Good Life Project - Arianna Huffington: On Family, Success and Sleep

Episode Date: April 11, 2016

Today's guest is Arianna Huffington, co-founder, president, and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, and author of fifteen books. In May 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that quickly became one of the most widely-read, linked to, and frequently-cited media brands on the Internet. In 2012, the site won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Huffington has been named to Time Magazine's list of the world’s 100 most influential people and the Forbes Most Powerful Women list. Originally from Greece, Huffington moved to England when she was 16 and graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics. At 21, she became president of the debating society, the Cambridge Union. She serves on numerous boards, including The Center for Public Integrity and The Committee to Protect Journalists. A devoted mom with a deepening focus on redefining the metrics of a life well-lived beyond business, she's decided to make sleep her revolutionary cause with her latest book, The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life One Night At A Time.In This episode, You’ll Learn:What family means to Arianna and how her Greek heritage shaped her lens on relationships.How an health incident awakened her to the important of redefining success.Why she chose sleep as the subject of her attention and new book.Why sleep may well be the single biggest game-changer for your life.What Arianna's doing to make her smartphone into a dumb phone.Simple things you can start that will make the biggest difference in your sleep.How sleep affects mood, cravings and weight.Mentioned In This Episode:Overwhelming Odds#SleepRevolution College Tour Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

However magnificent what we may be doing in the world is, who we are in our essence is more magnificent. And I feel that sleep is also a gateway to the mystery of being alive. My guest today is Arianna Huffington. I'm sure you recognize the name. She is the co-founder of the Huffington Post. She's been a longtime voice and activist in everything from politics to art and music and society, and somebody who's championed and really refocusing to champion a new definition of success. And that was kicked off really by an incident in 2007

where she literally passed out and realized that the way she had been living her life, building her life and building her business and contributing to the world was not the way that she wanted to continue doing it. That also kicked off a really deep fascination with sleep and what it does to us and for us and how we've developed an incredibly dysfunctional relationship with this massively important piece of our ability

to live good lives. So we dive into all these different things into her journey into the role of family and culture into redefining success and living a good life and into the power and sort of the nuances and the details and some of the big challenges and mythology around this idea of sleep. Really excited to share this conversation. And she also wraps all of this up in a new book called The Sleep Revolution.

I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. So, it's kind of fun sitting down with you for a whole bunch of different reasons. Your public story has been well told many times. What I'm more curious about is sort of more of your internal story. When you do a quick look for you online, on your Twitter profile, you start out with two

things, which is mother and sister. It's not a business thing. Your profile starts with those two things, which made me really curious just what the role of family is in your life. Well, it's great to be sitting down with you. I love what you're doing with these podcasts, and so I'm really happy to be part of it. You're absolutely right. I mean, family is key for me, and I feel it's the foundation of everything I've done and of who I am and it started with my mother and that's why maybe I put the fact that I'm a mother first because that was like the key

relationship and the fact that she gave me that complete sense of unconditional loving but also the sense of incredible possibility. Even though I was brought up in a one-bedroom apartment, we had no money, my parents were divorced, I spoke no English. She just made me feel that I could reach for the stars, but also that she wouldn't love me any less if I failed. So there's the combination of go for it, but you're not your achievements. You are more than that. And my love is unconditional.

So my relationship with my sister is incredibly important. You know, our mother died in 2000, and she moved in with me after that. Oh, no kidding. So we are continuing this tribal existence. And I have two daughters, and my younger daughter, who's graduated from college in art history and is a painter, still lives with me.

I'm glad she chose a profession where it's not as easy to make a living. And I shall be with you longer, maybe. So she'll be with me longer than otherwise, if she had chosen a more lucrative profession. Oh, that's funny. And my other daughter lives nearby. I mean, I'm in Soho. She's in the West Village.

So we see her a lot. And she's developing a series, actually, for the Huffington Post called Talk to Me, which is about children interviewing their parents and starting these intergenerational conversations. No kidding. That's fantastic. So, I mean, also you grew up in Greece, as I'm sure many people know. It occurs to me also that there seems to be almost like a de-emphasis on family in the U.S. And it seems like most every other culture, I have many friends that actually are either

first or second generation Greek, actually, or from different places in Europe. It seems like there's such a strong emphasis on people and relationships and family outside of the U.S. I'm curious whether you sense that being Greek. That's sort of like there's culturally, that's just, it's been embedded more strongly in you. Oh, absolutely. It's so much part of the culture. You never really leave your family. Like the question of, are you supporting your family? It doesn't even come up. It's like whoever has the most money supports the rest of the family. It's not even a question. So it's definitely in my DNA.

That's a beautiful thing. So when you come here, it's sort of politics and society phase and then a business phase. And from the outside looking in, at least, it feels like you're moving into, over the last maybe five, ten years, a focus more on really zooming the lens out on your own life, on what matters. And it felt like it really began with your last book, actually, in trying to redefine success. Do you feel that through line as well? Definitely. It actually began with my collapse in 2007 from exhaustion and sleep deprivation,

which is what started me looking more deeply at things that have always interested me. I mean, I went to India and studied comparative religion when I was 17. I've been meditating since I was 13. So these have always been part of my life, but I went much more deeply into them and I became much more interested in spreading the lessons that I learned to the world so the world didn't have to learn them the hard way the way I did. Collapsing, breaking my cheekbone, ending up with four stitches on my eye, etc. So that's what started this fascination to understand and then spread the word of redefining success and of sleep. And I chose sleep because for me, it's a kind of universal entry point.

Like people may not want to meditate or they may not want to redefine success, but they all have to sleep. Right. As much as they might believe otherwise. Yes. But they all have to sleep. Right, as much as they might believe otherwise. Yes, and first of all, correcting the impression that sleep is negotiable is hugely important because I think it starts with that, misperception. And I loved you retweeted Richard Branson saying that people used to believe the earth is flat. So I feel that our culture believing that we don't really need to sleep seven to nine hours, which is the accepted optimum number by every sleep scientist who studied the subject. This is part of what our culture still believes in large numbers, though declining, and it is a completely false belief.

So changing the cultural norms around sleep is going to have such a huge impact on our health, on our creativity, on our mental health, that I feel it's kind of, in a way, low-hanging fruit in terms of fundamental changes we can make. Yeah. It's so interesting, though. If it's such low-hanging fruit, I guess the big question is, why are we in this state? I mean, I remember you share in your new book, there was a stat where you cited some research that looked at the average amount of sleep in different countries. And Tokyo, I think, came out at like five hours or something like that or some ridiculously small amount.

And so it's not even that it's a U.S. issue. I mean, this is sort of across most developing countries. There seems to be this mass deficit in sleep. So I guess the question is, if it feels like such low-hanging fruit, like it's so clear that we need more and it's, why are we still in this place? That's a great question. And that's why I structured the book the way I did so I can answer this question. So the history chapter answers that question.

So I wanted to structure it. So you start with a crisis. Right. You know, why are we talking about a crisis? And look at the casualties, you know, the people who are collapsing on their treadmills because they've gotten the message that exercise is important, but they haven't gotten the message that you can't trade sleep for workout time. They hear it cognitively, but it doesn't filter through the behavior. So looking at the crisis, looking at the fact that over 30% of people are sleep-deprived with huge consequences for their health and their cognitive performance. The most stubborn skeptic that this is not just some new age evangelizing around sleep, but absolutely rooted in incontrovertible science. And that is growing every week.

We have new scientific data. because in 1970, the first scientific sleep center was launched at Stanford. Right. And now we have over 2,500 in the U.S. alone. So you see that it's a relatively new science. Right, right. But then, to answer your question, we move to history. Because for me, I had the same question you have. Okay, so the science is so convincing. the casualties are there for everyone to see. Why are we still holding on to this delusion? And the truth is that it really started with the first industrial revolution, which is when we started thinking, and you have amazing historical evidence that I include in the book to that effect, that we can really treat human beings like machines.

And the goal with machines is how do you minimize downtime? Right. So we forgot that human beings are not machines and that even in the history of creation, God, who is after all omnipowerful, takes a day off, kind of almost to send a message to humanity. Right. Hey, if I have to do it. If I have to do it. If I work for six days and I create heaven and earth and then I take a day off, you sure have to do it.

And the concept of the Shabbat is so deeply important. You don't have to be Jewish to appreciate the depth of this concept, which is basically having a day in the week when you don't fully identify yourself with your job and your worldly pursuits. context is so key because from the first industrial revolution we went to the second industrial revolution dominated by Thomas Edison and the invention of the light bulb and Thomas Edison becomes a huge denouncer of sleep I mean here you have this man who was admired and adored

talking about how we're going to eliminate sleep again the earth is flat an equivalent misconception, but perpetuated by somebody who is a cultural icon. Right, so then everybody wants to be like that person. Exactly, and then captains of industry perpetuating the same illusion, et cetera, et cetera.

And then we move to the third industrial revolution, which is the digital revolution, which of course makes it even harder to disconnect and go to sleep because we are all slightly addicted to technology. Some of us were very addicted. I think slightly, right. Yeah. I mean, we're like from slightly to excessively. Right.

In the blink of an eye also. And so how do we deal with learning to disconnect from our devices in order to reconnect with ourselves, which is essential if we're really going to have a deep and restful night's sleep. So that's a long answer to your question, but it's a very important question to understand how we ended up here. Yeah, because I think it sets everything up. And I think what we see, where you went now, especially because we see such an explosion of entrepreneurial spirit, which is fantastic, but at the same time, it feels like there's this culture built around entrepreneurship, which says that you have to be all in all the time and that requires, you know, like massive, massive number of hours. And the first thing that you're, it's okay to give up. It's almost like it's a badge of honor if you're not sleeping. And in fact, it sounds like that was very much a part of what happened to you in 2007. Absolutely. And, you know, the reason why I totally sympathize with the prevailing cultural norm about sleep is because I was so much part of it. And, you know, I was building a company. The Huffington Post was two years old. I have two daughters, but at the time they were teenagers. One of them was going through

the process of looking at colleges to decide what college she was going to go to. So I was a single mom and an entrepreneur. And I really thought that the only thing I could really give up was sleep. And I was completely and utterly ignorant of the consequences. And that is stunning because I was reading everything. So how did I completely miss that part? And that's why now I tell everybody, especially women, because we're more prone to that, to put our own oxygen mask first. And I think that's such a great thing they say on airplanes. Yeah. And they don't say because they're nice.

They say it because we're not going to be very effective if we don't have our own oxygen mask on first. Yeah. It is interesting that, you know, as a friend of mine says, it's so much easier to read the label from outside the jar. When you're inside, you may know it, but you just don't see it and you don't act on it. So we've kind of talked about why this thing exists and a lot of the culture and the history behind it and the fact, but I wonder if also part of the challenge is that sleep feels like this nebulous thing that we just don't understand. You mentioned in the 70s, the first lab came out at Stanford and now there are a couple thousand. It feels like, and I wonder if you came up with the research for the book, with the sense that, okay, now we have 2,000 labs.

We have a growing and substantial body of research, but it still kind of feels like there's so much more that we don't know, and it's almost like frustrating. Like, how do I hold on to something? Well, right now, actually, we know so much that can convince us of the importance of sleep. I'm sure, to your point, there's a lot more that's going to be discovered now that we have so many scientists around the world investigating what happens when we sleep. But just of the thousands of studies that I've been through, there are two that stand out for me. One was after the discovery of REM sleep. Basically, our whole idea of what happens when we sleep was transformed.

You know, we used to think that it was a time of inactivity. Right. And with the discovery of REM sleep, we came to realize that it's a time of frenetic brain activity. And as Bill DeMent, who was part of the founding of the Stanford Sleep Center, said, we used to think that when you go to sleep, it's like you put the car in the garage and turn the ignition off. And I like kind of the new metaphor, which is you go to sleep and your car becomes a driverless car that runs essential errands for you. Right. And then there was a study that came out last year that explains in a very graphic way what these essential errands are. And I love it because it's simple. It's like the brain's lymphatic system, which is really the plumbing system of the brain, is activated during sleep.

So the brain can really do one of two things. It can either go through a day, here we are, we are talking, we're communicating, we're getting stuff done, or it can clean up the toxic waste that's accumulated during the day. It cannot do both at once. So interesting. And as the sleep scientist who came up with this findings put it, I think beautifully, it's like you can either entertain the guests or clean up the house. You know, you can't be doing both things at once. And we think

that entertaining the guests is the only thing life is about. And as a result, this toxic waste accumulates and the buildups are the cause of major diseases, including now they're finding out Alzheimer's. So the connection between the epidemic of sleep deprivation and the epidemic of Alzheimer's is becoming clearer and clearer. I think that's going to be one of the most fascinating things to keep uncovering. But also, it's connected with an enormous amount of other diseases. You know, it's basically a lowering of our immune system, a rising of all the inflammatory indicators. So everything from diabetes and heart disease and obesity and cancer is affected.

Yeah, and I think that is one of the big surprises. It seems like the connections that this body of research are showing between sleep and the breadth of effects that it's having from cognitive function to mood to disease risk to your risk for obesity or your metabolic effect. What's interesting to me is that there's been so much focus on exercise and nutrition to get healthy, but sleep is playing catch up when it feels like sleep is almost like the unlock key that allows you to exercise more effectively and gives you the self-regulation abilities to actually control your behavior,

to eat better and make better choices and go out and exercise. Absolutely. It's really, if you think of it, the three legs of the stool. And we've been focusing on exercise and nutrition. So even if we don't do them, we're aware of them, right? That we should be. But now it's very clear from the data that let's say if your goal is controlling your weight,

getting enough sleep is a bigger priority than exercising. Because what happens is that if you are sleep deprived, then all the hormones that make you want to not just eat more, but specifically crave sugars and carbs are activated. It's like a big evil plan. Yeah, it's a big evil plan. So you got up early before you were fully rested to go hit the gym,

and then you end up having a second cinnamon bun or whatever your sugary carb of choice is. And the result is that you see the connection between sleep deprivation and overweight and obesity and diabetes. incredibly moving clinic on Monday in Harlem, where we took over a church and had about 200 people from the community have come to what became a sleep clinic with doctors, with products, with mattresses, with everything to educate people around sleep. And it was absolutely amazing, the lack of awareness, the number of women, and they're mostly in their 30s, all of them overweight, who really thought that sleep was negotiable. In fact, they almost judged themselves for needing more than four hours sleep. Because it's almost as though they had completely bought into the cultural assumption that winners don't sleep or you snooze, you lose, you'll sleep when you're dead, all these slogans that we have.

And when we had them fill a questionnaire that I also have in the book about their sleep habits, and they would often wake up in the middle of the night, often multiple times, and go and have sweets and go and email or text or social media. They would sleep with their phones. You know, all the obvious rules of sleep hygiene. Right. And I thought, my God, this is like going to be one of the easiest ways once we win this campaign to change cultural norms,

to change habits and change health outcomes. Yeah, and especially when you're talking about in the context of introducing primary caregivers to these concepts because then we're not just talking about their health. And both of us know this as parents. You can say everything you want to say, but your kids are going to look at what you do in the world. And they're going to mimic that behavior because that's what's real to them.

So if we're saying sleep is important and we're saying these different things, but then we're staying up crazy hours and not doing it in our own lives and they see that, then everything we say becomes largely irrelevant. So one of the things that occurs to me, though, especially when you're talking about the experience that you just had, it sounds fantastic. I wonder if one of the challenges that folks have, especially when you're in a really challenging economic time, is you're working two jobs or you're working extraordinary hours and you feel like you don't have the ability to work less. And so it's like in that scenario, how do you have the conversation with somebody that says, well, like you've got to get more sleep when somebody's working two jobs to sort of put food on the table. Absolutely. That was exactly, actually, the conversations we did have.

And here's what is interesting. Even people who are working two or three jobs have discretionary time, believe it or not. And what was interesting is that they all acknowledge they have discretionary time, and they all spent it watching TV. And in fact, they saw this as their reward that is my time for relaxing and so that's really where the education comes in yes that's a relaxing you know watching house of cards or whatever is a relaxing thing but sleep is a priority and so very often we heard the same story that they would actually end up watching whatever the series they love and then fall asleep with the tv on right which is one of the worst things it's not good at all so given that i mean ideally there's a lot

we need to do in the economy to make it possible for people to have a living wage, to be able to build a life without having to have two jobs, to have better health insurance. You know, all these things that we need to do. And in another part of my life, when I'm wearing my political hat, you know, we are fighting these battles at the Huffington Post. But improving your sleep habits is in the hands of everyone right now. And it's going to affect everything else, including your resilience. Because in a sense, the harder your circumstances, the more resilience you need. And we've seen, you know, people who've been able to tap into their resilience in the darkest of circumstances. And the same terrible event, losing a job, for example, losing a loved one, affects people dramatically different. And one of the factors in determining how it affects you is are you exhausted? Yeah, it makes complete sense. So when you look at somebody who's

really struggling to incorporate that, I think one of the other things that comes up a lot and you speak to it is, are the challenges that people have sleep disruptions or insomnia or the various types of disorders. I don't know if we call them disorders. That's the right word. There's one that actually you write about that came into my awareness a few years back, which I think is really surprising for most people, I think, which is the idea that we should have eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. It's actually kind of not the way that it was until fairly recently. It's probably not biologically the way we would naturally sleep. Yes. Well, I have a whole section in the book about segmented sleep, as it's been known historically. So especially before the invention of the light bulb,

people would go to sleep when it became dark, and then they would wake up in the middle of the night and go back to sleep. But the time when they're awake is a very special time. It's not the same as being awake during the day. It's actually absolutely beautiful to read how there are special prayer books of prayers you would read in the middle of the night. If people wanted to have children, it is an optimal time to have kind of sex with the intention of procreating, to have intimate, it is an optimal time to have kind of sex with the intention of procreating, to have intimate conversations in bed, to basically connect with your loved ones or

yourself in a deeper way. And it's actually something which I totally understand because I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, and it used to make me anxious. It used to make me feel— Right, because you think we're taught that there's something wrong with that. Yes, that there's something wrong, or I'm going to be tired in the morning. And now I consider it as a blessed opportunity to meditate without having sort of a deadline. Like I have 20 minutes to meditate, or I have 30 minutes to meditate during the day or in the morning. So, I mean, last night I woke up. It happens more when I've been traveling and I'm kind of on, my body's adjusting to different time zones.

And I meditated for two hours. And it was amazing. And then I invariably drift to sleep. Sometimes I may drift to sleep after 30 minutes, but whatever it is, it's now a special time that I'm looking forward to rather than something that I'm dreading. Yeah. I think when you understand that waking up in the middle of the night, actually, it's actually, it's been the natural pattern for a long, long, long time, except for this very recent little burst. It's like it normalizes it. And it's like you mentioned, the thing that keeps most people up when they wake up at

that window, it's not that they have to stay up. It's the anxiety that I'm up because there's something wrong. And when you actually learn that that's actually completely normal, let me just use this time to do something peaceful or whatever it may be. If you wanted to read, but read, say, poetry or a spiritual book or something not at all related to work, and you'll find yourself drifting off to sleep unless you rev yourself up being stressed because you're awake. Right, you probably keep the lights off with no blue light and stuff like that. In fact, they did, yes, definitely don't read on an iPad or your smartphone. In fact, you know, one of the rules, rule number one in the second part of the book,

which is about tips and techniques, but I always urge everybody not to jump to that part because it's really important to build to that, to understand the science, to convince yourself why these behavioral changes are important, to convince yourself of why we're in this place in terms of our history. Yeah, because you become invested in the behavior.

Because you become invested in the behavioral changes because behavioral changes otherwise are very hard. But if we are convinced that it's important and if we make the changes microscopic, you know, that's all the changes I recommend are tiny steps, you know, nothing overnight. And then you build little by little. And the first absolutely essential non-negotiable change is turning off your devices before you're going to go to bed and turn off the light. Are you guilty? I thought we're doing like the baby steps first.

I can see a kind of guilt. No, I'm actually, I'm really good with technology in terms of powering everything down. We don't have a TV in the bedroom. And do you charge them outside your bedroom? No, but that's the next step, actually, because I let them charge, and you'll meet them again in the morning. I promise you they'll be there. The reason why it's particularly important is because if you wake up in the middle of the night, you're going to be tempted, if your phone is within reach, to go to it. Yeah.

I mean, it's that conditioning, you know. It's the intermittent, you know, we're just, if it's there and you know. It's the reason why people check their phone. What's the latest data I've seen? Like between 200 and 300 times a day now. Yes. Which is a little bit horrifying. And, you know, related to that is the fact that if you talk to people who have really created the current technological

world we live in, they will tell you, after a couple of glasses of wine, that the fact that social media consumes such a large part of our attention is not a bug of the system, it's a feature. They actually intended to create a system that by giving us validation and affirmation, you know, likes, et cetera, hooks us. Yeah, it's the gamification of it all. Yes. What's interesting is, and I think about this, I'm curious whether you think about this too, is could you use that same behavioral design to re-gamify or gamify sleep? Could you take the different things that you offer in your book and build sort of like an app or a larger behavioral structure around it

where you're getting that same hit for actually reconditioning your sleep? Actually, we are. I'm actually doing that with Bennett Miller, who is the director of Moneyball, among other great movies, Capote. And the idea here is to take, create an app, which we're working on, that turns your smartphone into a dump phone. And you cannot overwrite it. That's really the key here, except for emergencies.

Right. And you can use it, of course, during the day, which is very important for building those muscles. Right. To realize I'm having dinner with my children or I'm now going to work on my book or a big project, and I don't want to be interrupted. So what you'll be able to do is only be able to be interrupted by, let's say, you want your children to be able to reach you at all times. Right. You have like three numbers or something like that.

Yeah, you have three numbers that can get through. But even with them, the way we have it is that, let's say, if my daughter wanted to reach me and I had power down, she would get a message back saying, your mother is power down. Is this important to disturb her? Because sometimes they may want to reach you to say, hi, I love you or hi, I'm going to the movies. Right. So they have a choice. And what is great about that is it begins to give other people permission because you say, hey, you know, Jonathan is doing that and he's very productive.

He gets a lot done. So I can afford to do that. Or Bennett is doing that. So it's like the more we actually get messages from our friends that they're powered down and they're people who respect. Yeah. Because part of what we need to do is is give each other permission to recognize that hey if i don't text you back within five minutes it doesn't mean that i don't care for you or that i'm rude i know sometimes especially with texting

which is which you know people really think you have to respond immediately. I've gotten emails from, or texts from friends saying things like, are you okay? Yeah. Yes. I'm okay and I have a life and I'm so sorry. I have a life outside of my texting, outside of my phone. It's unbelievable. It's like, we've gotten to the point of, you know, the expectation that you have to respond, and we bind to that expectation. Yeah. So to a certain extent, you're retraining yourself, but you're also retraining all those around you who've come to expect that you're constant on and constant access.

And third thing, like you said, you're giving them permission to start to think about adopting this in their own lives. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

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iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. It's funny, when I was working on my last book, I put an autoresponder on my email that basically says, I'm in a creative cave for a really long time. If this is an absolute emergency, here's my assistance, you know, and they know where to find me. And some people got angry, but a lot of people were totally fine with that. The funny thing is what you said started, I've actually seen my exact email language now copied and pasted in other friends' emails when they're deep into a creative or entrepreneurial venture. Now, this just happened the other day.

I was emailing a friend, and I essentially got my words back to me. I love that. Don't you love it? And I called him up. I said, hey. And he said, sorry, man, but it was really good, so I'm just using it. That is fantastic. So, yeah.

And also, I love the language. Creative Cave is fabulous. So I think part of what we want to do is to use language that inspires people. So capturing that, making it more poetic, helping people connect with something deeper is going to be very important. In fact, the technology for what we're doing is not that complicated. What we're spending a lot of time on is the aesthetic experience so that it becomes something that you actually want to be part of. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So we talked a little bit, we talked about one or two things that you could do. Can we talk a little bit about some of the other sort of things that you can

actually do? Because I think we have a decent sense of where we came from in the history and why this is really important. Powering down electronics is probably, like you said, big step number one. What are some of, like, what do you consider the, like, the big three things that, you know, that will make the biggest difference of the 80-20 in the sleep world? What are the smallest number of things that you could do that make the biggest effect? So the one I'm going to mention now is very familiar to anybody who has children. You have children.

So you know that when your children are young, you don't just plunk them in bed. Right. Well, that's the fantasy. That's the fantasy, right? But it doesn't happen. Never. And so transition to sleep is as important for grownups as it is for children. We each need to create our own ritual. I write in the book about my ritual,

and I recommend that everybody becomes their own sleep scientist and trying things and not being ashamed if they end up with some very hokey thing. It doesn't matter what it is. Does it work for you? Try it. If it doesn't, move on to something else. My ritual is at least 30 minutes before I'm going to turn off the lights, I power down all my devices, take them outside my bedroom, lower all the lights, have a very hot bath. You may prefer a shower. It doesn't matter. But the ritual of having water on you is like washing the day away. It's like as the Bible says, the evil of today is enough.

You know, every day, however blessed, includes obstacles, challenges, things we wish were otherwise. This is like a moment when we say, this day is done. Right. And I'm now moving to my time to recharge, to reconnect with the deeper part of who I am, and then face tomorrow fully ready to face whatever life brings me. And I put Epsom salts in my bath, which also have magnesium that is soothing. I always have a flickering candle nearby. So I make it like a ritual.

And it can be five minutes or it can be 10 minutes, whatever you feel you need that night. And then having special PJs or night dresses or a T-shirt, whatever, that you only wear to sleep. I used to sleep in my gym clothes, not the ones I wore that same day. But literally, you know, I mean, I would wear the same stuff. And your brain gets conflicting messages. Are we going to the gym or are we powering down? Right, because it makes the associations. Yes, so having special things.

And again, you can treat yourself. And if you're a woman and you like something silky, buy it for yourself. And whatever it is that kind of makes you feel I'm ready to go to bed. And then in bed, I only read real books that have nothing to do with work. And we're doing actually a social media campaign around nightstands. Because even if you're in a dorm and you just have that small space, the nightstand can become like a little altar. Yeah.

Where my nightstand has a little vase, even if you just have one flower, I say to, we're doing a college outreach tour, and my goal is to tell them, you know, you can cut a flower from all the gardens in the colleges and put it in your vase. You know, you don't have to spend money. Hopefully they have a lot of flowers.

Yeah, let's hope that I'm not accused of recommending stealing flowers, but just something fresh and alive, a picture of something you love. It could be your pet, your child, your parents, your best friend, whatever. If you are going to put your phones so far away that you won't hear your alarm, there are all these great old-fashioned alarm clocks. The old wind-up ones. Yeah, that you can put there next to your bed. And I also have a dream book.

Tell me more about that, too, because I know you actually write more about that. That apparently has been a tradition that you've had on and off for a number of years. Yes. So, as you know, I have a whole section on dreams because, of course, every major religion looks at dreams as an incredible way to connect with something bigger than ourselves, a way for us to get messages from God, a way for us to process through difficult moments in our lives, to get new insights.

And the history of dreams and the literature of dreams is amazing. And the number of scientists who came up with great inventions in dreams is amazing. And even the number of people who we very much admire today, like Larry Page, he gave a commencement speech in which he talked about

how the idea of Google came to him in a dream. Have you experienced any of your biggest ideas or biggest breakthroughs or deepest awakenings or connections through dreams? I've experienced both deep awakenings and also solutions. Like if there's a thorny problem, something at work that I'm not sure how to resolve, it's so much easier to resolve it. Just wake up with it. Yes. After a dream or things that I may have been anxious about that I see another perspective in a dream. Yes, absolutely. Because I know I've had that also.

In fact, I don't know if you find this also, but I find if I'm really thinking about something, a problem that I need to have solved, and I almost just kind of write it down beforehand, almost try and get it out of my head, but then go to sleep. I feel like I'm actually more likely to wake up at some point just with a big chunk of the solution. Absolutely. That is so true. And again, dream literature explains that because it's like what they called in ancient Rome and ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, dream incubation. You actually go to bed,

making it very clear either verbally to yourself, to someone else, to an Egyptian sleep priestess. If you go to the temple of Luxor, you know, there were priestesses whose job was to prepare you for sleep and to help you incubate dreams that would answer questions. There could be questions that had to do with your jobs or your worldly concerns. There could be questions that had to do with healing. If you were sick and you wanted some knowledge about what to do,

you could go to, you know, one of the Delphic temples and get that information. Ask the oracle. Yes, and get that information during sleep. So you're absolutely right. There is tremendous tradition around that that we are now rediscovering in a modern way. Yeah. And I guess it goes back to the earlier part of our conversation, right?

Is that the original assumption of, you know, the car turns off is just completely wrong. That there's profound work that can be done. So, you know, why not see if you can seed that work in a way where maybe we can get something the most productive output from it, you know, and who knows exactly how to seed it properly, but it seems like there are some things that may be beneficial. Yes. And I've talked to people who help with dream incubation and they give specific examples of what you can do in the book. And if you are interested in that, absolutely. There are a lot of techniques of how to facilitate remembering your dreams.

And the absolute easiest thing is to write something down every morning, even if you remember one word or a feeling, because then you give your subconscious the understanding that you care about your dreams. Right. And you don't take them for granted. You train yourself to recall. And also to have on your nightstand a pen that has a flashlight so you don't have to turn on the light because the less disturbance you have, the more you're likely to remember it. And if you are sleeping with someone, you don't want to wake them up.

No, there's the practical and there's also just the social side. There's the practical and the mystical all together. No, I love that. So just cycling back to the big things. So we talked about removing technology. We talked about creating a ritual. Would you consider those sort of like the two most important things? I think these are the two most important.

Then there are very specific things that then you can create these conditions even if you don't sleep in ideal conditions. So ideal conditions are blackout curtains and a temperature that's in the upper 60s. But let's say you don't have blackout curtains and let's say, and the other third thing is no noise, but let's say you live in New York City and have no blackout curtains. I think temperature is easier to control, at least in the winter. So I think earplugs. I don't go anywhere without earplugs. And a sleep mask. These are simple things.

These are simple things. That make a huge difference. That make a huge difference. And so you can carry them everywhere i mean i i never fly without them all these things you know are super easy to um to impose some change some change some appropriate change in your environment even if the circumstances of your life and your environment are difficult at that time. Yeah. No, I love that. And I wonder also whether, because the things we're talking about, they're not, they're

revolutionary, but they're not revolutionary. You know, they're revolutionary in terms of the impact that they can have, but they're pretty straightforward and accessible for everybody. Absolutely. Which is the beauty of it. And that is my goal, to make them accessible for everybody. I think it's just, a lot of it is a matter of awareness. And remember, we're swimming in a culture where people praise the people who don't sleep enough, where people at work are literally congratulated for working 24-7, which is the equivalent of coming to work drunk. We have the data now where men especially brag about how little sleep they need

or how little sleep they got, which is kind of another version of who's is bigger among men. And now women buy into it because they don't want to appear to be on some kind of sleepy mommy track. So there's a lot we have to change. And we chose in our campaign in April to start with students in colleges because we feel if you can change habits and understanding among millennials, their whole lives would be transformed. Yeah, at an earlier point, right? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

And also if you can do that in millennials who are notoriously sleep deprived. Exactly, sleep deprived. Who believe like in the John Bon Jovi song, you know, I'll sleep when I'm dead. That's a big shift. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference

between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. One of the things that you talked about also, and that I've experimented with for a number of years now, is, so we talked about the dark side of technology and sleep, but there's a light side of technology and sleep now also.

So you mentioned the app that you're working on right now. I've experimented with a number of different devices and apps and technologies. One of them is actually in your book, the Bedit device. So what's fascinating is that it's becoming easier and easier to actually understand what's happening when you're sleeping through simple and available technologies. Because I think sometimes we don't necessarily, when you wake up the next day, you don't necessarily remember or you couldn't tell somebody, well, I had a great sleep or a terrible sleep.

But if you can look back and there's something that shows you, you know, you actually, you know, you had zero delta sleep or you had, you know, that your sleep was that you were really light and it was really short and it was very fragmented, it helps give you data that you can start to rebuild your behavior around on a more consistent basis that's more objective. And I feel like that could be a real game changer. Oh, absolutely. In fact, it's kind of fascinating and paradoxical that we're now able to use technology to help us disconnect from technology and prioritize our sleep. And I love that.

That's why I have an appendix in the book of about 12 of my favorite apps, including Bedit, that can help us do that and can inform us and empower us to take control of our sleep lives. Yeah. I'm really interested to see where that goes because that's part of that conversation we were having about can we take the behavioral design that makes people really want to use apps and build it into technology that helps us actually do things

that are really beneficial to us. So zooming the lens out, you've done this intense deep dive a couple of years ago on redefining success. You've done this intense deep dive on sleep, which seems like it was sort of a natural evolution of one of the biggest pain points from redefining success. And it sounds like you started to answer this question in our conversation about what do you really want to come out of this? You know, what's the legacy level impact that you would love to see happen from the conversation

around sleep? So I want to really, first of all, find people where they are, whatever their objectives are. If your objective is simply to be better at your job, I want them to understand that sleep is a huge performance enhancer. And that's why I have so much information from athletes like Kobe Bryant and Andre Inguadala from the Golden State Warriors about how sleeping enough improved their game. So if all you care about is winning, sleep is the way to go. But also I hope that people may come for the job-enhancing benefits and stay for the life-enhancing benefits. Because, of course, my ultimate hope is that whatever the entry point

and however you got interested in this, you will also discover that we are more than our jobs and that our identity cannot be shrunken into who we are in the world. That however magnificent what we may be doing in the world is, who we are in our essence is more magnificent. And I feel that sleep is also a gateway to the mystery of being alive. And for me, that's the most sacred thing about it. But you don't have to start there. You can start at wherever you are and kind of go on that journey. And by improving our relationship with sleep, we will unquestionably improve every other part of our lives. Yeah, beautiful.

So I want to come full circle. The name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that term out to you, to live a good life, what does it mean to you? For me, living a good life means being fully present in my life. And to me, that means not phoning it in, not multitasking to the point of missing the moment. And for me, that means being recharged in the course of my life. That makes me more empathetic. So I want to give more to others. I want to make every interaction count. I mean, I know that if I was here with you and I was sleep deprived, I would

be looking at my watch and saying how much longer is it? Instead, I don't know how long we've been here. I've loved it, you know, and I'm loving the exchange, but I know what the alternative is. And I've been there so much in my life that I think for me, that's no longer a good life. That's really kind of betraying life's goals and the full possibilities of life. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, thanks so much for listening. We love sharing real unscripted conversations and ideas that matter. And if you enjoy that too, and if you enjoy what we're up to, I'd be so grateful if you

would take just a few seconds and rate and review the podcast. It really helps us get the word out. You can actually do that now right from the podcast app on your phone. If you have an iPhone, you just click on the reviews tab and take a few seconds and jam over there. And if you haven't yet subscribed while you're there, then make sure you hit the subscribe button while you're at it. And then you'll be sure to never miss out on any of our incredible guests or conversations or riffs. And for those of you, our awesome community who are on other platforms, any love that you might be able to offer sharing our message would just be so appreciated. Until next time, this is Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered.

Summer runs or playoff season meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Results will vary.