Something You Should Know - Bonus: SYSK TRENDING - The Science of Sleeping, Breathing, and Hydration

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

Why would anyone need to be taught how to sleep, breathe, or drink water? Those are things you already do every day. And yet, it turns out most of us are doing them just wrong enough to undermine our health. In this SYSK Trending episode, I talk with Michael Breus, one of the world’s leading sleep experts, about how small adjustments to when and how you sleep, breathe, and hydrate can produce outsized benefits for your energy, immunity, metabolism, and long-term health. Dr. Breus is a double-board-certified clinical psychologist and sleep specialist, and the author of Sleep Drink Breathe: Simple Daily Habits for Profound Long-Term Health (https://amzn.to/3ZposzW). His research shows that better health doesn’t always require doing more—it often comes from doing the basics correctly. This is simple advice, but it’s powerful—and it may change how you think about your daily habits. You can also take the Chrono Quiz Dr. Breus discusses here: https://sleepdoctor.com/pages/sleep-quiz PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS QUINCE: Refresh your wardrobe with Quince! Go to ⁠https://Quince.dom/sysk ⁠for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! HIMS: For simple, online access to personalized and affordable care for Hair Loss, ED, Weight Loss, and more, visit ⁠https://Hims.com/SOMETHING⁠ for your free online visit!  SHOPIFY: Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠ DELL: Dell Tech Days are here. Enjoy huge deals on PCs like the Dell 14 Plus with Intel® Core™ Ultra processors. Visit ⁠https://Dell.com/deals⁠ PLANET VISIONARIES: We love the Planet Visionaries podcast, so listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you're listening to this podcast! In partnership with The Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You hear a lot about sleep and health, but it's rarely as simple as, just get more sleep and you'll be fine. There's a lot more to it than that, which is why today's S-Y-S-K trending topic is how to sleep, breathe, and hydrate your way to better health. Most health advice tells you to do more, more exercise, more vegetables, more willpower. But what if some of the biggest gains come from doing things you already do just differently? Today, we're talking about three things you do every day, sleeping, breathing, and drinking. Small changes in how you do each one can have big effects on your energy, stress, health, and even longevity.

To put this in perspective, my conversation with Dr. Michael Bruce explains how getting sleep, breathing, and hydration right, can dramatically improve how your body functions. And we'll get to that right after this. The Regency era, you might know it as the time. when Bridgeton takes place. Or it's the time when Jane Austen wrote her books. The Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history.

Vulgar History's new season is all about the Regency era, the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal. Listen to Vulgar History, Regency Era, wherever you get podcasts. Three things you do every day. Sleep, drink, and breathe. You can't not do. do them. You have to do them. And maybe you could do them a little better, according to my guest, Dr. Michael Bruce. Michael's name has popped up on other episodes of something you should know.

He's been a guest, but even other guests have referenced him or quoted him. He's considered one of the top experts on sleep anywhere. And he is about to explain how small improvements in how you sleep, breathe, and hydrate yourself can have extraordinary results. Michael is a double board-certified clinical psychologist and clinical sleep specialist. He's the author of numerous best-selling books and his latest is called Sleep, Drink, Breathe, Simple Daily Habits for Profound Long-Term Health. Hi, Michael, welcome to something you should know. Thanks for having me. I'm stoked to be here. So why, I'm thinking people are wondering, why would I need advice on how to sleep, breathe, and hydrate myself? Such a great question.

So I get this all the time, like Michael, we already do that next. Here's the thing. When you think about the fundamentals, like what is the DNA of wellness? What can you stack all that on if you're deciding to optimize your health or start a new health program or any of that? If you're not sleeping well, if you're not hydrated and you don't breathe appropriately, you're not going to be able to accomplish any of those goals. So why not start with the basics?

And you kind of have to do them every single day. So if I give you a couple of tips that you can just kind of smooth on into your routine and it doesn't take a lot of energy or effort, why not? So let's start with drinking, hydration. That should be easy. I mean, the advice everyone's always heard is drink eight glasses of water a day and you're good to go. Is that pretty good advice? It's not the worst advice that I've heard. Eight glasses of eight ounces of water puts you at 64 ounces, which is about three quarters of the way you probably

want to be there, depending upon your height and weight, things of that nature. I will tell you, though, that here's the thing that I think most people don't understand is it's not necessarily about amount. It's about quality and timing. So as an example, number one, what kind of water are you drinking? If you're drinking water straight out of your tap, I would tell you that there are websites where you can put your zip code in and you can learn exactly what is in the water in the coming out of your tap. To be clear, there's a lot. of things that go into that water to clean it in order for it to be usable again. So for me personally, I only drink filtered water.

Now, to be fair, you don't have to go buy some crazy double osmosis thing for your home. Although if you do, you're going to get much better water. I went out and I brought a Brita pitcher and take my tap water and I run it through there. So that way I know that I'm getting decent quality water. If you can, don't drink water in plastics. There's a lot of data that's coming out about these nanoplastics that appear to leech. into the water and then we drink them. And they've actually started to find nanoplastics in utero babies now.

So we really want to keep that away, if at all possible. And then there are actually types of water. So you can't just call yourself mineral water or spring water without having minerals in it or coming from a spring. And of course, those two sources of water are infinitely better than kind of tap water that's not going to have a whole lot for you. Now, a lot of people like to ask me about things like what are called hydration, multipliers or these powders that you can put into the water to maybe make it better water or make it absorb better. Here's what I'll tell you is most of them are loaded with salt. And so for folks out there who've got high blood pressure or are salt sensitive, this might not be

the best idea. Then another area that I found super duper interesting that I didn't really think about before because I was the same of what do I just drink eight glasses a day, was sipping versus gulping makes a massive difference. So this took me a little while to comprehend. And so I had to think of an example. And the one that I thought of is sort of like this. So most people don't realize it, but when you wake up in the morning, sleep in and of itself is a dehydrative event. You lose almost a full liter of water just from the humidity in your breath every single night. And so when you wake up, we want you obviously drinking water and clearly you're dehydrated. So what a lot of people will do is they'll go and then they'll drink 30 ounces right in the morning, right? Like right before

a workout. This is not a great idea. Let me explain. So when you walk out in the morning to your kitchen and walk over to your sink, usually there's a dried up sponge that's lying there somewhere. You are that dried up sponge every single morning. If you took that dried up sponge and you stuck it under your faucet and you open up the faucet full blast as though you were gulping water, what happens to the sponge? Right. The water hits it and it runs right off it. But if you actually had it at a slower rate, right, like sipping water and you let it absorb into the sponge, soon the sponge regenerates and now you have a useful tool. You are the sponge. And so the better you can sip, the better it will absorb.

Well, one of the other things that I have heard about hydration is, yes, you should drink water, but the other fluids and the foods with fluids count. Oh, absolutely. One of the big recommendations that we have is making sure that each one of your meals has water-filled vegetables in it, right? And the good news is most vegetables have got a lot of water in it. But having that decent-sized serving of it, you can actually count towards your water. absolutely. And also I want to be clear, you can actually count coffee towards your water. Let me explain. So coffee is coffee in and of itself is a diuretic, but it doesn't really have that great of a diuretic properties until you get about three cups into you. So to be clear, and I am the sleep doctor, I'm telling you that if you want to have your coffee in the morning, one to two cups, you can actually count those cups towards your hydration. Now, as a quick tip, in order for you to get the

The biggest bang out of your buck from caffeine, now I'm becoming the sleep doctor once again, is what you want to do is you want to drink your caffeine 90 minutes after you wake up. You want to hydrate before you caffeinate because once again, your body is very dehydrated. And while the two cups of coffee do count towards water, you don't want to mix it up with the caffeine right away. If you do wait 90 minutes, here's what ends up happening. Is the adrenaline and cortisol that your brain needed to wake you up finally starts to slow down? and when you add caffeine, you actually get a bigger bang for your buck just by waiting 90 minutes after you wake up.

The only other thing about caffeine that I think is important to think through is when should you stop. And so caffeine becomes important from a hydration standpoint because again, once you hit the third cup, that's when it starts pulling water out of your body. So you want to be careful for that. But you also probably want to stop around 2 p.m. in the afternoon because caffeine has a half life of between 6 and 8 hours. And so if you stop it 2, then half of the caffeine is out of your. your system by 10, and that means you've got a far greater likelihood of getting some sleep.

So let's talk about breathing because, you know, I breathe, I breathe all the time. I seem to do it pretty well because I'm still alive. I'm not dead. Well, I don't think that's the right way to think about it, to be fair. Like, are you in great shape if you, you know, don't exercise? No, of course not, right? Same kind of concept here is I do it, could I do it a little bit better, and is the juice worth the squeeze. I think that's actually the more important question is, okay, Michael, you've come up with all these cool ideas to maybe make my breathing better or make my hydration better, but is it

really worth it? Like, am I going to get something out of this? So I think we will. And breathing is actually kind of an interesting one. And to be fair, it was the one that I was the least familiar with, but actually they had the most experience with. Let me explain. So mostly doctors work in pulmonary offices because pulmonary doctors or lung doctors usually own most of the sleep labs here in the United States. And so we end up dealing with patients that have got asthma, COPD, all kinds of breathing related issues. And so understanding how the lungs function becomes very, very important.

Also, sleep apnea is arguably the number one diagnosis in terms of sleep labs. So certainly something that I've had a lot of experience with. But thinking about breathing differently, not on the medical side, but thinking about it on the, hey, could I do it better side? And what good would that do me? Here's one of the techniques that I learned. That actually turns out to be incredibly helpful, not just for me, but for my patients with insomnia. It's called four, seven, eight breathing. So this is an interesting technique. And it's exactly like what it sounds like. You breathe in for a count of four. You hold for a count of seven. And you breathe out for a count of eight. If you do this 10 to 12 times, your heart rate will drop to about

60 beats per minute. The reason this becomes so interesting and important is because 60 beats per minute is exactly the place where your body can enter into a state of unconsciousness. Anything higher and it cannot. So this technique of 478 breathing, I actually have taught many of my insomnia patients who wake up in the middle of the night. So you might have listeners out there who are saying, hold on a second, what is he talking about? So I have a lot of patients who tell me that they wake up between one and three o'clock in the morning, and they have a terrible time falling back to sleep. This is where breathing can actually come into play to help lower your heart rate, decrease your anxiety, and get you back to bed.

The 478 method works because, number one, you're counting during the whole process so you can't think of anything else, and because of the way you're breathing, it's lowering your heart rate at the same time. This allows you to not think and just breathe, and then the natural sleep process has a tendency to take over. And so that pattern is just run me through it again. Sure. Go ahead. Seven, eight, breathing. Actually, we can do it together. So everybody listening, you would do it like this. Breathe in, two, three, four. Hold. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, out two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. That's it. It's very simple. It's very simple.

and you count in your head and you go through it 10 to 12 times and you really get involved and you're counting and you're breathing and you get into it and you just stop thinking. And then the natural sleep process kicks in because your heart rate has gone lower and you're good. My guest is Michael Bruce. He is a clinical psychologist, clinical sleep specialist and author of Sleep, Drink, Breathe, simple daily habits for profound long-term health. If Bravo drama, pop culture, chaos, and honest takes are your love language, you'll want all about TeriH podcast in your feed.

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So, Michael, let's talk about, you know, breathing during the day, just regular breathing. It could probably use some attention, but, you know, it just seems so automatic. It does seem automatic. And here's the thing is, is it really helping you? So as an example, another thing that I noticed, and maybe you could tell me if this happens to you as well, when I'm really concentrating on something like reading an email, I don't breathe. like I sit there and I'm reading, reading, reading.

And before I know it, if it's a long email, I'm like, and I have to breathe. So a lot of people when they focus and concentrate during the day, they actually forget to breathe and that's an important factor. And then the other thing that I've noticed during daytime breathing that a lot of people don't have a tendency to do is when I tell somebody to take in a deep breath, when they breathe in if their shoulders rise, that means that they're actually not using their abdomen. They're using their thorax to breathe. And so what I try to teach them to do is to breathe wide, not up.

Now, what do I mean by that? When you breathe, you don't want your shoulders to rise. What you want is when you take a big, deep breath, you want to feel your belly expand, almost like it's a horizontal breath versus a bringing up your shoulders breath. And again, these are different things that you can do during the day. Now, you're probably sitting here saying, well, Michael, when would I do that? Why would I do that? This seems kind of like information overload.

How can we put all something like this together? And I can actually have a cogent program so I can get on with it all. So I created a three week program. All you do is you set five different alarms on your phone, one for right after you wake up, one four before lunch, one after lunch, one before dinner, and the other one after dinner. And then all I'm asking you to do during these five separate times is you do a little bit of breathing, you drink a little bit of water, and you might be. do a few things that have to do with sleep.

And after three weeks, I can almost guarantee that you will have significantly better quality sleep. So let's talk about sleep. And the common advice is you get roughly eight hours of sleep per night and you should be good to go, right? So what we're talking about there usually is length of time in terms of sleep. And remember, sleep is not just a quantity issue. It's really a quality issue.

In fact, I could make the argument. with a lot of science to back me up, that you can actually sleep less if you have higher quality sleep. And so a lot of people are like, okay, I'm always up for higher quality. What is an easy way for me to do that so that I can maintain my regular old schedule and still have some high quality sleep? And so one of the things that I'm known for and you've known me for is this idea of chronotypes, right?

So these are genetic, predisposed sleep schedules that we all have inside our bodies. Sometimes we're called early birds, sometimes we're called night owls. I kind of rejiggered the system and changed the names. And so early birds are now lions, night owls are now wolves, and we actually know what time they should go to bed and what time they should wake up based on the science. And so one of the easiest things that people can do is just wake up at a consistent time based on their chronotype. And it will honestly, within three weeks, magically make the quality of your sleep, significantly better. And you figure out what type you are just based on what?

So you go to cronoquiz.com and you take a quiz and you can learn from that. Or you can just kind of think through and I can give you some of the different chrono types. Why don't we just talk about them for folks and they can listen as opposed to having to go to a quiz. Sure. So many of you might know or think of yourself as an early bird. But what I'm talking about here is without an alarm on vacation, what time do you wake up? If you wake up at 6 o'clock in the morning without an alarm on vacation, there's no question about it.

Genetically speaking, you're an early bird or what I call a lion. You might also be the opposite, right? And so what if you're the type of person who hates to wake up in the mornings can barely drag their butt out of bed before 7.30? Oftentimes it's 8 o'clock. But, boy, come 2 o'clock in the afternoon. you've got a lot of energy and you're brimming to go and ready to hit the trails. Well, then you're probably more of a night owl or what I call a wolf. There are people in the middle.

We call them bears. They make up almost 55-0% of the population. But there's actually a fourth one, and that's kind of what I'm known for. So to be honest, Mike, I haven't told you anything you don't already know, right? There are people out there that are early birds makes up about 10 to 15%. There are people out there that are night owls, again, makes up about 10 to 15%. And then there are people in the middle, and that makes up 50%. What are we doing with the other 15 to 20% of people out there?

Unfortunately, those are my insomniacs. And when you look at them genetically, they actually have a kind of weird genetic sleep schedule so that it actually makes it very difficult for them to sleep. The good news is I've done all the research in the book. And if you do the Corona Quiz online, I actually send you an email and tell you personally what are the different chronotypes and what's your bedtime, what's your rise time, things like that. So living within that chronotypical time frame actually turns out to be one of the easiest things that people can do just by waking up consistently seven days a week. What happens though if your chronotype doesn't match up to your work schedule?

Yep. Happens all the time. Like shift workers, for example, right? So what happens if you're a normal person or even an early bird and you've got to work from 11 at night till 7? in the morning. So number one, oftentimes I tell people, if it's humanly possible, it would be great to talk to your boss. So what I've discovered over the course of time is when I sit and talk with people's employers, it's actually quite remarkable because they can see the difference. They know who their employees are who are good at night and who are good in the morning.

And oftentimes, if you talk with them intelligently, they'll start switching people's schedules around to match their chronotype. Now, let's be fair, I'm not so foolish as to think that every employer out there is going to be so smart and be able to do something like this. So I've given people reasonable times to wake up. So as an example, if you're a night owl, I'm asking you to get up at 7.30. I don't think that's completely unreasonable. Now, if you've got a job that says you have to be there at 6.30 in the morning, I'm going to actually tell you to sit back and think if that's really the right job for you.

Because you're going to be fighting this every single day. So here's something that I find and have found throughout my life is that my type seems to change. Some days, when I was a teenager, I'd like to sleep late when now I tend to get up early, but a few years ago,

I tended to be somewhere in the middle and consistently. So let's talk about that for a second. So number one, it definitely waxes and wanes over time. Now, everybody actually goes through every chronotype. So if you think about it, when you're an itty-bitty baby,

you're a lion. You go to bed early. You wake up early. When you're a toddler or a middle school, schooler, you're a bear. You go to bed at 7.30. You wake up at 7.30, kind of in bed and out of bed with the sun. When you hit adolescence, oh, I remember that time too. I wanted to stay up until 2 o'clock in the morning playing video games and sleep until 12 the next day. That's when you're a wolf. Then you hit about 18 to 20 years old and your chronotype seems to set for about 30 years. Then you get older like

me and you turn 55, 56 and your chronotype actually starts to go backwards. So as an example, If any of the listeners out there ask their parents, for example, hey, mom, dad, you want to meet for dinner, what time do you want to meet? More times than not, if you're talking to a 65 or 70-year-old, they're saying, hey, let's have dinner at 5.30. Well, that's because their chronotype is going backwards and their melatonin production and their temperature changes. This is all based on when your core body temperature rises and falls. So that's really where chronotypes come from. Now, one little caveat that I think is interesting is if people said to me, hey, Michael, I don't want to wake up based on my chronotype, I would turn to them and say, okay, do me the favor and then just wake up at the same time seven days a week. You're not going to get all of the benefit of the higher quality sleep, but you will get some of the benefit of the consistency of the wake up time. Lastly, snoring, not only for the snorer, but for the people who have to listen to it.

Is it just a problem you have to live with or what? Absolutely not. I will tell you this, Mike. I've actually saved more marriages as a sleep doctor than I ever would have as a marital therapist just by working on snoring. And I agree with you, it is a big issue. So let's go through it fairly quickly. Number one, drop some weight.

You know, I'm trying not to be offensive to people and I'm not saying that everybody who's to snore is heavy, but the data would suggest that a 5% weight loss, so in a 200-pound person, that's 10 pounds, should reduce the snoring decibel level by about 25 to 30 decibels. That's massive. So number one, it won't be as loud if you or your bed partner loses a little bit of weight. The second thing I tell people is you want to decongest for better rest. So the way I think about this is, Mike, have you ever been out in the garden and you're watering the plants and you stick your thumb over the hose and the water squirts out faster.

You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. So that is a situation where the opening of the hose, you've closed it partially and then the substance, which is water in this case, has to get out a smaller opening. And so it has to move faster to get out of that opening. Same holds true with your nose. So now your nose is that hose. And as you're breathing in, anything that makes your nose more narrow or blocks it is going

to make the air move faster. When the air moves faster, it causes a vibration, causes a cadence, and causes a snore. So the only way to make snoring disappear is to open up the pipes. Anything that is making the pipes narrow or blocking them, we've got to move out of the way. And congestion, especially in the sinuses, does an amazing job of that. So what ends up happening is your whole sinuses congest up, your mouth drops open. Now you're actually breathing unfiltered air into your lungs, and you're sucking your tongue, to the back of your throat, all of that flappy tissue back there is now got all the air running

through it since it's not actually coming through your nose, and now you snore. So using something like a netty pod or something called a navage, which is a device that you can actually attach to your nose and it will run salt water through your sinuses and out and get all that gunk out of there can be extremely, extremely useful. It's not a bad idea to put an air filter in your bedroom. It is the room you're spending the most time in in your home, and you want that air to be of high quality. Third thing that I tell people to do is create a pillow wall between you and your bed partner. So remember, sound is a matter wave, and so if you actually physically block it, it will bounce back to the snorer, and then they will naturally turn away from you.

And then the final thing is, I think I would be remiss if I didn't tell everybody that if you've got a snoring bed partner, it's probably not a bad idea to do a sleep study to make sure that they don't have something called sleep which has terrible consequences if left untreated. And a lot of people out there who snore, unfortunately, have got sleep apnea. Well, this is great because you think about sleeping, breathing, and hydrating. I mean, how simple could it be? But apparently there's a lot more to it. And I appreciate you sharing this.

Michael Bruce has been my guest. He is a double-boarded clinical psychologist, clinical sleep specialist, and author of the book, Sleep, Drink, Breathe, Simple Daily Habits for, profound long-term health. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks so much, Michael. It's always great having you on. Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure wishing you sweet dreams. And that wraps up this SYSK trending episode where we focus in on trending topics that connect directly with what people are dealing with right now. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening to something you should know.