The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The Woman Who Helps Athletes Sleep: Stop Having Showers Just Before Bed! New Science! ‘Nappucino’ Phenomenon You Need To Know!

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Quicker decision making and faster reaction times, here's how you sleep like an Olympian  Dr Cheri Mah is a sleep scientist and Professor at the Stanford Sleep Medicine Centre, specialising in the relationship between sleep and performance in elite athletes.  In this conversation, Dr Cheri and Steven discuss topics such as, the sleep hacks of elite athletes, the link between alcohol and bad sleep, how to hack naps, and how sleep can improve your sex life. (0:00) Intro (01:32) What do you do and why do you do it? (03:55) Who do you work with? (06:39) What are the misconceptions about sleep? (10:19) Study that increases performance by 12% (13:44) NBA players losing based on schedule (16:36) Players who slept more sprinted faster (18:22) Athletes who have changed their careers by focusing on sleep (21:38) Where to start getting better sleep? (22:51) Does sound/music hurt sleep quality? (23:52) Does temperature matter? (25:47) Food timing for better sleep (28:42) The food to eat before bed that will destroy your sleep (33:36) What to do for a racing mind? (35:07) What is the parasympathetic nervous system? (39:13) Emotional link to better sleep (41:17) Perception change on the importance of sleep (43:34) Cognitive performance and sleep (47:22) Sleep debt and how it works (51:55) Muscle memory and its connection to sleep (53:48) What's a nappucino? (55:18) Do naps work? (56:52) Is the snooze button bad? (59:43) Are there different chronotypes? (01:02:19) Does school start too early for kids? (01:03:55) What parents should know (01:06:20) Sleeping travel tips (01:10:46) Sleeping drugs (01:13:34) Does sex before sleep hurt quality of sleep? (01:15:07) What is the most popular question Cheri Mah gets asked? (01:17:54) How common is sleep apnea? (01:19:47) What excuses do we hear for prioritizing sleep? (01:21:25) Sleep and injury proneness (01:23:08) Waking up early makes Steven hungry (01:25:05) Is waking up in the middle of the night normal? (01:26:38) How much does alcohol affect my sleep? (01:27:43) Guests last question Follow Dr Cheri:  Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/9kmHGQ1DHLb  Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/9NTFNX3DHLb  Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes  My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook  You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb  Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb  Sponsors: Shopify: http://shopify.com/bartlett PerfectTed: https://bit.ly/PerfectTed-DIARY40 with an exclusive code DIARY40 for 40% off

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I was 86% correct on accurately predicting when an NBA team will be at highest risk of losing strictly based on the sleep. Oh gosh. Yeah. And just 15 or 30 minutes can make a difference. So let's dive into just some very practical strategies to get the best sleep possible. Dr. Sheree Ma is a renowned sleep doctor and performance expert whose sleep optimization research has enhanced the careers of CEOs as well as athletes in the NFL, MLB, and Formula One, and has provided life-changing expertise to companies like Nike, Under Armour, and Google. For my elite athletes that I work with, sufficient sleep, it's a game changer. For example, we saw a 12% faster reaction time, a 9% improvement in free throws, and a 4%

increase in faster sprint time and when you experience what it feels like to be well rested you never want to go back to getting insufficient sleep and it doesn't have to be these big jumps i'd love to dig into that okay so i'd have a shower then i get straight into bed after is that good or bad tweak the timing of your shower and your hot bath to just an hour or two before bed it's hard to grasp how much of a difference this can make in your life. What about sex? Does it have an impact on your sleep? Okay, so...

Is there anything that I can eat before bed that won't disrupt my sleep but will get rid of the hunger? There's pre-sleep meal. For example, cereal and milk. Cereal? And the reason why is because... And then I read this fascinating word, mappuccino. Yes. This is a useful tool if you're a working professional and you need a little boost in alertness and performance.

What you do is... Dr. Ma, what is it you do? And why is it so important in your mind that you do it? Great question. So I'm a sleep physician, but I spend a lot of my time and career trying to educate and advocate for people to prioritize sleep, right? This fascinating process that each of us does every single night, and arguably is about a third of our lives. But many individuals don't do this very well, or

they, you know, sacrifice it and overlook this area. I very much believe if you don't sleep your best, you will not be your best. Or counter to that is if your sleep is best, you will be at your best. And what that means, if I unpack that a little bit more, is we often are sacrificing our sleep. We're underslept. We often don't have good quality sleep. We're very reactive to our sleep at nighttime. And it's the last thing that we think of at the end of the day when we wrap everything up. And that's arguably not going to put ourselves up to be the best we can be in the following day, right? And for my elite athletes that I work with, when you actually get sufficient sleep, you have practices that you plan into your day and you actually are more proactive with that, it can be a game changer. And for them, when it comes to performance on the field, that can be the difference of a 9% improvement in free throw shots.

It can mean reacting 12% faster. And so until you experience that, it sometimes is hard to grasp how much of a difference this can make in your life. But it is one of the foundations that will impact everything about how you function, your mood, how you feel, and ultimately perform the following day. If I could offer you, or yes, you specifically, Stephen, if I could offer you something that's free and healthy and safe, that's going to help you think more clearly, make better decisions, be in a better mood, be more productive and efficient, would you want it? Of course. How much?

Exactly. And so it's really a decision of whether you want to invest your time to be able to be more proactive with this particular area of your life to get the benefits that come down the road with it. Who do you work with? Give me a sort of broad spectrum of the individuals, organizations that you've worked with on sleep. And why have they come to you? I've had an opportunity to work with a number of professional sports teams and athletes as well as organizations over the years to try and apply the science into practice to help them improve their sleep, their scheduling, and their travel. So for example, I've been with the San Francisco Giants in Major League Baseball. I've worked with NBA teams like the Golden State Warriors,

NFL teams like the Philadelphia Eagles. I won a Super Bowl ring in 2017 with them, to other sports organizations like Nike and Under Armour and ESPN to try and show how you can predict when NBA teams will lose strictly based on the schedule and insufficient sleep opportunities, to individual athletes who recognize, you know, hey, this is an area that I am not optimizing, and I know this can be such a valuable asset to extend my career, to prevent injuries down the road, and to help me be at my best. Do you ever work with CEOs? I do. I do work with executives and C-suite executives to try and help them be their best because they too are high performers, right?

Their performance outcomes are maybe a little bit different than pro athletes where we're quantifying on-field performance and looking at their swim times and what they're doing when it comes to the, you know, on court or on field performance outcomes. But for these executives, they arguably are also making incredibly important decisions. They have to still react when they're under pressure and they have to make good judgment calls. And so many of the things that I coach and try to recommend to my elite athletes are very much applicable to the C-suite executive or even just the working professional. That's really what I found so fascinating about your research and your work is that although there's a focus on athletes, as someone who is also traveling, is also very,

very busy, also struggles with sleep sometimes because I have to perform late at night, whether that's on stage or with meetings or whatever it might be, I resonated with so much of it. And I also train in the gym pretty much every day, if I can. And I've also noticed a correlation between things like injury in the gym based on how I'm sleeping and my quote unquote sleep debt. But I want to confront two things. The first thing I want to confront is the misconceptions around sleep that you encounter over and over again. What are the big overarching misconceptions that stand in the way of people believing in and or implementing the advice that you give them? I'll start with just this badge of honor that I really believe still persists in society where you should get only four or five hours of sleep and should be able to perform at your best. And I think the tides are turning. And I do think that that is changing over the last several years where there are more vocal advocates of, you know, elite athletes like the Tom Brady's

who, you know, say everything is around performance enhancement. I need to go to bed early so that I can wake up early and to be ready to go for the day to, you know, the Simone Biles who says, I need to get eight hours of sleep. And so I think that that is a badge of honor that is now shifting. And now it's going to become, well, if you're not getting your eight, nine, 10 hours of sleep, right, then you're actually at a decrement to yourself and you're actually not going to set yourself up to be the best that you could possibly be, whether you're on the field as a pro athlete or whether you're leading an organization or trying to go after whatever it is that matters to you, right?

And I think that's going to continue to shift, but I'm excited about it because that's one thing until you experience that difference and that life transformation of what it feels like to be well rested, then it can be a game changer. You never want to go back to it again when you're getting insufficient sleep. Are there any misconceptions around how to sleep and sleep hygiene? And I know the quantities of sleep we need that also seem to stand in people's way of them getting a great night's sleep. Yeah, so I think that there is a misconception that everyone needs a certain amount of sleep. There's individual variability. So the recommendation from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society, so two of our national organizations here in the US,

recommend minimally seven hours of sleep. But that's the lower threshold. You might actually need eight hours or nine hours or more to feel well-rested, right? I personally feel terrible on seven hours and I much more need the eight to nine hours. And there's those individual differences. So you need to find what you feel well-rested, you're able to function well at a high level during the day, and that will then be your individual requirement. So I think there's this misperception that everyone needs a certain amount, but you need to find what works for you. And it's all about small changes.

So if you're not at seven hours, I think you shared sometimes you're under that. Oh yeah, sometimes, yeah. You know, it's about 15 or 30 minutes more can make a difference. So if you're getting six hours, then I'm going to recommend getting 15 minutes or 30 minutes more every day for this one week. And then get 15 or

30 minutes more next week so that you're building from, say, six hours of sleep to six and a half hours. And you may not think that that's that much, but we can all do 15 minutes more, right? We're less scrolling or doing what we're wrapping up our day. But those 15 minutes add up where that's the difference of like an A student to a B student. Or 11 minutes more sleep is the difference of a B student to a C student in one of these studies. Really? Exactly. And then over the course of a week, 15 minutes will be almost two hours more sleep than if you didn't. What was the study? So this was a study done in high school students,

but looking at the difference of how much they're sleeping versus their correlation to grades. And so that 15-minute difference was shown to be that A to B student, 11 minutes from that B to C student. Oh, gosh. Yes. So it doesn't have to be these big jumps, but small changes over time will add up.

The study I have in front of me here, which I've printed out, also highlights the importance of sleep for everybody, but also specifically in this case for athletes. Can you walk me through this study and what you found in this particular study on the adult male basketball players? Yes. And how you conducted the study. So in the study, we looked at the men's basketball team and we really tried to examine if we extended their sleep over five to seven weeks, encouraging them to get nine or 10 hours of sleep every single night to pay back what we call an accumulated sleep debt. Would we see any impact on performance outcomes? Specifically, would we see an impact on reaction time, their fatigue levels, and would we see an impact on their on-court performance, specifically free throw shots, three-point shots, sprint time? And these are measures that we would

do after every regular practice. And over the course of those five to seven weeks, we demonstrated that we saw a 9% improvement in free throws, a 9% improvement in three-point shots. We saw a 12% faster reaction time and a 4% increase in faster sprint time. which was novel at the time, was what was quite fascinating because it wasn't that 1% that I think many elite athletes are trying to find every small way to adjust their training to get that 1% better. Because in elite sport, that 1% can be the difference, right, of being at the top versus not. But this was arguably 9% or even double digits for reaction time, depending on the outcome. And so we've expanded that looking at other sports as well but this was one of the first ones to show that it really potentially could have a significant impact on performance outcome for these athletes how much did they sleep more per night to get those results yeah so they did so we did quantify objectively through a what's called

actigraphy it looks like a wearable nowadays. And then compared that also with what they thought they were getting. And so we did extend their sleep substantially over, I believe, an hour and a half compared to what they were getting prior to the study. Because getting 9% more free throws or three-point shots or 12% better reaction time is quite frankly for some teams

the difference between like winning a championship and not because I think about the premier league often which is it's soccer I guess football um often time there's been leagues within my lifetime there's been years in my lifetime where both teams have tied with the same amount of points and one is one just on the amount of goals they've scored. They've just scored a couple more goals. So after 38 games, they both have the exact same points, and the winner is just the person that's scored a couple more goals. But even you think of reaction times, you think of goalkeepers in soccer, their whole game is reaction time.

So if you can increase your reaction time by 12%, it's really, really staggering. It can be a game changer, and I think that's what has been so fascinating with some of the athletes or organizations and teams I've worked with who have made it to the most important games and those championships because the hope is that you've invested not just the night before that championship game,

but you've invested an entire season, even starting in the off season, on cultivating better habits to give yourself that foundation and be able to leverage these strategies that the other team is not. Because we know that it significantly can impact not just the individual level on performance outcome, but organizations as a whole. And I think one example of that is I partnered with ESPN to do what was called the MBA Schedule Alert Project, where they asked, can you predict, Dr. Ma, when NBA teams are going to be at risk of losing games strictly based on the schedule? So not factoring in strength of team, but based simply on their schedule, where they're traveling to, how many times those are crossing, these various factors.

Does it affect organizations as a whole and teams and their game outcomes, as you mentioned? And over three seasons, I was 76% to 86% correct on accurately predicting when an NBA team will be at highest risk of losing strictly based on the schedule. So in the spirit of the project, we didn't factor in strength of team. But to me, that was staggering because there's many other factors that maybe are not always considered to be as clearly important about this travel schedule up front. But hey, maybe these factors really do play and influence game outcomes in this way. And that's not the only thing that has obviously shown that organizations and teams as a whole will have differences in performance outcome. There's other studies like the Monday Night Football study that showed if you simply bet on a West Coast team when they play an East

Coast-West Coast matchup during night games, over 25 seasons, you'd beat the Las Vegas point spread 68% of the time. And so if you're able to predict with greater accuracy, then obviously there is potentially some gambling outcomes that could work in your favor here. But really being able to show that you would be able to benefit and predict better than what the spread will be between the two teams. Sorry, is that because the West Coast team has gone, who's traveled? It doesn't matter. It simply matters that the West Coast team is playing the East Coast team during night

games. So this can happen on the West Coast, it can happen on the East Coast. The reason why is because performance is enhanced in the late afternoon to evening, around four to eight o'clock. In both scenarios, the body clock of the West Coast team, because they typically go out just the day before the game, it feels like they're on the West Coast. Okay. Right. So when you're a West Coast team and you stay there and the East Coast team comes out, the East Coast is three hours later. So what is a seven o'clock game on a West Coast feels like a 10 o'clock game for East Coast team.

Got you. Same thing applies when the West Coast team goes East Coast, even if it's a seven o'clock game there, the West Coast feels like it's a four o'clock body clock. Yes. And so that special window around four to 8 p.m. when world records are broken and performance in a 24-hour day is optimal.

And that is leveraged then over those 25 seasons that the West Coast will have more favorable outcome overall. Got you. So in this study you did in 2011, that was published in 2011, one of the things I read as well is that players who had slept more in your study sprinted faster. I mean, quite dramatically faster as well, I think. From 16.2 seconds at the start of the study versus 15.5 seconds at the end. Over what distance was that?

Yes. So that was from the baseline to half court to baseline to full court and back. So we chose a very standardized sprinting drill that they are familiar with that we could replicate after every regular practice. As you imagine, not everyone on the team was participating in this study. And so they did this after every regular practice, and that ended up being a 4% difference in sprint time. That is pretty crazy. Do professional teams know this? Do athletes know this? Are they aware of this or is this something that's fairly new? Some are aware and I think the momentum is shifting towards more athletes, more teams recognizing that this is an untapped competitive advantage. That this is an area that they may or may not have implemented specific strategies or education or planning for when they

travel. But I think the more forward-thinking organizations, teams, and athletes are starting to pick this up and starting to recognize that they can use this as a weapon, right? As a performance-enhancing drug, if you may, because it is safe it's healthy it's effective and we know that it'll be one of the only things that can give you these performance benefits um and and those are the ones that are trying to leverage the science into application for optimizing yeah their sleep at nighttime have you seen athletes individual athletes change and save their careers when i say change i mean change the trajectory of their career and save their careers? When I say change, I mean change the trajectory of their career or save their careers because they focused on their sleep.

And can you give me some examples of that? Yes. Golden State Warriors, Andre Iguodala. He's someone who I worked closely with. He came to the Warriors back in around 2014. He was already an all-star. He was 28 at the time, knew that his career was going to probably be sunsetting at some future time, but wanted to extend it as long as possible. But he knew he wasn't doing sleep best as possible. He was very open about sharing how he would stay up till the wee hours in the morning playing video games, would sleep for a few hours, go to practice, play for a few hours, come home and take a two to three hour power nap. And that was his routine for 10 years.

And he said, you know, how do I improve how I approach my sleep? I know that this is important as an athlete who wants to play in the league as long as possible. So I had the opportunity to work with him over several months to help him recraft how he approached his sleep, including a wind-down routine, thought about some of his nutritional choices, tried to shorten his naps, time them closer to game time to give him the boost in alertness and performance, be able to manage a racing mind, and be able to have just a more proactive approach to his sleep. In a really neat way, the following season, the Warriors went to the

championship for the first time in many years. They won. He came back with the finals MVP. He subsequently has won three more championships with them, so four in total, and extended his career for 10 years. When we made these changes, there was a quantification of the performance enhancement. So a third party quantified as he went from under seven to seven and a half to more than eight hours, he had a twofold increase in his three-point percentage. He had a 8.9% increase in his free throw shots, which very interestingly is the exact same 9% that I showed in my man's basketball study that had the same 9% improvement in free throws.

He had a 29% improvement in his points per minute, a 45% decrease in his fouls. And so, you know, these numbers are pretty staggering, again, for someone who's already at the highest level as an all-star. And it's not to take anything away from Andre, but he has been very vocal about the difference this made as he changed these habits. He says it changed everything for him.

And I think that that's a very inspiring story of what it can mean to extend your career and be able to almost tap into this additional performance capacity that I think even he was surprised about, that he, for the first time, was able to improve beyond what he already thought was his best. And I think that's what's so inspiring because this is something that's accessible to all of us, to be able to tap into that little bit more. So not only did he win the Most Valuable Player award, but his three-point conversion went up 218%.

Yeah. So during the time that I had worked with him, his three-point percentage went up twofold during that time. It begs the question, what did you do to him? And you know, you named a couple of things there, but I'd love to dig into some of those key points where you started with him, the specific sort of things that you implemented into his sleep hygiene. And so that if I am him, the day that you met him, when he was taking those naps and staying up late, which I often do, to be fair, where would you start with me? And where did you start with him? Okay, so let's dive into just some very practical strategies that I started to challenge him with, which was, we'll start with his sleep environment.

We want to make your sleep environment like a cave, really dark, quiet, cool, and comfortable. Dark cave. So dark, blackout curtains, eye mask are some of the easiest tools that you can grab but are incredibly helpful and great investment to be able to use that both at home and then when you travel so that if you're in a non-ideal environment like a hotel room you have for example an eye mask that can help dampen out the the light making it quiet so earplugs also a white noise machine i'm a huge fan of even a small travel white noise so that you can actually mask over external noises that you may or not be able to control. I'm someone that tells myself that I sleep with something playing. I grew up with a radio in my room. So when I'm as an adult now, I'm always looking to play something as I fall asleep. Is that going to hurt my sleep quality?

I would say if you're accustomed to this, I would say that's fine to continue to do so. I am not a fan of having the TV on and having the bright light exposed to you in that hour before bedtime, because it also can just be very psychologically stimulating. But if like you said, it's a radio or it's a podcast that you feel is helping you relax, then I'm a fan of it. Do you think Dora Overseer will help people relax? It might. It might help you at least think about your sleep a bit more and challenge you to do maybe one change tonight. We consider that to be a scientific endorsement of the podcast. Okay, so I've got sound down.

You are a fan of the white noise machines. I am because sometimes there's external noises like a garbage truck or construction that you're not always able to control. So if you can at least mask over it temporarily, that can sometimes be helpful to keep individuals more asleep during the nighttime. And there's even some now that are adaptive. So if the door slams, then the volume temporarily increases and then will decrease.

So there's almost these smart white noise machines that are coming out on the market. So that's from a noise standpoint, and earplugs are going to be helpful if you're traveling. When you're at home, you can obviously use those to dampen down any external noise. From a temperature standpoint, you want it to be cool. I think this is an area that a lot of people can benefit from because they often sleep in much warmer temperatures than what we know is probably more conducive to sleep, which is cooler. 60 to 67 degrees has been shown to help individuals stay asleep and fall asleep. That may be frigidly cold for some, but you have to find the temperature that's right for you. I would say decrease your temperature by, say, one degree or two degrees every couple of days,

and then you can find the temperature that works well for you. And there's even technology now where there's mattress covers that can help you regulate temperature from much cooler to warmer. So if there's differences in bed partners, that's a way that you can actually accommodate both of their preferences. So that's about 16 to 20 degrees Celsius. What about when I shower or I bath? Because often I go and have a shower, then I get straight into bed after. Yes. Is that good or bad? I would encourage you to shift that timing a little bit earlier into the night. So an hour and a half before you are planning to go to bed, I would shift your shower. Because when you are taking a hot bath or hot shower, it increases your core temperature. But when you, it increases your core temperature.

But when you fall asleep, your core temperature drops. So you don't want that competing signal to be right before bedtime. But if you back that shower up an hour and a half, that should be sufficient time that we think potentially there's an augmentation of helping that drop in temperature. And some smaller studies have shown that that can help decrease the time to fall asleep and also enhance deep sleep, which has implications for muscle recovery, regeneration, and you get more of that in the earlier part of your night. So it's an easy fix just to tweak the timing of your shower and your hot bath to be just an hour or two before bedtime, not right before bed. So it's a strategy too, if you have difficulties winding down and relaxing to implement that hot shower, hot bath earlier in the evening. One of the problems I also have when I sleep sometimes is I hear people say you can't eat

three or four hours before bed. However, I sometimes get home at 10pm and I get home hungry as hell at 10pm. And then sometimes if I order food, for example, it might come at like 11, which means that I end up eating at 11. And then I really see it in my sleep scores. I think as well that I'm someone that tends to fall asleep later. Again, this might just be me telling BS to myself, but that's what tends to happen. And I know I'm not supposed to eat before bed, but I'm so hungry. So is there anything that I can eat before bed

that won't disrupt my sleep, but will get rid of the hunger? Yes, the preference is not to have a huge meal right before bed that's fried, fatty, really heavy sitting in your stomach that hour right before bedtime. So if you're able to time that and be strategic, then that's obviously the preference. But I'm okay with you having a pre-sleep snack. A lot of times for my athletes, that means we'll go for something

like 50% of a complex carb and like 50% of a lean protein. So for example, cereal and milk is an easy one. Cereal? Yes, cereal and milk. Of course, we want something that's whole grain and not necessarily a sugary cereal, but cereal and milk is an easy one that many people have access to, or cottage cheese and fruit, or 100% whole wheat crackers and peanut butter. And the reason why is because I don't want you waking up in the middle of the night being hungry or even trying to fall asleep and you feel like you're hungry. But we want something that's slow digesting through the night because ideally you're going to be sleeping seven, eight, nine hours during the night. And we want it to be able to get you to the morning time and then you will fuel when you wake up.

So a pre-sleep snack can be a great strategy if you're coming home late and you want to obviously be able to fuel before bed or if you have a really early dinner and you're hungry before bedtime. Yeah, that happens sometimes as well. Sometimes I'll eat dinner at about 5 p.m. Yeah. And then I get to about 10, 11 p.m. and I'm still awake and I'm starving. Okay. So what's a pre-sleep snack that you think you can grab for? Some nuts. Okay. Yeah. Does that work?

Yeah. Yeah. Nuts have protein in them. Yeah, you can grab a good nut mix. Maybe you can partner that also with like some yogurt too. Raspberries? Raspberries, yeah. Blackberries? Yeah, and some, yes, a protein and carb in there. And those are good pre-sleep snacks. If I wanted to destroy my sleep, what would you recommend I eat right before bed?

What would you recommend I consume right before bed? If you just want to destroy your sleep entirely. Okay. So we're going to have the nightcap of having a couple of drinks right before bed. Okay. So some alcohol. Yeah. We'll have some alcohol on board. We'll throw in some caffeine too to really get you to stay awake in the next couple of hours. We'll add a really heavy meal that's fried, tomato-based, fatty, sitting in your stomach right before bed. You say tomato-based? Yeah, sometimes individuals will have acid reflux with tomato-based products. And so if that's something that is, yeah, is that something that you experience, then you generally want to avoid

some of the tomato-based products that can aggravate some of the acid reflux. So some fried food with some ketchup. Yes. Okay, so alcohol, caffeine, and some fried food with some ketchup. I think that would really work to your disadvantage

during the nighttime. Any sugar? Yes. Sugary carbs are tends to be some of the preferences when you're particularly also sleep deprived. So people will choose more carb heavy foods and foods that have less fiber and more sugar. Why is it that if I eat those foods before bed, it impacts my sleep? What's going on? I don't think we have a great understanding of that. I think the field of sleep and nutrition is definitely growing. And I think down the road in the next five or 10 years, we hopefully will have more answers to that. But it's a fascinating area that we do start to understand what we eat can affect our sleep. So for example example, the stages of our sleep or how we sleep during the nighttime. Some of the smaller studies have shown what you eat can then affect having more awakenings during the nighttime and affecting the quality of your sleep.

But I think many of them are still at the infancy. Because that's certainly something I can attest to. I talked about one time many months ago, I think it was last year, actually, when I was staying in a hotel here in LA, and I had a cookie before bed, because it was because I'm bloody, you know, I blame the hotel, I don't really blame the hotel, I take full responsibility. It was in the minibar. And I hadn't eaten all day, I came back, I've been working all day. And when I'm, when I'm, when I've been working a lot, I'm much more likely to reach for something bad. And I had this cookie. And honestly, I woke up the next morning, eight hours later, feeling like I hadn't slept at all.

I just felt so tired. And I know it was that bloody cookie because I looked at my whoop, hashtag ad, hashtag investor. And I could see that my heart rate throughout the night was really high, like atypically high. My heart rate throughout the night will usually just be this nice flat i don't know 50 55 beats per minute and when i'd had that cookie it started and pretty much stayed for the first three or four hours about 75 beats so it was like my body was was still on it was like i was walking um and so i've always just had this idea that when i if you eat something like that right before bed, that puts your body under a lot of strain, like metabolic strain, then it's kind of like your body doesn't fall asleep. And my REM sleep's always attacked as well if I were to eat something like that. to understand the connection of what we eat, how our gut is responding to that, and then how that

potentially can affect your sleep and then ultimately your daytime functioning the next day. But we do recognize from sleep deprivation studies that individuals will make different nutritional choices and grab for the cookies and the ice cream and some of those other snacks later at night than they would if they were well rested. That's a real horrible paradox, isn't it? It is. Do you know what I mean? Like if you're tired, then you're going to eat bad things right before bed, which is going to make you sleep worse and make you tired, which is going to mean you eat bad things before bed. This is a vicious cycle. It is. And unfortunately, that could potentially lead to potential weight gain and other downstream consequences. So just

one other reason why obviously making sure you're having sufficient sleep, but also having good practices and your approach to sleep is also a priority. So you're asking what else did we do with Andre? But in that ways of preparing to sleep, you know, We addressed, does he have a wind-down routine? So we implemented one where he would read before bed to actually relax and prepare his brain and body to sleep for the night. Managing a racing mind can be incredibly common for not just the elite athlete, but for all of us. And so even before he did that reading, we would actually have him stretch and process his thoughts outside of bed. And that set him up with a two-part system so that he could actually be strategic about preparing to sleep for the night. A lot of people can relate to this managing a racing mind.

Athletes, performers, creatives. So I've got a racing mind, I think, as well. I think I tend to feel like I have my best ideas just before I'm about to get in bed. What would you recommend someone do if they have a racing mind? Again, incredibly common to have racing thoughts, thinking through the day, needing to process your thoughts about how to prepare for tomorrow. So what I'd recommend is spending 10 minutes processing your thoughts outside of bed in dim light every single night. So that can mean I would recommend you could do stretching and you could do deep breathing exercises to activate your parasympathetic system and dampen down your sympathetic system. That's what I recommend for a lot of my athletes.

If that's not your thing, I recommend journaling, getting your thoughts down onto paper or writing a to-do list. Those are easy ones that all of us can do for, even if you start with five minutes today. So I'm going to stretch. I read something, I think it was Whoop's data they released at the end of the year where they, because there's an activity log in Whoop where you basically say what you're doing. And I'm going to butcher this, but I think the stats said that reading before bed improved your sleep by about 5% across everyone that was using Whoop, which makes sense because you're going to be away from light, I guess. And you're also going to be calming your, you called it your parasympathetic nervous system. Yes. The parasympathetic nervous system, what do I need to know about that in the context of sleep?

That's just the system that helps you relax and wind down. It is in balance with the sympathetic system, which you may have heard is the fight or flight system that gets you going. That's where your heartbeat will be much more rapid. Your breathing can be much more rapid when you need to go. That's what I'm overthinking. Yes. But you want to dampen that down and you want to get your parasympathetic system activated so you can help actually relax physiologically your body and also your brain so that you're in a better state to sleep at night, right? It's easier to slowly pump your brakes and then try to sleep versus if you were going 60 miles an hour on a freeway and then suddenly slamming on the brakes and just jumping into bed. So you actually have a process to slow yourself down, your brain and body.

It will help prepare you to actually get better sleep during the nighttime. Just want to close off on Andre then. Is there anything else you did with him? Yes, there's more that we've done with Andre, but this is to give you some highlights. So, you know, approaches to his sleep were having that way to process his thoughts, being able to wind down before bed and relax, improving his sleep environment so that it was, as I mentioned, dark and cool. I believe his was around 67 degrees. It was quiet. We took out technology from his bedroom,

so he didn't have that exposure prior to bed. We looked at cutting down some of his power naps that were several hours long to shorten them to 20 to 30 minutes and time it much closer to game time, so we would get that boost as you would go into evening games. And we looked at some of his nutritional choices, but this is the highlight of some of the ways that we were strategic about his approach to sleep. And while we're also extending his sleep from that under seven to seven and a half to eight hours, because we knew he had an

accumulated sleep debt that had been built from not getting sufficient sleep probably for many months to years prior to this. And so as we've shared, some of the performance outcomes were astonishing. And he's been very vocal about sharing his sleep story. And he's not the only one. If I could share another story about another athlete where you've asked what has saved someone's career. So with Andre, I think he saw this performance enhancement that he could tap into that was previously he didn't know almost existed, right? But then there's other athletes where I think having sleep as a foundation almost saved their career. One example is Ryan Jensen. So Ryan Jensen was cut from the Ravens and put on the

practice squad. And during this time, as the story goes, his father said, you know, what's happening? You're not yourself. You like made your mom cry the other day. You know, there's something that's going on. And he eventually was tested for sleep apnea, which is a very, very common sleep disorder where your airway has some partial or a full collapse during the night. And so it can have very fragmented sleep through the night. And he was eventually tested, diagnosed, and then put on treatment through what's called a CPAP or continuous positive airway pressure. So it's a mask that provides air to keep the airway open. So then you actually can have consolidated sleep during the nighttime.

And in a very neat way, four years later, Ryan Jensen comes back, signs a $42 million contract as one of the highest paid centers in the NFL. And then three years later in 2021, wins the Super Bowl with Tom Brady on the Bucs. I see this as the success story of saving his career. And he's been vocal about how much of a difference it made from literally almost the end of his career happening to now being able to succeed at the highest level.

And also, of course, being healthier and being able to have more success on the field than he probably imagined for himself. And better relationships. Presumably he's not made his mother cry. I'm quite curious about that. Why is it that when we haven't slept, we're more likely to make people cry?

Because our emotions are not regulated well when we're short on sleep. We are more irritable. We are more grouchy. We respond more with our emotions than being able to. Why we respond with our emotions. What's going on in the body? Is it like a different part of my brain?

Is it my hormones? Is it something else? It's probably a combination of both, right? We know that our emotional regulation is not the same if we're well-rested versus if we're sleep-deprived. And so we rely more on our innate response, which may not necessarily be that which is strategic for what we should be responding with if we were tempered and had a better rest under our belt. So we ask cognitively, there's an implication of which part of your brain you're going to be using.

But then also, you are just not in a state in which you are going to be able to respond in the way that you would otherwise. Is it the amygdala that's the emotional center? That is one that's where like fear is very much and emotions and yeah, the amygdala is where like fear and emotions are are often centered because i've started when i started learning more about sleep and the impact it has on my emotions i could see a huge variance in how um how i make my decisions but also how like short i can be yeah if i haven't slept yeah and so on the days now where i haven't slept i literally have a conversation with myself and tell myself that i'm going to be in my amygdala today. So to try not to make any decisions, try not to talk to many people, because there's a risk that I might just be, I might be too short in how I consider things and how I respond.

And I really want to stay away from that. But I've seen such a huge, huge variance. And I've also heard of other like famous CEOs and stuff like that talk about how they focus so much on their sleep. I was reading something the other day and it was, I think it was, it was Jeff Bezos. Do you know what I'm going to say? I don't, but Jeff Bezos is someone who has been an advocate about sleep and vocal that he needs eight hours every night. Yes. The quote that I heard him say, or someone told me that he said was, I think it might have been Arianna Huffington, actually. He said that his job as a CEO is to make decisions.

And he says he doesn't have to make that many decisions a year. He only makes a couple of big decisions a year. Every day, he's probably just making two or three big decisions. So if his job is to make decisions, then his job is also to sleep. Because the variance I see in even my own decision making when I'm slept and underslept is just unbelievably staggering. As someone that sits here for seven, eight hours a day, sometimes having conversations, you wouldn't believe the difference when my brain and my mouth are like connected because I've slept. It's like a different human being. It's a different podcast host. Have you got data to support this, this impact on cognitive performance?

Yes. So you definitely make better decisions when you're well-rested. You're less likely to make cognitive errors. You have better judgment when you're well-rested and you're going to react faster. So in the situations where you need to make big decisions, whether it's on the field and you need to react because you're running a pass, whether you are Jeff Bezos and you're running a company and you need to make critical decisions under sometimes acute stressors, or you are someone who just is trying to be your best, we know that the cognitive domain very much is influenced by getting sufficient sleep. And some of the, I would say, large, very public disasters have happened as a result of what we know is sleep loss, where people have made poor decisions or decisions that have led to unfortunate disasters. So, for example, the Challenger disaster. What was that?

With a space shuttle that exploded. Right. And as a result, there's investigations of why did this happen. And the final report does suggest that insufficient sleep for some of those key decision makers around being able to launch or not was attributed to fatigue and insufficient sleep. So being able to make good game time decisions had this disastrous effect ultimately on the challenger explosion. Are you aware of any studies that have measured cognitive performance on and sleep? Yes. So my studies, as well as many of my other colleagues, particularly look at reaction time, because we know reaction time is very sensitive to sleep loss. And I'm starting to find it also

is sensitive to extension of sleep. So the other half of this story, when you pay back sleep debt, we see that benefit on reaction time. But reaction time and looking at aspects of, you know, how quickly you're able to respond or if you're having errors when you're responding and you're not supposed to be responding. Cognitively, those are tests that are typically used in a lot of sleep studies because we know it's quite sensitive. Can you give me an example of a study that will convince me that if I sleep more, my cognitive performance will improve? One of the studies I mentioned before, even 15 minutes more sleep was that difference of that A student to the B student. There's another study I often cite where if you look at the difference of someone who gets nine hours of sleep for a full week, the reaction time stays very consistent.

Great. You want to react appropriately. You want to not make cognitive errors or lapses in judgment, and that will be consistent over the week. If you're someone who's getting seven hours of sleep, you see a slowing of that reaction time and then a leveling off. If you are getting five hours of sleep, you see an even sharper decline in being able to react fast, and then you see a leveling off.

If you're getting three hours of sleep every night, you're just going to tank that reaction time and be slower. At the same time, you have more lapses in judgment and not able to respond appropriately. But the thing about this study that I find so fascinating is when we know that there's this deficit when you're going to react slower, in the seven- and the five-hour group, there's this leveling off. So people say, oh, can I get used to getting insufficient sleep? In some sense, there was this stabilizing of it, but the reality is you're not at your best,

right? We know what your reaction time could be if you were getting that nine hours. And if we even gave you three nights of what we call recovery sleep, so we said, okay, now we get, let's say, eight hours in bed for the next three days. You're going to feel better and you'll probably feel more refreshed. But those reaction times for the seven hours and the five hours and the three-hour group didn't go back to the baseline. So it takes more than one night or one weekend of that recovery sleep to get you back to your baseline. And so that's the bottom line that I try to show my athletes is that you can pay back

sleep debt, but it often can take more than just one day or one weekend of quality sleep. How long does it take? So my studies have suggested multiple weeks will really be beneficial to paying back more of your sleep debt than just a night or two nights of sleep. The biggest bang for your buck tends to be in the first week or two, but obviously this depends on how much more you're actually getting, how you're timing that in your night. But the bottom line is that if you can invest maybe a week or maybe if you have a vacation coming up and you do two weeks, that's going to be the biggest impact on paying back your sleep debt. hour of sleep, that was shown to improve cognitive reaction time and also processing speed in the

athletes that actually got one additional hour. So if you got six hours, you went to seven. If you got seven hours, you went to eight hours versus the athletes that just continue to get their normal sleep. Interesting. I guess I've got to understand what this concept or this idea of sleep debt is, because I want to make sure I'm super clear on what it is and isn't because when you say the word debt I assume it's kind of like I owe the sleep bank manager a couple of hours um but but I I've kind of gone back and forward on this idea of sleep debt I think some people have told me that it's real some people have told me that it's not real um and I don't know where I should stand on it yes so if I if I

haven't so for example I flew into LA the first couple of nights And I don't know where I should stand on it. So if I haven't, so for example, I flew into LA, first couple of nights, my sleep wasn't great. Am I still, but I had good sleep last night. Am I still paying for it now? The way I explain the concept of sleep debt is that your body requires a certain amount every single night. Again, we talked about individual variability, but let's just say you need eight hours every night. And conceptually, if you don't meet that eight hours, then you build up a debt. So if you're only getting six hours a night, you now have two hours of debt built up. If you go Monday to Friday, that's five days. Now you have 10 hours built up, right? Two hours every night becomes 10 hours. And if you

then sleep in on a Saturday and you get, let's just say, 10 hours of sleep, you've paid back two of those hours, but you still have eight hours left to go. And my body knows. Yes. So conceptually, that's the idea of accumulating sleep debt. I do stand in the camp that believes that that does accumulate over time. We do think that you can pay back some of that debt on the short term, right? So what you lost, like you said, this past day or this past week, maybe this past month, you should pay that back with getting extra sleep, or we call sleep extension. We don't think that you can surplus and bank more and that you can pull from that in the future. But we recognize that if you've got insufficient sleep, that if you extend it over

a couple of days, maybe a couple weeks, then you will see benefits in your reaction time, in your fatigue levels, in your performance outcomes. And so we do recommend that as a tool, especially if you know that you're going to have a day where you're going to have sleep loss. So it's a strategy, for example, if you know, okay, in a week, I'm going to have a project and I'm not going to be getting enough sleep that night, then what you can do in the days leading up to it is getting sufficient sleep, but arguably even more so that we know when it gets to that project, the decrements that you'll experience tend to be less robust than if you went

into it with just say that was five hours. So what evidence do you have that sleep debt is a real thing? What's the first thing that comes to mind? So what I've dedicated my career to is trying to understand how to pay back sleep debt with sleep extension interventions. So what that means is typically I'm working with a number of collegiate athletes where many of them are not getting what they need because when we start these studies, many of them have high fatigue levels. They are reacting slowly. We often see lapses in their judgment

and their ability to ultimately perform and function, which is what they consider their baseline. But then when we actually challenge them by paying back some of that debt by getting additional hours, when we monitor the differences that can make over multiple weeks, that's where we see there's improvement in the reaction time. Their fatigue levels drop. Their performance on the field improves.

And so we recognize what has changed in this is trying to pay back some of that accumulated debt when the rest of their training has been held consistent, when we've been trying to maintain the rest of their training. Which is the key point, because in my mind, I go, well, maybe if you've got the athlete to sleep well on that first night, then when they've showed up to training, they've trained a little bit harder. They've built their muscles a little bit more. They've had better recovery in their muscles. So then the next day, the same thing happens because they've slept.

So it's actually just that they're training better, which is causing them to improve their scores. That's fair. We've tried to hold their training to be consistent and choosing periods where their training isn't going to vary significantly, as well as you can almost make the argument, too, that sometimes as the season goes on, athletes get more fat least is some suggestion that the intervention of sleep, while we also have the measures of how much more they were getting, actually were at least associated with these performance outcomes. Because REM, one of the key things about REM sleep,

which is the sort of final stage of sleep, is that it helps with muscle recovery? Deep sleep is actually, deep sleep is where we, deep sleep is where it's implied that there's more muscle recovery regeneration because there's the biggest pulse of growth hormone during your deep sleep. So to back up a bit, you have light stages of sleep, then you have deep stages of sleep, and then you have that rapid eye movement sleep or when you dream. That tends to be more associated with consolidation of learning and memory and skill consolidation. So you go through these cycles during the nighttime, about 90 to 120 minutes, but the proportion changes through the night.

The beginning of the night, you get more of that deep sleep. And then in the early morning hours is when you get more of that REM sleep. So you might have woken up in an earlier morning and had the recall of these vivid dreams. It's because you often will be waking up from that REM sleep. Yes, that happened last night, actually, because I woke up suspiciously early for me. So I woke up at about five or six o'clock and I was just kind of dipping in and out of dreams.

And they were very vivid dreams that I can still remember now. So the muscle memory element of all of this, what is muscle memory and how is that sort of implicated with sleep? So muscle memory, there's different types of memory and you need sleep. Think of sleep as hitting that save button, right? You need to sleep after you have learned new information, learned a new skill so that you can consolidate those memories and be able to retrieve it later. So I always use an analogy of hitting that save button. After you learn new material or learn a new skill set, you need to go home and sleep so that it goes into

long-term storage and that you can retrieve that the following day and subsequently. Without that sleep, we know that that groundwork for that new skill or that new memory is not going to be as strong. And so in the context of students who are trying to study for a test or an athlete that's trying to remember the playbook, you want to space those intervals that you're learning that material and have sleep that follows so that you strengthen those connections. And also you mentioned when you were talking about one of your athletes encouraging them to nap before a game. Yes. I read this fascinating word in the research that I was doing on your work. I think it's nappuccino. Yes. What's a naappuccino? The Nappuccino. So this is a useful tool if you're

trying to have a temporary boost in alertness and performance. So the Nappuccino, you go and take your favorite caffeinated beverage. The caffeine will start to kick in in about 15 minutes and you go and then take your 20 to 30 minute power nap. So if you're able to fall asleep within that five to 10 minutes while the caffeine will start to come on board, then when you wake up after 20 to 30 minutes, then bam, both the caffeine will have kicked in and the power nap will have kicked in. And there's research to show that that's more effective for alertness and performance improvement for a couple of hours than if you only did the caffeine alone or only did the power nap

alone. So the nappuccino is a useful tool for some who utilize caffeine and you can partner that together with a short 20 to 30 minute nap. So if I wanted to take a nap now, I have an espresso and then go and have my nap. Exactly. Yes. The caveat is you do need to fall asleep within about 10 minutes or else the caffeine will start to come on board. But if you do this in the late morning or early afternoon, it can be a helpful tool so that you have a boost in your alertness for a couple of hours. And I grew up thinking that naps didn't work because the minute I learned about sleep and these sleep cycles, and then it takes, I don't know, 45, 60 minutes, whatever it is to get into late stage sleep, like the REM sleep, the deep sleep. I thought, what's the point taking a 15, 20 minute nap if I'm not going to get into deep

or REM sleep? So there's benefit of just that 15 minute nap you mentioned. You want to stay in lighter stages of sleep because there's benefits of lighter stages of sleep. And that can give you that alertness and performance boost. Even when you're in lighter stages of sleep. And that can give you that alertness and performance boost even when you're in lighter stages of sleep. You actually don't want to go into deeper stages of sleep because when you take the longer naps, as I think you might have shared, you've taken the two-hour nap, the three-hour nap, you wake up and you're much more sluggish,

much more groggy. That's not a good state for you to go out and then do work after that, or it's not the state that you want to be for a basketball player and have to go and play a game. But those deeper stages, you come out of what we call sleep inertia with that sluggishness. And so it can also affect your sleep at night and make it harder to sleep subsequently. So you actually want to stay in those lighter stages of sleep and keep those naps very short. So what's the maximum length that a nap should be? I like 30 minutes. Okay. Yes. So you can time that by setting an alarm. If it takes you five or 10 minutes to fall asleep,

you can plan for that as well. And then setting an alarm to wake yourself up 30 minutes later. I think it's a great strategy when, again, you don't get sufficient sleep at night or you had poor sleep leading into that night and you need a little bit of a boost later in the day. What do you think of the snooze button? The snooze button. I'm not a huge fan of the snooze. I fully understand why people love to hit the snooze and then go back to bed. And if you're someone who does that, one of my suggestions is just to cut down so that you only hit the snooze once, five minutes later, start your day. The reason why is because it helps to maximize your REM or your dreaming sleep in those early morning hours if you can actually sleep consolidated all snooze button five times every five minutes for a half hour, it means that you're having very interrupted sleep for the last half hour of your night.

Versus if you just let yourself sleep consolidated all the way through and then maybe hit the snooze button just one time and then got yourself up to start your day, it means you would have given yourself another 25 minutes of consolidated sleep, likely that dreaming REM sleep that's so important for learning and memory. And so that is one just easy adjustment that you can make in terms of your morning approach to maximizing what you get during the night. So what's the value in consolidating it versus just... Having fragmented sleep. Yeah. So then if you're getting a lot of that REM sleep in those early morning hours and you're snoozing, you're going to be waking up and coming out of that REM sleep.

So you likely are changing the stages of sleep you would be getting in those early hours. So you would then be awake and then probably going into lighter stages of sleep awake, lighter stages of sleep than necessarily having a solid REM period all the way until you wake up. What's the cost of that? So learning and memory and consolidation is definitely one area that we recognize is associated with that REM sleep. And so you want, as we talked

about, it changes through the night. You want to have as much as possible, but you part have to have just the duration. So when you get the most of it in the morning hours, if you cut that short and either wake up earlier or you're snoozing and you're interrupting it, you're not going to maximize the value you get of the hours in REM. Okay. So I just want to make sure that I, those 25 minutes, I give them to REM sleep versus just giving them to a little fragmented light sleep. Exactly. So I'm better off just putting my alarm to the time that I actually have to get out of bed.

Exactly. Just to maximize the amount of REM sleep that I get to consolidate my memories. Are you a snoozer? No, not really. Okay. Well, I mean, we all have our moments, but not really. I can't remember the last time I pressed the snooze button. But the thing that I do, snooze button. But the

thing that I do, and I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not, is because I have told myself, and I say told myself because I'm quite conscious of the BS that I believe about myself, but I've told myself that I'm like an owl chronotype or something, which by the way, I don't even know if it's true. And I don't know if chronotypes are true. And I typically work quite late. I love working late. I get better ideas late. I do my writing pretty late at night as well. And so what I've done in my life is I've basically made sure

that I don't have any meetings or any engagements before 11 o'clock. So even like this podcast today started at 11 o'clock. Yes. Basically nothing in my life starts till 11 o'clock for that very reason. Because if I do end up staying up a little bit late, I want to be able to kind of sleep through without having to set an alarm and just wake up naturally. What do you think of that? Is that suboptimal? No, I think it's a great strategy. So there are chronotypes where you've mentioned you're more of an evening owl. You go to bed later. You like to wake up later as a natural

predilection. Is that real? This is real. Justifying myself. No, there is a natural tendency for some to feel like they're evening owls. And there's others who feel like they do much better in the morning. So they go to bed earlier, they wake up earlier, they're more productive in the morning. Those are our morning larks. And then there is a group that's somewhere in the middle that don't strongly lean one way or another.

But really what you're doing is you're making your sleep work to your chronotype and to your advantage where you do feel like you're more productive in the evenings and then you want to be able to maximize your flexibility. And so society often will force, particularly the night owls, onto an earlier schedule where you have to wake up, whether to go to work or other obligations or kids at an earlier point. And then you're cutting your sleep short, like you mentioned, with school. And then you're on a schedule that doesn't work synergistically with what your chronotype is they should do some studies on kids in school and like disobedience and ability to pay attention and do your homework and grades because honestly i was so useless in school and i really i really think a lot of it now i'm not entirely

sure here because i got diagnosed with adhd when i was like 30 years old so part of me thinks i've just got like a very active brain and part part of having an active brain meant that late at night I was finding ways to stimulate it by playing video games etc so that might just be the reason but the other reason might be that I'm an owl chronotype and I found it really hard to get up at like 7 30 to get to go to school by sort of 8 30 ish. And so I would miss school, I would show up knackered, I would sleep in lessons. I feel like school just starts way too early for kids. It's an ongoing problem. And actually, in a very interesting way, there has been a change to school start times, particularly in California. This year was the first year that school start times for high

schools and for middle schools was shifted much later because there are studies to show that when our students are better rested, they have higher attendance rates, their GPA and grades are much higher, there's less mental health issues, there's less car accidents. And so these studies have been over the last decade and longer in which they have built evidence to help make decisions to start school time later. And that is in California, been enacted this year, and some other states are starting to follow suit. But to your point, what makes it challenging is that at the age of high school, many of those body clocks are shifted. And so students want to, in adolescence, go to bed later and wake up later naturally.

That's just how our sleep changes through the life cycle. But when they stay up late and then we cut their sleep short by forcing them to get up really early for school, now they have insufficient sleep and that builds like a sleep debt. And so they're not setting themselves up for success in school for learning and memory. So that's where, again, there's more evidence of if we can shift the school start time, get these students to have a little bit more sleep, they ultimately are better prepared for school, come to school, have less car accidents and are just healthier students. Do you think there's anything parents need to know about sleep as it relates to their children and sleep hygiene with their children? I think it's important for parents to start at the early, early years of instilling good sleep

habits, a good sleep routine, and giving their children the tools and skills to be able to make sure that it's a priority as they go through early childhood into adolescence, and hopefully then set themselves up for making sure it's a priority for their adult life. I'm a young parent myself. I just had my first son. And so I recognize and can empathize with the struggles of getting sufficient sleep when they're very young. But then trying to instill how they can approach their sleep from early age I think would be incredibly helpful. To also just change culturally how we think about sleep because so many of us now have never learned about sleep before or what we should do until you're an adult. But if we can make that change earlier on, I think we're going to have healthier kids, better families who are better rested. And also just this generation where we recognize this is so important that we shouldn't sacrifice it because we're doing ourselves a disservice

to letting us be the best that we can possibly be. How old is your son? 11 months. 11 months. So how are you sleeping? Oh, I transparently am quite tired. Okay. I, as a new young mom also, I don't have the ideal sleep that I know I would love. It's for a short time, but I'm trying to be strategic of the things that I can do with some of the tools that we've talked about trying to leverage power naps. When, for example, I do have to still wake up during the nighttime to tend to him. And, you know, the early morning starts are not always consistent. So my sleep schedule is not always consistent. So, you know, going back to those

three buckets we talked about earlier, like if I don't get the full duration that I want, then how do I maximize the quality, right? I've optimized my sleep environment. I try to have a process to wind down at nighttime or the timing, you know, is, and the sleep schedule is another area that you can still work on when, for example, you may not be getting the duration. So these are strategies that I try to employ when I know that I also am a work in progress and trying to get the best sleep possible. Once upon a time, if you had a business idea, it was exceptionally difficult to get going. But now in the age of Shopify, it is exceptionally easy. As many of you will know, Shopify are a sponsor of this podcast. If you don't know Shopify, it's an exceptionally simple web platform for anybody that's got an

idea that wants to transact on a global scale. So things like these conversation cards which we sell, we've sold using Shopify and it only took us a couple of clicks to get going. So why did we choose Shopify? For a number of reasons but I think one of the big ones which goes unappreciated is their checkout system converts 36% better compared to other platforms and here's what I'm going to do to remove the cost for you. If you go to shopify.com slash Bartlett, you'll be able to try Shopify for $1 a month. I've seen Shopify completely change people's lives. And for many of you, I think it could change yours. What are the other examples of sort of case studies that you're you're most

proud of, or that were most pivotal in shaping your thinking about sleep? I mentioned the Philadelphia Eagles back in 2017 and tried to help them educate their players about sleep, how to have a more strategic approach to their wind down routine, to thinking about how they're integrating sleep into their training practices and thinking about ultimately how they travel and having, for example, strategies to minimize jet lag when you're crossing time zones and having to play in different locations. Give me some of those then. So some the tips you'd give me as someone that travels a lot, pre, during and post travel, what should I be thinking about before I travel, while I'm traveling, and after I land? Yes, so have a game plan for every trip.

I think most people have no strategies in place when they travel. They just get onto an airplane, get to a new location, and try to adjust when they get there. That is not really a great strategy. You want to have at least a pre-flight strategy, in-flight strategy, and post-flight strategies because that will set yourself up better to minimize jet lag,

also travel fatigue, and ultimately then be able to acclimate faster if you're crossing multiple time zones. Before pre-flight, try not to panic pack. I know all of us do panic packing right before we're getting on a flight. So you want to try and be strategic and pack early. You want to get at least... Why do I want to not panic pack? Because most people will panic pack the night

before they have a flight and then they'll cut their sleep short. So they'll get only, say, five hours of sleep because they're staying up late, trying to pack everything and get ready for that early morning flight or for the next day. Well, I pack the morning of travel.

Okay. But I'm out here in LA for two weeks, and I packed a carry-on suitcase. Okay. Because I opt to look at what I'm wearing. I wear just the same outfit every day, so I have the same outfit. But I pack literally an hour before I go to the airport. Okay, okay. But you're right, it does cut my sleep because I could have been in bed.

Whether it's beginning of the day or the end of the day, if it's affecting then the duration of your sleep, I would recommend trying to be a little more strategic and do it a day before, two days before. Don't plan a pack. Number two, try to get at least those seven hours, if not your amount of sleep that makes you feel like you're functioning and performing well,

at least a day, if not two days. If you get insufficient sleep before you get onto least a day, if not two days. If you get insufficient sleep before you get onto an airplane, jet lag will be worse. And that travel fatigue can feel much more robust. And you're more likely to have the croissant in the airport, which is going to destroy the whole thing for you. So those are things that you can do before flight. Depending on where you're going, you can actually start to adjust your body clock before you even get onto the airplane. So let's just take a three-hour time difference. Here in the U.S., if you're in the West Coast and you're going to the East Coast, three time zones. You can actually start to go to bed a half hour early, wake up a half hour early. Do that for two or three days

and get sunlight in the morning because that sunlight reinforces to your brain to start to shift that body clock. So if you can do that a day before, two days before, maybe three days before when you actually get to the new location, you don't have to shift your body clock three time zones. You've already shifted it one time zone or two time zones because the rule of thumb is for every time zone you cross, it takes about a day to reacclimate. Even if you feel better after the first day, usually jet lag feels the worst in that first day when you arrive. But physiologically, you haven't really adjusted fully, even if it's over a couple of days. So that's the rule of thumb. So those are some things pre-flight you can do. When you're in flight, you want to hydrate throughout the flight because dehydration can worsen jet lag. You want to think about getting onto the new time zone schedule.

So, again, depending on which direction you're flying and how many time zones you're crossing, you want to start to synchronize perhaps like when you're actually sleeping or some of your meal times so that you're getting onto that schedule. And then you partner that with, for example, building a travel sleep kit. I'm a huge fan of investing in sleep tools that will help you sleep when you need to in non-ideal situations. Whether you're on the plane and now trying to take a nap or shift your sleep schedule, then you actually have an eye mask and ear plugs. You have noise-canceling headphones. You have your own travel pillow. You have the tools with you to make... Sleeping drugs? Sorry? Sleeping medication.

Okay. So some medications can be helpful, like melatonin, particularly if you're trying to advance your clock, has evidence that it can help shift that a little bit more quickly when you're trying to advance your clock earlier. Would you recommend it to athletes? I would say if it's something that you've used before and you know that you don't experience some of the side effects, it could be a useful tool. So melatonin, while it's one of the most commonly used supplements and sleep aids, there are still side effects that I'd be wary of.

So specifically for athletes too, you can feel more groggy and sluggish when you wake up from it. It's not regulated by the FDA here in the U.S. And so you don't always know what's actually in those supplements. So for my elite athletes, they use what's called NSF sport certified versions. They're just, there's more regulation around them. But in for the, for the, you know, everyday person, you know, there's a study where they looked at the amount of melatonin that was actually in a variety of these supplements. And it was a wide range from over 400% of what was on the label to obviously sub, you know,

you know, under a hundred percent of what they actually indicated. So there's a wide range of what's actually going to be in the supplement, But it can help, particularly when you're on travel, with re-acclimating. My team here, most of them use a certain app when we travel. And it just tells you, basically, you say where you're going and then it will tell you what time to eat, what time not to eat, et cetera. So you can get aligned with that, with your destinations,

like circadian rhythm, I guess. So we'll link below one of the apps that our team use we're not affiliated with them in any way but when we're flying out here i know will and my team sent me a screenshot and said steve this is what time you need to be eating and everything because we're going to la so it's been super helpful for all of us i'll link that below because i know some people are going to be wondering what apps they should be using so we're in the flight we've got our post travel flight kit with the eye masks and all those kinds of things in. We've got our app. We're hydrated. Noise-canceling headphones.

Is there anything else we need to be thinking about while we're traveling? When you're traveling? On a plane. On a plane. So we talked about hydration. Minimizing alcohol and caffeine or eliminating entirely is going to be a great strategy instead of having some on board, because that can also potentially worsen jet lag and or make it more difficult to sleep when you're actually trying to when you arrive. And again, seeking light, that is the most powerful signal to your brain to help shift your body clock. Also bringing sunglasses so that you actually avoid

sunlight at certain times because your body can respond differently depending, again, on your home location and how many time zones you cross. So there are certain times that these apps can be helpful that will likely tell you you don't want to get sunlight during these hours. And so you want to be strategic about that and just make sure you have sunglasses so that you can still go about your day but try to minimize that sun exposure. Getting well rested and getting sufficient sleep, even if it might be a little bit more fragmented than usual, just giving yourself at least a day to acclimate so that I would recommend not scheduling your most important meetings right when you get in or in that first day. For athletes, they don't want to do maximal exercise because there's a risk that that jet lag could increase injury in that acute period. So you want your body clock to be able to readjust. And then using caffeine and power naps strategically. So for example, our afternoon,

one to four o'clock is typically when we have this dip in our alertness. Now, when you get to a new time zone, that can occur at a different time point in the day. But strategically, then you can use caffeine and power naps to be able to help you through those lulls when you're in that new time zone. What about sex? People actually make the mistake of being in bed and being on their computer, on their phone, doing other work while they're awake. And that actually helps strengthen that connection that when you're in bed, you're awake and your brain will start to associate that. So sleep and sex are all that you want in bed. Everything else should be outside. So when we talked about that wind-down routine or that racing mind, all that should happen outside of bed because you want to actually tease apart that association that your brain is making of being awake in bed. And that will be one small adjustment

that's helpful to get better rest at night. But will sex improve or hurt my sleep? I'm thinking, you know, because I'm really trying to get out, like, should you be in bed with someone? Does it improve your sleep to sleep with someone? And does sex have an impact on your sleep? Cause I, you know, speaking from personal experience, I think that if I have sex before bed, I sleep better. I don't think that there's great literature on sleep and sex out there, but, um, I will say that there has been, um, there's definitely an impact potentially of a bed partner sleeping with you in bed because their movements can affect your sleep. If they snore, that can very much affect your waking up during the night time. And then, you know, with sex, I think that that is something anecdotally, some people will definitely say it helps them to be able to consolidate their sleep and they feel like the

quality is better. But I don't think there's a lot of great studies that are being funded for research right now. What is the most popular question you typically get asked about sleep from people? Most popular question is napping, which we've discussed. Keep them short, 20 to 30 minutes. I get asked a fair amount about, can you oversleep? So no, we don't think really you can oversleep. When some people say they get, say, nine hours or 10 hours and feel much more groggy, it's because often they've shifted their sleep schedule, or they have an accumulated debt that has built up, and then they're fine allowing their body to relax. And so now that they don't have the mask of stimulating activities from their day

or their work, that can affect their sleep. I didn't read a study. One of my podcast guests told me that there is a harm to oversleeping. But I think from what I managed to ascertain, the studies they were citing just proved that people who sleep for like 10 or 11 hours typically have a higher risk of disease and mental health. But then it's hard to establish cause and effect because if you're in

bed for 11 hours maybe you're a depressed and b one would assume you're exercising and moving a little bit less so you probably got a lot of like cardiovascular issues yes so there are studies of looking at the more extremes of less hours of sleep and then even more hours of sleep like the 10 hours and obviously there can be other comorbid conditions that go along with individuals who sleep much longer. As you mentioned, you can sleep much longer because of depression or other chronic health issues. And so that's a different context of thinking about oversleeping. I think the question I typically get is, oh, I slept one night of 10 hours and I feel worse, so I'm never going to do that again. And that's actually not true, right? I think we want to have just more consistent hours that are timed. So you're not having a

shift in the bedtime and wake time by like three hours later, because that could be why you're having that grogginess when you wake up, not because you got the 10 hours, but because you're waking up now at 11 a.m. instead of your typical, you know, 8 a.m. wake up time. You could be more dehydrated because of that longer time. Snoring is one that I get asked a fair amount about is, you know, is it completely benign? And I would say if you're snoring, you should go talk with your primary care doctor, and you should potentially ask about getting a sleep study. There is sleep disorders like obstructive sleep apnea.

We mentioned before that's incredibly common. And that's when that airway has some partial or full collapse and can lead to very fragmented sleep. So you can wake up not refreshed because you really didn't get quality sleep during the nighttime. And snoring, I think, in our society has become just an accepted norm that can happen as you get older. But that is not always the case that it is a benign, a benign symptom. And so making sure that you talk to your primary care doctor and potentially get a sleep study, I think is incredibly important. Is sleep apnea the most common disorder that you see? Yes. Yes, it is. Sleep apnea can be incredibly common. I believe it's

about 26% of people in the ages of 30 to 70. And so that, as you mentioned, that's like one in four individuals. But many individuals don't actually get tested or diagnosed and then treated until they're way into their adulthood or even past into their 60s, 70s. So with a sleep apnea, oftentimes people will not wake up refreshed. They will often feel tired in the daytime. They may have a lot of caffeine or have to rely on power naps to keep their alertness up. A lot of individuals will have early morning awakenings. So in those three, four, five o'clock in the morning, they'll wake up and not realize why they're waking up frequently. Snoring can be very common. If you've ever had a bed partner or a roommate and they've ever noted

that you stop breathing or pause breathing or gasp and choke, those are very suggestive that you might have sleep apnea. And again, it is incredibly common, but very manageable. So something that I would highly recommend if you, your bed partner, your roommate snore, just suggest to have, I would suggest they go see their primary care doctor. And typically, is it people that are slightly overweight that are more likely and susceptible to having sleep apnea? Yes, yes. A lot of individuals who are overweight or obese will be more at risk for sleep apnea? Yes, yes. A lot of individuals who are overweight or obese will be more at risk for

sleep apnea. As you imagine, the collapse of the airway typically is here around the neck, and so more weight typically is not helpful for apnea. But you can also be a very fit, healthy, young individual. So I work with elite athletes, and I have a number of my professional athletes who, again, are young, healthy males, but their anatomy is just more susceptible for this condition. What are the big rebuttals you get, the big excuses that you hear from people? I don't have enough time. Yeah, I don't have enough time to sleep, OK? I don't have enough time to sleep. And what do you think of that one?

I don't think that that's true. I think we all are going to make sacrifices and priorities in our day. And I think if you are saying you don't have enough time, I think there's ways to be strategic about how you manage your time in the day. I think we all have five minutes to implement a wind down routine. We can all do that at the very least. I think all of us can optimize our environment. I think we all can invest in some sleep tools. I think we can make better choices about how you go about your day so you set yourself up better for sleep. So I think that those are just small adjustments, but will be huge in terms of what that will mean at night. I hear that, you know, I will sleep, you know,

I'll sleep in the off season. Right now in season is when I want to focus on being my best. But really, I think that's a backwards way of thinking about it. If you're thinking about optimizing your sleep when it gets to the season or the postseason when some of the most important games come down the line, you're just playing catch-up. Because if you have a sleep debt built up and you're just trying to maintain that through the season, you actually are at a deficit versus the other guy or growl on the team who has paid that back in the off season.

Now you have given yourself, you know, zero sleep debt. You're at your best. And now you're just trying to maintain that through the season. What about injury? If I'm an athlete and I'm underslept, are there any studies that suggest I'm more prone to injury? There are a few studies that do suggest getting insufficient sleep. So under six hours, there's been more fatigue-related injuries in adolescent athletes. There's also a study that has looked at under eight hours of sleep still has an increased risk around 1.7 fold higher of injury. 1.7 fold, 170%. Yes. Yeah. Of higher risk of injury when you're getting under eight hours of sleep versus those that got more

than eight hours of sleep. And so I think it's unclear exactly why you're specifically more at risk for injury, but I tried to take a look at the biomechanical changes of what happens when athletes are not getting sufficient sleep in one of my early studies that has explored the biomechanical changes. And what we showed is that when you're not getting sufficient sleep for multiple days, you have more variability in your biomechanics. So you're moving differently. Yeah, so you're moving differently. So you're not actually selecting probably your preferred coordination strategy.

So for example, I had them doing a vertical jump. And if you're well-rested, you likely should be able to do that very consistently as an elite athlete. But when you're not well-rest likely should be able to do that very consistently as an elite athlete. But when you're not well rested, it's much more variable. So they're moving differently and that may put people at risk for injury. So they're landing differently. Exactly. Yeah. How their knees, their hips are coordinated together differs. And so that may put you at risk for injury down the road.

But more to come, hopefully, on that front. There's just not that many studies that currently exist. I've noticed something recently, because recently I've had to get up quite early on a few occasions. So when I say early, I mean I've had to go wake up at 4 a.m. because I've got a flight at 6 a.m. And really interestingly, say if I got on bed at like 11 p.m. at night and I have to wake up at, at say 3 or 4 a.m., when I wake up at 3 or 4 a.m., I'm really hungry.

But if I wake up at 8 a.m., I'm not hungry. Well, you are starting your day much earlier. So your body clock is starting at a much earlier time than you typically would versus 8 o'clock. So you almost have what we call socially jet lagged yourself, right? Where you didn't get on an airplane yet, but you literally shifted your whole sleep schedule to be an earlier wake up time. And so you can feel some of the symptoms of jet lag, where you can have, and you can have stomach GI upset, you can feel more fatigued, you can have those symptoms as if you got onto a new time zone and flew there, but you hadn't yet. It almost feels, dare I say, like hormonal. Because I was trying to understand what hunger

is. And hunger is essentially a bunch of hormones, isn't it? So yes, you have certain hormones that regulate your appetite. So leptin and ghrelin are two hormones that impact your appetite. Ghrelin makes you more hungry. Leptin feels ghrelin are two hormones that impact your appetite. Ghrelin makes you more hungry. Leptin feels more satiated. If you don't get sufficient sleep, these levels can be imbalanced. And so that's where people tend to, as we've talked about, gravitate towards, you know, carb and unhealthy foods in the late or evening time. But also when these are not well balanced, that can also lead to weight gain or situations where you're not able to potentially regulate

your weight appropriately. And so when I have individuals who are wondering about not making weight goals, I ask them about their sleep and they don't recognize that sometimes being able to address how they sleep will actually help them to get to the weight management goals that they're really striving for. Jack, what about you? We've talked about sleep before. How are you sleeping at the moment? I've got pretty good at my sleep. But waking up in the middle of the night, you spoke about it in terms of like sleep apnea. Yeah, but it feels like it should be normal to wake up. So awakenings actually can be very normal. This is a very common question I get asked is, you know, should I never wake up at night?

And that's actually not true. So you shouldn't necessarily hit your head on the pillow and then you're out for the full night and then never have an awakening. If you wake up, you go to the bathroom one time, you come back, fall asleep in the five to ten minutes, great. That's actually very normal. So you can have awakenings that happen even in the early morning hours, and that can be just a typical part of your sleep cycle because it can be as you're transitioning between these sleep stages that you'll have these awakenings. Sometimes you'll consciously know that you're awake, and other times you will unconsciously awaken. And so something like a werewolf might actually show you that you have these awakenings during the nighttime that you don't recall. But when it becomes very frequent, then you have these awakenings and over multiple weeks, or it makes it more difficult and challenging than to function in the daytime, that's when we get more concerned about awakenings. Because there's a number of ways, reasons why you can awaken at nighttime.

To name a few, it could be environmental factors that affect your sleep. It could be that you had alcohol, you know, that right before bedtime, maybe there's caffeine that's causing you to be awake. There's also just stress, or if you just have a racing mind that potentially could cause those awakenings. A bed partner is something that is a common culprit, or underlying sleep apnea that can happen. And so there's early awakenings that need to be investigated with your doctor. How much does alcohol impact my sleep in percentage terms? I don't know the specific statistics of how that's going to impact the duration, but I will say that when we look at the studies of moderate to high consumption of alcohol, that very much has an association with more fragmented sleep, more awakenings during the nighttime.

And so the quality of your sleep is significantly impaired. So if you're trying to have an important meeting the following day, an important game, or you're just trying to be able to be your best that following day, at least try to minimize or eliminate the alcohol. Or in the sleep docs world, we say, drink when you wake up. We'd rather you have that alcohol in the morning or the early afternoon, not necessarily right before bed. And so, yeah, that's one of the strategies is to eliminate the alcohol right before sleeping. Dr. Marr, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest

not knowing who they're going to leave it for. And the question that has been left for you is, if you could go back and fix your worst mistake, but it would change everything afterwards, with no guarantees, would you do it? No, I would not do it. I think we make mistakes in life and we learn from them and we adapt. And it can set us off in a different direction.

But that ultimately is going to influence who we become, who we interact with, how we build a life forward. And I wouldn't change my life if I could go back and it would set me on a completely different trajectory. Could you think of a worst mistake when I said that? Did one come to mind or was there a category? There wasn't. Maybe I haven't spent a lot of time to try and dive into some of my worst mistakes.

I definitely have made mistakes along the way and obviously would have done some things differently in my personal or professional life. try and dive into some of my worst mistakes. I definitely have made mistakes along the way and obviously would have done some things differently in my personal or professional life. But I do think that that is what has made me who I am today, right? I think I have tried to learn from those mistakes, try not to make them again, and try to figure out how to adapt from there. But that has, I think, set me on a path that is where I am today. So I wouldn't change that. It's so interesting, the subject of sleep for me, because I was part of the like burnout brigade, the like badge of honor burnout brigade for a

long period of time. And I definitely thought in my early career, when I started my first business at around 18, 19, 20, 21, up until probably about, I'm going to say up until about 26, I thought that me not sleeping was something to show off. And I thought that I was more impressive if I communicated to people how little I slept and how much I was able to accomplish in spite of that. I think actually the greatest enabler to my productivity is like being really obsessive about my sleep and having that rule that I said where nothing in my life, unless there's something that's immovable, is booked before 11 o'clock. And I really hope other people, after listening to you, after going through your work, which is all available online, really prioritize their sleep? Because as you've shown through your research and the studies, the impact, the very real impact on our lives is so profound. Maybe one shift in your mindset too, that I encourage you, but everyone that's listening as well is the way I frame it to

athletes is it's a small tweak, but if you think about sleep as not the end of today, it's the beginning of tomorrow. What you do to prepare, what you do to try and get the duration that you're striving for, and how you set yourself up will affect everything about how you function, how you interact with individuals, and ultimately perform tomorrow. If you're willing to do everything it takes for you to be your best, sleep has to be foundational in every day. And if you're willing to put in that time and that effort, you'll reap the benefits that come down the line and it can be completely life-changing. But you have to give yourself that grace and that patience to be able to make these small adjustments. But as some of my athletes

have shown, it can be a game changer for them. It can completely change the trajectory of their career and even life once they actually get quality sleep under their belt. And so I challenge everyone to make small adjustments starting tonight and reach out if you have questions. Where do we find you? You can reach me at Instagram, Twitter, or X, Facebook, LinkedIn at DrSherryMah, D-R-C-H-E-R-I-M-A-H. Or you can find me, my website is DrSherryMah.com. Thank you so much.

I know that there's a lot of different individuals from various sports teams that listen because I speak to them. I was speaking to some of the guys at Manchester United two weeks ago in a hotel from the wellbeing team about these subjects and the sort of interconnected subjects of sleep and wellbeing generally, but also I've spoken to people at Chelsea Football Club that listen to the podcast about these themes. So I'm convinced there's going to be a lot of athletes and aspiring athletes and just people like me who are going to benefit profoundly from the work that you do and the research that you've done that really shines a light on the importance of sleep, which is often misunderstood and is seen as a negotiable part of our lives.

So thank you so much for the work that you do. And I'm very excited to see where your research and where your studies take you because it will be pioneering research, no doubt. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure. Perfect Ted has quite frankly taken the nation by storm. A small green energy drink that you've probably seen popping up through Tesco or to Waitrose, they've grown by almost 10,000% in a very short period of time because people are sick and tired of the typical

unhealthy energy drinks and they've been looking for an alternative. Perfect Ted is the drink that I drink as I'm sat here doing the podcast because it gives me increased focus. It doesn't give me crashes, which sometimes might happen if I'm having a three, four, five, six hour conversation with someone on the podcast and it tastes amazing. It's exactly what I've been looking for in terms of energy. That's why I'm an investor. And that's why they sponsor this podcast. And for a limited time, Perfect Ted have given Diary of a CEO listeners only a huge 40% off if you use the code DIARY40 at checkout. Don't tell anybody about this and you can only get this online for a limited time so make sure you don't miss out. Bye.