Insight with Chris Van Vliet - You're Sleeping All Wrong! Dr. Greg Wells On How To Get A Good Night's Sleep Starting TONIGHT

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

Dr. Greg Wells (@drgregwells) from Precision Nutrition is a wellness advocate, scientist, TedX speaker and best-selling author. He joins Chris Van Vliet to talk about not only WHY we need to sleep better but also HOW we can sleep better. He focuses on the science behind sleep, little hacks that anyone can do to get a better night's sleep, how sleep effects other aspects of your life, how to sleep, eat, move and think better with 1% changes and much more. Visit Dr. Greg Wells' website: http://drgregwells.com For more information visit: https://precisionnutrition.com If you enjoyed this episode, could I ask you to please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcast/iTunes? It takes less than a minute and makes a huge difference in helping to spread the word about the show and also to convince some hard-to-get guests. For more information about Chris and INSIGHT go to: https://podcast.chrisvanvliet.com Follow CVV on social media:  Instagram: instagram.com/ChrisVanVliet Twitter: twitter.com/ChrisVanVliet Facebook: facebook.com/ChrisVanVliet YouTube: youtube.com/ChrisVanVliet TikTok: tiktok.com/@Chris.VanVliet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All systems are going. Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Van Blea! That intro just gets me so fired up. Welcome back to another audio adventure here on Insight. I'm CVV, Chris Van Fleet, and you saw the title of the episode. Yep, you're doing it all wrong. But by the end of this conversation, I promise you you'll be equipped with some tools that are going to help you fall asleep quicker and actually help you stay asleep. I know that's a big problem for a lot of people.

Dr. Greg Wells from Precision Nutrition is a wellness advocate. He's a scientist, a best-selling author. And the thing I love about him is he takes all these scientific phrases and scientific studies and he makes them understandable for people like me or you who don't have a PhD. Well, I'm guessing you don't have a PhD. I guess I shouldn't make any assumptions, but he makes them easy for us to understand, right? Take a screenshot. Let us know that you're on this journey with us.

and tag us on social media so we can share it. Dr. Greg Wells is at Dr. Greg Wells, and you can check out his website, Dr.Gregwells.com. You can find me at Chris Van Fleet. My website is Chris Vanfleet.com. And here we go. It's me and Dr. Greg Wells. I am just so excited about this.

Dr. Greg Wells, thank you so much for joining us. Chris, let's do this. I'm so pumped. I think a lot of people know that sleep is important. but I don't know if they realize why sleep is important. So let's begin there. Why is this so important? It's so cool. We're learning so much about human physiology over the last, you know, 10 years. I feel like it's just exploded. And so many people are learning about how to feel better and do better. And sleep has really come to the forefront of what everyone can do. We all sleep. We do it every day, hopefully. And we can all sleep so much

better because so many people are struggling with sleep. And so just like to get it started, one of the things I think so fascinating about sleep is we've discovered what's called the glial lymphatic system, which is this network of vessels inside the brain that literally pump fluids through the brain at night when you sleep and clean out viruses, bacteria, broken down cells, waste products, amyloid plaques, and pull those up to a network of vessels that are just on the inside of your skull that drain out into the lymphatic system of the body, which is how we dispose of all of these things that we don't want. So the brain is literally washing itself out every single night while we sleep. So it's the fundamental thing that we need to do to keep our brains healthy.

And there's many other things too. But like that's just the coolest advance that we've seen probably in the last 10 years when it comes to sleep. And the imagery around it's amazing. We can now see this happening live in some of the cool studies that are being published. It's it's absolutely amazing. Is eight hours still the optimal amount of sleep that we're aiming for? Well, we've, you know, there's a wide range for all humans.

Some people can sleep less. Some people require a little bit more. But in general, what we've learned is we have sleep cycles. And in these sleep cycles, we go through REM and stage one and stage two and stage three and stage four. And we cycle through those stages throughout the course of the night in roughly 90 minute increments. So on average, we like to get five of those a night, which is somewhere between seven and eight hours, right, five times 90 minutes, seven half hours. So ballpark, that's the zone that we want to get into. The research is quite clear.

Any less than six hours a night or four complete sleep cycles, your risk of all cause mortality starts to go up. that's population level statistics, many things involved there, but not enough sleep is generally associated with an increased risk for all-cause mortality, also associated with mental health problems, depression, anxiety, those sorts of things. So we really do want to try to get into that. I always say bare minimum seven, ideally somewhere between seven and eight. Every once in a while I need to sleep in and every once in a while, you're not going to get enough. So it's totally fine. Over the long term, we just want to balance it out. I think you're, you probably hear this a lot, but there's a lot of people, Greg, that go, well, I get into bed.

with enough time, but I just can't fall asleep. Yeah, and the mind is racing. You're staring at the ceiling. You're exhausted, but you can't shut your brain off. And I think that's a symptom to some extent of the way that we're living these days. Like we go flat out. There's so much to do. So many things were involved in, you know, looking at our screens, staring at the phone.

And then all of a sudden you put away your phone. You're like, why can't I go to sleep again? So one of the biggest thing, why can't I go to sleep at all? So one of the biggest things I think that people can do to dramatically improve the quality of their sleep. And this is a huge lifestyle shift for a lot of people is to defend your last hour and try to not look at your tech in the last hour. That includes televisions, tablets, phones. There's these incredible things called books. You can actually order them on your tablet.

You can read a book. You can take a bath. You can do some meditation. You can do some gratitude journaling. You can talk to your spouse or partner. There's a lot of things that we can do to unwind at the end of the day. Sort of like imagine a plane landing, right? And it gets to the terminal.

There's so many things need to do to shut down. And we really need to give ourselves a chance to unwind, a chance just to settle, a chance to gently fall into sleep rather than sort of sprinting across the finish lines of our days, collapsing into bed and staring at the ceiling for an hour until you fall asleep. Well, I think you always hear people talking about a morning routine, but what I don't think is talked about enough is that nighttime routine, which you touched on a little bit, but what would be the perfect nighttime routine for that last hour before going to bed? Right. Yeah, I mean, the morning routine has gotten so much traction recently for good reason. If you, you know, as you win, if you win the morning, you can typically win your day. But a great way to ensure that you're going to be world class the next day is to ensure you get a great night's sleep. And the way to get a great night's sleep is to really defend that last hour. So. I break it up into 20 minute blocks. So if you can do three times 20 minutes of three things that you love to do that help you

to unwind and calm down, that's your defend your last hour protocol. So three times 20 minutes, pick three things, experiment, try things out. And that can really help you to unwind. So for example, you might finish your day, shut down all your stuff and do 20 minutes of gratitude journaling. Then you might do 20 minutes of meditation and then fall into a nice warm bath. you can completely decompress, get out, dry off, fall into bed, go to sleep. You can also read fiction, not industry reports, right, or not the news or not social or

anything like that. But like reading fiction is another one. There's some amazing yoga poses that help to activate the parasympathetic nervous system to enable you to calm down. You can do some slow breathing. You could do some, yeah, talk to your partner or spouse. So I just chill out. Decomplicate at the end of the day or not, depending on how things are going in your

relationship. Sometimes I may not be a good thing, but most of the time it's pretty awesome thing to do. What's the ideal room look like? I love how you talk about how not having light or not having artificial light in there is something you really want to focus on. Absolutely, because humans have what's called a super kiosmatic nucleus. It's a little tiny structure inside the brain that's very sensitive to light. And when we have light go through our eyeball and it can be light from the sun, it can be light from the lights in your room, light from a screen, light even from your alarm clock. That goes through your eyes. It can penetrate your eyelid as well. So if there's any room, any light in your room whatsoever, your eyelid is thin. It'll probably get through.

And that light hits the back of your eyeball and little structures that convert light into electricity. That electricity shoots back through your optic nerve into your brains, detected by the superchiasmatic nucleus and what's known as the pineal gland. The pineal gland releases a hormone called melatonin, which is what controls your sleep wake cycles. So if we're firing electricity into our brain in a form of light, then the superkousmatic nucleus is activated. The pineal gland is activated. Melatonin does not get released. It makes it really hard for you to fall asleep quickly and deeply. So one of the things that you can do is to make sure that the bedroom where you're sleeping is really dark. So an incredible investment to get set up is blackout blinds. Or you can just

get a piece of paper and hang it over your window or whatever, right? Like it doesn't need to be much of an investment to make that happen. Make sure your alarm clock is covered up. Make sure your phones and tablets are not in the bedroom with you, you know, charge them somewhere else. And once your bedroom is dark, the other thing that really helps is to keep your bedroom a little bit cool. So a little bit, your body needs to be about a half a degree to a degree cooler than during the day in order for you to trigger the release of melatonin and that decreased of body temperature is what does that. So having a bedroom that's slightly cool will really help you to fall asleep and to stay asleep. You and your partner may have different temperature tolerances.

So you might need different thicknesses of blankets. I know Judith, my wife, is like Arctic duvets. I've got a thin sheet because I produce a bit more heat, I guess. So those are a couple tactics that you can use just to get started. Keep your bedroom cool. Keep your bedroom dark and it'll make a big difference. My bedroom is so dark that I can't even, see my hand in front of my face if I'm laying in bed. And so I live in an apartment building. I don't know. I'm not going to live here forever. So I'm like, I'm not going to go out and buy like custom blackout blinds. So what I did cost me about a dollar 50. I went out and bought aluminum foil. So my bedroom window has aluminum foil taped to it. So if you close the door,

even right now in the middle of the day, if you close the door right now, you won't be able to see your hand in front of your face. Perfect. Yeah, that's great. So there you go. That's an easy hack you can do right now. You know, the other major thing I've done is made sure that my kids have that understanding as well, right? Because for them, Ingrid's almost a teenager now. And so she's beginning to stay up a little bit later. And so having the bedroom set up properly for the kids has made a big difference for them as well. We've really committed to it as a family. My daughter got quite sick a few years ago. And one of the things we knew we needed to do to heal her brain. She had viral encephalitis disaster nightmare scenario. So one of the things we knew we needed to do is to get us sleeping well as

a family. And it didn't happen easy. It didn't happen quickly. It took us like six months to learn how to sleep. And for us to get into a routine as a family, commit to it as a family, get consistent with what time we were going to bed, you know, get the blackout blind set up in the rooms. It takes a while. This isn't going to happen in a week. It's going to happen over two, three, four months, maybe longer. But the payoff is incredible. You'll recover better.

You release growth hormone when you sleep, which heals your body. It's considered to be the fountain of youth by physiologists. You regulate leptin and grelin to hormones that control your appetite and satiety. So when you sleep well, you can make better decisions around your food. We know that good sleep is associated with a lower risk for depression and anxiety. Data from the economist has shown that around the world, world over the last 20 months, anxiety and depression are up about 20%. So this is definitely something that we need to, we need to consider. So yeah, I mean, I learned this the hard way. And by no means,

was I perfect in that process of learning about how to sleep, I uncovered all of this information. But six years ago, this was not on our radar, but we had to because Ingrid got so incredibly ill. And for, you know, knock on wood, she's infinitely better now. So it's definitely been part of our journey for sure. But it's not easy, but the payoff is worth it. So I don't have kids, but I'm imagining it might be pretty hard to put young kids in a room with blackout blinds. Like I grew up with a nightlight on. Yeah, we've, we kind of treat it like a digital sunset in the home. So we actually installed dimmer switches in the entire house. We are here now. This is like, I'm not moving for 10 years, like the 20 years, 30 years. They're carrying me out of this place in a box. So I can, in fact,

feel good about, you know, making an investment and putting in light switches. If this, if I was in the previous apartment where I lived, I would absolutely not have done that. I would have been hacking every way I possibly could without spending any money on it. But aluminum foil. Aluminum foil everywhere. So yeah, it does take a little bit of time. We've created a system where we sort of replicate a digital sunset. So, you know, in the evenings, we dim the lights a little bit. We've got every single device in the house set up for night shift mode. So we got rid of the blue light. In fact, where are they?

I even got, they're here somewhere. My blue light blocking glasses are up there on the shelf behind me, right? Mine or, oh, they're over there. But yeah, they're here. They're somewhere. Actually, they're right, right there. Anyway, so it took us a while, but that digital sunset concept of just slowly decreasing the amount of light, slowly decreasing the activity level, doing things that are really good

for us physically, downshifting as a family, as a group. And when it's time for us to fall asleep, I know I'm really, really lucky, like, read a story and they're out. So, and we don't obviously turn them into a pitch black room immediately. We'll leave a couple lights going. But then later on, we'll walk up and turn everything out once they're all asleep. And then Judith and I'll come down to our room and pass out. But it took a while. And one of the things that really helped, for anyone who has children, one of the things that we did that made a huge difference in getting the kids to buy in and follow and, quote, unquote,

the system was to write up our routine on a little piece of paper and stick it up on the wall. And when the kids know what the next step is, they like to follow it. And we just built that routine. We had to. We had no choice. Ingrid was sick. It was something we had to do. But once they saw that routine and they were involved in building the routine and

talking it out and doing what they want to do, which stories they want to read, then, you know, it just was so much easier for all of us. And this sounds like a utopia. you like for some people who have kids where they're like, oh, come on, Greg. The last time I got eight hours of sleep was before I had kids. The fact that you are bringing your kids into the routine, I think really starts to change things. Yeah. And let's be completely honest. Like from zero to six months, it's an absolute disaster. Like no one's sleeping. You're as exhausted as you're ever going to be in your entire life. Six months is like the ultimate low point where you're

not sure if you can get through the next hour of your life without literally dying. It's that bad. And then there's a glimmer of hope where maybe they nap just long enough for you to get in one sleep cycle so you don't think that you're actually going to die from fatigue. And then slowly and slowly and slowly it gets just a little, I'm not trying to get you to not have kids. Kids are awesome. It's great. But that first six months is rough. And slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly from there it gets a little bit better. But we can look the key thing is for kids, for adults, for older people, people who, you know, say I have never been a good sleeper. I am not a good sleep. I hear that all the time. We can learn to sleep better. You can train yourself to sleep better. The human body has an

incredible capacity to adapt. You know that when you do strength training, you get stronger. You know, when you run consistently, your fitness goes up. You know, when you eat healthy food, your body composition changes. You know when you meditate, your ability to concentrate and focus improves, when you're in nature, your mindset and your ability to downshift out of hyperintensity beta brainwave mode into alpha brainwave mode where you're more reflective improves. So we know that we can physiologically adapt. We just need to be consistent enough with building some protocols and routines and tactics and strategies into our life to gently nudge ourselves towards better fitness, better recovery, better regeneration, better sleep. And if you stick with it over

time, like I said, I'm a PhD researcher in this stuff. Like, I live this stuff. This is all that I do is all I think about. It took us six, like six months before we began to really notice the difference. And now it's, it's pretty dialed in. But this has been a long journey. And it's absolutely worth it. So no matter where you are on the spectrum of exhaustion, of children, of, you know, maybe even you've got things dialed, you're already into biohacking. It's still possible to just tweak it a little bit, maybe get a little bit more consistent, maybe get a little bit more deep sleep if you're tracking yourself using a wearable, and you can definitely still make progress, even if you've never slept well in your entire life. And the research of like how it can help to prevent disease or even

combat disease, to me, a non-researcher here, a non-expert here is mind-blowing. It is pretty crazy. I wrote a book called The Ripple Effect about five or six years ago and there's a chapter on sleep. And when I was writing the chapter, I started to dig into the research and discovered that sleep is related to cardiovascular disease. If you get one extra sleep cycle per night, about 45 to 60 minutes of extra sleep per night, you cut your risk of cardiovascular disease almost in half. Sleep is so closely related to cancer that for women who have had breast cancer, the risk of recurrence, is directly related to the amount of sleep that you get. So you can have a lower risk of recurrence of breast cancer if you work on your sleep after finishing that first round of treatment,

whatever that treatment protocol happens to entail. Also, by the way, community is involved in there in nutrition and exercise and many, many other things too, but sleep is directly and independently related to recurrence. We also know that it's related to type 2 diabetes. One bad night of sleep changes your insulin resistance to make it look like you're diabetic. at the metabolic, at the cellular level, at the membrane of the cell, you become resistant to insulin. So imagine that we can, through good sleep, cut our risk of cardiovascular disease and half, decrease our risk for depression, improve our insulin metabolism to the point where we can literally reverse type 2 diabetes in conjunction with good diet and exercise and stress management and many other things. So the potential for this is truly incredible.

So if you have a, you know, anyone listening, if you have a specific challenge, don't be afraid to ask your doctor for a referral to a sleep clinic to get some coaching from licensed professional about how to sleep better. If you're looking for general recommendations, obviously everything that we've said is valid. But if you have any one of the challenges I've mentioned above, including things like depression, anxiety, don't be afraid to speak to your medical professional about getting help to learn how to sleep better because it will make a huge difference. for you with whatever challenge you are faced with. So sleep obviously so, so important, but it's just one of the pillars that you talk about. So the way that you kind of put it out is eat, sleep, move, and think. And each pillar is so incredibly important, almost like four table legs holding up a table. Right.

And the cool thing that I discovered when I started to dig into all of this idea of the ripple effect with these, you know, elements that influence each other, whether it's, you know, whether it's sleep, whether it's recovered. whether it's stress, when nutrition, exercise, all of these things weave together. And when you do one of these areas well, it has a cascade of effects in the other areas. If you get a great night's sleep, you regulate leptin and grelin that controls your appetite and satiety. So maybe you make a better decision the next day about your food. If you eat better food and you maybe don't have the snack that you might otherwise have had due to exhaustion or fatigue, you're not tired. So you make the

good decision. You have a little bit more energy. Maybe you get your workout in. If you get your workout in, guess what? That dissipates stress hormones, cortisol, and adrenaline, which then lowers your overall stress level improves your mental health. When your mental health is better, guess what? You sleep better. So it's this, we can create these positive upward spirals of health and well-being by working on one of these areas and then enjoying the cascade effects everywhere else. Then maybe you move on to the next one. Once you're sleeping well, you start to look at your nutrition. and make 1% improvements all through your nutrition. Do that for a year, then start exercising, right?

This is a three, five, 10 year project for you that helps you to live longer, helps you to live better, improves your performance at work. And it's not easy, and you have good days and bad days. But the simplicity of it is quite profound when you just do little tiny things every day that make a difference. They add up. And I think it's about being intentional, too. I think there's going to be a lot of people that are listening to this going,

well, that sounds great, but I don't have time to exercise or I don't have time to make meals or I don't have time for this or that. And to that, I usually say, well, that's funny because if you needed to leave work early, you would automatically, magically find some time. So I think it's about being intentional with all of this. I love that idea of being intentional. I think that's so important and powerful. I learned an interest, I took an online course interengineering from a a gentleman named Sedguru a few years ago, a bunch of my friends and I did it. And in that,

he talks about intention versus compulsion. And just trying to be intentional. And when you notice yourself being compulsive, that's where you can really begin to lean into that and discover what's going on there. So social media would be a perfect example. If you're deliberately commenting on one of your friend's weddings and say, hey, that was a great event. Congratulations.

You guys. You're awesome. you both have a great honeymoon, that's totally fabulous. If you're compulsively scrolling through your feed at 2 o'clock in the morning, that's a huge problem. And so we want to be as intentional as we possibly can be. When we notice ourselves being compulsive, it's worth journaling about that. It's worth deconstructing that. It's worth talking about that, figuring out what's going on there? Why am I doing that? Because it's not serving me. If it's serving you, great. If you're compulsively going for a run, that's probably going to be awesome. If you're compulsively meditating because it makes you

feel good. That's not a bad thing. If you're compulsively scrolling through Instagram, maybe not the best. So or whatever social media, not to, you know, talk about anyone, anyone, just good and bad about social. And then the other thing you mentioned about time is huge. What I'd love people to realize is that these might, like 1% can make a massive difference. One percent of your day is 15 minutes. We know that 15 minutes of walking is enough to decrease your risk for 13 different types of cancer by 20. 24 to 40 percent. Like you don't need to do hard workouts.

You don't need to do long workouts. You just need to go for a walk, but it has to be consistent. If you do as little as three minutes of meditation per day, you can develop stronger myelination of white matter tracts inside your brain. Basically, your brain gets healthier and stronger, and the regions that are associated with concentration and focus

improve and become bigger. So we can literally rewire the brain. We can re-engineer, our bodies in very little time at all. An easy thing for people to do right now just to see the power of this is just maybe do a body scan. Feel about how you're feeling right now. Just sort of pay attention to that, the body sensations and positions that you have.

And then let's just all take a deep inhale together. And imagine a birthday cake, you know, a birthday cake in front of you with some candles and just blow them out, right? Like that one exhale can help us to dissipate so much tension. out of our bodies. And it's literally instantaneous when we do that. So you don't need to go to the gym for an hour. You don't need to meditate for an hour. You don't need to like little tiny shifts throughout the course of the day, sprinkle them in and all of a sudden things will appear very, very different. So intentions huge and 1% wins are huge as well. That was so powerful

because you know how few people actually take a second in their day to intentionally take. take a deep breath in through their nose, hold it for a second, and then blow it out. You know, a few people do that? Almost everybody doesn't do that at all. Yeah. That's another one I heard learned the hard way, right? Like, I do research at a children's hospital and probably about 10 years ago, I had a, I do research in leukemia and cystic fibrosis and a bunch of other pretty severe conditions. Like, and I'm a researcher, I have a PhD, not an MD, so I'm not involved in the medical treatment, but I am involved. in the research program. And I had one of the kids I just absolutely adored at the hospital

unfortunately passed away. And I was like just crushed and angry and devastated. And I was driving home from work and not in a very good, not in a good place at all. I'm still like I'm shaking right now even just talking about it still to this day like, you know, 10 years later, I'm like on the verge of tears even thinking about it. Anyway, I got home and walked into my house and my daughter, two years old at the time, was in the living room with my wife. wife and I can tell you that my interaction with them was not good. Like, yes, okay, I'm loving and I was like happy to see them, but I was not in a good place. Shouldn't have been in the room and the energy was very, very, very, very poor.

And I learned that when we take a moment to pause, right? And when I cross the threshold into my home, that is a very good time to check. How are you doing? And if you're in a place where you're going to be of service to your family, fantastic. go on in. But if you're not quite there yet, then it's okay to go for a walk. And so now on the way home, we call that the transition ritual. On the way home now, if I've had a rough day, I call Judith, my wife. And I'm like, I'm not quite ready to come home. She's like, why don't you go for a walk, like a really long walk? Don't come back anytime soon. There's this park. There's that park.

There's this park. There's the climbing gym. We'll see you whenever you're here. No rush. And that's awesome to have a partner that's like supportive like that. But we kind of joke about it now. like, yeah, you don't go home. But now that I know, if there's something that happens, the power of taking a breath to create a little bit of time and space between the stimulus and the reaction is the difference between a reaction and a response. And if you're reacting, it's probably not going to go well. If it's a response, at least it's intentional.

So that ability is to create time and space, whether it's one breath, whether it's three breaths, whether it's you looking at your partner, your loved ones, even your teammates at work or your clients being like, you know what, I just need to go get a drink of water. I'll be right back. You just go, you reset, you clear your head, you bring yourself back into the zone, and then you re-engage.

Can make all the difference in the world between a positive situation where everyone gets elevated on a daily basis or a situation that you're doing damage control on for, you know, minutes, months, minutes, hours, days, months, years, whatever. So, yeah, time and space is huge. I love that so much. And I think the idea of like putting triggers into your day, like building triggers into your day, like every time you get into your car, you will habit stack that with something else. Or every time you walk through a doorway, you'll think like I need to smile.

Because I think that in the world we live in right now, where we all have this supercomputer that sits in our pocket, we're just on autopilot so often. Like, when was the last time that someone was actually able to be bored? Because back, Back in the day of waiting in a doctor's office or waiting in line of the DMV, you actually used to have to like be alone with your thoughts and think about things or people watch or do whatever. Now the second you get bored, you pull your phone out and you start swiping away. I love boredom. I think it's awesome. Like we're on drive.

So many times I'm driving my kids around the city to and from a practice or something. And they're like, I'm bored. I'm like, good. It's great. They're like, what? I'm bored. I'm like, yes, I know. And then you just leave them be bored.

And within two minutes, they're playing a game. They're looking out the window. They're coming up with something to entertain themselves. They're being creative. The danger that we have right now is we have instant access to entertainment and distraction, which keeps us constantly engaged, but prevents us from accessing learning, creativity, reflection, problem solving, strategic thinking, all of the things we need to do to live an exponential life. And so I love the idea of using technology intentionally,

but I also really love the idea of deliberately unplugging and having at least an hour a day where you turn your technology off and you leave it alone. No screens, no notifications. and a great start for everybody would be when you have dinner with your friends and family, phones are away and the audio notifications are off. That's a simple thing that you can do. It's incredibly powerful. If you ever in a meeting with a client, make sure that the phones are off. Audio notifications are off and the phones are away.

Imagine if like as a personal trainer, you're leading someone through a workout and you're checking your phone in the middle of the workout. It's just not going to go well, right? It's so epically disrespectful. And so we just need a little bit of time to be bored. And when you're bored, your mind will wander. When your mind wanders, all of a sudden, you put two and two together. And boom, there's a new idea. There's a new piece of art. There's a new story that you can craft. There's a new piece of music that you can write. We will not get at that level of creativity if we're constantly entertained and

distracted. And by no means are we saying the internet or social media are bad. It's a tool. And a knife is also a tool. A knife could be used to stab someone or a knife in the hands of a surgeon could be used to save someone's life. So I think it's important how you use that tool. Absolutely. I think that the internet is, you know, one of the greatest advances that humans have ever achieved. The fact that we have access to all human knowledge in your pocket instantaneously is fantastic. Who's the 12th president of the United States? I have no idea. I can tell you, 10 seconds, though, right? That is absolutely phenomenal that we have access to that. The fact that I can video call my kids from anywhere on the planet is unbelievably fantastic. The fact that social media,

for example, was involved in the Arab Spring that helped to change the politics of many countries that were extraordinarily repressive. And that's wonderful. The Me Too movement happened on social. I think that as a father of a young girl, that is a, I think that is a very important, uh, advance for humanity that we have innate, we have given voices to people who can communicate directly with many people to create a movement that engage, you know, creates positive change in the world. However, like you say, it's a tool. It can be used to, a knife can be used to cut bread. And it can also be used to, you know, cut your skin by accident. So we have to be very, very careful. We have to be intentional. We have to use technology to make the world better to improve

our lives. But if we notice that it isn't serving us, that's the key, right? It's that self-awareness to know that, you know what, maybe I'm spending a lot of time on YouTube. What would my, again, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever it happens to be social media, whatever, mindless consumption of entertainment that doesn't necessarily educate or elevate your life. Just imagine what your life would look like if for a year you read biographies of some of the greatest humans in the planet for 30 minutes or if you spent 30 minutes day on social. Yeah. You wouldn't recognize yourself. And so that's the point is if you want to deliberately, you know, entertain yourself because you're straight. You've tired. It's been a long day.

Absolutely. Catch up with what your friends and family are up to on social. That's the point. if you're mindlessly scrolling through your feed for hours a week, then maybe we need to look at why, what are we getting away from? What could we possibly do better? What other things would you rather be doing and make it very easy for you to access those other things? You know, get the books that are going to elevate your life. Register for the courses and set aside some time with a friend to make you accountable so

you actually show up. Hire the personal trainer and pay them ahead for six months that they, actually show up at your door and lead you through the workouts. And if you miss the workouts, you've already paid for it. So it's, you know, it's on you. Whatever it happens to be to make optimization easy to make your environment better. So your success is inevitable. That is ultimately what we're trying to look to do. You mentioned turning off audio notifications. I've actually taken it one step further. And it's probably been the greatest life hack for me. I turned off all of my notifications. So my screen at no point ever has any notifications on it because I found myself in conversations like this one, Greg.

My phone would be in my pocket. I would feel it buzzed and that I'd instantly be removed from the conversations because I'm thinking to myself, what was that a Twitter buzz? Was that a text buzz? Was that from Instagram? Was that from something else? Was that an email? What's that email about? And as soon as I did that, I stopped thinking about those things.

I love that. I'm going to do it as soon as we get off this call. That's super fantastic. The only person whose ringtone is not silenced is my wife, Judith. All other rings. Well, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I mean, obviously, if she's calling twice, it's important.

So I will answer that one. But ultimately, what we're doing is we're controlling our attention. Where your attention goes ultimately determines what happens in your life. And if you allow other people to control your attention, then they're in control of your life. And that happens when they send you an email and you get an audio notification, your attention goes to that email. And of course, if you're in sales and you need to keep track of emails and respond to your potential customers as quickly as possible to get the sales, I mean, that's your job. That's fantastic. But if you're trying to do some creative writing, if you're working on a project

and your email is open, you're being distracted every 30 seconds by an incoming email because someone else needs you to do something. That is a problem because you end up doing urgent things, not important things. That's the whole Eisenhower matrix that has been published and publicized for many decades now. But the game is to control your attention. I've mentioned this many times before, but Johnny Ive didn't allow his children to have iPhones and he helped design them for Apple.

So that should tell you a little bit about whether or not, you know, how we have to be able to control this. And around social, I mean, I build my business. and one of the ways I build the business is to share content. And so I now consider myself a publisher on social, not a consumer. So I use a platform to schedule posts. And I try not to look at inbound. I try only to publish so that I send positivity out into the universe.

And then when I want to catch up with people, I will do so deliberately. But the whole game is controlling your attention. So your attention goes where you want it to go, not where everyone else in the world wants your attention to. go. Man, this has all been so powerful. And I think that if people even just apply one of the things you're talking about here, their life will change so drastically. Yeah, and that's an important point. Pick one. Don't do them all. Just pick one little thing and get that dialed in. And then once you've

got that one thing dialed in and you know that it's no longer something that takes your attention to implement, it's now a habit, then you can move on to the next one. So yeah, just pick one of these ideas and hopefully it really helps you out. You've mentioned gratitude and gratitude journaling so many times throughout this, and I love that because I start and end every day saying out loud three things that I'm grateful for. So as we start to wind this down, what are three things for you, Greg, that you're grateful for in your life right now?

I love it. You know, gratitude is one of the things that I've started to practice probably for the last two or three years and I've learned it from a number of people that have been teaching me different elements of it and you know finishing your day with three to five bullet points written down said out loud or things that you're grateful for is an absolute game changer I'm starting to do it now with my 11 year old daughter at the end of every day makes a huge difference for her because she's starting to be more aware of the world and you can get you know in a difficult place sometimes so three of the things I'm grateful for my family's healthy and happy and

be nothing's more important more important to me than that i'm really fortunate right now that in my life i seem to have the ability right now that i can kind of do whatever i want which is amazing you know i i i if i feel like doing a podcast i could do a podcast i can write books like there's so many cool outlets that i have for what fires through through my brain i'm infinitely grateful for that as well. And I'm also, and I don't mean to say this and for it to sound superfluous or anything like that, but I'm just super grateful that I now get to connect and have incredible conversations with epically cool people on like podcasts or interviews and do work like this, right? Like, we're chatting about really cool stuff.

Like, this is how I get to spend my life. I giggle every single day when this is, I realize this is like, this is what I do. incredible. So those are my three things. I love it. What's the best way for people to find you or to be able to work with you? Amazing. Everything is on my website, Dr. Gregwells.com. My podcast is there. Social media is there. The app that we're developing is there. Books are there. Books are there. It's all at that location. So feel free to fire me a note through the contact page and just mention that you heard me on this show and I'll be sure to answer you. I love it. And if people check you out through precision nutrition. What are they going to find? Well, we're doing a new program with

precision nutrition. I've been involved in precision nutrition for decades now. Dr. John Barardi is a dear old friend of mine. We work together on many national teams and athletes around the world. And we're putting together a course right now to help people learn about sleep, stress, and recovery. Because that seems to be such a common element around eating better, exercising more. So if people want to check out the new course, we would love for them to be a, uh, a part of the time. part of that because we're really, we've got some unbelievable experts that have come together to put some pretty cool content. And it's all related to the things that we were just speaking about. So if any of this information was fascinating to you, definitely check out the new

material from Precision Nutrition for sure. So fascinating to me. And I feel like I'm okay at doing some of this stuff. I could definitely be a lot better. And now you've kind of lit that fire under me to like try to optimize and hack even more. Let's do it, buddy. I'm all over it. We'll do it together. We'll keep in touch. And we're just going to go on this journey. It's super fun. I love it. Thank you so much. Thanks, Chris. There are just so many little things that I'm going to change before I go to bed tonight. But like Greg said, just try one and see what kind of difference it makes. Big thank you to you for being with us for this. A big thank you to Dr. Greg Wells, of course, for joining us for this super insightful conversation.

Yeah, pun intended. Head to proceed. Decision Nutrition.com for more info or to Greg's website, Dr. Greg Wells.com. Greg also has a pretty great podcast. It's called the Dr. Greg Wells podcast. So wherever you're listening right now, go check that one out since this episode is wrapping up here. And take a screenshot. Tag us so we know you're listening.

Dr. Greg Wells is at Dr. Greg Wells. I'm at Chris Van Fleet. And I'll leave you with this quote from the great Les Brown, who says, too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears. What that sink in and marinate with you over the weekend. Be great and be grateful. We will see you on the next one for some more insight.

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