HealthyGamerGG - Why Having A Bedtime Routine Doesn't Always Work

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

Have you ever found yourself in a position where your routine has gotten in the way? Maybe you've missed a deadline, or missed a social event in order to abide by it. In today's episode, Dr K. address...es that issue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax. Want to browse with confidence? Get pre-qualified with no impact on your credit score and shop within your budget. From luxury to family rides. CarMax has options for almost every price range, including over 25,000 cars under $25,000.
Starting point is 00:00:21 Want to get started? Head to CarMax.com for details and get pre-qualified today. Want to drive? CarMax. This episode is brought to you. to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents who
Starting point is 00:00:49 close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at Redfin.com. Own the dream. Today we're going to talk about why a bedtime routine isn't enough to actually get you to sleep. So this is a really common problem that people experience where if I need to go to sleep, I get stressed out about it, right? Oh my God, I need to sleep. I need to sleep. I have a final tomorrow.
Starting point is 00:01:18 And the more stressed out you get, the more you need to go to sleep, the harder it is to actually sleep. Or you wake up in the middle of the night and you're like, oh my God, I need to be well rested tomorrow. Why did I wake up? I need to get back to sleep. I need to get back to sleep. And so the stronger that your desire is to go to sleep, the more sleep eludes you.
Starting point is 00:01:35 So if this is a problem, oftentimes what we end up doing is try to implement a bedtime routine. And I remember when I first encountered this, I was training to become a psychiatrist. And I had this brilliant lecture on sleep hygiene from someone who is faculty at the Harvard Medical School. And they came in and they said, if you have a patient who has difficulty sleeping, here is what you do. You tell them to go to bed at the same time every single day. This helps them train their circadian rhythm and forms the habit and will help them sleep. You tell them there are no devices to be used for an hour before bed because the blue light from the device suppresses melatonin production and will interfere with their sleep. And you tell them that doing things like half an hour of meditation before you go to bed has been clinically proven to help people sleep.
Starting point is 00:02:23 And then here I was a second year psychiatry resident recently minted MD. I go to my patients and I say, my friend, I know you have difficulty sleeping, but I have the answers. all you need to do is go to bed at the same time every day. You need to stop using devices and you need to meditate for half an hour. And of course, my patients did what all patients do. They went home and they said, ah, I didn't realize I was supposed to go to bed at the same time. I didn't realize I was supposed to meditate for half an hour.
Starting point is 00:02:46 I didn't realize that I wasn't supposed to use my phone. And then they all slept very peacefully for the rest of their lives. No, it doesn't work like that. Right? The whole problem with sleep hygiene and these evidence-based recommendations is that that's hard to do. It's kind of like telling someone like, hey, you're overweight and you've got diabetes, just go to the gym every day. What I discovered as a clinician is that implementing the right advice about around bedtime
Starting point is 00:03:13 was very difficult to actually do. That the people who were able to and had enough routine and frontal lobe function and willpower to go to bed at the same time every single night, those were not the ones who were complaining about sleep. That the answers that we had didn't seem to work for the people who actually. actually struggled with the problem. And so instead, what we need to do if we want to understand sleep is we have to understand the physiology, the neuroscience of sleep.
Starting point is 00:03:39 What is it that keeps you awake and what is it that lets you fall asleep? So we're going to start with something called the reticular activating system. So this part is back here kind of in the back of our brain. So this is the part of our brain that governs wakefulness. So it does things like tells us when to wake up. And when the reticular activating system is calm, then it allows us to go to sleep. So this is the first thing that we've got to understand about sleep. Sleep is not something that you can do.
Starting point is 00:04:06 It is a circumstance that you can create for your brain so that your brain will say, okay, fine, it's time to go to sleep. Now I can afford to sleep. This is what the reticular activating system responds to. Not just habitual signals, it's whether you can afford to sleep or not. So how do we figure out what works for the reticular activating system? And this is when I was working as a clinician. I sort of implemented this advice, right?
Starting point is 00:04:30 So I went to people, I said, Just go to bed at the same time every day. Don't use devices. You're set. And so I was struggling with these patients, and I started to realize that there's this other principle from medicine called positive deviance, which is that if you want to figure out how to do something, you don't take the group of people who don't know how to do it and then try to solve that problem.
Starting point is 00:04:50 What you actually do is take the people who never had a problem to begin with and figure out what they do. Once you do that, then you will develop what you need to do for the people who struggle. So I know that sounds kind of weird, so I'll give you all like the actual example of where positive deviance came from. So we're a group of researchers who were trying to fix malnutrition in Vietnam. And so they went to this part of rural Vietnam, and there was 50% of children had childhood malnutrition. Oh my God. 50% that's terrible.
Starting point is 00:05:21 So how do you fix malnutrition? Easy. You give people food. So these researchers showed up. They had a grant to get some amount of food, but because of some kind of government corruption, none of the food ever showed up. And so then these researchers are like, well, how are we supposed to fix this problem without any food? Because that's how you fix malnutrition. Duh, right?
Starting point is 00:05:38 Just eat, bro. Just go to bed at the same time every day, bro. Like, that's how we fix it, right? Easy. Just exercise. Just feed them. And so the government was like, oh, yeah, we're really sorry about that, but can you please try? And so these doctors were like, okay, fine, we'll give it a shot.
Starting point is 00:05:53 And then that's when they realize something really important. 50% of kids are malnourished. And then we said, but hold on a second. Do we already say that? Yeah. But what they also realized is, If 50% of kids have malnutrition, what that means is that 50% of kids don't have malnutrition. And they all live in the same rural area.
Starting point is 00:06:10 They all have the same socioeconomic status. They live down the street from each other. So they started asking themselves the question, how is it that 100% of people are not children don't have malnutrition in this particular area? And that's when they discovered there were a couple of different behaviors that the healthy kids' parents did. And it's very simple things. Like there's a particular weed that grows in the rice paddies, which is viewed as poor people's food, but is highly nutritious. That was one of the behaviors.
Starting point is 00:06:38 And the second behavior is frequently when you're in the rice paddy, you'll see different things like shrimps and clams and things like that. And literally half of the village would carry an apron where they would scoop up that kind of stuff and stick it in the apron. And the other half didn't. And when they went home, they took these veggies and they took the little shrimps and clams and whatever. And they added them to their regular diet. And they sort of fix malnutrition that way. You get a little protein, you get a little micronutrient, you get a little bit of fiber, and that actually fixes the problem. So we're going to do that for sleep.
Starting point is 00:07:07 So what we're going to do is take a look at people who sleep healthily and what is going on in their reticular activating system. And once we understand that, we will discover how to be able to sleep in a healthy manner. And the majority of it actually has nothing to do with bedtime. Hey, just a quick note. A lot of people will ask us, what do I do next? And that's why we built Dr. Kay's guide. It's a comprehensive resource that distills over 20 years of my experience, both as a monk and as a psychiatrist. And it's designed in a way that's tailored to fit your needs.
Starting point is 00:07:39 So if you're interested in better understanding your mind and taking control of your life, check out the link below. So, let's understand the reticular activating system. All right. So here is the RAS. It sits back here around our brain stem. and it governs wakefulness. So now the key thing to understand is that sleep is not something that you do. It is something that happens to you. In the right set of circumstances,
Starting point is 00:08:12 sleep comes naturally, right? And sometimes y'all may have experienced this because there are certain circumstances that you trigger when you don't want to fall asleep. Oh, I'm here to watch this movie, but I fell asleep during the movie. How did that happen? Because you triggered the right set of circumstances
Starting point is 00:08:27 And even though your mind is saying, I want to stay awake, your RAS is like, nah, man, we're going to actually go to sleep right the second, even though you paid $18 for this ticket. So what does the reticular activating system respond to? The first is that our frontal lobes have a measure of what we're supposed to do today. So we have this idea of amount of work. And there's this phenomenon called revenge, bedtime, procrastination. So this is what happens in revedget time procrastination. So we know we're supposed to do something today, right? I have some amount of work to do or I'm supposed to have fun.
Starting point is 00:09:08 Our mind kind of has this idea of like what a normal productive day looks like. So if we waste the day and we try to go to bed, what does our mind tell us? Our mind is like, no, no, no, we can't go to bed yet. We have so much stuff to do. And if we have stuff to do, this goes and activates, the reticular activating system. It tells, the frontal lobes say, hey, we haven't done enough.
Starting point is 00:09:32 These are the parts of our brain that measure, like, how much we've done. Like, the reticular activating system doesn't know how to do that. It also exists in, like, turtles and stuff, and they don't have, like, a daily quota for anything.
Starting point is 00:09:41 Or maybe they do. Who knows? But this is where, if we sort of look at, like, okay, what are we supposed to do? We're supposed to get some work done. And if we don't do that work, then the reticular activating system is going to, or the frontal lobes will go to the reticular activating system.
Starting point is 00:09:53 And they'll say, hey, we can't go to sleep yet because we haven't done our work for today. Now, this becomes increasingly problematic because if we look at the frontal lobe and sleep, what we discover is that when our frontal lobes are impaired, so when we sleep less, okay, what actually ends up happening is it weakens our frontal lobes. So our reticular activating system won't let us fall asleep unless we've done what we're supposed to today. And when I go back to this principle of positive deviants, I actually, when I was really trying to help my patient sleep, I stopped asking my patients who were struggling what they did to sleep.
Starting point is 00:10:35 I started asking my patients who never have any trouble sleeping. I took all my patients who didn't have any trouble sleeping. And I asked them, hey, how do you spend your day? And here's what I discovered. The first four hours of the day are productive. You don't even need to do everything that your mind wants to do. This is very important to understand. Because a lot of people will say like, oh my God, do I have to finish everything for the day?
Starting point is 00:11:03 No. You just have to trick your brain into thinking, hey, at least I had a productive day. And the part of the day that makes you think that you had a productive day is actually the first four hours of the day. And this is one of the reasons that sleep is so difficult is because we don't realize that the majority of being able to sleep is not about how you go to bed. It's how you spend your waking hours. So if you want to fix this revenge bedtime procrastination where you feel like I haven't done enough for day, what you really need to control is the first four hours of the day.
Starting point is 00:11:34 Come hell or high water, drink a big cup of coffee if you need to, but for the first four hours of the day, do something, anything. It doesn't matter what you do. You can do laundry, you can take out the trash, you can do some work, you can exercise. It doesn't matter. Just spend four hours of productive time first thing in the day. This will calm down your frontal lobes,
Starting point is 00:11:53 and you'll feel like you did enough today. Even if you, and once you have that feeling, it'll allow the reticular activating system to calm down, which will in turn help you fall asleep. That's number one. Number two, you got to manage your emotions. Now, what do we mean by managing our emotions? So something has changed recently in our society.
Starting point is 00:12:18 Since the advent of basically smartphones, our amount of emotional management has dropped, has cratered. So what we know is that basically any technological device, okay, whether it's a cell phone, social media, video games, pornography, binge watching, Netflix, HBO, Hulu, whatever. It doesn't matter. YouTube, Twitch, doesn't matter. All of this stuff does one common thing in your brain, which is that it suppresses the activity of your limbic system,
Starting point is 00:12:46 which is your emotional circuit of the brain. So basically, as we go through, throughout our day, if you kind of think about how you spend your day, you're basically constantly on a device for most of us. We work on a computer. We study with a laptop. We are on an, we have an audio book or we're listening to music in the car. There's always some kind of electronic at play. We use the bathroom with our cell phones. We are on our phones on the train. We're on our phones when we're at dinner. We're on phones when we're standing in line. So phones, phones, phones, phones, phones. So what that means is that we are suppressing negative emotions throughout.
Starting point is 00:13:20 the day. Now, what do you think is the effect of negative emotions on your reticular activating system? When you're filled with negative emotions, are we like, oh, man, I just went through a terrible breakup and my boss yelled at me, wow, I really want to go to sleep. I can't wait to lay down. Sure, I can't wait for this day to be over. I can't wait for tomorrow. But you're not like, oh, man, I really just, I'm so excited about going to bed today, not how it works. So negative emotions activate the reticular activating system. And by the way, a reticular activating system
Starting point is 00:13:55 is what wakes you up. Okay? So as long as we're like stressed out or anxious, we can't go to sleep. And now we begin to see this problem of, I really need to go to sleep. Right? Because when you really need to go to sleep,
Starting point is 00:14:08 what are you feeling internally? You're feeling anxious. You're feeling worried. And that, in turn, activates your stress system, activates adrenaline, cortisol. We'll get to another neurotransmitter or hormone called orexone.
Starting point is 00:14:20 in a second, activates all these different hormones that then turn on your reticular activating system. So now the question is, what do we do about this? And y'all may have noticed this that when you go to bed, finally, when you're done with a device, all of these negative emotions start flooding up, right? So when you go to bed, if you try to go to bed on time, what is the experience of someone who actually goes to bed on time? They sit there and their mind is hyperactive, wandering, and sometimes even flooded with negative
Starting point is 00:14:48 emotions. And so how do we fix that problem? What we do is we wait until the fatigue is so high that we just get zonked out. Or what we end up doing is using a device to keep emotions at bay and thoughts until we pass out with the device. You fall asleep watching something. Also, expensive. Sell their pint-sized pieces on D-pop and list them in minutes with no selling fees. Because somewhere, a dad refuses to pay full price for the clothes his kids will outgrow tomorrow.
Starting point is 00:15:36 And he's ready to buy your son's entire wardrobe right now. Consider your future growth bird budget, secured. Start selling on D-pop, where taste recognizes taste. Payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details. Right, and that's because you have to wait until that fatigue becomes so overwhelming because if you ever stop to turn off a device, all these thoughts and emotions come flooding back.
Starting point is 00:16:02 Now, this creates an even bigger problem because if you are using this strategy, what this means is that you are getting to such an excessive level of fatigue that it weakens your frontal lobes. And now we get into a real problem, because once our frontal lobes are exhausted, this is where our willpower comes from, comes from the frontal lobes. And once our frontal lobes are exhausted, we have zero willpower. And once we have zero willpower, we can't force ourselves to go to bed on time. The other really interesting thing, there are three major drains of willpower.
Starting point is 00:16:37 And emotional suppression controlling your emotions is one of these strongest drains of your willpower. So if you kind of think about it, right? So if you get really pissed at someone, man, you want to yell, you want to yell, you want to go just wher, and you hold it in, you hold it in. It's so hard to hold it in. And afterward, you're like, you can't do anything, right? You can't like, okay, now I'm going to go to the gym. Now I'm going to practice guitar.
Starting point is 00:16:59 You're so exhausted after controlling your emotions. And so here we are suppressing our emotions all the time. They build up. They become very difficult to control. Our frontal lobes become exhausted. We end up passing out. We wake up the next day tired. When we wake up the next day tired, we can't be productive in the first four hours.
Starting point is 00:17:18 Huge problem. So what do we do about this? This is one really simple way to manage your mind. motions. You don't even have to fix anything. All you need to do is give space before you go to bed for all that thinking that's going to come anyway, right? Because when we go to bed, all the thinking comes. So you spend one hour and you're going to say, oh my God, Dr. Kay, I don't have one hour. I'm so busy. Fucking look at your phone. Look at your daily usage of your phone. And I would bet money that 95% of you have at least two hours a day on your phone. The average
Starting point is 00:17:51 amount of cell phone use in the population today is around three hours and 45 minutes and even at the top end like 50% of people use up to five to six hours of technology usage, especially cell phones per day. So you have the hour, you just choose to waste it on your phone, which we both know. Okay. So you want one hour of unstructured mental activity. So what does that mean? You can go for a walk. You can sit at a blank, you can stare at a blank. You can stare at a You can journal if you want to, just something where your mind is not occupied by something. And this is the cool thing about the mind is it'll clean itself out on its own. All you have to do is give it the space.
Starting point is 00:18:32 It may be a little bit unpleasant, but you'll notice all these thoughts come up. This is why I think walking is the best. There's all kinds of other things going on with your cardiovascular system with walking. So I'd say if you can take a walk for an hour at any point of the day, ideally maybe before bed can help some. But at any point throughout the day, give your mind the space to emotionally decompress. because your emotions are going to activate your reticular activating system. Third thing that we're going to talk about is my boy, erexin.
Starting point is 00:18:59 This is a hormone or neurotransmitter that governs wakefulness and motivation. It's actually, I think, one of the most, it's kind of like the silver bullet that we're missing in terms of motivation. So orexin is important for the development of addiction. It's important for going to bed on time. and it's important for being focused and motivated to do things. It's actually like really interesting. So what we want here is a modulation of our orexon level. And we have very little science into this,
Starting point is 00:19:30 but this is the best that I've been able to piece together. So very high fat, diet, or even meal, triggers orexin, increases in orexin. And orexin will keep you awake. High carb decreases orexin. Okay? So this is where we've got to be super careful about the amount of total fat. If you look at a lot of health food nowadays, they'll have low carb because everyone's like carbs, carbs, carbs are bad.
Starting point is 00:20:06 Protein is good. We're going to do protein. I'm going to add some quinoa. I'm going to add some of these grains. P protein, protein, protein, protein, protein. And carbs are bad, no carb. We're going to put all this artificial cachera. And if you look at any kind of like health food, you go look at the health food aisle, what you'll find is all of these things are very high in fat.
Starting point is 00:20:24 oftentimes saturated, but it's healthy. It's coconut oil. So we're going to put a pound of coconut oil, sprinkle of sugar, artificial sweetener, and we're going to take some weird kind of, we're going to take the husk, we're going to take the fiber,
Starting point is 00:20:36 we're going to take the unedible, we're going to take a leaf and a bark, and we are going to turn it into bark flour, and we'll add it to it and make it healthy. That's how it works. So you have to be careful about this. Very practically what this means is, baby, you know it,
Starting point is 00:20:53 high carbs for dinner. Oh my God. Ideally complex carbohydrates. So we have that carbohydrate load that's actually sprinkling into your system for the next four or six hours. But by all means have a whole wheat pasta, have some fruit, have a lot of pasta. Go for it. Add some protein, adds a fiber. We're not saying that you should have a, you know, just straight unhealthy carbs.
Starting point is 00:21:16 High fiber, high carbohydrate dinner before meal works really well. This is what I used to call the burrito trick. or if I really needed to go to sleep, I would go eat a burrito that had rice in it, and it would slip me into a food coma. That's really unhealthy, so we don't want to do that. But you can actually have a healthy amount of carbs. Slam a bunch of carbs before you go to bed. And by all means, eat low carb throughout the rest of the day.
Starting point is 00:21:37 It's okay. All right. Talk to your doctor if you have any health concerns, but this is what we sort of know about orexin. We don't really know much else about what triggers it. So be super careful about high fat diets. And instead, what we want to do, especially before sleep, is get that erecton level to go down. Next thing that we want to do is engage our diurnal rhythm.
Starting point is 00:22:02 So part of the reason that we have difficulty falling to sleep is because our brain doesn't know what's daytime and what's nighttime. Because generally speaking, the two are the same. Right. So I wake up, I sit in this office, I turn on some artificial lights and my brain doesn't know whether it's daytime or nighttime. It looks, in fact, the way that this, literally this setup is made is that it looks the same, whether it's daytime or nighttime so we can control for lighting. Right? That's why I have these lights the way that I have them so I can do this. This is what daylight looks like.
Starting point is 00:22:32 Okay? And then I turn this shit on. And then it's like, oh, look, it's daytime. But I can do this in the middle of the night. It makes no difference. So what you really want to do is try to spend some time outdoors, ideally immediately after you wake up. But you want to give your brain a period of light and give your brain a period of darkness. Even if you're working on a screen, try to do it in a place. where you have windows or get some kind of sunshine,
Starting point is 00:22:55 go outside for a few minutes. And this is the key thing. You also, as best as possible, want to give your brain darkness. So what I would recommend is going outside in the AM and after dark. This is also very important. Now, we have no science to support this, at least that I'm aware of. But in my experience, our brain is really, really good at picking up different kinds of things. So I suspect if you walk outside that even moonlight or starlight or any of that kind of
Starting point is 00:23:29 darkness, the darkness of outside, there's no doubt in my mind that somehow your brain can tell it is nighttime if we're outside. It's not just about lighting is what I mean. You can sort of tell the difference. There's all kinds of weird chemical signals that we haven't figured out. But engage your diurnal rhythm and let your brain know, hey, it's like nighttime now. So that may trigger particular things that we haven't discovered yet. Okay.
Starting point is 00:23:50 Now, the last thing that we're going to talk about is, unfortunately, has to do with devices. So this is where things get kind of interesting. So the research on bedtime procrastination has gotten to a point where we've discovered something, which is that there is a new area of procrastination. Basically, based on my clinical assessment and the reading of the literature, we sort of know that how late we stay awake has gotten about 200% worse in the last. 20 years. Okay? I want to say something like 80 to 90 percent of teenagers are actually sleep deprived and they sleep like around 11 p.m. or after 11 p.m. I want to say 40 percent or something
Starting point is 00:24:31 sleep at 1 a.m. I'm rusty on the statistics. And so what's changed? So researchers actually discovered something very interesting. There's all this procrastination that we've already talked about, but there is a new level of procrastination. There is a different kind of procrastination that actually gets added to the mix. This new level of procrastination is there's procrastination to go to bed, and there is procrastination to fall asleep. So now people are spending one to two hours in bed trying to go to sleep, but what they're actually doing is they're on a device. Cell phones are number one.
Starting point is 00:25:06 And so what we've sort of found is that we've doubled the amount of delay in going to bedtime, and basically all of it has to do with cell phones. So now we get into a problem, because how do we protect this, right? What do we do about that? because these are, so this is where sleep hygiene is kind of correct. We do not want to take our phones to bed. And it's not enough for me to tell you that, but let me explain to you why. So here's what we know about bad behaviors.
Starting point is 00:25:30 So this actually comes from research on suicide. So if you look at the, there's a guy named Matt Knock who's done a ton of research on suicide, has awesome, awesome papers on it. So what we sort of know about suicide is that the majority of people, I want to say 80 to 90% of people do not premeditate their suicide. What they do is they make it. impulsive decision and within five minutes of making the decision, they make the suicide attempt, 80 to 90% of people. About 40% of people decide within 60 seconds. They say, hey, you know what,
Starting point is 00:26:00 I'm going to kill myself and then they actually go ahead and do it, like within 60 seconds. This is not what the media tells us. The media is like, oh my God, people plan and plan and plan. No, no. So here's what we know. So when someone is suicidal, there's one major thing that we try to do as mental health professionals, we remove access to suicide. So we're going to take away your gun. We're going to take away your noose. We're going to take away the way in which you can kill yourself. But you can say, but Dr. Kay, can't someone just go out and buy a gun if they really want to? Absolutely they can. Why do we do it this way? It's because if they have the impulse for suicide and they have access to suicidal means, that is what is the highest risk. What we know is if we take
Starting point is 00:26:43 away the access. The impulse will decrease over time. So people may feel suicidal. And I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but a lot of people feel suicidal a lot, but they're not killing themselves all the time. So the whole idea behind this impulse of suicide is if you can ride out the impulse without taking an action, you'll be okay, hopefully. And if you're struggling with that, you should absolutely see a mental health professional. But what we learn from suicide and human behavior in general and why do we look at suicide? It's because it's an important behavior. So we've really studied it a lot. So same thing is true of cell phones. If you have an impulse and you have access, then you're screwed.
Starting point is 00:27:20 And phone designers, every technology designer has figured this out. This is why if you look at it, what is the trend with device usage? There are fewer and fewer barriers. So now you have face unlock, you have fingerprint unlock, you've got auto logins, you've got auto loading, auto patching. Why do people auto patch video games? because they know that if you load up and you have to wait five minutes to play, then you're going to go do something else.
Starting point is 00:27:48 The desire to play a video game will disappear. So you literally have a whole industry, and I'm not trying to demonize any particular person. Everyone has figured this out. TikTok, YouTube, every game designer, every social media platform. You now even have things like if you log into Netflix, they start auto playing something to engage your attention. Because before they auto played, what did you do when you loaded up your on-demand thing? You scrolled for 15 minutes looking for something to watch and then kind of decided, I have nothing to watch and then you turn it off.
Starting point is 00:28:16 And then every single one of these like online streaming platforms is like, oh no. The only thing worse than them for you turning it off is you switch to a different platform. And that other platform has something auto playing and then you click on that. And now Netflix has lost and HBO has won. So there's an industry that is trying to get you to capitalize on your impulses. They're trying to improve access. So the moment you have an impulse, you have access to the thing and then you lose an hour, right? Because that's what happens.
Starting point is 00:28:46 When you're scrolling on some kind of shorts, platform, reels, TikTok, whatever. A five second impulse, let me see what you know that you want to do it. A five second impulse results in an hour of lost time. And that's what they're trying to do. Science of human behavior, folks. And this is where the sleep hygiene becomes really important, right? We're going to come full circle here. You have to understand that when you go to bed,
Starting point is 00:29:09 you have this industry that for every minute, literally every minute that you spend on your phone, multiple people are getting paid. One person's selling your data. One person is making ad revenue. Then you switch to something else.
Starting point is 00:29:23 Someone else is making the ad revenue. Everyone's selling your data. So everybody wants you to use it. And they're going to make you try to use it. And they recognize that if we can make this as easy as possible, if we can improve access as much as possible, then they'll give in to their impulses and we win. They make money.
Starting point is 00:29:40 So what can you to solve this? This is where I could say, okay, go ahead and train your brain through meditation. Go spend years in the Himalayas become an absolute Chad monk and then you will have impulse control. Or what you can do is remove the access. You can do what we do as mental health professionals. We're trying to keep people alive. Remove the access.
Starting point is 00:29:59 So literally, one to two hours of going to bed later than usual is because people use cell phones. So do not take your phone into the bedroom. or do not take it anywhere near your bed. I will sometimes leave it on a dresser on the opposite side. And this is for those of y'all who are like, but what if somebody needs me in the middle of the night? I want you to just think for a second. In the last 365 days,
Starting point is 00:30:20 how many in the middle of the night phone calls have you gotten? I'm a fucking doctor. I've gotten only a handful. Right? And it's people's job to call me in the middle of the night if they're having trouble. So you may miss something, so that's fine. If you don't want to miss something,
Starting point is 00:30:32 you can leave it at the opposite end. Leave no devices near your bed. And this is where the other thing, standard sleep hygiene stuff is also good. So using a device one hour, two hours before bed, not a great idea. So at the end of the day, if you want to go to bed on time, it's not even about bedtime. It's about daytime. You have to understand, okay, what is the part of my brain that allows me to sleep or keeps me from sleeping?
Starting point is 00:30:58 Because you want to sleep, but something in your brain is not letting you sleep. This is the reticular activating system. And there are a couple of important inputs that we need to understand. Number one, any kind of work that we need to do. If your brain is not satisfied with what you've done today, it will keep you awake. So the first four hours of the day, you need to be as productive as possible. Next thing, any amount of pent-up emotions or stress will activate your mind and has been artificially suppressed. So you want to spend one hour just with unstructured mental activity.
Starting point is 00:31:34 Next thing is there are certain dietary things that we can do. be careful about super high fat diets and have a decent amount of healthy carbohydrate before you go to bed, it's fine. I'm not talking about dessert. I'm talking about dinner. Okay? Complex carbohydrates will also leak glucose into your system and glucose will actually suppress orexin and help you fall asleep.
Starting point is 00:31:52 So you want to have maybe a really solid meal two hours before bed. And then no devices, folks. Hate to say it, but that's how it is. Right? The last thing that I'll leave you with is the one willpower thing. And hopefully what will happen is as you do all of these other things, all of this stuff will start to get easier. And this is how people who don't have trouble sleeping, sleep.
Starting point is 00:32:29 Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we're fit for your ambitions, whatever shape they may take. Whether you're planning for today or tomorrow, we've got the flexibility and know-how to help you reach your goals. Because we're built for what you're building. First Citizens Bank, fit for your ambition. Learn more at FirstCitizens.com. ambition.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.