reason. By the way, I think I can kind of tell you what some of that reason is. Sleep follows the core body temperature cycle very closely. And so what happens is around 10 o'clock at night, 10.30 at night, you hit this peak. Then when you hit that peak and you crest it, your brain releases melatonin and it goes down,

down, down. You hit the bottom of that temperature curve somewhere between two and three o'clock in the morning and you start to get warmer, right? Well, when your body gets warmer, it's harder to sleep. And that's why you have a much easier arousal threshold or what we would consider to be lower arousal threshold. You wake up easier, you get up. Now you do something that almost nobody does. Okay. You're, you don't look at the clock, right? Everybody looks at the clock. Everybody does. And they do the mental math instantly. And they say, Oh crap. I've it's three o'clock in the morning. I've got to get up at six 30. I only have three and a half hours left to sleep. And then they go sleep, sleep, sleep. And they try really hard to sleep. Okay. There's so many things that are messed up with that

equation. I can't even count them all. Well, what cortisol and blue light, well, suppression of melatonin. Yeah. All of the anxiety. Yeah. Right. But you're, you're creating a sympathetic nervous reaction during a time when you want the parasympathetic system to be taking over so here's here's a bad pattern that i've found to be effective and i don't like it and sometimes like i said sometimes i'm sure people can relate to this sometimes no worries fall right back to sleep great normal sleep patterns yeah sometimes i get caught in a loop and then I can meditate down. I can, it's actually just parasympathetic switching on.

Yep. And then other times when it's too long, I go, damn it. So I get out of bed. Okay. And I'll try to start over. Yeah. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn't.

So I got a series of things. Here's the one that hasn't been, that has been working that I don't like. Sure. Is when I'm on the road, I will do something that you're going to, you're going to cringe at, but it's helping. It is, I'll flip open my computer and I will, like, I like documentaries and they tend to be very monotone. Yeah.

And so it hijacks. And so I'll, I'll put like a, I'll have the lightest damage you can and I'll turn it away, but it's just the audio that I'm getting now. And it hijacks my thinking pattern. And it's like the one I'm listening to right now is this great documentary on Gandhi. And so, um, it's interesting, compelling, but not enough to stay awake. And so it almost is like a lullaby. It's a distraction technique. Yeah. Right. And, but it's not great because if it's too interesting, I'm still entertaining it. And so let me tell you what happens in my bedroom every night. Okay.

Well, hold on. Hold on. I'm just saying. Okay, hold on. I'm just saying. So I get in bed. My wife's there usually asleep. There's a French bulldog in the bed.

There's a Chihuahua in the bed. There's a cat that's wandering around that usually ends up in the bed. There is a big screen television that is on. You're breaking all the rules. I'm the sleep doctor for God's sakes. Okay. Right. And so when my wife and I were dating, she said, Michael, if we ever happen to have a sleepover, I need to let you know that I fall asleep with the television on. And I said, hon, don't you worry about that. I'm a sleep doctor. I'm going to fix that. Now I don't know about anybody out there, but if you've ever tried to fix anything in your partner, it doesn't usually go particularly well. So I removed the television from the room and I was told that if I did not put the television back in the room, I was going to be removed from the room. So I put the TV back in the room and I decided to study her to just figure out why does she need this thing? Right? So what I discovered was is that she wasn't actually watching it. She was listening to it out of what I call the corner of her ear. It's almost identical

to what you described. It's an old episode of Seinfeld and it's just enough to distract her from these ruminative thoughts. There's a reason why we ruminate in the middle of the night and it's because nobody is asking us to do anything. It's the first time of day we actually have some peace and quiet to ourselves. If you're not a meditator. I will sort some stuff out. I know. Like flat out.

It's a really clear thinking place. And I don't want to do it then. And I've got a long pattern of meditation, you know, mindfulness training. And sometimes it's just, it's not good enough to shut me back down or whatever. So number one, stop giving yourself a hard time. There's nothing wrong with what you do. I recommend that type of stuff to people all the time. So the big thing is nobody should fall asleep with the television on because the blue light

is going to have an effect on you. I'm calling BS on that. Okay. Here's the deal. The blue light is all the way across the room. If you're bothered to wear blue light blocking glasses, which I do, then I would argue that you're perfectly fine to do that, but you do it even better. You turn it on, you turn it away. You can't even see what's going on. You're listening. And if you don't have

the volume too high, a decibel level, it's not going to maintain a level of wakefulness. Yeah. It's a little art to that. Yeah. You've got that switch just you know play with it a little bit yeah um and then you go right back to bed because all you're doing is distracting yourself right it's no different than counting backwards from 300 by threes right i have people do that all the time it's mathematically so complicated you can't do anything else and it's so damn boring you're out like a light i thought yeah i thought i read somewhere recently that counting sheep actually it was a piece of research that doesn't work. It's not. So I didn't say counting sheep. No, I know. But like, but I was riffing off of that. Your, your mechanism is that it's complicated. It's hard. It gets boring. It's distraction.

They forget about it. And you're, you've actually suppressed cortisol at some level. There's no question. Yeah. There's no question. If you start stressing yourself out, what's wrong with my math skills, that would be another problem. That's an anxiety issue. And so as an example, if I give somebody that technique of counting backwards from 300 and they say, I made it to the bottom three times, we have a much different issue on our hands. We have somebody who's probably obsessive compulsive. We've got somebody who's got super high levels of anxiety and we need to address that issue surrounding sleep. i'm not here to cure all that ails you on your ocd but i can help people with ocd sleep better okay so let's talk about

females for a minute sure hormones are changing all the time are you a it's a complicated multi-dimensional conversation about hormones my wife is teaching me about this. I'm not teaching her like, and so she's way more informed on this conversation than I am. So speak to folks, females maybe that are, um, in their 40 fifties and circadian and circadian and hormones are changing. Yeah. So, so let's start at the most basic level. Okay. Let's talk about menstrual cycles, right? So women are different than men, period. End of story. There's a whole lot of different reasons for that.

Hormonally speaking, it's very, very interesting. I have women where I change their bedtime depending upon where they are in their cycle for the 28 days or 30 days that they're having it. I'm like the only guy in the universe that's ever done that, which it seems so obvious to me. Okay. So pre-menstrual, what happens? Pre-menstrual, lots of women get incredibly exhausted. Post-menstrual, lots of women have tremendous energy. So we change their bedtimes based on their chronotypes to be able to give them more or less need for sleep. So if you're a lion, if you're a lion

and you go to bed at 8.30 at night and you get up at 4.30 in the morning, generally speaking, right? And you are pre-menstrual, you might be going to bed a little bit earlier. You're suggesting go to bed earlier. Because you might need more sleep. Oh, you're still going to wake up at 4.30. You're still going to. Turns out that the wake up time is the most key aspect to all of sleep.

If people want to get one thing from our conversation, it's a consistent wake up time will serve you well. It's the anchor. My, my son's school read some science somewhere and they're like, yeah. And like, I'm very active in this area. Well, they got it wrong. You know what they did? They kept the normal school time, their normal school time, which is earlier than all the other schools around and then gave them one day to come in later. And so I'm screaming at the top of my head, of my lungs, like, why would you do this? Sure. So absolutely. So here's the problem, is schools are kind of dipping their toe into this whole idea.

The data is incredibly clear. Teenagers should not be awake early hours. They just should. They're all wolves. What people don't understand is- Oh, wait. So chronotype changes? Absolutely. I thought it was a genetic predisposition. It is, but you got to get there. You got to grow up and get there, right? So here's what happens. When you have an infant, they're a lion. Think about it. They go to bed early. They wake up

early. When you have a toddler and a middle schooler, guess what? You got a bear on your hands. They go to bed around 7.30. They wake up around 7.30. When you have a teenager, what happens there? I got two of these things running around my house. It's terrible, right? Here's what happens.

They go to bed at 2 o'clock in the morning and they sleep until noon the next day. They're wolves. Once you hit about 18, 19, 20 years old, your chronotype will settle into what you are. And by the way, it changes again when you get older. At what age? Depends on your medical frailty and how good of shape you keep of yourself. But generally speaking in the sixties, what you see happening is people will either turn into dolphins where they'll have problems sleeping because of medical challenges, medicines, things like that, or they'll turn into lions and they'll become early birds. I mean, how many times have you seen people at the blue plate special, right? That's at five 30 and you wonder who eats dinner

at five 30 old people do why? Because their circadian clock has shifted in the opposite direction. It's no doubt that you love the craft that you've spent your life on. It's really good. And, and passionate. Yeah. And there's a, a nexus or an intersection right now between your science or the science that you understand and the need for people to want to feel vibrant. The new wealth is not a bigger home, bigger car, bigger watch. The new wealth is vibrance. No question. It is a youthful, playful appreciation for life. And with fear and fatigue on board, that's not possible. Yep. And by the way, it's not like you have to change everything about your universe.

I mean, we started our conversation where I said eight hours is a myth, right? So I want people out there to know and understand. I do what I call Tai Chi sleep. I meet people where they are and then I make small incremental changes that they will see productivity in. And then they start to ask me for bigger and better changes. I'm not going to tell everybody, go to that room in the back of the house at eight o'clock, turn off all the lights, never watch television and hope for the best. Okay. As I told you, my life is very different. I go to bed at midnight. There are three animals in my bed.

There's a big screen TV going on. Sometimes a child walks through the door. God knows I might have to get on an airplane four and a half hours into my sleep and travel someplace in the world to give a lecture. And I got to be on point for that because nobody likes a sleepy sleep doctor, you know? So, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that gets involved, but it's complicated, but here's the good news. It's easy. Yeah. Okay. So you're really clear about breaking that myth about the eight hours. Absolutely. And then am I wrong by thinking that five cycles is still important? 90 minutes, get five cycles. That some people have five some people have four generally speaking wolves or night night owls have a tendency to have four cycles of sleep lions and bears have a tendency to have five so it's very very interesting when you again when you go from

the macro to the micro it all gets more interesting and here's the thing is i haven't made a micro where there's 50 different types. You got to figure out which one you are. There's four, right? And that's part of the goal was to make it very general to a little bit more micro to get people there. But I have actually have a five-step program I'd love to give to everybody if I can to tell people just five easy things that they can do to fix their sleep literally starting

right now. Great. Step one is wake up at the same time every single day, including the weekends. If you're a six 30 guy or gal during the week, be a six 30 guy or gal on the weekend. Even if you're sleep restricted. Yes. Here's why. So what happens is, is let's say that normally you go to bed at 11 but it's friday night you wanted to go see the newest movie or check out the greatest restaurant you get in bed at one o'clock in the morning oh michael i'm only getting five and a half hours of sleep is that really okay it's fine here's why if you sleep in more than 30 minutes your entire biological clock will shift and you get what's called social jet lag when you you stay up late on Friday, sleep in on Saturday, stay up late on Saturday, sleep in on Sunday. Guess what happens Sunday

night? Sunday night insomnia. And that's why Mondays suck, right? So keep it simple. Wake up at the same time every single day. Your brain knows what to do. That's step one. Step two has to do with caffeine. Stop caffeine by 2 PM. It. It's really simple. Okay. Now, people don't realize that caffeine has a half-life of between six and eight hours. A quarter-life of 12. Yeah. So you're okay with the eight hours? Stop at two. Absolutely.

You're not saying 12? No, I'm not. Absolutely not. Here's the thing. Most people are so sleep-deprived, that level of sleep deprivation will overcome any lingering stimulation from caffeine that's eight hours old. That's number one. Number two, people have different caffeine sensitivities. It's quite fascinating. Some people are much more affected by caffeine than others.

And number three, I guarantee you there are people listening and here's what they're thinking. Sleep doctor, he doesn't know what he's talking about. I can have a big old cup of coffee right before bed and I can be just fine. So here's the thing. If I attach electrodes to your head, you might've fallen asleep, but the quality of the sleep you're getting is crap. If you want to have coffee later in the day, try four sigmatic, right? I drink it. I was actually having a cup while we were talking. It's mushroom coffee. It's non-caffeine. I recommend it all the time. Step number, I think, sorry to interrupt. I'm bullish

on what they're doing, their product and what they're doing as well. I am too. It's cool. Yeah. Is that, I think that there's some caffeine in the, in that one. There's different types. I like the, um, there's a, the mushroom one that's non-caffeine. That's those are the only ones I'm drinking too. Yeah. They're awesome. Yeah. They're great. Okay. Sorry. Step number three has to do with alcohol. There's a really big difference between going to sleep and passing out, right? Number one sleep aid in the world is alcohol, right? More people drink themselves to sleep than any other thing that they do.

So here's why that's not the best idea. It takes the average human body approximately one hour to digest one alcoholic beverage. We know that alcohol knocks out stage three, four sleep. It turns out stage three, four sleep is your physical restoration. Half the reason you get a hangover is from lack of stage three, four sleep. The other half is dehydration. Alcohol is a diuretic, makes you start peeing. Once you break the seal, you're pissing all night long, right? So what do you need to do? If you stop alcohol three hours before bed, assuming you've had two to three drinks, you've given your body the time to get the alcohol out. You've enjoyed your meal with

your glass of red wine or your scotch at the end and you're able to sleep just fine. Okay. So I think it was Dr. Walker. I asked this question to, and he's like, yeah, even one glass will do it to you. But maybe what you're offering is one glass within one hour of falling asleep. Like don't drink until you're. If you have one glass of alcohol and you wait one hour, your body will have digested a large portion of it. I have to be honest with you. I disagree with Matt in a couple of areas. And this is, is this one of them or is it? I wasn't aware that this was one of his big areas. I might've gotten this wrong from him. I don't know know but it makes sense to me that if you're

going to pass the alcohol takes about an hour for per shot glass whatever and be to be fair have a glass of water for every alcoholic beverage so glass of wine glass of water one hour you're good good okay it's pretty straightforward again i like to make things simple that are effective step number four has to do with exercise. I'm a big fan. The single best way to improve the quality of your sleep is with exercise. But to be fair, exercise increases your core body temperature. Remember we were talking earlier, core body temperature needs to go down, not up, in order to allow our bodies to fall asleep. Give yourself three or four hours, or take a cool shower before bed. Lower that core body temperature. Get yourself there.

So that wouldn't turn on the sympathetic nervous system though, or that would turn on the sympathetic nervous system or cold shower. I'm not saying cold, cold, cold. I'm not talking Wim Hof cold here. I'm talking cool. Okay. Just to give your chance, your skin temperature, a chance to come down. Okay. You're not trying to freeze yourself causing hypothermia. You're just trying to lower your core body temperature. You actually, when we go back to my narrative, you actually nailed it in a way that I, like if we're going to go play sport, hoops, whatever, I'll go through three shirts, four shirts. Like I'm a sweater. Me too.

Whatever I'm doing, like my body temperature is really sensitive. I wish it wasn't. And I've gone to acupuncture, acupressure to get some clarity to see if I could turn down some of that hot stuff. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But anyways, so you nailed that piece for me. Okay. Very cool. Step five. Step five is when you wake up in the morning, drink a bottle of water and get 15 minutes of sunlight. People don't know this, but sleep by itself is a dehydrator. You lose almost a full liter of water from the humidity in your breath that you breathe out every night, right? So you wake up in a dehydrated state. Number one, grab the water and chug it.

Your body needs it. Get sunlight. Sunlight turns off the melatonin faucet in your brain. So you'll get that morning fog will start to clear. To be fair, when you grab your bottle of water and walk over to the window, put on a robe. I thought you needed to have like some body exposure, not just your face. Face and eyes are all you need. Come on. Because of the hypopituitary. You have melanopsin cells in your eyeballs and they are directly affected by the blue light, which immediately turns off the melatonin faucet in your head. This is great. I appreciate you, dude. I'm a geek. Yeah. Two nerds ripping. Absolutely.

Yeah. So, um, hold on. We got to, Alex's got a question. Fire away, Alex. Cannabis. Absolutely. So full disclosure, I'm developing my own line of sleep-friendly cannabis because I like it so much. So if you are smart about it and you really look at the data, and by the way, this data comes out of Belgium and Israel because, of course, we here in the United States don't run marijuana research because it's all federal and legal and it's all these other problems. The data is actually quite interesting. THC in and of itself definitely reduces REM sleep. There's no argument about that there. However, when you look at the dosage of THC, you can modify the reduction in REM sleep. It's not an on off switch. It's a reduction. That's number one. Number two, most people don't know this. Every single SSRI that's out there almost obliterates REM sleep completely out of your brain. I can actually tell when somebody's in the sleep lab, if they're taking Prozac because they have this thing called Prozac eyes. It's very well documented in the literature.

We know exactly when people are there. So reducing a little bit of REM sleep because using cannabis is probably not the worst idea. But the fact of the matter is, here's what it really does. It reduces anxiety. It reduces pre-bed anxiety. I'm not going to be creating a product to get people stoned. I'm creating a product to get people to sleep. All I want to do is lower that pre-sleep anxiety, allow the natural sleep process to take over. Believe it or not, CBN turns out to be the most powerful cannabinoid that is effective of sleep, which also turns out to be old THC. THC, as it oxidizes, turns into CBN. And that's really where we've seen the literature that it's quite interesting. I've written extensively about both CBD, CBN, and THC on my blog on thesleepdoctor.com. So if people are interested, check it out.

You're bullish on CBD as well? I am, but only to a certain point. To be fair, CBD is everywhere. It's in everything and it's not in the right dosages by far. I got asked the other day to evaluate a pillow infused with CBD as to whether or not I would endorse it. It was unbelievable. So I went along with it and I was like, okay, how is it administered? And they said, we have these little micro beads in the pillow. And when your head rolls around, you break open

the beads and then you'll breathe in the CBD. Come on. I literally started laughing in the middle of the meeting because I said, that can't be what you are actually going with. And they were. CBD is arguably the most overused term right now in the beauty, healthcare, medical universe ever. It's pretty intense. Yeah. It's everywhere. I mean, come on, it's going to be sold at Walmart soon, right? So at the end of the day, what I would argue is, is that yes, there are CBD products that can be very helpful for sleep. You need the right dose, You need the right kind of CBD. And you need to know where you get it from. I would imagine you're not bullish on the isolate.

It depends. Full spectrum? I like full spectrum because I think the entourage effect is real. And I think that it helps with a lot of different factors for sure. So I wouldn't say you should only take CBN or only take CBD. I think you're going to miss out on a lot of the good constituents within the flower. Yeah. Look at you.

Clear. Okay. Brilliant. Um, I just want to say thank you for your time. Thank you for this is blast. Like, yeah, the, the thing that I get geeked on is feeling your passion and intensity and the clarity of thought. There's a lot of that.

And so that neurochemical exchange is wonderful for me. So I like, I want to say thank you. You're welcome. And then where can folks find you? I'm super easy to find on the internet, the sleep doctor.com. You can't forget that one. If you want to learn about your chronotype, go to chrono quiz.com, or you can get there from my website and follow me on Instagram, The Sleep Doctor. Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening.

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