Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - A Recipe for Effective Sleep - With Tara Youngblood

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

Welcome to episode 167 with guest Tara Youngblood! This episode is all about the recipe for effective sleep. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep167/. My guest, Tara Youngblood, is the founder and CSO and Co-Founder of Sleepme Inc./Chilisleep, a company that creates award-winning technologies and apps that are changing the way the world sleeps. Their Chili Cool Mesh signature product has been used by Presidents, celebrities, and CEOs. A leading sleep authority, Tara has given a TEDx talk on the recipe for effective sleep. In addition, she has spoken for: National Sleep Foundation, Charlotte Science Museum, Wellness conferences, and Health Optimization Summit. Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.  

But if we can find a way to fall back in love with this time that we give to ourselves and to our body to heal, make sure you find the time within a two-week period to really create resilience in your life for sleep. Hey, Dr. Mindy here. And welcome to season four of the Resetter podcast. Have I got a lineup for you this season? Lots of deep thinkers, a lot of brilliant minds, all with one focus to move the, needle forward on your mental and physical health. So please know that this podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. And I want you believing in your body.

I want you believing in your mind. I want you believing in your spirit. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. enjoy on this episode of the resetter podcast i am bringing you terra youngblood and we are going to dive into everything you need to know about sleep this is such a rich conversation so let me tell you a little bit about tera she is the chief science officer and the co-founder of sleep me uh some of you know that as chili pad or chili sleep she is definitely a sleep expert as you're about to

learn. She has a really powerful TEDx talk where she talks about the recipe for effective sleep. And this woman is on a mission to change the way we all are sleeping. So what I found really fascinating about this conversation is that we went through many different aspects of sleep that I do not think are talked enough about. For example, I had seen this study a while back that we don't necessarily, have to have a continuous eight hours of sleep. There's something known as first sleep and second sleep. Tara talks about that. We also are starting to see that just putting your head on the pillow and going to sleep doesn't mean that you're actually repairing while you sleep. So we went

into what's the difference between deep sleep and REM sleep, how much sleep do you need, and what systems are repairing while we sleep. Of course, we had to also go into hormones and what blew my mind about this conversation was the fact that she shows and through not only her own knowledge, but she brings in some incredible studies that are showing that when we sleep in the correct way, and as you're going to learn, there is a correct way, that it actually impacts our hormonal balance during the day, specifically cortisol and our sex hormones. So I know so many of you, especially the women that are listening to me, are working on balancing your sex hormones out. And what you're going to learn in this episode is how to use sleep to be able to do that

effectively. The other part of this conversation is how we really dove into what happens to our performance during the day. And this goes for all ages. when we get this high quality sleep and how important temperature is in getting that high quality sleep. So I literally could go on and on about this conversation. You will hear at the end, there are so many biohacks that I've done through my menopausal journey. And if I had to narrow down the ones that fit in the top three chili pad is no doubt been in a game changer and is in that top three of the most powerful biohacks I have ever done for not only mental health, not only for hormonal health, but for just showing up as an enjoyable human the next day after I've been using

this pad at night. So so much information. I can't wait to hear what you all think of this. And I'm so excited to bring Tara to you. You are in for a serious treat. So enjoy. Okay, resetters, hopefully you know that one of my nutritional tenants is that we need to diversify the fruits and vegetables that we're putting in our body. And the interesting thing about this is it's very difficult to do this, but you've got trillions of microbes in your gut and they all feed off of something different. So if you're eating the same fruits, eating the same vegetables over and over again, you're creating what we call a monoculture where those one set of bacteria are

being fed over and over again, leaving the other bacteria out. So when I'm out shopping, I'm always looking for different fruits, different vegetables, different prebiotic fibers to get into my body to feed a vast array of microbes that will support neurotransmitter production and better sleep and happiness and blood sugar regulation, all the things that makes living in a human body so enjoyable. So this is why I love organifies green juice is they have some key nutrients in it that you're not going to be able to find in your supermarket, like Meringa. Have you ever heard of Meringa? It is a miracle plant that fights disease, and it's loaded with vitamins, loaded with minerals, loaded with amino acids and antioxidants, and it's considered nature's most perfect multivitamin.

But where do we find that? How do we get that? Well, we're not going to be. to find it in the produce section, you're going to find it in organifies green juice. Or what about Oshuaganda? How many of us are feeling stressed out and we're struggling to adapt to the influx of stressors coming into our life? Well, this is where an herb like Oshuaganda can be really helpful because it's an adaptogen that helps to decrease cortisol. And when you bring cortisol down, you're going to regulate insulin a lot better. And when you regulate insulin a lot better, you're going to be able to tap into better sex. You're going to be able to tap into better sex hormone production. So we want more of adaptogens in our life. But then what about things like

Corella? Corrella is also a difficult nutrient to get in and it's really important for alkalinizing and supporting the liver and detoxifying. Now, hopefully you all know if you've been following the podcast for some time that the liver is such a critical organ for fasting. It is what is going to make ketones. So we need to start to add in nutrients that's going to keep our liver livers healthy. So Corella is an incredible nutrient for doing that. So what's really cool is that Organify has all three of those in there. This green juice, one scoop, add some water, and you are now not only feeding the microbes that are going to build you an incredible brain and body, but you are starting to bring down cortisol. You're starting to detoxify.

yourself, you're supporting the organs that want to love on you, and I'm so grateful for this product. So Organify's green juice. And as always, I hope you guys know that Organify loves you. They have given you a 20% discount when you use the code PELS. You just go to Organify.com backslash PELS, backslash, and put in the promo code Pels, and you'll get 20% off. I hope you love this as much as I do. I just want to start off by thanking you, Tara, for coming here, coming to the Resetter podcast. This is probably the most needed conversation that I've ever brought to my listeners. So I'm so grateful to have you here.

So welcome. Oh, thanks for having me. I agree. I'm a big fan of sleep. Right, which is really funny. So this is something that I say all the time with fasting is I say fasting is like sleep. It's a healing state you can put yourself in. but not just like sleep, just because we know sleep is good, doesn't mean everybody knows how to do it, which sounds so crazy.

And I feel like the same thing about fasting. So let's start off with that. Why are so many people struggling with their sleep? I think a lot of it is just knowing the basics of what's required and honestly letting going some of these myths and being less stressed about sleep. So we have this hate relationship as a society right now with sleep. and it takes away our lives, it shortens our day, we have to give in to sleep. But if we can find a way to fall back in love with this time that we give to ourselves and to our body to heal and find a way within a 24-hour period to get eight hours, and if it means you

have to take naps, if it means you need to take other time, whatever that looks like, it actually is just about getting good quality sleep within a 24-hour period. And if you can't at least try to build up on sleep or create some sleep resilience or elasticity in your life. So over the course of a week or a couple weeks, you really are making sure that you're fully recovering. I know people do marathons or we have athletes that they can't always hit those eight hours, but make sure you find the time within a two-week period to really create resilience in your life for sleep. Oh my gosh. I'm so happy you said that because this has been like something that's been like weighing on my mom.

mind, which is as I've moved through menopause, like, it takes, I don't know what it takes to get more than seven hours. If I get seven hours asleep, I feel like I'm a rock star. If I get six hours of sleep, I'm like, wow, okay, that was great. And if it was six continuous hours, I feel even like more proud of myself. And that's after like massive amounts of magnesium, getting my chili pad exactly right. And so then when I look at the research, I'm like, okay, wait, I'm supposed to be getting a lot more. I should be getting eight, nine hours. So what I just heard you say is take a nap and if you get them in different chunks throughout the 24 hour period, that's okay. Absolutely. We actually didn't evolve to sleep eight hours. If you look at Hunter

Gatherers, there's a great study out of UCLA that was done on Hunter Gatherers over the course of a year. They on average actually slept closer to that six to seven hours. They actually didn't have a word for insomnia. So they literally just slept more relaxed and better, but they didn't always sleep in one segment. Even in Dickens, I was just talking about Charles Dickens because my son's rating it in English class. And I'm like, yeah, we'll talk about first sleep and second sleep. We didn't sleep in one segment prior to the industrialized age when factory workers needed to have one bucket of sleep. And we, you know, kind of made that happen. But like in Spain, even still today, they have a late dinner, it's so that they can come home and nap in the late half of the day, sort of four to seven,

and then they'll wake up and have dinner nine and ten. And they may stay up until two or three in the morning and socialize. And that was actually pretty normal across Europe, again, prior to the industrial age. So if your body and yourself, your genetic history comes from that European descent, chances are your body was used to sleeping in segments anyway. And it should be able to do that again if you need to do that in order to just get enough sleep to feel good. That rocks my brain. Thank you for that. I feel like you just freed me because I'm like nine o'clock time to go to bed and then I get

into bed and I'm trying to like sometimes I can't get my body to relax. Again, this is something new that's happened through the menopausal journey. And then I wake up at two in the morning and like each little pattern of difficulty of sleeping, getting to sleep or staying asleep, I've had to find new hacks. And it's so freeing to think, oh my God, maybe I don't have. to have it be continuous. So that was amazing. Tell me what the total amount of sleep then I would want in a 24 hour period. When you get into time of sleep, it's really important to think about quality of sleep. And so, you know, again, it's about how long you stay in bed. It's easy to kind of lay in

bed for eight hours. And then you wake up and you're like, well, I didn't sleep. I was just laying in bed for eight hours. And so we need to make sure that we're really thinking about like deep sleep and REM sleep and really getting quality sleep. And you need at least two hours. hours of deep sleep and two hours of REM in that 24 hour period is ideal. And it's really hard to get deep sleep. And we'll talk about temperature and sleep. I know when we get to the chili pad. But it is possible to still get that. But deep sleep as we age gets harder and harder to get naturally. So when you're aging, by the time you're 80, 90, you may only be getting a couple minutes or no deep sleep, hardly at all, which is why they feel so tired, which is why there's

cognitive loss, why lack of sleep and specifically lack of deep sleep is attached to every disease of the elderly. So it's really important as we look at that total amount of time to kind of take a step back and saying, even if you're not wearing a tracker, you should wake up feeling rested. And if you're not and you're still spending that time in bed, then you really need to look at some of those quality metrics. How can you improve the quality of that eight hours? Eight hours is a good round number. Like, but everything, there's eight billion of us. Eight hours is there's not one number for all of us. There's not one diet plan. There's not one amount of fasting.

You know, we talk about those things. Like, there's not one sort of number that's going to make every single human feel amazing. That's ridiculous. We are a bell curve of different types of sleep, just like everything else about us as humans. No two of us are the same. So if you and your girlfriend don't have the same sleep patterns, one of you can nap, the other one has to do it all at night.

Like, that's normal. And men and women are very different on how they tend to sleep. So if you and your partner have different sleep habits, that's all really, actually very normal and we're supposed to like because the research it was easy to research how long people were in bed became the metric for a really long time when you have no science when they had no sleep trackers they could tell how long someone was in bed so that was an easy way to study sleep and we've really only been studying sleep in that kind of in-depth studies for like 25 years now like it was all pretty loose before that so when you think about the scheme of sort of research into human

what we do. Sleep is really baby in its research, what we know about how it works. And so it's important to think that all of that study is that eight hours in bed comes from, all we could do is watch you sleep and tell you if you were sleeping eight hours, then, well, that must have been good. So that's where some of those metrics come from, but it's really based, a really basic end of the science. Once you start looking into the last five years, people are going to talk about deep sleep and REM sleep and quality metrics of sleep, much more in those studies, because they could start to measure that using sleep tracking and brain waves and those kind of things while people were sleeping, and it wasn't as possible 25 years ago. I think that you make such an important point.

I see this a lot in my community where people want to know, like, tell me the absolute, like, what should I be eating for my microbiome? How long should I be fasting? How long, what exercise is best for me? And I think it's really interesting that when we look at the research right now on all of these lifestyle habits, that support our health, we're like an infant in understanding the impact that our daily habits have on chronic disease and longevity. So I want to make sure that my listeners don't lose sight of the fact that when we look at sleep, I think it's fascinating that we don't have enough research on what second sleep and first sleep. I saw that study come out a couple of years ago.

We don't have any research on light. I mean, you're going to, I'm excited to talk about what we're now learning about temperature of the bed. Like all of this is so brand new because we're just starting to research it. And I think that's really important that we now we take the research, we take the understanding and we play with the principles and we become our own end of one, I think is a powerful, powerful way to look at the emerging information. So talk to me a little bit. You have a really interesting TED talk. And I love the title of it is the recipe for an effective sleep. Talk to me a little bit about what is the recipe if you were like sitting down with somebody and you were just like, here's the recipe for a good night's sleep. What would that

recipe be? Yeah. So I have to say, I love to cook. And, you know, no two people are going to have the same potato salad or, you know, whatever you're making. Everyone's got their own version of what that is. So that's kind of why I like recipe is you have to come up with being your own scientist. That end of one is so important. So we talk about the pillars of sleep, even when we coach our athletes. And it's important to look at each of the three pillars. It's kind of like the three basic ingredients when you come to sleep. One is your behavior. So what are you going to do during the day, when, where and how do you do things during the day that's going to affect your sleep? The next is mindset, which is, you know, whether you're stressed out, feeling anxious,

are you feeling peaceful? That's where that meditation, gratitude, all of those kind of things come into play as far as what is your mindset when it comes to sleep. Being in love with it, respecting it is going to make it way easier to go to sleep than hating it and dreading it and putting it off. And then obviously that environment. And the reason environment is so important is in your brain, sleep is really old. And when we think about that as far as evolutionary part, it's an involuntary kind of response to go to sleep. So the smallest organisms, like even just a larva with no brain whatsoever, recognize that they have to have an on-off session.

They have to have sleep, even though it doesn't look exactly like ours. It actually is still a different type of on-off. Even marine larva will go up to the surface for light and warmer part during the day. And then when it cools off and the light goes away, they'll go to the further down depths where they can camouflage and disappear.

So when you think about it, your environmental controls are an easy way to trigger yourself to go to sleep that you don't have to think about because your brain automatically recognizes those changes in light and temperature. But then when you think about it, we've done everything in our modern lives to remove any change of light and temperature. And so we've actually made it much harder for ourselves to go to sleep by having the comfort of being able to turn on a light at any moment and having this consistency in our temperature. So our microclimates within our homes are all sort of regulated. And so our microclimates within our homes are all sort of regulated.

they don't change at night. They don't get cool and they don't slow down and be more dim as the evening goes on. We and dimming our lights and kind of like, oh, it's, it's, you know, fireside time now versus, like, bright light of first thing in the morning. So we've actually sort of sabotaged those triggers. And so our brains are now stuck with, like, I don't know what it's supposed to go to sleep. But all of those triggers will release melatonin when you can trigger them. So a change of temperature will trigger the release of melatonin. That's exactly how that mechanism works in your brain. So melatonin is released when there's a change of temperature.

Clifford's safe. you actually discovered this in 2003. So it's been a long time since it's there. So it's not new science, but how it's evolved and how people have recognized how it can work is been where the evolution has come. But those neurons are absolutely triggered by a change of temperature. For some people, again, back to that wide spectrum, light may be more powerful than temperature. But in the hunter-gatherer studies, all of those have all validated that it was a change of temperature that sort of really late in the evening cooling down. The sun's gone down. They didn't go to sleep the moment the sun went down. They went down as it dimmed. And that change of temperature was

what triggered them to go to sleep. I'm so happy you said this because I had a discussion with a woman who has a sleep podcast. And we were debating or, you know, having a fun conversation about the fact that the temperature might have been how we were primarily conditioned to go to sleep because we slept on the ground. And we probably slept with a cowhide or an animal hide on top of us on a cold ground. So everything that we look at from fasting to food to, you know, the way our nervous systems work, moving in and out of sympathetic, parasympathetic, all of that is primarily driven. So it makes sense to me once I wrap my head around the idea that, oh my gosh, my ancestors fell asleep because of the coolness on the ground. And that when my

body goes into my bed and gets a cool experience, it actually triggers something primally within me that tells me to go to sleep that I might not be getting if my mattress isn't cool. Do you feel like that's an accurate hypothesis? Yeah. Just to clarify what is going to happen with that, because people are like, well, I heard if you warm up or take a warm bath, that can do that. So it can for some people. Most menopausal women, because we're sort of hot-blooded right now, this is not going to work. But you'll see studies we're putting on warm socks or warming up will help you go to sleep. What's happening there is that change of temperature of warming your extremities actually causes that sort of circulation in your body, which will still trigger that change of temperature.

So it's important to remember, again, that wide spectrum of us. Way over here are some people that need a warm up to fall asleep. And honestly, when Todd and I invented this, I was absolutely me. I still, I wanted that warmth and nesting to kind of start my sleep process and then cool down after that. So it's important to know that that is absolutely okay. And that's a good part of a lot of people's process to fall asleep. But the other extreme of it, and this is, you know, people with more extreme menopausal women can use this. Terry Walls with MS has used this process as well.

if you follow any of those of those people. But anyone with a neurodegenerative disease may have to go more extreme on that cold. They can use like something like the chili pad or they can use like 20 minutes of ice bath, which isn't lovely. But it will actually, when you get out of it, you'll be pumped up. So do it like an hour before you go to sleep. But about an hour after doing a ice bath like that, you will be knocked out like an elephant tranquilizer. And you'll get really great deep sleep.

Deep sleep loves it cold because our body is trying to drop two degrees core body temperature in that first half of the night. So by really forcing that if your brain or your body isn't normally allowing that, you can actually get really great deep sleep and sort of hack it by making sure your body's cold enough to achieve that deep sleep. But those are the extremes, warm fuzzy socks and warming up to the cold ice bath. Most of us are in the middle as we go through our lives, certainly with women, even just in your cycle. So if you're still having cycles throughout your cycle, you're going to find that you're in different spots on that spectrum as well. So it's important to say like not every night is the same for as you go through your cycle. You're going to be warmer as you kind of end that cycle. You're going to be like, wow, I'm hot right now.

What I set it at like earlier in the month may not be the same if you're setting a chili pad. Yeah. One of the things I love about the chili pad is the fact that you can make the temperature change throughout the night. and I have like three different programs on there, and one of them is exactly what you just said. I recently was like, wow, I kind of like it warm when I first get in, but then I can't fall asleep to that. So then if I said it, you know, within 30 minutes of getting in to start to go down into the colder temperatures, it really is true. Once that temperature goes down, like, boom, I'm out. It's the craziest thing I've ever experienced. So I love that you said that because, again,

you're giving me freedom. Okay, I'm going to get in when it's warm and then I'm going to cool it down. So it really, there's so much to learn about what we can do with temperature to control our sleep. And to that point, something that I've been wanting to tell all of you at sleep me is that literally I'm pretty sure that my chili pad saved my marriage. And let me tell you why. When I would, during the pandemic, I was like at the height of my hot flashes at night. And I just needed my room completely cold. And our oldest daughter had moved out of the house. Our son was a senior in high school.

And I, you know, it was the pandemic. It was a lot of stress. And I just said, okay, I'm going to take the guest room and I'm going to put the, make the air conditioning so cold in there that I can finally sleep. And it started to work. But I was in a separate. room from my husband. And I literally slept in this separate room for a year. And there was this part of me that was like, I don't feel like this is great for my marriage, but I'm getting good sleep, which makes me a more

enjoyable person, which helps my marriage the next day. So I feel like when I got a hold of a chili pad, you literally that product brought me back into my bedroom, made me able to sleep in a room with my husband. He could sleep with his temperature. I could sleep with my temperature. and I'm happily sleeping back in my bed again. And it literally was so freeing. So I have to start off by saying thank you for that because I'm pretty sure that chili pad, the chili pad saved my marriage. Oh, that's awesome to hear. Yeah, that's exactly why it was invented. So my husband and I sleep at different temperatures. He is like a total furnace. And so like you can almost feel the heat coming off of them. Like it's crazy. And so exactly the same thing. His uncle invented the water

bed. And so if you've ever been on a water bed when it didn't have the heater in it, um, water is really good at pulling heat off of anything, really, um, just because of its specific heat capacity from a science perspective. And so we just, there's not as much water as a water bed. It's just tubes or a membrane that's on your bed, depends on what style of pad you have. Um, but it, it really isn't a lot of water, but that amount of water is just enough to pull the heat out or add whatever heat you want. Remember, we're 98 degrees Fahrenheit. So I get people all. the time like, well, I kind of, I don't want to have it like that cold. I have it at 86. Well, that's still cooler than your core body temperature. And so it doesn't have to be a lot of change

in order to still give your body that freedom to cool two degrees cooler. You just don't want it hot in the middle of the night. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the hormonal piece to the chili pad because what we know about menopause is that estrogen, you're going to start to lose estrogen. And when you're in those peri-men, menopausal years, like the 40 plus, estrogen goes high, then she goes low, she's all over the place. But when she goes low, it triggers the hypothalamus to turn up the heat, which is why we get the hot flashes and we get, you know, the night sweats, which I never, during my menopausal journey, I never had it during the day, but I only had the sweats at night. So, and I see this is happening

at younger and younger ages. I'm even seeing this at 35, 35 year olds and early 30 year olds telling me that they're getting night sweats. So talk a little bit about what we know when we, when we cool down the bed, does it stop that trigger that estrogen is having on the hypothalamus to turn up the heat so that you, or are you still turning up the heat? You just don't feel it and it's not waking you up. Like how does it tie in to that change of estrogen in our sleep? Yes, we actually just did a study that was published in September. I think officially came out in August, but then was published in September. We did it in partnership with Wake Forest University. We had a bunch of women sleep on it who were in full hot flash mode, so not perimenopause,

but full menopausal mode. We did find that they actually had less hot flashes during the day as well. And so what it really talks about is that there's always an order of operations, right, where your body is going to have to prioritize. Sleep is going to have a higher priority than just sexual hormones and in the scheme of what it's doing. So it's going to prioritize sleep. So if it can get the cooler part to go to sleep, it's not going to trigger the hot flashes the same. So you may still have some of those slight symptoms, but you're not going to be aware of it if you can achieve deep sleep. So once you're in deep sleep, you can recover. You're going to actually have less symptoms during the day because that sleep time allows your body to actually manage hormones better. All of those

hormones are managed during some of that sleep process. And so it actually is an over, you know, over the whole 24-hour period, you're going to have relief if you can sleep better. And so if we can sort of mitigate any hot flashes that would pop up, mitigate that system from overheating or feeling those sort of changes by talking to your brain about let's get great sleep first. It's like, right, we're getting great sleep. Then while we're sleeping, it can manage through and heal. and do that sort of normal hormonal balance that it should do during sleep as it moves between sort of the various systems that it needs to do. Every system during sleep is sort of managed from cardiovascular to hormonal systems, digestive systems. Everything sort of healing is really focused

about happening at night. Even your memories are filed. A lot of that's focused. So if you can get great sleep, no matter what you're going through, we see this with cancer patients. I talked about it with neurodegenerative diseases, you'll have less symptoms overall if you can just get sleep and that temperature can tell your brain to say, let's just sleep. Forget about all the other shit that's going on and just sleep. Amazing. So, okay, you ignited a thought in my brain about the systems repairing as we are sleeping. So the way I had always learned this was when the sun goes down, melatonin kicks in and the body starts to prepare itself for, to prepare itself to repair, to reset and to go through each organ system.

And that usually starts around two hours. The way I'd learned it, starts around two hours after the sun goes down. So getting into bed a couple hours after the sun goes down is key for repairing your whole bodily systems. But then what I'm also hearing you say is we also have evidence that just getting good chunks of deep sleep and good quality sleep is going to help with that repair and it's not necessarily the time. That to me is an evolved thought from what we originally were taught. I mean, this is like 20, 30 years ago. So when we go in, we get our temperature to that right place. Is there an order in which the body repairs? Like does it go brain, liver,

sex hormones? Like, does it have an order or does it just completely repair itself when that temperature is set or does it need, does the temperature set deep sleep that then now we've got the repair going on? Speak a little bit more about that because I think we're pretty ignorant when it comes to what the repair actually looks like when we're sleeping. Yeah. So there's actually, you know, it is systematic. I don't believe they know if there's a specific order.

Generally, the brain is cleansed. This is why deep sleep or lack of it is attached to Alzheimer's and cleaning out those. proteins that cause Alzheimer's. Most Alzheimer's patients will not see their brains being cleared. But actually, when you fall asleep and get into deep sleep, one of the first things that happens is your spinal fluid washes your brain, good brainwashing. And that's really required to keep your brain healthy. There's because of the brain blood barrier, there's not a lot of other times or ways in which

your brain can be cleaned. And so this is what's taking those toxins out, making sure your brain's really healthy. it's when memories are filed, you know, that sort of priority is given often to the brain and the cardiovascular system. So those are often the first things to get repaired. Once it gets past that, I think it's sort of what's needed based on the individual human. But those are both sort of recognized things that happen is that both of those systems are kind of looked at because they're highly needed in order to sort of on a functional basis. If your brain's not working or your cardiovascular system isn't working, you're not doing anything the next day. So those are the sort of high priorities

of sleep for your body to heal. But almost every system is touched during sleep in order to try to heal it and make it better. But that's how your body's been programmed. So you can go through your day, even your memories, you know, when you think about it, what happened during the day, all gets filed. You just put those files on your desk all day. Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting. And then at night over a two-week period, it's usually decided whether last Tuesday's lunch was something you need to remember or it wasn't important. But if you got in a big fight with your husband or there was some trauma that happened, then that will keep going. And you're like, okay, we might need to have that in there to keep kind of refreshing and keep that in long-term memory. But last Tuesday's lunch, if it was just sort of last Tuesday's lunch, usually gets lost.

And, you know, two years from now, you won't remember what last Tuesday's lunch was. Yeah. Yeah, no. Talk about the difference between deep sleep and REM sleep. The way I'd always learned it was deep sleep is detox. Rem sleep is more brain repair. And where does temperature fit in to those two pieces of sleep? And how do we make sure we not only get great deep sleep, but that we get good REM sleep? Yeah. So it's really kind of to take a step back. Your body has a clock that's really called your circadian rhythm is what. you know, you'll hear it sort of referred to. And that clock is just like your computer clock. It's like any other clock in your life that manages your, you know, appointments and however you manage that, your body kind of manages it with the same clock. And your temperature has a pattern that it does on a daily basis based on that clock. In that 24-hour period, you'll have periods where it's higher,

and then you'll have periods where it's lower. In the middle of the night, it's about two degrees cooler than your average core body temperature. And then it warms back up as you go to the morning. So if you think about it in terms of sleep, and we work even with shift workers, there's a dip in the afternoon that makes you a little bit cooler as well. So that's where if you are tired, afternoons are a good time or if you're a shift worker during the day, that's your window for deep sleep versus in the evening your deep sleep windows in the first half. If you go to sleep first thing in the morning, it's going to be in the second half of your sleep because of that dip. So trying to manage those temperatures based on when you're sleeping is important to kind of match it to that

circadian rhythm or clock. That makes it ideal. But you also get blood pressure when you should have a bowel movement, when you should work out, when you should do creative versus high cognitive load. All of that's managed in that clock circadian rhythm system. And we kind of take it all for granted. But the more you know about your circadian rhythm, the more powerful you are about when you can have the best time of the day to do different things. But it is. tied to sleep and most often talked about with sleep. But when I talk about deep sleep in the first half of the night, it doesn't mean you just have deep sleep in the first half of the night. You actually, if you pull up a sleep tracker, you'll see you dip in and out of deep sleep.

You'll still get a little bit of REM sleep in the first half of the night. It's not just a straight line of here's your deep. And then bloop, it turns to REM sleep. It's more of like a possibility or probability window that you'll get more deep sleep in the first half of the night, you're going to get more REM sleep in the second half of the night. And so deep sleep likes it cooler, REM sleep likes it warmer as you kind of come up out of that valley. So from a temperature perspective, they really do have different profiles of what they're doing. Our latest product actually will tie that. So using our sleep tracker, it actually has an AI relationship called Hyper that recognizes when you're in each of those states and will warm it or cool it slightly

in order to enhance that sleep state. But if you want to think about what is deep sleep, what is REM sleep? It's usually defined by your brain waves. So REM sleep looks a lot like awake. And that's where a lot of people thought that was the only time we dreamed. Because if you do remember your dreams ever, it's because REM sleep is so close to being awake. And when you wake up, those are the dreams you most often remember because your kind of your brain is like almost awake when it was doing that.

And then just like deep sleep, you would assume your brain waves are slow down as they get further and further into deep sleep. And so you want to have that sort of slowing down of your brain, just like a heart rate. Your resting heart rate will also slow down the deeper you are in deep sleep. You'll get a lower resting heart rate if you're getting good, effective deep sleep. So those are all ways in which you can sort of measure that slowing down or the recovery part of your body. Just think about it. Just everything is more chill, more slow down in deep sleep.

So, oh my gosh. So again, you're like connecting dots for me. Thank you. Thank you for this discussion in general. But I typically I'll wake up at like two or three in the morning. Not all the time. I've got some hacks now that I've been working with. And I find that I actually have to change the temperature of my chili pad when I wake up at two or three in the morning. And so is that because maybe my brain is shifting into REM sleep? And so it needs a different temperature. It does. It doesn't. Like I have to bring it up. Yeah, absolutely. You'll wake up since you're now too cold and you're absolutely right. So you're coming out of that. When you come out of the valley, we have a lot of people that do that. Even younger people or athletes that will use it. They'll actually cannibalize their REM sleep if they stay cold too long. So as we get older, we just wake up. But the sort of younger athletes, because they're so physically involved, they'll actually just have mostly deep sleep then and not get much REM sleep. So they have to kind of find that balance. And that is.

is absolutely that sort of middle of the night time somewhere around two to three to change your temperature a little bit warmer. And it may take some experimentation, to be honest, of how much warmer that is for you. And depending on what you're going through, again, there may be times of your cycle that that's a different temperature. So it's important to kind of keep in mind what's the best one for you. But it is usually warmer than deep sleep. And think about as the planet's warming up, even though the sun isn't up yet, that is coming around. It often changes the temp, starts to change the temperature. You start to warm up as that planet warms up.

Even that pre-dawn is a little bit warmer than the coldest part of the night, usually. So you're starting to see that warmth happen and your body's looking to just match that planet. It just wants to be part of the planet when it does that. So it's, we are, you know, all of those things that we can't see. We really do and train to the rhythm of the planet, whether it comes. from that pulsing EMFs to the temperature, to the light, even the sounds that happen are all ways in which our brain is like, okay, am I in sync? And it wants to be in sync to get great sleep. Yeah. So the other cool feature. And so with that, you can set me. What I love is you can set it.

However, like, I can set it. Once I started to see the pattern two or three, I just made sure that I set it so the temperature naturally went up at two or three. So I didn't, you know, then I didn't wake up. The other really cool feature that you guys have, and this is the greatest way to ever wake up, is to raise, I can program an alarm. And instead of something beeping in my ear, I just warm my bed up. And I have found that it gently wakes me out of my deeps, out of my sleep. And, you know, there's no snooze to hit. It gets to a point where it's getting so warm that I'm like, okay, I'm ready to get out of bed.

It's the most beautiful way to wake up that I have ever experienced. So talk to me about what's going on in my body with that. Yeah, it's basically we're turning off sleep. So when we think about, and again, that Clifford Sapir, who found those sleep switches, called it a sleep switch. You can literally Google sleep switch and that's what he called it. So if you think about like flipping on a light bulb or turning on sleep and causing a cooling to do that or that change of temperature to do that. at, you also want a change of temperature to turn off sleep. And it's important as a sleep mechanism, I often will have a balloon when I'm doing talks to kind of explain that sleep has to be fully deflated so it can fully inflate and we want to turn off sleep just as much as we want to turn on sleep. And so if you snooze your alarm a lot or sort of wander through your morning and don't turn off sleep, your body's like, I don't know when we actually ended that. So I don't know, are we starting the sleep count towards the nighttime or not? And so what you do in the morning

and warming up is just such a powerful way. You actually get a release of cortisol, which is good cortisol. I know it gets a bad name for stress and all sorts of things, but it's great in the morning to give your brain that boost. And if you do warm awake, you can actually put off your caffeine for about 90 minutes because you'll get a good burst of cortisol that should last between 60 to 90 minutes, then take your caffeine for if that's what you like to have, your coffee or tea in the morning, and you'll actually continue that boost of like, wow.

you combine that with sunlight around 9 a.m., which is at peak time to get great light into your body, again, triggering all those things. And then you can really sort of fully burst into your day, your cognitive self will feel like it's ready to work out. It's ready to do whatever it is you do for your job or whatever it is, your sort of heaviest cognitive load administrative tasks you need to do. It'll be primed ready for all that. Yeah, that's crazy to me. I did not know that temperature affected cortisol like that. And, you know, I see a lot of women as they go through menopause. They can't do coffee as much. They become very sensitive to caffeine. You know, we know that cortisol is actually going to, if it spikes at the wrong time or it's out of control or you have dysregulation, it has your menopausal symptoms are going to be so much worse. even your insulin resistance.

So in the menopause reset, I write a lot. And even in Fast Like a Girl, I write a lot about the hormonal hierarchy. And what I see in my community so much is this desire to manage insulin because people want to lose weight. But what they don't realize is that in order to manage insulin, you have to manage cortisol. So what I just heard you say is tracking, making sure that your temperature patterns, is right as you're sleeping and waking up can have a really dramatic effect on cortisol regulation. And do we have any evidence that now that can also lead to insulin sensitivity and can help

you with your blood sugar regulation and your weight loss desires? I don't have any research on that. And I would love for that to be, you know, the research unfortunately often ends in that sort of like this is when cortisol is released. And like I said, this is the impact it has. And so little research for sleep in particular is done on women. It's my whole, I can do a whole soapbox on like testing. You're talking to the college men. That's right.

Yeah. Most of the sleep research, again, you know, it's taken years to hunt down the research on women and make that happen. But, you know, most of it back to, you know, early research was done on young college men that sleep great and are completely different than girls. So, yeah, so it's important, you know, to kind of keep, that's where that early sleep research, you really have to keep it with a grain of salt because it was. It was just done on the available people at the time, which was predominantly young men. Yeah. You know what you need to do. I don't know if you've done this. It would be fun to do with my community is have you ever done like a hormone test and then put the chili pad and do like a 90 day, 60 day experience to see if if women just

get, and women of all ages, if we know their hormonal profile and then we set the temperature right for their night's sleep and then recheck their hormones in another 90, 60, 90 days, if we would start to see a big hormonal shift. It was, it was in the, in the research study done with Wake Forest, they started that. We really need to do a subsequent study, but that's where the early results on that, they should have, if they could follow them over the course of a year, But it really shows the power of being able to sleep and what sleep does as a sort of a regulatory reset for our all hormonal challenges. But you will see there was a couple women that had sort of Hashimoto's or some of those things that go a little bit beyond regular sort of challenges and autoimmune disease. You start to see that a lot of their symptoms beyond just the menopausal ones will start to improve.

Again, it does help with cortisol levels if you could get great. sleep. If you get deep sleep, it totally resets that. So it's a, you know, it's a huge way. We want to end up, you know, totally relaxed during deep sleep. And it gives your body a break from being sort of that pumped up fight or flight all the time. Yeah. And what about fertility? I'm seeing a lot of, since Fast Like a Girl came out, I've had more women that are in their early 30s reach out to me that are struggling to put their hormonal picture back together. And many of them, are married, they're wanting to start families, they don't have regular cycles, some of them don't have cycles at all, and, you know, we're working with food and fasting to help in cycling that

to be able to get their cycle back on track. But do we have any research or any even anecdotal evidence that if we can use the temperature or something like a chili pad at night, that it can actually not only balance these hormones, but could help with fertility. Do we have any signs of or any evidence that fertility improves with that? So the only research I have, which is done, again, on men in the armed forces, but one of the things that happens when you're really stressed out for men is that their testosterone levels tank, and they really have a hard time because of that. So what we did is increase their sleep, just sleep, was able to radically change their

testosterone levels of just getting regular sleep. And again, I wish there was a study that I could speak to anecdotal evidence of people that I've talked to and have worked with on improving their cycles, especially women that are in sports. So a lot of women in sports do lose their cycles when they're really working out that hard. And sleep will actually help alleviate that from happening. So again, if you're pushing your body really hard, you're going to lose your cycle. But when they sleep better, the Santa Clara women's soccer team, we worked with and did a bunch of studies with them. And overall, their sort of health on their cycles and just performance overall improved, but their cycles definitely were more regular. Everything about them was more sort of in tune

and more across the board even, which is good. We want that balance of life. When they they got great sleep. So again, it's not sort of direct evidence, but the power of sleep is amazing. We need that on off. You know, you think about whenever you're, even electronics get wonky. I kind of use it all the time. Like, you have to reset. You have to turn it on and turn it back off. And by doing that as our bodies need that. And it needs it to be done really regularly and, you know, get that deep sleep. When we do that, everything gets better. And so again, is that sort of three legged stool of, you know, fitness and diet, sleep has to be there in order to help keep the other two to work better. They all work better. We eat less nasty calories when we sleep. We work out more

when we sleep. Everything is better when you sleep. Yeah, it's so true. It's so true. By the way, I know that study, or I know that you guys did it with Santa Clara University. My son goes to Santa Clara University. And he's a soccer player. Yeah, he's a soccer player. He doesn't play on the team there, but he's, you know, he's got friends, women that are on the soccer team. And he said that to me. He's like, Mom, hey, do you know that they all have, they now have chili pads like you? And that was the first time that I realized, wait a second, this might not just be for menopausal women. There's a whole application to this amazing pad that's, that's allowing me to sleep. There's a whole other application. So it's interesting that you just said that because, you know, for any athlete,

we're back at cortisol goes up. And if cortisol's up all day long, those sex hormones are going to start to go down. So I love, did you guys do it write up or anything on what you discovered with the Santa Clara women? Yeah, it wasn't published in a journal, but there is a, you can go to our website and see it there. But the, you know, what the results were. So that was really, really, really, you know, very powerful. You know, the other thing that's really interesting is mental health is very tied to sleep. Every mental illness is tied comorbidity with sleep.

And so we've done a lot of work with veterans, with PTSD. And, you know, again, the profile from, you know, sort of a sleep perspective when you have a mental illness is you get very little deep sleep. Your brain gets stuck in REM and in that sort of almost awake state because night terrors, everything like that, looks like you're awake in a brain state. So it's really important to still get deep sleep. And again, that temperature overrides what's going on in your prefrontal cortex a little bit and says, hey, why don't you just go to sleep? And so a lot of our veterans with PTSD will sleep better and get, you know, they won't eliminate all PTSD, but they'll get a good night's sleep and the work they do during the day on sort of improving that and thinking through whatever they

need to with their therapist. It's an amazing difference. It's night and day difference, like a 90 percent improvement rate versus, you know, it takes more, like just a lot longer recovery time for a lot of them. So it really, you know, and again, I talked about Terry Walls and MS. It's really, again, the power of sleep, no matter what's going on, is amazing. And if you can bypass all the stuff that prevents us from sleeping, you know, we almost are our worst enemies when it comes to sleep. If we can bypass that and just get better sleep, across the board, there's less symptoms, whatever is going on in your life. Yeah.

Oh, my gosh. So talk a little bit about one of the things I've seen with menopausal women is that as we lose progesterone, our ability to relax becomes very difficult. And so it's really nice to have a glass of wine at night and that can start to slow us down and prepare us for sleep. But what we know about the research of alcohol is that, you know, long-term, chronic alcohol drinking is not good on the brain. So do we, do we have any evidence as far as have people, have women been able to drink less? Do we, can it help you repair from your glass of wine

habit that you have every night? Because I see this as a really big hurdle for a lot of menopausal women is I know I'm not supposed to drink my glass of wine, but it is the thing that relaxes me and gets me into bed. What, what can we know about using a chili pad to, to help overcome that. So this is probably my favorite hack ever when it comes to the chili pad. And really the doc pro, this was a big part for me and why we pushed harder on those temperature barriers. So our latest one has, you can get way colder than you can on previous ones.

And part of the reason is exactly that. America loves to have a drink in the evening. And sleep can be the biggest party pooper out there because when you drink alcohol, it increases your metabolism and makes you hotter. So when we think about what we just talked about, that temperature profile, if I just gave you something that's going to make you hotter when you're trying to get deep sleep,

you're not going to get deep sleep. Even if it helped you relax and overcome that anxiety and try to get you to fall asleep, it's going to really destroy your sleep once you're asleep. So it can mitigate the result of alcohol because my husband loves bourbon, which is even more so than wine. And he already sleeps profile.

hot. So yes, even our big linemen that, you know, they're basically doing the equivalent because they're working out late at night, those evening games, whatever that is, they're super hot already. And then they've just increased it late at night. So that late at night right before you go to bed to increase your metabolism is a killer for sleep. It's terrible. But if you can crank down your doc pro and freeze yourself out, you do not have that same problem. You're actually still able to get deep sleep. Now, the long-term effects of, like, more than one glass and you're, like, having bottles of wine, you know, that affects, that affects your liver and other things. I can't fix all of that, but I can mitigate the results of heating your body up from a glass

of wine or two, and you're able to sleep cooler and still get great sleep. So if that's a handicap that you need, because it's just a great tool sometimes, any of those tools we want to, not have bottles of wine or, you know, over time, if you can use it less and you can train your brain to say, well, now it's time to go to sleep. It's time to relax. You can train yourself to downregulate, just like we train ourselves to fast or do other things or work out at a certain time. You can train your brain to start relaxing. Weighted blankets are another huge way that a lot of people have been able to give up a little bit of that glass and wine. So try a weighted blanket when you're watching TV or reading a book or whatever you do in the evening to downregulate

already, try covering up with a weighted blanket and see if you can skip your glass of wine. It's actually crazy. I know everyone's like, I don't see how it works. My husband was like a totally like there's no way that can work. Like I don't think that a weighted blanket is ever going to do it. He sleeps religiously with one now. And it is, it started for autistic children. And it is really simple.

It's just a blanket with extra weight on it. but it does release serotonin. A lot of the same things that happen when you drink a glass of wine, you're going to get with a weighted blanket with no side effects. And so it is a great alternative to try. It's worth a try. I have a funny story about that because I have a weighted blanket too. And we were going on one summer on a vacation to Lake Tahoe.

And we're packing up the car. And I'm literally packing the weighted blanket. And I'm taking the chili pad. off of my bed with my doc pro. And I'm like, okay, come on. Here we go. And my husband looks at me. I'm like, oh, we're going for a week. I am not messing my sleep up. I need to make sure that I've got all my amenities. And when I travel, it really, you guys need to come up with a travel one because when I get into a hotel, the first thing I do is turn the temperature way down. I gather all the pillows and put them on top of me to try to get the room cold enough and get enough weight on top of me to let me

go to sleep. And it's crazy how that works. And I think that it's primal. I go back to the cave woman. She slept on the ground. It was cold. And she had an animal hide on top of her. And that was how we were primally designed to signal to go to sleep. Yeah. No, for our athletes, we do that. Actually, I've had more conversations with TSA agents about my weighted blanket because even if like I'll often travel, we do have travel cases, but they don't travel great at this time. We absolutely have are working on a travel version at some point. But the weighted blanket, I've cut in half. So at least it just covers the top half of my body. And it can still go on my carry on. So I have a quarter of my carry on goes to my weighted blanket. And then the rest is everything else that I put in there. But then almost always I get pulled over on the side. and they're like, what the hell do you have in there? I'm like, it's just a weighted blanket. Go ahead, take it out, feel it, touch it. We'll put it all back.

But like, now I'm kind of used to like, all right, we're just going to, I just have to talk to the TSA agent, but it's not like it's not allowed. It's just flags them as like something weird. But yes, I travel with my weighted blanket. And then the other things you can do, again, training your brain just like anything else, if you train it to sound, if you train it to smell, those are also all primal. So our most popular item with our athletes is. actually lavender pillow spray. And when you think about your, you know, professional baseball players and football players and these, a lot of these, you know, big super macho guys are using lavender pillow spray like ruthlessly. It's crazy. But again, when you've trained your brain that it smells like home,

smell is extremely powerful in transporting us wherever we are. If you have any smell that transports you back to, I smell the cookies and I think of Grandma's Kitchen or whatever. whatever that is, smell is really, really powerful. And if your brain thinks that you're at home, even if all your tools aren't exactly there, but if you can get the sound and the smell to be the same when you travel, you'll actually have a pretty good sleep on the road. I've tried to perfect that over the years because between myself and the athletes I work with, we have to figure that out because every hotel, I don't understand when they're selling a bed for the night that you can't sleep in them. They're terrible places to sleep. So in the final

minutes that we have. Talk a little bit about what, how do you get, you know, if you go to your website, you're looking at the different products. You have a doc pro. You have the Ouler, I think, was the original one. So talk a little bit about the difference of that. And then what's the difference between your product and some of the other products that are out there? I've been so pleased with your product. I, you know, I don't know much about the other ones, but talk about the differences there. Yeah, absolutely. So our original product, if you think about your old-time thermostat where you set it and forget it, you know, a lot of the dial ones and you set it to one temperature and it just stayed that then.

So the original chili pad, the cube, is absolutely that way. It's one temperature. And again, if you're just going to leave it on super cold, a lot of people find that that's enough. And again, if you don't have a huge body mass, you know, because again, it's thermal regulation. So big room air conditioner is not going to work. Our little room air conditioner is going to work for a big room.

think about it in terms of that on how cold you think you're going to want to get. It's a great baseline model. And a lot of people, again, if you don't have a lot of temperatures you're going to do, you just know you need to be cold, then that works for a lot of people. It has a remote, so it's super easy. No app. If you're not an app person, it's that way it works. The Uler does have an app and it's programmable, almost like a programmable thermostat.

So it's going to have a similar sort of pad profile. So think about small room air conditioning versus large room air conditioning or just what you're trying to get out of it, how cold you want it to get. And then the Doc Pro obviously has the most amount of cooling capacity. It has a very different designed pad, which allows the thermal regulation to really make that bed cold and as cold as you want it to get for the most part. Most people can't sleep on all the way cold. And even our NFL linemen, we kind of designed it for the 375 pound NFL lineman dude putting off heat. So it's going to be able to power through that.

The differences between ours and other products out there. Others will even, we have a sleep tracker that will go with the Doc Pro, as I mentioned, and then it can regulate, it'll change the temperature dynamically throughout the night. So our sleep tracker is the only one in the world that's doing that actively at night based on your sleep profile that night because every night is different. So even if they've looked back at the previous night and then try to superimpose that, which is what some of the others will do. It's not the same.

You didn't have the same day day to day. And so it's going to give you a very different sort of experience when it comes to that active AI working on helping you sleep. We like to think about it as GPS. So when you pull up Google yesterday's map experience of what accidents happened on the freeway yesterday isn't going to really help you get home today. And so that in real time is a big part of the difference.

You know, I think the other temperature profile is really similar, But the biggest part for me, and this is where the physicist is, it's really important to keep EMFs out of your bed. EMF is an electromagnetic field and everyone's like, what does that? What does it mean? But it's stuff we can't see, but it's really electronic interference. So when there's a constant stream of electronic magnetic fields interfering with your body and your space, and that's why people keep electronics out of your bedroom, it's really a lot about keeping EMFs out. Now it's crazy because the Earth pulses in fields that are very similar, but that pulsing

part actually is good for us, but a continuous stream is not. It's kind of like alternating current versus direct current. You obviously don't want to have a direct current. You want to have an alternating one because it's actually more gentle and it's what your body is used to from the planet. But EMFs are bad. We keep EMFs out of the bed, so there's no electronics in the bed for us. And that's really what's separated us. We're able to put in airplane mode. So if you're sensitive, if you've ever had a traumatic brain injury, you have neurodegenerative diseases at all, you're going to be very sensitive to EMFs. And if you haven't heard about them, it's worth Googling it and kind of doing your own research on what those effects are and kind of managing

that for a lot of people. It may not matter. But if you're sensitive to it, you're going to actually feel the difference of having a high amount of EMFs in your bed versus someone that may not register. But that is we've always really, that was always really important to me to make sure that we do not have any of that. Again, bed should be for healing. So we want to make sure we've created a space that first of all does no harm only helps. Yeah. You know, you talked about the AI piece of this. And I'm just now experimenting with the sleep tracker and seeing, you know, what that, what it's giving the data it gives me in the morning. But what you just got me thinking about was this idea that actually what you guys have created is like a sleep partner where your bed and your body

are starting to get to know each other so that the environment in your bedroom is perfect for not only sleeping well but for repair. I think that's like when you talk to you can't you've said this a couple of times about the AI of the sleep tracker and I think that is so important. I don't want people to miss that. Like I don't know another tool that has your bed as a partner in making sure that you are getting the most reparative sleep that you possibly can. I think you guys are geniuses, by the way. And I can't even imagine all the number of diseases that you'll prevent, the number of the mental health problems, the suffering that people have during the day when we can start to get the bed in partner with the body and the brain.

we've changed, we changed the trajectory of health for all ages. So I just, I just grasp that right now. And you're talking about that tracker. I'm like, that is, that is brilliant. So thank you. I really, really, not only did you save my marriage. I'm now seeing that you, you know, have the potential to really prevent chronic disease. So really appreciate you all for that and for your hard work and, and the way that you've thought this through. What a game changer. So thank you. Oh, yeah. No, I'm thrilled. Thank you. I want to finish on this. I could talk about this forever because I really, Tara, I do honestly want you to know that of all the biohacks I've done, this one has been the most profound. Like when I see you guys, your booze at conferences, when I see anybody on your team, I'm like, thank you, thank you, thank you. It is in my top three of the most important things I've done for my physical and mental health through and my relationships through my menopausal journey. So I just have so much gratitude for you.

So please, please pass that along to everybody on your team. So I want to finish up on this. This season, we're doing a lot on self-love and self-care. So I'm asking all of my guests, you know, what's a self-care practice that you have outside of sleep that you do on a daily basis? And then the other part of that is, what do you think your superpower is in the world? We have too many people that talk about what they're not good at. and I really want people to stand up and talk about what they're really good at and what they contribute, what their superpower does to contribute to this amazing world we live in. So self-care

practice and superpower. So the self-care practice actually started during the pandemic and I've talked about it a lot. So stress, you know, we've mentioned it as sort of the biggest enemy. It is the enemy of sleep. It's the enemy of everything in our lives, really. And it actually comes from BJ Fogg. I heard to talk from him years ago on, you know, the power of tiny habits and what a small change can do. And even 30 to 60 seconds a day of meditation, gratitude, breathing, whatever that looks like for you, down regulation is extremely powerful for watching cortisol out of your system and reducing stress. And so my sort of self-love habit is we use the restroom seven times a day on average, sometimes more,

sometimes less. but attaching a new habit to something you're already doing is extremely powerful to anchor that and make it happen again and again. So next time you're in the restroom, this is what I do. I close the door and I take 30 to 60 seconds and I will rotate between doing breathing or gratitude. Like if it's really tough and I'm like, I'm not sure I can get into breathing right now, but I'm going to at least stop and be grateful for whatever's happening in the day or my family

or find a moment. but taking 30 to 60 seconds every day. One of those restroom stops has to involve 30 to 60 seconds that is just about me. And again, in that moment, you're doing something that you have to do for you. We all have to do it. Take an extra moment. Don't be on your phone. Just be soft.

That is, that is been, it's been life changing on reducing the stress I have when it comes to nighttime when I climb into bed. It's phenomenal. It's super simple, but it really works. and it's fabulous. And so then I guess my superpower, I love finding a way to take something like, well, like sleep and the AI and simplifying it and making it easy. For me, like it is. It's revolutionary.

If we talk about self-driving cars and all the way in which we can use AI to deliver for us, we're unconscious during sleep. And so we need something to be thinking for us, hey, what's the best way to do this? And so when I look at the patents and design and sort of what's important to me, it's really important to get people to a place where they can heal. And I love the idea from a little girl of being a healer. I'm like, I just want to be a healer, whatever that looks like. And so for me, of creating devices or things or habits or helping out, you know, I get talks, all of that. The big why is to find a place where people can heal.

And that sort of place of healing and delivering that is, is A, what I love. It's my why. But I believe especially attached to the technology I invent that is my superpower. Amazing. Well, we're all benefiting from your superpower. So I really appreciate you. How do people find your product or follow some of the research you all are doing? Yeah.

It's just sleep. So if you think about sleep for yourself, that's it. That's the entire website thing. So just go to sleep. Me and you'll find there's blogs, tons of blogs and different information and the research. You can explore all of that there. Yeah, beautiful. Well, again, from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much.

And I'm going to say thank you from all the menopausal women who have benefited from your product. But hopefully people are seeing, too, that this goes way beyond menopause. So I'm super grateful for you, Tara. And again, really tell everybody over there, just what a huge fan I am. am, this has definitely been a game changer. So we have all benefited from your superpower. So grateful for you. Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. This has been fabulous. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends,

and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.