HealthyGamerGG - You Need To Stop Waking Up Tilted

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Today's discussion revolves around strategies to prevent waking up on the wrong side of the bed. Starting the day feeling off can significantly impact your daily rhythm. We'll delve into effective techniques aimed at improving your behavior and sleep patterns to shake off that morning funk. Check out HG coaching: https://bit.ly/47dF7rF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Want to get started? Head to CarMax.com for details and get pre-qualified today. Want to drive? CarMax. Today, we're going to talk about how to stop waking up tilted. Because waking up tilted sucks, right? You wake up, you're already angry, you're full of negative emotion, and it kind of informs the rest of your day. Sometimes you can sort of bring yourself out of it, but for the first hour or two of the day, like, you have to like spend that hour digging yourself out of the hole instead of actually doing stuff.

And so you're kind of like exhausted by 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. and you haven't even done anything yet. So waking up tilted is something that actually costs us a lot in terms of productivity, in terms of mental health, in terms of like actually living the life that you want. 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. So if you're interested in better understanding your mind and taking control of your life, check out the link below. In order to understand how to avoid waking up tilted, we have to integrate

a lot of information from neuroscience, clinical psychiatry, dreams, all kinds of crap, okay? So we're going to talk about sleep, we're going to talk about stress, and we're going to talk about emotions. And once you understand the relationship between these three things, it will help you so much in life. So let's start with emotional. So one of the things that we know about mood disorders is that people who are clinically depressed have something called early morning awakening. So what we sort of know is that there are a lot of things that can look like depression. So if we look at like the features of depression, low energy level, not being able to have fun, difficulty sleeping. But those three things can be caused by all kinds of stuff.

Like if you've got cancer, if you've got hypothyroidism, both of those diagnoses can cause low energy. levels, difficulty sleeping, and a lack of pleasure in life. But there is one thing, or three things, really, that is very specific to mood disorders. And that is early morning awakening. So a lot of people who are clinically depressed will describe a really interesting feature, which is that they wake up at like four to five in the morning, and their mind is going like a mile a minute, and it's also like in a very negative headspace. And so they spend the first couple hours of the day crawling out of that negative emotional pit. Now, the cool thing is that even if you wake up tilted, we can take this case of clinical depression and understand a lot about what's going on in the brain. And essentially,

what we know in clinical depression is that there is an overabundance of negative emotion. So when we have an overabundance of negative emotion, let's see how it affects our sleep and our brain and what our brain is kind of evolved for. So let's think about the circumstances in which our brains experience a ton of negative emotion. It's usually when things are going bad, right? That's what we've evolved for. It's like, okay, so like if our tribe is being attacked by another tribe, we have to flee. And as we flee, we're filled with negative emotions. And what is adaptively useful in these kinds of situations? The more negative emotion we have, we actually want to be very, very light sleepers, and we don't want to sleep a full night. So there's data that shows, for example,

that cortisol, which is a stress hormone, affects the part of our brain, which governs sleeping and waking. This is a part of our brain called the reticular activating formation. So when our cortisol or stress levels are high, think about evolutionarily, like, what does our brain want to do? Our brain wants to sleep very lightly, right? We don't want to be deep sleepers. If our tribe is being hunted by another tribe, I want to wake up at 4 in the morning. Absolutely. Like, I don't want to sleep till noon.

And also, I want my sleep to not be very deep or very restful. Because if they're hunting me and I hear a twig snap, my brain needs to wake up right away, right? I can't afford to sleep restfully. So stress in your life and negative emotions. So negative emotions will induce stress and cortisol production. And cortisol production will interfere with our ability to sleep for extended periods of time. And so then we will wake up early in the morning with our mind filled with negative emotions. You're with me so far?

Okay. So we're waking up tilted, right? So stress has something to do with it. So the other thing to keep in mind is that in depression, what causes that early morning awakening is that overabundance of emotions. So why is everyone waking up tilted now? Has something changed fundamentally? And whether we wake up tilted, remember, it has to do with an overabundance of emotions.

So there are two things that have changed a lot in our world today. The first is the way that we absorb emotions. And the second is the way that we process or really fail to process emotions. So the first thing to understand is that when we have emotional problems right now, what do we usually do? So in the past, like, let's say 100 years ago, if I had a fight with my brother, what would I do? Like, let's say I live on a farm somewhere, right? So I have a fight with my brother and I go do some rote work. Like, I'm going to go milk a cow.

Or I'm going to go, you know, get some hay or, like, weed, a garden or something like that. And as I go and engage in this, like, sort of kind of simple physical labor, right? because for the majority of human evolution, like we've engaged in like simple behavior. Like we're not doing cognitive stuff like 5,000 years ago. It's not like everyone was a scholar in writing like poetry, right? We would like spend our time hunting and gathering and like weaving stuff and like milk and cows and whatever. And so when I'm doing that, what is my brain actually doing? It's taking that emotional insult and it's actually processing that emotion.

There's studies that show, and I've seen this kind of when I'm working on inpatient psychiatry, that if I have a group of kids who's been traumatized and we are doing a trauma processing group, one of the healthiest things to do in the trauma processing group is to give every kid, especially adolescents, needlework. Needlework actually facilitates trauma processing. So there's something weird with our brain. This is probably the way that it evolved, right?

Because we were doing this rote activity. That when we're doing like needlework or we're like weeding the garden, we're like processing emotions at the same time. It's just how it works. And we've observed this in clinical settings. And if you're trying to, like, think through your problems, by all means pick up needlework or go gardening or whatever. There's all kinds of studies that show that like, so that's good for your mental. And it's because something about the way that our body works is when we're like moving a little bit, our emotions start to get processed.

So now let's think for a second. What do we do now when we get into a fight? That's right. Let's look at cat videos or see what my least favorite politician is saying that's going to piss me off. We turn to these devices now, right? When you have a fight with a friend, when you get dumped by someone, what do you end up doing? You're going to browse Reddit. You're going to browse YouTube.

You're going to browse TikTok. You're going to browse all kinds of crap. And so what happens to the emotions that we accumulate throughout the day? They get suppressed through technological devices. What does that mean when we go to bed at night? That means that the emotional load that we have is greater. And remember what leads to early morning awakening over abundance of emotions, usually negative emotions, okay, but also positive emotions. I don't know if y'all were ever like this, but like when you're

on vacation, you're going to Disney World, like you wake up at 5 a.m. every day, and you're super excited because you're at Disney World and kids don't fucking sleep at Disney World. So any kind of overabundance of emotion, but especially negative emotions will lead to early morning awakening. And we're piling up our emotions instead of processing them the way that we have for thousands of years. So next stop, let's understand a couple of other things. So in addition to piling up emotions that we used to process, increasing our total emotional load. There is something else that has changed a lot in society, which is sleeping and dreaming. So the other cool thing about our brain is it has one other really awesome technique to deal with negative emotions, and that has to do with sleep. So sleep is filled

with a couple of different stages. Okay, so there's like stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four sleep. And then there's something called REM sleep. And during REM sleep is when we actually dream a lot. And what we sort of know is that one of the functions of sleep is emotional processing. And so what we also know is that dreaming is one way that we emotionally process. And so basically when I'm doing like dream work with my patients, and y'all can do this too. We'll talk about it for a second. Is this how dreams work? So when you've got a bunch of emotions, when you stop and dream, what happens is you feel those emotions.

Right. So the emotions that you feel in dreaming are real. Like, if someone's chasing you in a dream, you're actually really scared, right? Like, that fear is 100% real. Like, if there's lust in a dream, like, I don't know if you've had those kind of dreams, but like, you know what I'm saying? Like, that's some good dreaming right there. And even to the point where people want to do lucid dreaming,

where they want to experience all these like really, like, lusty fantasies in their dreams, fucking perverts. But so really what happens when we dream is the emotions that we feel are real. And Freud sort of made this discovery, and this is how we do like psychotherapy around dreams, is what I'll usually do with my patients is I'll ask them, like, it's not about like the circumstances of the dream. So there was like, I was driving a car, and then a giant tooth came and smashed my car. And then once I was smashed in the car, I turned into a rabbit. And then I flew up into the sky and I saw the eye of God.

And the eye of God was crying. All that like imagery crap, I don't think there's a whole lot of very solid. scientific evidence that like the tooth means something and the eye of God means something. But what we do know more scientifically is that the emotions that you've stored up throughout your time during the day or your life will come out in dreams. And we know that because like if you if someone's been traumatized, right? So what happens is when they get traumatized, they dissociate. When they dissociate, they don't feel any of those emotions. And where do those emotions go? What is one of the most common symptoms of PTSD?

TSD. Nightmares. Emotional dissociation during the day correlates with nightmares at night. And what do you find as you do psychotherapy and you process those emotions for traumatized individuals? The nightmares go away. And it's not any random nightmare, right? It's the emotional energy of the nightmare that's really important. So it's not whether it's a horse or a tooth or a car or whatever. It's how did you feel during the dream? And as you experience, those emotions, it's kind of the opposite of dissociation, right? So if I dissociate and I store emotions up, when I feel them during the dream, I'm kind of like processing them, and then I felt that emotion, and then it's gone. So that's the other thing to keep in mind about emotions. So when we feel negative emotions,

we feel them for some time, and then they go away. That's like how it works, right? So if I'm going to get pissed, but over time, after I feel enough anger, that anger will start to fade. If I suppress it, the anger will come out. But if I let myself channel the anger, if I go to therapy, if I talk about it, and I feel that emotion coming out, and then it's out of me and I'm Gucci. Okay? So the next thing that happens is we have to understand. Overabundance of emotion, building up through technological suppression of emotions. And dreaming is one of the major things that we do to process emotion.

Now, what does that have to do with everything else that we've talked about? In our society today, we do not dream enough. Let's understand why. So the first thing is, if I have cortisol, if I have an overabundance of emotion, then I'm going to do an early morning awakening. When do we do most of our dreaming? We do most of our dreaming at the end of our sleep cycle. So at the very beginning of our sleep cycle, stage one sleep is really, really big. And we only get like 10 to 15 minutes of a REM sleep in our like first two hours of sleep. The next two hours of sleep, we get half an hour of REM sleep, half an hour of dreaming.

The next two hours of our sleep, we get 45 minutes of REM sleep. The last two hours of our sleep, we will get like an hour of REM sleep. Those aren't really perfect figures, but one thing that is very scientifically known is that our REM sleep slowly increases throughout the night. So if cortisol or an overabundance of emotion is waking me up six hours after sleep,

I'm actually missing out on the REM sleep and the emotional processing part. So the actual place that I process emotions I'm actually getting rid of. And if you sort of think about it, that's kind of adaptive too. Why would our brain want to do that? Well, because if another tribe is hunting me, I don't want to wake up in the morning and be like,

oh, man, today's such a beautiful day. Man, it's gorgeous today. Oh, fuck. I completely forgot that these people are hunting my tribe. Maybe, oh, shit. Oh, crap, right? So we actually want to wake up with negative emotion if we are in danger. So now we start to see all kinds of things cascading in.

There are a couple of other really fascinating things. Technology use probably interferes with REM sleep overnight. is where we also find something else that's really interesting. People who use a lot of psychoactive substances like marijuana, alcohol, stimulants even, drinking Red Bull and stuff like that. It messes with your sleep architecture. And so this is the real problem if you use marijuana to like help you sleep at night. Marijuana will knock you out, right?

It'll help you quiet your anxious thoughts so that you can fall asleep. But it interferes with your sleep architecture and your emotional process. processing. People who get high or drink a lot of alcohol before they go to sleep don't dream as much. If they don't dream as much, they don't process emotions. So you're accumulating all these emotions throughout the day. You're not getting rid of them and you're going to wake up tilted. So how do we fix this? How do we stop waking up tilted? The first thing that you can do is literally sleep more. So of the people that I've worked with who wake up tilted very, very chronically, they usually sleep for about seven hours a night. So you've got to sleep more. Don't use

pot, don't use marijuana, don't use alcohol, or even sleeping medication to help you sleep. What you want to do is blackout curtains, weighted blanket, right? These are the two things that you want to do. Lower the thermostat, make it cold and snuggle into that blanket. You want to force yourself into a physiologic hibernation. First thing you need to do is just sleep more. There's a lot of evidence that shows that waking up tilted actually correlates with sleeping insufficiently. So this is some really interesting research as well. How do we regulate our emotions? We regulate our emotions with our frontal lobes. Our frontal lobes, when we're feeling too emotional, our frontal lobes will be like, yo, amygdala. Calm down, bra. It's okay. We'll be fine. Don't worry about it. Just relax.

When our frontal lobes are capable of doing that, that's when we sort of feel emotionally better. So what leads to what sort of short circuits are frontal lobes? A lack of rest. So as we get fatigued throughout the day, as fatigue builds up, at the end of the night, like, we get pissed, right? We start making really stupid decisions. We make impulsive decisions. You don't text your ex who's toxic for you at like 11 a.m. on a Sunday when you're well rested and you played frisbee golf all morning. You text your toxic X at two in the morning when your frontal lobes stop working and you can't control your emotions. That's when you stock them on social media as well.

So this is why first thing we got to do is we got to sleep. more. Strengthen our frontal lobes and do so in a non-pharmacologic means, if you can. Second thing we've got to understand, overabundance of emotion leads to early morning awakening. Early morning awakening means we miss out on our REM sleep. Missing out on our REM sleep means that we don't process emotions, hence we wake up, tilt it. Okay? So second thing that we want to do, process emotions before you go to bed. All right? So if you want to journal, that's fine. You can go for a walk. And I like this really simple exercise, which is do this reverse analysis of your day. So start with the end of your day and kind of ask yourself, okay, what did I do this last hour?

This is what happened? And this is the key thing. Ask yourself, what emotion did I feel over the last hour? And then go to the second hour before bed and the third hour before bed and unwind your mind. So you can say, okay, at dinner, like, oh, yeah, like I wanted to order this thing, but they screwed up my order and I got kind of pissed off at the waiter. Oh, yeah, I felt that anger. So process that for a second. Okay, I got really upset.

That's okay. What happened the hour before that? Oh, and then I got disappointed. And then the hour before that, I felt really anxious. I was going to go to meet my friends for happy hour, but I haven't seen them in five years. And I've gained some weight, and I was afraid that they would think that I'm pathetic, right? And what actually happens when you go to the happy hour? When you're on your way to the happy hour, you're scrolling through your phone to suppress those emotions.

You go to the happy hour and you start pounding the drinks to suppress the emotions. So you've got to unwind your day and think through all of the emotions that you felt. that day. Even doing that for half an hour or 15 minutes or one hour can be very, very helpful. Okay? So we want to try to sleep more. We want to unwind some emotions. Next, a couple things that we can do are pretty common advice that are hard to do, but let's mention them anyway. Second thing is, if you use technology, chances are it's going to suppress your emotions. So this is where if you're feeling upset about something, the one thing I would encourage you to do, do some kind of rote activity for 15 minutes before you pick up your phone, right? Go for a walk,

go gardening, fold laundry, do something stupid with your hands for about 15 minutes. If you want to do needlework, do needlework. Literally, this is stuff that they do. Like, I worked in an inpatient hospital where on day one, when you're checking in, we take away all of your shoelaces so you don't hang yourself and we hand you needlework. Right? But that's literally what we would do. Anyway, we also check you for razor blades and here's a blunt needle. So what you want to do is do some, like let your mind emotionally process for a little bit,

okay? And the last piece of advice that I'll give you is dream more. So pay attention, I know it's kind of weird, how on earth do you dream more? Pay attention to what you can do throughout your day that results in you dreaming more. And the more that you're able to dream, so try to figure out, okay, like, what do I need to eat? What do I need to avoid alcohol? Do I need to avoid marijuana? Try to dream is like, like, try to figure out, like, what can I do to dream more? Does that mean sleeping an hour long, an hour later?

Because literally that emotional processing part of your brain functions through dreaming. So what I found with a lot of people that I've worked with is I'll just ask them, what are the things that you can do that will allow you to dream more? And it's not like a perfect science, right? You can't say like, okay, if I do this before I go to bed, I'll definitely have dreams. But y'all will sort of know. And the main thing to understand is what the value of that dreaming is. So if you get better quality sleep, if you sleep for longer periods of time, so we really

enter into that REM phase, if you reduce your stress, cortisol, through things like meditating, and most importantly, if you have emotions that happen throughout the day, do not turn straight to technology to suppress them and instead process them. If you do these four things, there is a very, very, very, very. very good chance that you will wake up less tilted. There's a world where legends race across city skylines. Romance blossoms in glittering ballrooms. And there's magic around every corner.

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