Sense of Soul - The Importance of Sleep

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Today on Sense of Soul, Shanna had an important conversation with Devin Burke he is an international and TEDx speaker,  bestselling author of "The Sleep Advantage," the founder of Sleep Science Academy, and one of the top health and sleep coaches in the world.  His books, keynotes, programs and videos have inspired thousands of people to improve their sleep, energy, and life. His mission is to give the 40+ million people who suffer from poor sleep the tools and support they need to stop suffering and start sleeping as quickly as possible. Devin Burke helps high achievers and exhausted insomniacs get sleep and stay asleep so they can wake up with more peace, power and presence. He was named one of the "Top 25 Health Coaches in America." He has studied innovative holistic coaching methods from some of the world's top health and human performance experts for over a decade. Check out Devin on his YouTube,  How to Get Better Sleep Devin Burke Find all of Devin’s links here! https://linktr.ee/devinburkewellness  Follow him on social media: @devinburkewellness Visit Sense of Soul at www.mysenseofsoul.com Do you want Ad Free episodes? Join our Sense of Soul Patreon, our community of seekers and lightworkers. Monthly circles, and Shanna and Mande’s personal mini series, Sense of Soul merch and more. https://www.patreon.com/senseofsoul Thank you to our Sponsor! ATHLETIC GREENS:  https:// athleticgreens.com/senseofsoul

Welcome to the Sense of Soul podcast. We are your hosts, Shanna and Mandy. Grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Hey friends, if you're looking for ad-free Sense of Soul episodes, you can find them at Sense of Soul Patreon. Become a monthly member at any level. You will also have access to our monthly SOS Sacred Circles, our mini-series, merch, and MuchBorn. And it's a great way to help support our podcast so that we can continue to bring you inspiring episodes twice a week with our enlightened guests from all around the world.

Check out our Patreon. Today we have with us Devin Burke. He is an international TEDx speaker, the best-selling author of The Sleep Advantage, the founder of Sleep Science Academy, and one of the top health and sleep coaches in the world. This is a topic I feel like is not talked enough about, and we all need to hear it. So I'm so grateful that Devin is joining us today. I'm glad to be here to share about it. There's a lot to it.

Yeah. And, you know, dreams are a huge part of my journey. So sleep is important to me, not just the physical part, but also the spiritual part of my journey. I've kept a dream journal next to my bed for years. And sometimes I use the old practice of a well. Have you ever heard that one? No, I haven't. No. Whatever you want to set your intentions, you imagine writing it on something, you fold it up and then you imagine it going down a well and you just keep

imagining it going down until you fall asleep, thinking about the intentions or whatever you asked or, you know, whoever you want to connect with. And I do it for like a week. It's amazing because at first you're like, I didn't get anything. But then after you write down like all the little things that you think you didn't get, they actually all tell a story. So it's so cool. Wow. So that's, is that like a technique, like a dreaming sort of spiritual technique, I guess? Actually an old indigenous core practice that they would use all over the world. You know, of course, drum journeying and, you know, meeting their ancestors and dream journeying was a part as well. That's interesting. Yeah. I, I, I've never really studied or read too much up on dreams or dream

interpretation or any of that. I do know a little bit like the yogis used to use some like astro projection and all kinds of things when they're asleep and you hear these things and, you know, in some of the books that I've had on my shelf, I'm like, oh, that's fascinating. Most of my work is really helping people be able to get to a state where they could even dream. So that's really where I focus. Because if you're not sleeping, you're not dreaming. That's right. And that's why it's been so important to me. And I have to say that I would say most of my life I had insomnia.

As a child, especially especially I had bad dreams and that would keep me up. And so, and then I would be scared at night. And then when I got into my twenties, of course I had children. So that interrupts your sleep. Then it was, I was having anxiety in the middle of the night. You know, I'm like, why am I thinking about everything in my entire life at three o'clock in the morning? I have an answer for that. It's common, isn't it? It's very common. It's very common. And I think there's a, I mean, there's never one answer, but this is what I've sort of my hypothesis on this is it's usually the nighttime is the first time people actually start to slow down. And so like the first time you, sometimes people even stop all day is when their head hits the

pillow. And then the brain starts to like unwind or think about what they need to do or what happened that day. And that's the last time that you want your brain trying to problem solve or troubleshoot. And it creates this form of anxiety. And that can happen in the middle of the night when you wake up. It's quiet. It's dark. Most people are sleeping. that people do because there's not intentional space during their day to like think through, Hey, is this the right relationship that I should be in? Or what do I want to do when I grow up or whatever it is, right? These big questions. It's not just like, you're worrying about the stuff you didn't do that day. You're like going all the way back, like 10 years. And I'm like, what? And then it just starts, you know, rolling. And it's also a space that some call it like the God hour or the witching hour or whatever, where people will often have some sort of mediumship.

That's like very common. You know, it's the same reason you're creating that space that otherwise you wouldn't during the day because you're so busy. I think also I have a theory on this too. During the night, there's a lot less energy flying around right so like I know the buddhists they wake up at like 4 a.m that's like a magic hour for like meditation because it's like the world is a little bit calmer yeah you know the episode that we released on emfs and just thinking about that there's less electricity on. Yeah. There's less interruption when it comes to appliances and phones and all of that stuff,

especially for us today where we have so much stimulation. Yeah. Which is why most people have trouble sleeping, by the way. So the blue light from your devices, for sure. The cells in the eyes, the myopsin cells don't really know the difference between the blue light from the sun and blue light from these devices. And then what that triggers is melatonin release from the penile gland, which is like, makes you, it's like your sleep timer essentially. And melatonin faucet doesn't get turned on because the body still thinks that the sun is up.

I think that it's more though than that. It's more of the hyper arousal that comes from social media or watching these TV shows. It's more so the body might be relaxed when you're doing it, but your brain is not. You start comparing your life to the people that you are scrolling through or whatever. FOMO or you're watching a TV show and it's like a crazy show and your body's actually like processing that and releasing cortisol. Like my palms get sweaty when I watch some of these documentaries of these guys like climbing mountains. It's like, yes, that's a real thing. So the hyper arousal that comes from the technology is, I would say, even more impactful than the blue light. So my little girl has issues with sleeping and my 10 year old. And so I do give her melatonin not every night because it says that you can't. If I want her to go to sleep, I have to give her melatonin. Yeah. I mean, so, so the thing about melatonin, and if you look at the meta-analysis

of melatonin, so with a meta-analysis is looking at like all of the studies with something, right. And so when they looked at all of the studies of melatonin related to sleep, what they found is actually doesn't help with sleep. So yeah, it helps a little bit in some ways, but not significantly. So it's more of like a placebo, but it does help set the circadian clock and like the timing. So if you're using it while you're traveling, it can be helpful, but as a sleeping aid, and this is just like the science, it's not really effective. Um, when they, when you look at the science, the other thing about melatonin is it's a hormone and actually you used to need a prescription to get

melatonin in Europe. There are some theories that say, if you're, you're taking melatonin, it can mess up your natural production of melatonin. Now there's, there's studies that say that, and then there's studies that say that that's not true. That doesn't happen. But I think there's a lot of better options for people or children that have issues with sleep. There's a ton in my book, actually, there's a whole chapter on sleep. Yeah. I mean, that's just the science on melatonin. So as an antioxidant though, melatonin is amazing. Some people use it therapeutically. And even, and this is another interesting thing that I discovered when I went down the melatonin rabbit hole in

some countries in high doses, it's actually used as a contraceptive. What? Yeah. So think about it. It's a hormone. And so, yeah, so on really high doses. And the other thing about melatonin, so when they did a study on all these different melatonin companies, these supplement companies, what they found was that the dosing, even from the same company and the same brand, could vary up to 400%. So you might think that you're taking a half a gram of melatonin, but it might be like 400% more than that or way less.

So it wasn't consistent. So that was other interesting thing that I sort of discovered when I was researching melatonin. It's a bandaid. And the science shows that it could be just like a placebo like i would try giving her like a sugar pill and see like yeah and see what happens well listen to this this is pretty interesting so we did go to her doctor and you're probably not gonna like this she does have also some she's got very sensitive skin and so she was having these

very random breakouts where it was solid red between her neck and her torso, just in the torso, solid red. I mean, like it looks like a sunburn and it would only be right there. I thought it was food, but then there was nothing she would eat. Sometimes it would happen. And so it was very random. She said, well, let's do this. Let's give her Benadryl because she's having issues with sleeping. Let's give her Benadryl because she's having issues with sleeping. Let's give her Benadryl early in the night, every single night. Yeah, I don't like that. No, I'm serious.

I was like, are you serious? Like, no. Yeah, that's not a good strategy. I mean, I want to give maybe her the Benadryl if she's having some sort of reaction. Yes. But to give her Benadryl every single night, it'll eventually stop working. I mean, if you're using it as a sleep aid, that's the thing, the challenge I think that really a lot of people have with when they're trying to sleep better is there's a lot of misinformation out there. There are certain

things like tools that you could use and medication, whether it's over the counter prescription, that's a tool. But if you don't really address the underlying root causes of why somebody is having sleep issues in the first place, then those tools eventually stop working and they actually can become harmful. So like for instance, sleeping medication, it's only meant to be used for a couple of weeks and I'm not against sleeping medication. I think it's great to have them, but people we help at our sleep, sleep Academy, they use them for decades from one to the other. And a lot of them are habit forming. And if you look at the side effects, a side effect of Ambien, and this is on the inserts, is insomnia. You know, that kind of happened to me with something they were having me take at one

point. It was something for sleeping, but it gave me hot flashes. I was like, are you freaking kidding me? I'm like, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, so side effects are not great. I mean, and a lot of sleeping pills, they're linked to massive increases in cancer, believe it or not. So, but you know, taking them temporarily, cool, no problem. But if you're like relying on anything to put you to sleep, like sleep is a result. It's, it's never a problem. It's a result. And what most people do is they treat it like it's a problem. And then they use band-aids to try to solve it. And then they wonder why they're not, it's not working. And it's like, well,

you're, you're looking at the wrong thing. Sleep's not the problem. Your body knows how to sleep. You don't, you don't think about your heart beating. You don't think about breathing. You don't think about your hair growing on your head, your nails. You don't think about any of that. And it just happens the same way. It just happens. It happens. So it sounds like what's keeping us from sleeping though, is what's going on in our head. What's keeping us from sleeping though is what's going on in our head. What's repeating in our minds. It's this pattern that we've created around sleep. Yes. And I mean, you can't separate your mind from your body. So then those patterns become patterns in the body.

So you have to really work with both. You have to work with the mind and the body, but mind first, because the mind is what controls the body. It's like the guy on top of a horse. The horse is your body and the guy is the mind. So we have to work with the guy first, then we work controls the body. It's like the guy on top of a horse, the horse is your body and the guy is the mind. So we have to work with the guy first, then we work with the horse. I remember I had restless leg syndrome. That was another one. So, and it would wake me up. You know, it's unfortunate when you have these actual physical things and going through menopause as

well, which is very uncomfortable. And I, and so, I mean, nowadays they have all the good things. I mean, I got the cooling pillows and the cooling sheets and the cooling comforter and my partner was freezing his ass off with the fans and all the things, but when I did sleep, it was harder. So, you know, can you talk about that? Like the light sleepers and the deep sleepers, the light sleepers, are they still getting the same amount of sleep if it's like, say, 10 hours than the deep sleeper that's sleeping maybe six or seven? You know what I mean? Yeah, I do know what you mean. You don't really know unless you're measuring it. So I don't have an answer for you, really, because I am a

great sleeper. I sleep like eight and a half, nine hours sometimes. I used to be embarrassed about that. But when I started to measure my sleep, what I found was the quality of my sleep wasn't as good as it could be. One, I didn't really know anything about sleep. Two, I thought it was a waste of time. And so when I started to really learn about sleep and implement these things, I noticed, wow, now I went from having under an hour of deep sleep to over two hours of deep sleep and REM sleep, which is the deeper stages of sleep. So quality makes a difference, but you don't really know unless you're measuring your sleep. And we use a device called the Oura Ring. For some people, that's an investment. I think they sell it for like $300, but you could use your Apple watch or a whoop strap, or I think

even Amazon has a really affordable fitness tracker, any type of tracker just over several weeks and months can give you some input as far as like stages of sleep and how well you're doing. The thing is your sleep architecture changes throughout your life, but ideally for a healthy adult, you'd want like about 20, 25% of your total sleep time in deep sleep and REM sleep. And REM sleep is when we're dreaming. That's also like rapid eye movement. You're working out the emotional traumas of the day. It's really an important stage of sleep.

And delta sleep, that's when like the body's recovering. That's when, you know, the cells, the cancer cells are getting cleared out. And, you know, the hormones are being released. So much actually happens throughout the course of the night in these different sleep cycles and stages. What about children? Because we were just talking about that. Is there a recommended? Because actually my friend and I were just talking about this last night and she wants her child to have 10 hours of sleep. Yeah. Here's the thing. And this is the honest truth. Some people don't need as much sleep. I was going to ask you that. Yeah.

So the honest truth is not everybody needs between seven and eight hours of sleep. If you go to the National Sleep Foundation and you look up, they have these great sort of charts around like from when you're a baby to when you're like an old person and they show you like, okay, here are the healthy ranges, but it's a range. Yeah, we're all different. It's bio-individual, right? So the problem is, is that when you feel like you can't sleep as much as you feel like you need, like the next day you're dragging ass, you're drinking three, four cups of coffee to be able to see straight. You know what I call it? My Aunt Charlotte loved her to death.

She used to do like the shuffle in the morning. I could hear her feet when I would stay with her. So I called it the Charlotte shuffle. And some mornings I found I have the Charlotte shuffle. I can't even pick up my feet. That's definitely a sign that you're probably not getting enough sleep. Right. Yeah.

So it's, you know, like anything, there's never one reason for me. I always look at if sleep is a result and it is, well, what are the things that lead to that result? Right. And so, you know, some people actually have what's called psychophysiological insomnia. It's like this learned insomnia where they get anxious about their sleep. They get anxious about what happens if they don't get enough sleep. And that anxiety is the very thing that keeps them up. Yeah. I wonder if that is something my daughter has. So she's always had an issue, it seems, well, all of her siblings are adults adults so it's kind of hard when

everybody's awake or coming home and stuff like that for a child who the youngest in the house that's just the life that she lives so we're late because you know i have three adults yeah however we've done all the things and she likes all the things like she has a noise machine in her room that she loves meditation music and she's had that and we have done meditation together since she was probably like four that's great then she has soft lights in her room because she doesn't like the pitch dark so you know we've I've researched like the lighting dark. So, you know, we've, I've researched like the lighting. Then I had even gotten her a lavender mattress, which now I'm overdoing it because what happened, Devin, is that I didn't realize, you know, it's really great to have all of these very natural and

organic oils and stuff, but they are strong. And when she was five, she started developing a breast bud because the lavender was acting as estrogen. Wow. Yep. And so not only was she getting it, of course, Johnson and Johnson lavender is not going to have that effect. He had it in some sort of diffuser. She had it natural in the stuff I was getting from Lush for the bath. She had it in her mattress. So, I mean, it was just like this overwhelming. And so the doctor at Children's, they took an x-ray of her hand and that's actually how they figured out. They said, take out all of the lavender, and all the things and they started to learn this because everything became so very potent and organic and real so boys started to have this and so that's

how they found out and so they said take it all out sage also was another one that was included with that and um i did and it stopped that's really really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's really, but I was trying everything. Here's, here's what's what I found after talking to literally thousands of people over the last five years with this issue is that what you just described is what we would say is sleep hygiene. So like sleep environment specifically, like having the room in a certain way, lavender oils, you know, having a ritual, which is all great, but you don't need any of that to sleep. True. There's millions of people tonight that will do the exact opposite of all of that. And they'll be able to sleep. Amazing. So we know that that it can be helpful for sleep

quality, but then people start to think and believe that, oh my gosh, if I don't sleep in my lavender mattress, or if I don't do my meditation, or if I don't take my melatonin, or if I don't have lights, then I'm definitely not sleeping. And then it creates this belief. And it's not true. The belief is not true. That's not true. It's actually not useful belief either. And so people have, and we work with all different types of people. We don't work with children, but they have all these beliefs that are just not true and actually create this expectation that they need to have them, which is a form of stress, which creates hyper arousal, which then obviously then the body doesn't, if the body's aroused, it's not going to sleep because it thinks it needs to be ready to fight something when we work with people.

So we work with first with the mind, the psychology of how people get stuck with their sleep. Then the physiology, the last thing we do is the environment, which is then reintroduce some of this stuff just for sleep quality, but that does not solve sleep issues. I wouldn't be in business. I wouldn't have a business to be honest. Wow. Now I see, I mean, she has the most amazing sleep environment because I have researched and definitely did not find you, or maybe you would have saved us years of sleep. Oh my gosh. There's millions of people right now that unfortunately are, they just, they need this information and they don't have access to it. And so that's, I mean, that's why I do these podcasts. Yeah. Well tell me though,

why is it so important that we sleep? Yeah. We could go down a rabbit hole with this and we can, and I'm happy to. So I always, whenever anyone asks me that, I always ask, well, what is the most important area of your life? Is it your health? Is it your relationships? Is it your career? And then whatever they tell me, well, it's my health. Okay, great.

Well, let's talk about how sleep impacts your health. When you're not sleeping, your body's not repairing or recovering. And here's the thing. I want to, before I get into all the specifics here, I'm not saying this stuff to scare people because sometimes people hear this and they're like, Oh my God, now I really need to sleep. And actually it can like backfire. But for those people that are listening to this, that don't prioritize sleep, it's important to understand that sleep is important. There's a lot that happens throughout the night and it's essential for really longevity. If you want to live a long life, every single major disease, the increased risk of every single major disease, if you're not getting enough sleep and enough

quality sleep, meaning increased heart disease, increased cancer, increased Alzheimer's. That's a huge one because the glimpse system is like the limb system for the brain that's during the night our brains kind of like shrink and then this cerebral spinal fluid flushes out the beta amyloid the tau the things that build up over time the plaque that builds up that creates those neurological diseases so really important if you want to live a long life and not have one of these, you know, diabetes, this was really fascinating. They did a study where they sleep deprived people took their insulin pre, you know, after they were getting great sleep, took their insulin,

sleep deprived them, took their insulin again. And they were pre-diabetic as a result of literally after one night of deprived sleep. So one night, I was just on a show with a doctor who specializes in hormones. I mean, there's such a big impact with your hormones in sleep, cortisol, the stress hormone, you know, estrogen, testosterone, all of the hormones get produced and either regulated or dysregulated as a result of not getting enough sleep. This is a really important one for physical longevity and why sleep is so important is so ghrelin and leptin are the hormones that signal when you're hungry and when you're full ghrelin and leptin, those get dysregulated when you don't get enough sleep. So what happens is,

and everyone listening to this, we all, I've had bad nights. Everyone has don't get enough sleep. So what happens is, and everyone listening to this, we all, I've had bad nights. Everyone has had bad night of sleep. The next day, usually you're more hungry. You crave sugar and fat like crazy. And the reason is because your body doesn't signal when you're full. So there's a direct link to weight gain. And then on top of that, your cortisol levels higher. If your cortisol levels are higher than they need to be, you know, they fluctuate throughout the day. You'll store that fat around the midsection, which is where most women don't want to store that fat. Right. So from like a weight loss standpoint, if you're not sleeping well, you could be eating all the healthiest foods and exercising, but if you're not, body's not recovering, you're going to crave sugar and fat like crazy. And you're going to store it because your body thinks it needs to because it's under stress. Wow. That is huge for myself. Since I keep a dream journal, you mentioned the different

devices that we can use now to track our sleep. That's how you end up figuring out if it's quality or not. Cause really you don't know. Here's the thing. You don't want to ever obsess about sleep. Most people, like if you went to a traditional sort of CBTI practitioner therapist, they're going to have you keep a sleep diary. I don't like sleep diaries because one, they're not accurate. And two, they cause more anxiety because you're like, you have to look at the clock. And if you look at the clock when you wake up, now you're like counting the hours before you have to get up and start your day. And it's like, that's not helpful. So I like using devices. And at the end of the day, you don't want to, you don't have to track your sleep forever. Just track it for like a couple of months and then let it go because you're going to learn what to do and what not to do. Is it like a habit thing? Kind of like, is your brain used to doing this the same way? Like if you track it for a few months, like this is pretty much a pattern. Yes. And so the reason you'd be tracking it is to troubleshoot. Well, what happens when I have a glass of wine too close to bedtime? How does that affect my sleep? What happens when I don't prioritize space throughout my day? Okay. That definitely affects my sleep. Like it helps you

with the behavioral changes that sometimes people struggle with, like turning off Netflix. The founder said sleep is his number one competition. So, yeah. So the reason you track your sleep is to sort of draw the conclusions. It's like in a blood test for your sleep. Yeah. Okay. Doctor, you get a blood test. He says, okay, you have high cholesterol. We can put you on this medication or you can start a diet and exercise program. You can kind of see you get that feedback. Start to feel a lot better too when you start sleeping. I mean, I'm sure your whole life change was my dead when I started sleeping. I remember that. I remember saying, I don't think I've ever slept in my life until I started really sleeping. Well, that's the thing. Well, people don't really realize how bad they feel until they start to feel good.

And the same with sleep. Like people don't really understand how bad they were sleeping until they start to sleep. Good. It's like, oh my gosh. Wow. I thought I was sleeping pretty good, but man, I wasn't. And there's probably, am I right? There's probably a lot of medications that are preventing people from sleeping and having

good night's sleep. Yeah. That in the most abused drug in the entire world, which we're all addicted to, which is caffeine. Yeah. Here's the thing. Like I, I have an espresso machine in my house. I love to taste the coffee and espresso. It feels good, you know, and it helps you focus. The thing is though, what it does is it blocks adenosine and adenosine is the chemical that builds up in our body that creates sleepiness and caffeine blocks that receptor. That's why you get the kind of euphoric little buzz. And if you do that, the half-life of caffeine is about six hours. So it's in your system for about 12 hours, depending on how fast you metabolize it.

It doesn't feel that way. Yeah. It doesn't feel that way. And then you need more of it. You're right. So a lot of times people have to rely on caffeine and get through the day. And then they wonder why they can't sleep at night. And it's because the adenosine is you have sleep debt. And you're spending like $12 a day on Starbucks. $12 a day on Starbucks. So yeah. So caffeine, I mean, there's a lot of other drugs that people take that definitely can affect, you know, sleep for sure. And most people, I'm always surprised, but people just, they take medication, but they don't like read the side effects of like the, I guess maybe out of fear or just, I don't, I don't know really why definitely can interfere with your sleep. Alcohol is another big one. Most people, you know, drink alcohol to relax

and it is like, it does act as a sedative, but it'll heats the body up and it'll disturb REM sleep, which is an important stage of sleep. It does. But here's the thing, just have it earlier on in the, you know, have it with dinner. Don't have it while you're watching your Netflix show or something like that. Wow. That's so interesting. What about drinking water before bed? Because my, my kids always want a glass of water next to their bed. Yeah. I mean, it's not ideal, especially if you're have a small prostate, which I'm sure your kids don't have a small prostate at this point. Um, yeah, you really want to front load your, your water. The reason for that is because a great night of sleep actually happens as soon as you wake up, you lose a liter

of water through sweat and respiration throughout the night. So drink most of your water. First thing you should do is drink a big glass of water. And then at night you want to start to taper off your water else you're going to be using the restroom. And then that gives the mind an opportunity to start revving up and then you might be up for the rest of the night. How important is that schedule of sleep? It's important and it's not necessary, but it is important. At the same time, some people will say you have to be in bed by nine kind of thing. I've never been that kind of mom, by the way. No, I think it's more important that you

get up at the same time every day. Going to bed at the same time every day. That's, that's helpful because it does, our bodies do have rhythms, bio rhythms. Most people's bio rhythms are totally dysregulated because, you know, we're disconnected from the magnetic frequency of the earth because of the shoes and the roads and everything. That's real science. That's not like people hear that and they're like, oh, that's a hippie, hippie thing. I'm like, no, it's real, real science. It's important that people understand that going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time for sure would be helpful. Having a bedtime routine is helpful, but you don't need one in order to sleep. Okay.

So you get your brainwash. Is that the beginning part of your sleep? That happens mostly in the Delta phase, which happens mostly in the first quarter of the night. Some people call it the money sleep hours between like 10 PM and 1 AM or 12. So like those first initial hours, if you started to measure your sleep, you would notice that first sort of quarter of the night is when you're getting most of that deep sleep. And then the fourth quarter, right before you wake up, which is why you usually

remember your dreams. That's when you're getting most of your REM sleep. And most people, those two, they go to bed too late and then they wake up too early because they have to be somewhere with an alarm or whatever it is, but they just wake up and they're kind of like not getting enough REM sleep, which is really important, which is where we. So where does beta brainwave come in? Yeah. So each stage of sleep has a, has a brainwave. So there's alpha, delta, beta. Is the beta is that in between, right? That in between awake and asleep? Because that's like when you're in like deep meditation and like all of the good hormones are like releasing

like oxytocin, melatonin, you know, all the things that you're probably taking in pill form. Yeah. Meditation, what's interesting is you'll hear people that have really consistent meditation practices need less sleep or they don't need as much sleep because they're kind of getting into those brainwave states and their body is in a state of relaxation. And it's sort of like, kind of like a sleeping state, but it's, but it's not, you're, you're obviously conscious.

There are studies and people that have meditated like these monks and they do get into these deeper brainwave states. Most people don't get into them. So it's like these advanced meditators. And are you getting the same benefit of sleep when you're in this meditation state? I don't know. You know, after my dad had died, I lost one of my good friends and I was really, really stressed. My insurance company was doing a study on stress and nighttime meditation. I was so excited. I was like, oh, this is going to be the thing. Cause I was having a hard time sleeping. Cause I just had all of this grief that I was dealing with and all the things. Meditation wasn't a regular practice for me yet, but I had been

taking mindfulness classes. So I had an idea, but so I was really sad is that I didn't qualify for the study because I was too stressed. I'm like a too stressed for your stress study. I was so excited. I was like, I'm just going to do it anyways. So like, cause I had saw what the program was. So I like found my own nighttime meditation and there was not a lot back then available, like for me to search for, but I found one. And I would do it every night and I would journal and stuff like that in the mornings. And then I would get up and I kind of had a practice of meditation. It was almost like I tricked my mind. The nighttime meditation helped me meditate during the day.

Interesting. And I started to have this in between. I had sleep for the first time. It was insane. It was like the meditation quieted my mind enough for me to, to go to sleep. And so it became very important to me because I started to feel extremely good and it was because of the sleep. Yeah. That's interesting. That's really interesting. Yeah. I mean, so different things work for different people. Generally, I try to steer people away from meditating at night. It depends on the style of meditation and there's so many different styles,

but most meditation can actually wake you up, give you energy. And like, you're kind of raising the, you know, they might say like the Kundalini or whatever you want to call it. So depending on like what type of meditation, and it sounds like you probably were practicing a specific like meditation design to help sort of. Yes, it was. Yeah. It was a nighttime specific meditation. That's important because just like there's different types of exercise, there's different

types of meditation and some of them better than others at certain times of day. But mindfulness practice is something that is extremely helpful for people with sleep challenges, whether it be breathing, whether you're practicing like a Vipassana style, just focusing on their breath, any type of mindfulness practice, bringing your attention to the present. Number one, you have your first like disconnect where you realize that you're not your thoughts if you do it often enough. And then you can start to inquiry into your thinking. And that's where all the stress is created. It's

in these stories of the past or the future that create all this unnecessary stress and suffering. And maybe it was more of a mindfulness kind of meditation because I think the breathing was important. I discovered how to breathe. I mean, it was something that no one ever taught me how to do was breathe. It's so important. Most people, yeah, breathing correctly. They're breathing from their chest, not into their diaphragm. Andrew Weil has a great technique that he teaches. It's the four, seven, eight breath technique. Such a good one. That really helps people get dropped into the parasympathetic. There's another one that we like to teach our clients, box breathing, but we call it bed breathing. So the Navy SEALs use that technique. I'm a big

believer in breathing just because it gets people out of their heads and into their bodies. Yeah. And you always have it. It's also thinking about how, like what people are watching at night. You watch a scary movie, of course, we're not going to be able to go to sleep right away. We're going to toss and turn. But you know what? The news is as scary. The news is more scary than the worst horror film you could watch. Yeah, no, that is the worst thing you could possibly do for your

sleep is watch the news before you go to sleep. Yeah. 10 o'clock news, go to bed. What? The worst, the worst. You're just going to hear about all the murders and the rapists and the killers and the wars. It's like, no, no, that's not when you want to watch the news. Watch it like during the day at some point. And like, maybe just a little bit. Probably has a lot to do with people, you know, struggling to kind of get into that relaxing state that you need to get to. A hundred percent. Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. Yeah. What about with the time changing lately? It's been so hard to wake up. It's so dark. Yeah. Well, the two things that sort of, I call them the levers that control sleep are lighting temperature, getting light first thing

in the morning helps turn off the melatonin faucet. And then, you know, making sure you don't have light at night helps turn it on. And so we have light receptors like all over our body. And so it's really important to get enough sunlight. I actually, when I was growing up, I grew up in Philadelphia in the suburbs of Philadelphia and I would get like depressed during the winter. My mom was like, what's going on with you? That's a very real thing. Yeah. It's a real thing. And then she got me this, this light, this like sunbox light. And I remember I used to come home from basketball. So I wouldn't see, I'd get up really early in the morning, go to practice,

go to school all day, have practice after. And then I'd come home. So I'd wake up. It was dark. I'd come home when it was dark. And after a couple of weeks of that, I would literally have, I'd be depressed. And so she got me the sunlight and i used to listen to uh the beach boys and have the sun on and it literally made a huge difference dude your mom is so cool my mom is super cool and smart because that was why did you have issues sleeping my family used to joke around. They said my nickname was Narco. It's not because I'm like a drug dealer,

but because literally I would be, they'd be watching Sunday football and I'd be asleep. Like sleep for me is a superpower. I'm blessed. It's a gift. So many people I know, you know, and work with, they wish they had that superpower. Well, yeah.

I mean, you know, we charge our phones. We make sure that they get fully charged. Yeah. That's what sleep is. It's like you're charging your body. You know, I mean, when I think about the few things that humans definitely need, it's like nutrition, sleep. Yeah. I would go this order.

It's, it's really, it's air, it's water, then it's sleep. Food. Yeah. You know, you're going to live a couple of minutes without air, right? You live a couple of days air right you live a couple days without water and the next most important thing is sleep you know after my dad died my mom was not sleeping she had never lived by herself in her entire life ever and she could she didn't sleep and she started to seriously have hallucinations yes yes. Yes. So there's a, do you know who the magician,

he's a mentalist, one of the most popular guys that does it. David Blaine. David Blaine. So I was listening to an episode. So cool. What a cool dude. I was listening to him get interviewed on this thing that he did where they put him on this pillar in the middle of, I think it was like time square or something. I remember when he did that. Yeah, a couple of years ago or more than that. So he's talking about this and I thought something was really interesting. How hard was that to do? And he said, you know what the hardest part of that stunt was? He's like not sleeping. What happened was I started to hallucinate. I started to see spiders crawl up my arm. I started to see like

weird stuff, snakes and all because my brain was saying, Hey, you need to sleep if you don't sleep. So it was creating all of these things to kind of like signal, like, Hey, like you're killing yourself. And I was like, wow, that's really interesting. God, didn't they torture people that way somewhere? It is. Absolutely. Yeah. Because, yeah, you start to lose your mind. You get crazy.

What's interesting is daylight savings when we lose that hour of sleep the next day, massive spike in heart attacks and car crashes. Huge, like significant spike. So, and the reason is because people are losing an hour of sleep, just an hour of sleep. You know, your reaction time decreases, your decision-making. I can't remember stuff, you know? I'm like, I don't even remember this morning because we woke up so early to catch a flight.

Like, I don't even remember how I got to the airport, you know, kind of thing. Yeah, you're like in a fog. Yeah. Your brain's not really functioning. No, it's not. Unfortunately, which what about the sleepy time team? Yeah. I mean, there's teas, there's tinctures, there's supplements. My ritual actually is I do drink a bedtime tea. This, this company called Rishi, they make this amazing lavender, not for your daughter, but lavender blend, but Gaia herbs makes a really nice sleepy time tea. But yeah, I mean, teas can relax you. Kava, Kava is great. They use that as in their ceremonies in, um, Polynesian islands, Kava, that's a natural sedative and it actually rebuilds the GABA system in the brain.

Whereas a lot of these medications, sleeping medications, they deplete the GABA system. There's actually a guy, he's a kava expert. I actually interviewed him and he created this kava oil that you can take and it definitely increases quality of sleep called kavaplex. I like that. And you know, my dad used to sleep with mentholatum under his nose. Nasal strips, mouth taping is a thing now. So if you want to breathe out of your nose, you want to be able to breathe and you want to breathe from your nose, not from your mouth. That makes a difference in quality for quality of sleep. I seriously laugh because if someone saw me some nights, I have like my eye mask on, my nose strip on.

Oh my gosh. I mean, last year was very, I struggled going through menopause. And at first I didn't realize what the hell was happening to me. 60% of women have insomnia during menopause. Brutal. I mean, and I just was tired all the time. I really felt like impaired from the lack of sleep. I couldn't talk. I would have like word loss. You know, I, there were so many things I like major ADHD symptoms, all of these things. And when I kept hearing like people say, Oh, you should go and get this little hormone and you should do this and that. But I just kept on kind of saying, you know, I'm going to embrace this. I, I had this perspective

about menopause because of spiritually what I've been going through that I going to embrace this. I had this perspective about menopause because of spiritually what I've been going through that I wanted to embrace it. And I, but I felt that if I loved it and I accepted it, that it was going to be okay. And I swear to God, when I think about my like whole journey with menopause than other women, I mean, mine was gold. I gained so much wisdom, so much space to be able to think and, and just be, and it was just nothing but wisdom and I'm sleeping now. So we're all good. You said something really important that I think we should make sure people heard. You said acceptance, like in those times of life, whether it's when you're a new mom or you're going through menopause, even if you're somebody that has insomnia, if you can learn to actually

practice acceptance of whatever the night brings in your situation, that is one of the most powerful sleep aids you possibly could learn or take. And most of us are constantly in a state of resistance of what is, and we're trying to control things we have no control over. And so when you can just accept your situation, that doesn't mean to resign or like not try to do something to change it, but it's a state. It's a, you can, you can learn to get into this state of, okay, if it happens, okay, if it doesn't. And that is a great

space to live from, from that place. And it absolutely helps you sleep. So there's actually a whole therapy around that called acceptance and commitment therapy, that there's techniques that we use from that therapy that are tremendously helpful for people with their sleep and their life. So can you, can you tell me about the aura ring a little bit more? Yeah. So I like to say the aura ring is like a sleep lab on your finger. And it's a little ring that you wear on your finger that measures your body temperature, your heart rate variability, which is the time between each heartbeat and measure stages of sleep latency, which is how fast you fall asleep, sleep efficiency, which is time in bed actually asleep.

It's really amazing, all the data that little device picks up. And yeah, and what's really cool about it is it'll alert you a couple of days before you get sick because during the night, your body temperature will spike. And then you know, okay, I'm fighting something and the thing is accurate. And now they're using it actually, um, for, um, menstrual cycle tracking and pregnancy because it's, it's so the device is that accurate that it can, can help with, uh, you know, ovulation and that type of period of time for planning, um, you know, having babies and all that, which is pretty amazing. Yeah. That is very amazing. So then does it shoot you like a report and like, you can track it like

on. Yeah. So, yeah. So this is where it kind of, it's not so amazing. So you get the data, it'll give you a score every day. Um, and i could kind of pull up mine here and just show you um let me see if i can do it real quick so is it an app or something yeah it's an app so it'll that syncs to your your phone and then and then for us we have a practitioner platform where we can monitor all of our clients but you'll see i don't know if you could see that. So last night was a good night. I got 90, 90, I got an A. My total sleep was eight hours. That's great. Yeah. They give you a sleep, what's called a sleep score. And essentially is they're taking all of the data and they're running it through an algorithm. And then they're going to tell you, you know, where you are based off of your sleep data. And so they give you a

readiness score and a sleep score. Yeah. It's, it's pretty cool. Pretty cool. Wow. It is very cool. I'm looking at it now. I'm like, I want one, but you said other devices, of course, other devices can do it too, but yeah. If you care about your sleep and you want to improve your sleep, the Oura Ring is the one to get. If you want an overall fitness tracker, and I think a whoop strap would be probably your best option there, but Oura Ring is the one to get. If you want an overall fitness tracker, I think a whoop strap would be probably your best option there, but Oura Ring is awesome. I love it. Yeah. You know,

I've never been a very long sleeper though. Like I've been good. Like I'm good with like six hours of sleep. I don't know if it's just because I just get harder when I sleep. That's why it would be very, I think it'd be great for me to know. Like, why is it? You might be getting like two hours of deep sleep and like two hours of REM sleep within the six hour period. And like, that's awesome. That could be the case.

So that, so that'd be an A if you did something like that, Kendall? Well, it's gonna, it's gonna, so your sleep is unique to you and as you wear the device, it might be an A or it might be, you know, a B or C. I don't know. But it is about the quality within that. Yeah. I mean, quantity and quality, but for some people are short sleepers. They don't need as much sleep. Yeah. Cause I mean, you know how you said, you said you used to be embarrassed by, you know, getting too much sleep. I have actually, I'm embarrassed sometimes about the least sleep that I used to get. We're getting sleep shamed over here. Too much, too little, like, geez, this is the world. How do you feel? You know, I mean, how are you? That is it. That's really important. You know, it is a bit challenging though. Sometimes though, because it's subjective and you might feel like

you feel pretty good, but then when you get better sleep or you become healthier, then you're like, wow, I, you know, that can change. So that's where it is a little bit tricky, but at the end of the day, that's, that's what it's all about. Like, why do we sleep? We sleep so that we can live. We sleep so that we can wake up and have energy to enjoy our life. Right. So how you feel is a really good indicator of how well and the amount of sleep that you probably need. Well, and you know, I've never been a napper ever. Like I've, I've never been able to understand how people could take like a two hour nap during the day and like be good to go. I mean that the times that I've napped, it's ruined my day. But lately as I've gotten older,

I've allowed myself the space to, if I'm tired to lay down. Yeah. I just listened to my body. I think that's an important thing. And I do also know sometimes I've gotten too much sleep. You know, is that such a thing? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. They've there's, there's research that shows if you people that sleep, I think it's, I don't want to misquote it, but it's over like nine, I think it's nine and a half hours that the, their, your life expectancy decreases because usually that's associated with like depression or something like that, or maybe another health issue that you have. So yeah, you can have too much of a good thing.

Yeah. Well, that's very good to know because like, you know, teenagers just happen to sleep like forever hard. They need more sleep. They need more sleep. Yeah. And they're growing. Yeah. It's important that teenagers. So they're not just lazy. Lay off of them parents. They need their sleep. Well, your book and your program, tell us about it. Yeah. So we work with people all over the country. It's a holistic approach based in science. We take people through three phases over the course of eight weeks. First, we look at the psychology of sleep, why people are not sleeping, then the physiology, and then the environment.

We use data from the aura ring track and measure sleep. So people can see as they're making these changes, how it's impacting their sleep, how it's improving their sleep. And they get a coach, an individual coach. And then I actually once a week, everyone jumps on a call with me as well. And that's the high level of our academy. There's a lot to it. When people are going through those three phases, you're learning a lot and working through a lot of things, but that's, um, that's what we do. That's our, our comprehensive program for people with insomnia. And then the book, the sleep advantage, that's just your simple guide to better sleep.

I was reading all kinds of books when I was starting to learn about sleep and what's available. They were all scientific. They were boring. I was like, let me just write something that's to the point that can give people some good strategies to start their journey to improve their sleep. That's why I wrote that book. So there's a whole chapter on sleep supplements. I share some of the techniques that we use at Sleep Science Academy that we found to be very helpful for hundreds of people we work with. Yeah. It's on Amazon and audible. Well, Devin, go ahead and tell everybody your website and social media. So sleep science academy.com and then social media.

It's a Devin Burke wellness. So just my name, D V I N B U R K E wellness. And now it's time for break that shit down. Yeah. So my break that shit down would just be, remember that sleep's a result and you don't have to do anything in order to sleep. And practicing acceptance is the fastest way to actually reduce the anxiety that most people have that causes them to not sleep. That's good. I'm going to work on that with my little girl. I mean, how it goes. Yeah.

I think we're doing too much ritual stuff. Yeah. Let some of that shit go. Yeah. Thank you, Devin. It was so nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Thanks for the conversation.

Thanks for being with us today. We hope you will come back next week. If you like what you hear, don't forget to rate, like, and subscribe. Thank you. We rise to lift you up. Thanks for listening.