The School of Greatness - The Sleep Doctor's 5 Rules for Your Best Night Ever | Dr. Michael Breus

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

You already know sleep matters. What you don't know is why you keep waking up at 2 AM, why your tracker is probably lying to you, and why the rules you've been following may not be meant for you. Dr. Michael Breus is one of the world's leading sleep doctors - not just a sleep expert, but a clinical psychologist who actually treats patients and pressure-tests every theory in real life. The difference matters. The rule saying you need a pitch-black, 65-degree room with no TV and no partner? He sleeps with two French bulldogs and a big screen on. His point isn't that sleep hygiene doesn't matter. It's that it has to work for your actual life. One thing that might reshape how you think about your body: every human on earth wakes up between 1 and 3 AM. It's biology. Your core body temperature drops to prevent hypothermia, and your body briefly surfaces. Most people roll over and go back to sleep. If you don't, the fix isn't pills - it's understanding what's happening and using tools like 4-7-8 breathing to lower your heart rate below 60 and let sleep return naturally. Your chronotype - lion, bear, wolf, or dolphin - is genetic. It shifts across your lifetime. Forcing a wolf to be a lion doesn't make them a better performer; it makes them worse. The biggest unlock, according to Dr. Breus, isn't more sleep. It's doing the right things at the right time for your specific biology. Dr. Breus has a five-step daily framework he gives every patient. It's specific, it's sequenced, and most people are violating at least three of the steps without knowing it. Dr. Breus’s books: Sleep Drink Breathe: Simple Daily Habits for Profound Long-Term Health Energize!: Go from Dragging Ass to Kicking It in 30 Days The Power of When: Discover Your Chronotype and the Best Time to Eat Lunch, Ask for a Raise, Have Sex, Write a Novel, Take Your Meds, and More The Sleep Doctor's Diet Plan: Lose Weight Through Better Sleep Beauty Sleep: Look Younger, Lose Weight, and Feel Great Through Better Sleep Take The Chronotype Quiz! Dr. Breus on Instagram Dr. Breus on LinkedIn In this episode you will: Learn the five-step framework Dr. Breus uses with CEOs, elite athletes, and patients to dramatically improve sleep quality without medication Discover the 4-7-8 breathing technique developed by Dr. Andrew Weil and how it lowers your heart rate to unlock sleep when your mind won't stop Understand chronotype science - whether you're a lion, bear, wolf, or dolphin - and how aligning your schedule to your biology changes everything from performance to sex drive Uncover the truth about sleep trackers, melatonin supplements, and why eight hours is not the universal target you've been sold Master the Napa Latte protocol and non-sleep deep rest (Yoga Nidra) as emergency recovery tools when life disrupts your sleep For more information go to https://lewishowes.com/1930 For more Greatness text PODCAST to [phone] Follow The Daily Motivation for essential highlights from The School of Greatness More SOG episodes we think you’ll love: Andrew Huberman Dr. Baland Jalal Shawn Stevenson TOPICS chronotype, circadian rhythm, sleep drive, adenosine, 4-7-8 breathing, Yoga Nidra, non-sleep deep rest, Napa Latte protocol, melatonin, chrono longevity, sleep anxiety, Dr. Michael Breus Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy!Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is the most powerful drug in the world. And if you can figure out how to use that to your advantage, now we're talking. If you were a patient of mine and you walked in and let's say you were taking 10 milligrams of Ambien, I could utter one sentence looking at your medical chart and I could make that Ambien not work. I could just turn to you and say, you have cancer. Boom, you ain't sleeping that night. His research has changed the way top CEOs, elite athletes and millions of people think about sleep, energy, and performance. a best-selling author and one of the most trusted sleep experts in the world. Dr. Michael Bruce,

thanks for being there. I think sleep is kind of like the volume knob for greatness. When your volume is low, nobody can hear you. You can't hear you. You can't perform at the levels that you want to perform. Sleep affects every organ system and every disease state. Literally everything you do, you do better with a good night's sleep. What ruminates in the mind that causes us not to sleep? That is literally the number one question that I'm asked is, what do I do if I wake up in the middle of the night, somewhere between one and three, and I can't get back to sleep. What do you do? So I've got a whole routine, and I tell people all the time about it. So first of all, you said there's a difference between sleep experts and sleep doctors.

What is that difference? Yeah, so it's not just a nuance. It's a whole different kind of area. So a sleep expert, and by the way, I love sleep experts. They really help me do my job really well. Sleep experts are folks who are a lot of times academicians. Right. So they're running research. They're looking at things. But when when you do a research study, it's in a very controlled environment, right? And you get these interesting results and you can talk about them and tell people all these interesting things. That's what a sleep expert does. They kind of create an overwhelming theory based on all their research and try to explain a problem. I'm a sleep doctor. I take care of people's sleep. I take care of people's apnea, narcolepsy, insomnia. I look at these things called chronotypes, which I know we're going to get into. But I pressure test. all of their ideas in the real world,

and then I manipulate them so that they work. So a lot of times it works in the research lab, but it might just not work in your bedroom. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's interesting because before we started, you were talking about how you have two French bulldogs that sleep in bed with here. Yes, I do.

You have a, you know, a 60-inch, big screen TV, that's bright lights on the whole time. And right away, I was like, that's everything that sleep experts say not to do. Right. They say to have it, you know, 50 degrees or something, you know,

60 something degrees is the perfect temperature, blackout shades, snake plants. Like they have all these like cooling temperature shoots. Right, right, right. They have the perfect environment, which I actually love the idea of having the perfect environment to allow yourself to sleep. But it sounds like as one of the top sleep doctors, you don't do that. Nope. And I've also heard sleep experts say like, don't sleep with your partner because like any

movement is going to disrupt your sleep. Like if you could have optimal optimal. sleep they're saying this, but I'm also like, okay. Who has that? Right. Exactly. Come on. Exactly. It's ridiculous. Right. So as a sleep doctor, you go against the rules of a lot of sleep experts. What I try to do is I try to adapt them, right? And try to figure out what is the mechanism inside of their research that they're finding can help people with better sleep. And then how do I

adopt that to people's real living and real lifestyles? Right. I know you're an entrepreneur, right? Entrepreneurs sleep differently than others. people sleep. Let me give you an example, right? So I work with entrepreneurs all the time. And one of the classic things that I hear people on the doctor's side is, hey, I fall asleep just fine, but I wake up somewhere between one and three o'clock in the morning and either takes me an hour or I don't fall back to sleep. You know, what is that and how do I fix that? By the way, that's the number one question that I get asked, but it's different for an entrepreneur. When an entrepreneur wakes up in the middle of the night, they're not stressed. They're excited. They're thinking.

They're like, I've got the idea. I figured out what my business problem is. And so we have to be able to change some of the thinking that we used to have for insomnia and adapt it to the entrepreneur mindset. Yeah, when I was growing up, it would take me hours to fall asleep. Really? And it would take me hours. And I think it was just like a stressful home environment.

And I didn't feel maybe psychologically or emotionally safe. And, you know, I knew my parents loved me, but they didn't have a healthy relationship with each other. Right. So there was a lot of uncertainty in screaming. and fighting and silent treatments and then just this what's going to happen you know the uncertainty of life as a seven eight 10 year old yeah i would argue a lot of sleep related issues are fear based right so you want you might have been safe physically yes but emotionally things weren't necessarily where you thought they should be or or understood they should be yeah yeah and that fear can really

play a role most of sleep issues that i deal with have an anxiety component to them and when i think about anxiety it's not like oh I'm afraid of this or you know I've got a phobia about that it's there's a level my heart rate is up there's stuff going on it's not it's not working here and I'm concerned I'm scared that will override just about anything really yeah I give you an example if you were a patient of mine and you walked in and let's say you were taking 10 milligrams of ambient I could utter one sentence looking at your medical chart and I could make that ambient not work I could just turn to you and say you have cancer boom you're ain't sleeping that night, right? It overrides the pharmacy, right? This is the most powerful drug in the world,

is your brain. And if you can figure out how to use that to your advantage, now we're talking, right? So I'm not saying anything against pills. There are plenty of people out there who use medications. And by the way, there's nothing wrong with that. There are certain situations where pharmaceutical intervention makes a ton of sense, right? If you're a paranoid schizophrenic, you get your Ambien, okay? You know. If you've been in a motor vehicle accident, I've got terrible pain. Hey, you might need a sleeping pill. My goal is to try to get people off of those medications when they're not necessary. Yeah.

Almost everybody was able to sleep without pills when they were younger. So let's see if we can figure out how to get back to some of that. Yeah. And as a psychologist, then what shifts in the mind that causes people not to be able to relax and slow down their thinking? Right. What is it a traumatic event? Is it a a reoccurrence of an uncertainty around events?

Is it a constantly thinking about the past, worrying about the future? What ruminates in the mind that causes us not to sleep? All of the above, right? You literally hit almost all of them. So it's traumatic events. But it can be as simple as daily worries, right? I mean, here's the thing. You know, I've heard this many times.

It's a lot of people, they wake up in the middle of the night and they get monkey mind, right? Now, I'm not sure I have to give a formal definition of, monkey mind, but I think we all know a little bit of what that is. It's, are you worried about your kids? Are you worried about your job? Did you get the right groceries? You know, what's that noise? Letter in the house, right? Like, there's a whole host of things that can be out there. This causes a level of what we call physiological arousal. What it does is it turns on what's called the sympathetic nervous system. So you've got an autonomic nervous system breaks out into two pieces,

sympathetic and parasympathetic. This is the fight or flight was just sympathetic. And then the rest and digest is the parasympathetic. We want, at least before bed and during sleep, we'd love you to be in the parasympathetic. But when you wake up in the middle of the night, here's the thing that's kind of crazy. Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night for a good reason? Does anybody run into your room and said, happy birthday in the middle of the night? I don't know. Hey, it's joyful. But not many times. Not many times. Believe it or not, our brain is built. When we wake up in the middle of the night, we immediately go to the negative. And that can be problematic. And so you start to think about different things.

Sometimes people will flip on the TV. I gotta be honest with you. You flip on the TV nowadays, it's tragedy all over the place. It's geopolitical stuff. It's financial stuff. It's emotional stuff. I mean, there's a lot of things that are influencing us on the regular. What I try to explain to people is you need runway to land the plane, right?

So you need time before bed that we don't have all of those things going on so that I can lower your heart rate. So here's the crazy part is if everybody gets just one point, one piece of evidence from from this podcast, you want a heart rate of about 60 or below to enter into a state of unconsciousness. If your heart rate's above that, it's going to be tough for us to get you there. Now, don't get me wrong, there are people out there with high blood pressure who may never get a heart rate below 60, but I'm just talking about a lowering of the heart rate pretty significantly to allow your body to begin to relax and then allow the sleep process to take over. And if your mind is constantly ruminating on stressful things, or it's watching stressful things, it's going to be hard

to bring it back down. Exactly. So I use all kinds of different techniques for people, even when they wake up in the middle of night. Because like I said, that is literally the number one question that I'm asked is, what do I do if I wake up in the middle of the night, somewhere between one and three, and I can't get back to sleep. What do you do? You want me to go through it? Yeah. All right, perfect. So I've got a whole routine and I tell people all the time about it. So first of all, don't go pee. You heard it here, don't go pee. What if you have to pee?

If you've got to really pee, please go pee. But here's the thing. People wake up and they say to themselves, I'm up, I might as well, go pee, right? What happens when you go from a lying position to a seated position to stay? Your heart rate starts up. So, then you have two problems on your hand.

So what I tell people do, roll over to your back, count to 10 or 15. See if you really have to pee. If you have to pee, please, do me the favor. Go pee. Don't let the bet. Right. Don't put on some depends, okay? Like, that's not what we're talking about here. But if you're going to do that, have some strategically placed night lights along the way.

Because if you flip on lights, you just told your brain it's morning and it doesn't actually work out so well. Step number two, don't look at the clock, right? Here's what people do. Then you start ruminating more. You instantly do the mental math. Oh, man. I lost the sleep. I need this much more sleep. Now you're still tomorrow. Right? You're like, you spin up and now you're pissed off. Yes. Right. You're like, oh my gosh. It's. 3.30. I got to get up at six. Sleep. Sleep. Like, that doesn't, in the history of time, no one has ever forced themselves to sleep without anesthesia. Okay. So it just doesn't work that way.

So if you can avoid the clock, now what I tell people, plug your phone in across the room. You can still hear it if there's an emergency because everybody always tells me, oh, what if my kids call or use it for my, you know, alarm clock. Great. Stick it across the room. But what happens, most people when they wake up, they grab their phone and they head to the can. Yeah. Right. And you know what they do. They're checking. Checking social media. They're looking up their tech. Who needs that at three o'clock in the morning? Nobody. So, if you can avoid it, don't go pee. You got to pee. Remember, please go pee. Avoid the clock. Now you're lying there and you're wondering, well, what am I supposed to do? I want to back up for a second and describe to everybody why this has occurred. Because by the way, it's biology. Okay. So here's where it gets really, really interesting. Your core body temperature rises, rises, rises, 30 at night. And sleep follows your core body temperature. It hits a peak and then it drops. That drop is a signal for your brain to release melatonin. Melaton is kind of the key that starts the engine for sleep.

It's not the only thing that you need, but you ain't got no melatonin. You're not going to be able to fall asleep. Your core body temperature continues to drop, drop, drop, drop, drop. At some point in time, if your body doesn't heat up, you go hypothermic and you die. Guess what time that is? To one and three. Really? Every human on earth wakes up between, one and three o'clock in the morning. But here's what happens. They burp, they fart, they roll over, and they go back to bed. I'm talking about what happens if that doesn't occur?

What happens if you don't fall back asleep immediately? Here's a technique that I have all my patients do and they love it. It's called 478 breathing. So this is a technique that was developed by Dr. Andrew Weil, Harvard-trained naturalist, believe it or not, used in the military to help our snipers be able to shoot in between heartbeats. Because, you know, if your heartbeat's speeding too fast, you can actually change the trajectory of the bullet. One little flinch.

Exactly, right? And so here's what it is. And by the way, it's exactly what it sounds like. You slowly breathe in through the nose for a count of four. You hold for a count of seven. And you slowly push for a count of eight. Now, you need to do this about 20 times and those cycles will dump your heart rate below 60, which is kind of our magic number. Now, I'm going to be honest with you, when I try this myself, and by the way, I've had this happen to me.

I'm not immune to having sleep problems every once in a while. I mean, I'm a human being, right? I lose count. And then I get anxious. And then my heart rate goes up. And now I've completely screwed the whole thing up. So here's what I do is I have people take their hands and make light fists. And when you do one level of four, seven, eight, you stick out a finger.

Two, three, four, five. You get to ten. You wrap them back. Most people don't even make it back. Because you're also like heavier, right? Exactly. And you do it down by your sides, right? And so now you're doing something distally.

and then you're breathing. And here's the kicker is you want to picture the number in your head. Because you can't count and think of anything else at the same time. It's impossible. So you picture that four, then the three, then the two, then the one, then the seven, all the way down, and then the eight for the push. And now it's not a hard push. To be clear, it's very gentle, very light. It's a breathing in and breathing out. Also, I couldn't hold my breath for seven seconds and push when I first started doing it. So I modified it a little bit. So I did a little bit. So I did a 4-5-6 for about two weeks, then a 4-6-7, and then a 4-7-8. Yes, a breathing strategy, I think, is really important.

Now, here's also what happens if this doesn't work? What happens if you get through 20 cycles and you haven't fallen asleep? A couple of different things you want to think about. One is there's actually data now to show something called non-sleep deep rest, otherwise known as yoga nidra, right? Lie there, relax. It's actually rejuvenative. So even if you don't fall asleep but you're chilling out, you're actually.

actually doing your body some good. And as we were talking earlier, you're got to stay positive. So so many people go into this negative mindset. If you find that you're lying there and you're like, this sucks and you can feel your heart rate going up, that's the time to go ahead and get out of bed. Have a specific area in the house, right? Where there's a book, there's a light,

and you can just relax, chill. And when you start to feel sleepy again, then return to bed. Yeah. Now, most people think they have a sleep problem because they're not getting eight hours of sleep. Yep. Is eight hours still the optimal for average human beings? Absolutely not.

No. No, absolutely not. Should some people be getting less or more, depending on their personality, depending on their job, if they're athletes or... It has a lot to do with genetics and where they are in their physical stage of life, right? So when you're younger, you can get six and a half, seven hours. When I talk about younger now, I'm talking like early 20s, things like that. When you're much younger, you want to get as much sleep as you can because you've got a developing

body. I mean, you're an athlete. You understood this. When you were out playing, you got your rest. You need a lot of sleep. You need naps. You need sleep. You need 10 hours maybe. Right. And so in those cases, you might need more sleep. But once you kind of hit adulthood, what we're learning is somewhere between seven and nine hours seems to be kind of the general average. I'll be honest with you, though, I get about six and a half. I'm 58 years old. I get six and a half. I've had no coffee today. This is my energy level every day. Right. So sleep is flexible. That's the thing I want people to really understand. I've got so many people out there like, the only way I'm going to optimize is if I get

eight hours. Remember, sleep isn't about quantity. It's also about quality of sleep. And so depth of sleep matters. Are you getting the right stages? How is that going for you? And a lot of people say, okay, well, I've got a tracker. You know, I've got a ring.

I've got a wristband. I've got a watch. I've got something that's tracking my sleep. What do you think about those wearables that track your sleep? Here's what I'll tell you is none of them are fantastic. Okay. They're not accurate because here's the problem. We measure depth of sleep from brain waves.

It's hard to get brainwaves from your finger, right? So you have to use a proxy. So you have to use heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, and then an algorithm is kind of guess. Okay, Lewis is at this heart rate, at this time of night. We're pretty sure he's in this depth of sleep. The biggest problem, I think, with the trackers out there is people just zone in and they, like, it'll hijack your day.

I can't count the number of people who walk up to me and they're like, Dr. Bruce, I only got 14 minutes of deep sleep last night. Am I going to die? You're probably going to die, but it's not going to be from deep sleep loss, right? Because how much did you get the night before? And they'll say, oh, 16 minutes. I go, how about the night before? 18 minutes? I said, well, then the trackers being consistently inaccurate. I can work with that, right? What we're looking for is the delta or the deflection. So if you get 14 minutes every single night, there's no universe. You're only getting 14 minutes of sleep. It doesn't work that way, right? it's being consistently inaccurate. But if you get 14 and then you get 407 one night, I want to know what happened that night, right? Look at the trend at the end of the week. Don't double down on the number

because sometimes it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They wake up, they get a crappy sleep score, and then they think, oh, my day is shot. Yeah. Right? I'm going to be done for the day. It's not going to work. It's not going to go well and all this stuff.

And then it ends up not going well because they've kind of made it up themselves, right? So use the tracker as, something to guide you in different directions, but you really don't want to look and say, this is the number. Because unfortunately, we're not there yet. Now, I will tell you, probably 18 to 24 months from now, we might be. Some of the AI and the algorithms that I'm seeing out there, I would not be surprised if a lot of these companies are starting to work in getting better and better at the, at the variability and the guessing game. And I think we'll get there

over time. But that is very different than, for example, what we do in clinic with a sleep study, So a sleep study is where you actually are looking at all of those things. You have FDA-approved medical devices that really are measuring brain waste, measuring the whole thing, and getting you a much better understanding. So if you've got a tracker, use it as a guide, but not the Bible. Now, as a sleep doctor, you get around six and a half hours of sleep. I do. You have two French bulldogs in bed with you.

I do. Snoring and making their noises, moving around and licking your face throughout the night or whatever they're doing. You've got an 80-inch flat screen TV blaring signals, frequencies. Yeah. And you told me before that you also have a sleep apnea? Yep. So I was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea. So what does that mean? And do you use a machine for this? I sure do. So sleep apnea. I'm glad we're talking about this because this is important, right? So it's kind of funny. So I'm the sleep doctor, right? And about a year and a half, two years ago, I wasn't feeling up to enough. My workouts weren't as good. My time's weren't as good on the treadmill. So I called my doctor,

the woman who takes care of me, Carrie, and I said, Carrie, you know, God, I'm kind of dragging ass. She said, let's do some blood work. Let's see what's going on with you. And I said, okay, great. So she thought maybe I was iron deficient, like I had anemia, maybe there was some kind of deficiency, something was going on. So we got back and my testosterone was around 400. Now, for a guy my age, that's still okay but she was like you know let's put you on testosterone and let's see what happens right so she puts me on testosterone almost nine months goes by no change all that happened was i lost more hair really yeah let me tell you that was not the side effect i was looking for brother you need you're like i wanted to get jacked i want to get stragged exactly exactly and so then she turned to me and she said hey uh mr

sleep doctor why don't we do a sleep study on you and i was like you know i hadn't done one in a few years in the clinic when I used to be practicing on the regular I would test out all the new equipment on myself so I had a pretty good idea what was going on so I actually my company called sleep doctor we actually do home based sleep tests now so by the way since COVID almost nobody really needs to go to the sleep lab if you're if you're looking at sleep apnea in particular so I got a machine comes to the house you wear it on your wrist with a little thing on your finger that's it by the way the whole that's the whole thing sleep with that yeah sleep with that information ports over to an app the next day you're online talking with the doctor turns out i stopped breathing in my sleep 24

times an hour wow right that's a lot that's moderate sleep apnea how long you stop sleeping uh stop breathing for so the definition is anywhere from 30 to 90 seconds come on for real you stop breathing for 30 to 90 seconds 24 times an hour correct that is sleep apnea now i want to be clear and you can't hold your breath for seven seconds right right it's a little bit different just so it's fascinating when you start to kind of look through these ideas, but for everybody out there, obstructive sleep apnea is where there's a blockage somewhere in your throat. Now, a lot of times we think of sleep apnea as a big person's disease. Look at me, dude. I'm 160 pounds soaking wet, right? I'm not one of those people, but I've got some level of

obstruction that's here in my throat. So I ended up using a CPAP machine. So CPAP stands for continuous positive airway pressure. So literally, it's an air compressor with the hose and a mask that sits on my face and pushes air down my lungs and opens the area that has collapsed and ascends air to my lungs and I breathe all night long. Now here's the thing. A lot of people say, I don't want to get sleep tested. I don't want to sleep with a mask on my face. Michael, it's not sexy. There's no way I'm going to do it. I'm claustrophobic and they come up with every excuse in the book. CPAP's not the only solution, Lewis. Like there are mouth guards that you can wear with no hose, no mask. There are surgical interventions. Weight loss can help. They

There is a dramatic number of treatment modalities that we can do for people where you don't necessarily have to wear the mask. But people won't even get tested, right, because they're afraid to wear the mask. If you've got undiagnosed sleep apnea, you are on the road to diabetes. You're on the road to atrial fibrillation, congestive heart failure. Like, it's a mess. Cognitive decline for sure. Right? Like this is a significant medical issue.

And we want people to at least get tested. for it so they know and understand what's going on. I had a question the other day I thought was really interesting. They said, Michael, are GLP-1s the new CP-PAP? Right? Because, you know, people are losing weight with GLP-1s. Can that, I think it can be helpful, but I don't think it's the only solution. And by the way, there's a pill now that's in progress.

It's in the research trials. I would say 18 months from now to two years from now, there's a pill that you'll be able to take that will be able to help you with your sleep. So people need to get tested. Is it true that one of the greatest things that an individual can do to reach their greatness is to have better sleep? 100%. I think sleep is kind of like the volume knob for greatness, right?

When your volume is low, nobody can hear you. You can't hear you. You can't perform at the levels that you want to perform. Sleep affects every organ system and every disease state. Literally everything you do, you do better with a good night's sleep. I mean, cancer has a circadian rhythm. I mean, we can actually help people with cancer faster and better if they're sleeping better. Really?

It's unbelievable. There's now data to show that if you administer chemotherapy at a particular place in someone's circadian rhythm, we need less chemo and it works better. Come on. Dude, the research is out there. Wow. Absolutely. So, wait a minute. So you can, if you have cancer and you get treatment, if you get chemo at a certain time,

In your circadian rhythm, it could potentially, the research is showing that it helps you recover faster. And you need less chemo. Less poison is going into your body. Really? Oh, yeah. The research has been around for a little while. I mean, okay, so tell me about circadian rhythm them. Why is this important for us to understand and what should we know about our own circadian rhythms?

So sleep is basically two separate systems in the brain. One is called your sleep drive. The other is called your sleep rhythm. Sleep drive works a little bit like this. When a cell eats a piece of glucose, something comes out. the back end. That thing is usually called adenicin. Adenison works its way through your system, goes through a very specific receptor area in your brain. As that accumulates, you get sleepier and sleepier and sleepier. That is sleep drive. By the way, as an aside, I'm kind of a sleep geek,

so I'm all into the research. If you look at the molecular structure of caffeine and the molecular structure of adenicin, they're off by one molecule. What does that mean? So I'm going to tell you what it means. I figured out this thing. I call it the napal latte. So here's what we do. The napal latte. Yeah, you're going to like this. All right. So if you're a dragon ass, you've only got four hours, you know, the night before, you got a big presentation, going to be on a podcast, you're going to do something cool and fun. You want to be able to be present and be able to be at your best. Here's what I want you to do. Take a cup of drip, black coffee, no cream, no sugar, throw three ice cubes in it merely to cool it down, slug it as fast as you can, and then take a nap for 25 minutes.

You burn through the adenison, right? And since caffeine and adenison are off by one molecule, caffeine fits into that place, blocks future adenison for up to four hours. So what does that mean? That means you're wide awake and not dragging it for four hours. Really? Absolutely. I do it with athletes.

I do it with CEOs all the time with my entrepreneur set. Don't do an apple latte every day. That's not what we're looking for. Once a month if you didn't get a good night's sleep or something. Right, exactly. But you can definitely use something. something like this to your advantage. So give me an example.

You're up all night, ruminating, thinking, excited, you can't sleep. Maybe you only get a couple hours. Yep. And you got a game. You got an event. You got a speech. You got something the next day. Right.

I would say somewhere around 60 minutes before you're going to go on, right? Do this 25. Take the coffee with, cool it down. Take the coffee. Why not hot coffee? Because you have to drink the whole thing fast. Okay. It's merely to cool it down.

You can't sip it for an hour. You have to drink it. Not the goal. The goal is to put it in and close your eyes. And what if you can't sleep right away? Doesn't matter. It still works, even if you never actually fall asleep. But be in a room that's quiet, that's dark, give yourself a good opportunity to be able to do that, right? And sleep for 25 minutes? 25 minutes. You don't want to go over that? You ever taking a nap and felt worse, not better?

That's because you sleep too long. This is a very subscribed nap. 25 minutes, right, with the caffeine in front of it, you'll be shocked at how well it works. That's sleep drive. All right. Now let's talk about sleep rhythm, because that was, the question that you ask me. What is circadian rhythm? Why do we care? This whole cancer idea, what's happening there? So circadian rhythm is kind of my area of expertise. It's one of the areas that I really love because within circadian rhythm are these things called chronotypes. Okay. So a circadian rhythm is a lot like hunger. You ever notice that you're hungry around breakfast time, around lunchtime, around dinner time? That's your circadian rhythm for hunger. For sleep,

at least here in North America, most people are sleepy somewhere between 10 and 1030. You go to Latin America where they take a siesta during the day. They eat at 10.30. I mean, these people are up, up, up, right? That's a whole different, you know, ballgame. And we can work with those people. But circadian rhythms are basically your brain is telling you when to go to bed. Melatonin is really the big factor on the circadian rhythm side. Melatonin is a sleep regulator, not a sleep initiator. Okay. Initiator would affect adenisone. Melatonin affects the circadian rhythm. So I was looking, I had a patient who came in. And if I'm honest with you, dude, I failed. I mean, I failed with her.

We were trying everything. She had terrible insomnia. I tried cognitive behavioral therapy, which is my drug of choice, if you will, for my patients. We tried medication. We tried sleep hygiene. We tried everything. When I have a patient that doesn't do well, I bring them in for free and I just assess, assess, assess, because clearly I must have missed something that's going on here.

About halfway through the interview, she turns to me, and this is when I was practicing on the East Coast, she said, Dr. Bruce, she said, if I'm a, if I'm not, I'm going to I just lived in California, everything would be great. I'm like, explain that to me. She said, well, everything there is three hours later. She said, if I could just go to work a couple hours later and stay a couple hours, I think it'd be fantastic for me. I said, well, why can't you do that?

She said, well, I don't think my boss would like it. My husband probably wouldn't like it. I take care of him and the kids, you know, waking up in the morning, that kind of stuff. She said, and by the way, I'm not doing well at work. I'm on like probation. Like my work product is down. I said, well, can I call your boss and ask him if you can come in two hours? later. And she said, you can try. So I call up her boss. This was on a Monday. And I explained who I was

and what I was doing, who I was working with. Of course, I got her permission in order to do all this. And he said, you want to do what? I said, I wanted to come in two hours later. So in this particular job, she had to be there at 8 a.m. Right. So I said, I wanted to come in at 10 and I wanted to leave at six. I say, can we do that? Is she leaving two hours later? Yes. Okay. So you're still the same work hours, but we're just starting two hours later. Exactly. He's, he, he's, he's, he He said, Michael, you can try whatever you want. I'm firing her on Friday. Wow.

I'm like, no pressure. Great. Right, right, wow. So we run the experience. Did you tell your client, the patient this? Like, hey. No, no. Because then she really wouldn't sleep.

Right. Right. Exactly. So I didn't tell her that part. So I call him back on Friday and he picks up the phone. And you know what the first thing he says to me is? I got three more employees I want you to talk to. Wow.

Okay. This is what's called a chronotype. It's genetic. You don't actually get to pick it, by the way. I got interviewed a couple weeks ago by the Wall Street Journal, and they said, what do you think of the 5am club? I said, I think it's the second stupidest idea I've ever heard other than mouth tape. Okay. Okay, tell me why.

Because 85% of the world can't wake up at 5am, Lewis. 85%. They're going to fail no matter what, genetically speaking. I can actually look, if you had your genome sequence, I could look at your 23 and me or your ancestry.com. I can show you where it's an area called the P-E-R-3 area. I want to be clear there's about 30 areas that control this, but PER3 is kind of the big, the big one that we look at. And if you have something called a single nucleotide polymorphism, which is a snip, which means that the building blocks, if they flip one way, you're an early bird. Now, you've heard of this term before.

A lot of people out here have never heard of chronotypes, but they've definitely heard of early birds. If it's flipped another way, you're a night owl. If it's not flipped, you're what we used to call a hummingbird, okay? So I was looking at this system, and I said, now I've heard about this system. I was in school I heard about it. Like it's kind of a well-known system. I said, but it doesn't encompass this woman I was talking with because she also had kind of a strange system.

Sometimes it'd be late. Sometimes it would be early. So it turns out that there's a fourth chronotype. Once again, this is genetic. So this is not just some social construct of just saying, ah, I'm a night owl. I'm an early bird. So this is like, if someone's saying that, they're actually, it's their body saying it. Exactly.

It's not they're just like, ah, well, I just don't want to wake. up early. That's right. It is actually their body. Okay. Now, I have always been a nightful. And you can test this. Yeah. Is it through blood work you're saying? Or is this through? I've got a quiz online. Okay. That people can take. And, and look, 30 questions online. It doesn't take you but about three or four minutes. And it's, it's not hard. Like, this isn't like some, oh my gosh, I've got to figure all this stuff out. Like, you can figure this out reasonably quickly. To be fair, I'm a mammal, not a bird. So I decided to rename the system. So early birds are now lions because who wouldn't want to be the king of queen of the jungle, right? And lions are very interesting people. They make up about 15% of the

population, right? And these are the early birds. So these are the people that wake up at five o'clock in the morning. They're all chipper. I mean, honestly, the only thing I hate more than mornings or morning people, right? I mean, come on. They're just too into the morning scene for me, right? They exercise early. These are the people that'll make a list and go from step one to step two to step three during the day. They have a very interesting personality. kind of characteristic. Once again, only 15% of people do this. So they're great for the 5 a.m. club, but 85% of the rest of the freaking world is not going to do well at the 5am club. The next group, I call them bears. They're the ones in the middle. These are more solar sleepers.

They go to bed around 10. They wake up around 7. And by the way, 50%, 5% of the population is a bear. And I got to be honest with you, dude. I wish I was a bear. Life is built for the 9 to 5 schedule works perfect for a bear, right? Absolutely perfect. And these people are a lot of fun. They're really good to work with. And, you know, a lot of times it makes a lot of sense. We've had almost 3.5 million people take my quiz now.

And so, yeah, it's amazing. And so what we've discovered is there are actually early birds, early bears and later bears within that category. Sure. Right. The next category I call wolves. These are the night owls. This is me. I've been a wolf.

my entire life. I'm the guy who like, it was crazy. When I first went to college, I took, you know, the classic freshman 8 a.m. It's the worst. It's the worst, right? It's awful. Number one, I missed it half the time because I was asleep, right? Like my body just doesn't work then. I was labeled lazy, right? I was told that I wasn't intelligent. I was so all of these different things. And if all I had done is just taken some of those classes later in the day, dude, I would have crushed it. Right? Now, what's interesting about my night owls is this is where my creatives are my CEOs right these are my artists my actors my inventors because who gets an idea at two o'clock in the afternoon nobody i get at 2 a.m. right there why is that well is there's something around brain chemistry yes or like the ability to

dream or to let go or talk about dreams in a second that's a slightly different category but what's interesting is right after or right before REM sleep is when you turn out to be the most creative Interesting. So far, I'll be honest with you. I haven't told you a whole lot. You probably didn't already know. You knew about early birds. You knew about night owls. You figured there must be people in between them, right? My real kind of the thing I'm most known for is the fourth category, which I call dolphins. Now, people always ask Michael, why? Why do you call them dolphins? So it turns out that dolphins sleep unihemispirically. So half of their brain is asleep while the other half is awake and looking for predators. I thought they don't sleep, right? I mean, they're just swimming in a circle. Exactly. Like if you see at the zoo or whatever, just like, Exactly. The swimming 24-7. Exactly. So half of their brain has to sleep while they're swimming and then it rotates to the other house. Crazy.

Right. That is my insomnia groups. That's what this woman was. She was a dolphin. And, you know, we did. What percent is that? It's about 10 to 15 percent. Man, closer to 10.

And what are the wolves? The wolves are about 15 percent. So we've got 15 percent lions. We got about 55 percent bears. We got another 15 percent wolves and about 10 percent are dolphins. And then some people can float around. Now, I want to be. clear about something. The dolphin is interesting because sometimes it's not genetic for a dolphin.

Sometimes it's circumstance, right? So if you're a woman and you're going through menopause, you're a dolphin, dude. Because your hormones are all over the place. This is all based on your melatonin and your cortisol moving up and down. So this is how it works. If you're a lion, your melatonin turns off at 4.30 in the morning, the cortisol comes up and now you're awake. but if you're a wolf like me, my melatonin doesn't turn off until seven, like a full almost 90 minutes later. So here's where it gets in really cool. So my book is called the power of when, as in when to do something. What I tell people is don't change your chronotype. Embrace it. Change your activities to the time when your body will naturally have the hormones that you're looking for. So how do you know once you go through your quiz and you find out your chronotype?

Yep. then you should know when to have sex 100%. So you can learn when to have sex based on your chronotype to have the best night's sleep? Absolutely. So when is that? So let's talk about it. So everybody always wants to know. So I'm going to give a general recommendation and then I'm going to get some specific recommendations based on people's chronotypes, right?

So in order to have sex successfully, you need five hormones to be elevated. You need estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, testosterone, adrenaline, and cortisol. I'll need to be high. And melatonin in the sleep hormone needs to be low. So when we surveyed people, 75% of people have sex between 1030 and 1130 at night. What do you think their hormone profile looks like? It's the opposite. Melatonin is high and all five of those things is low.

So that's hit. You need that to switch. Exactly. So you should be having morning sex, not night sex. So you've already caught on. You're quick. You've already caught on, right? So then the second thing is if you happen to be having sex with somebody who was born biologically male, what do most men wake up within the morning?

An erection. If that's not Mother Nature telling you when to use that thing, I don't know what is. Yeah, if you're exhausted at night and you can't get an erection, why force it? Exactly. It's not, not tonight I have a headache.

It's not tonight I'm too fucking tired. Like, that's what's really going on here. So everybody here who's watching and listening has a prescription for with their partner to be able to, if you want to have sex, try it in the morning time. Go to the bathroom, throwing a little mouthwatch first, right? Then hop back in bed.

Here's what's interesting. We surveyed people when we asked them to do that. Men actually have better performance. They have better erections and they last longer. Women have better emotional connection. Right. Now, here's the question that I get asked all the time. Michael, this all sounds great, but what if I'm a wolf and my wife's a lion?

What do we do then? So in the book, I created a matrix. Sure, sure. So I've got male on the one side of female on the other side. And then I also created one for gay and lesbian couples because the hormones are different. Right. So we can figure this out, dude. Like, it's not hard to do.

I can tell people the best time to have sex, eat a cheeseburger, work out, drink caffeine, have alcohol. All of it runs on these circadian systems based on your crundic. This is the biggest unlock that anybody could do. Wow. Okay. So, so here's the thing. I feel like when I was growing up, I was more of a wolf. This is such a great question.

I know where you're going. Right. Yeah. But then through social conditioning, through sports, where we had to wake up at 5 a.m. for lifting. It's like, yep, I had to condition myself, essentially go against my nature or the way my brain was working at that season of life. So to try to fit in with, you know, high school, college, then pro sports, then. Yeah. But then I flipped back to being a wolf when I was an entrepreneur. Yes. Because I was like, oh, I'm just up all night thinking. And now I can create and do and there's

everyone's asleep so I can actually get some work done. Yeah. But then I was like, okay, well, 2 a.m. every night doesn't work also because now I'm gaining weight and I'm not it's like my healthiest. Yep. So I feel like I've become more of a bear and probably more of a early bear now. Yep. Just so I can get up and get my workouts in first. And now with twin daughters, I got to spend time with them in the morning. So it's like fitting things in the morning. So it's called chrono longevity. Okay. So you go through all of the phases in your lifetime. Yeah. I'm sure I've been a dolphin So your daughters right now are lions. They go to bed early.

They wake up early, right? Once they hit middle school, they're going to be bears. They're going to go to bed around 7.30. They're going to wake up around 7.30. Then adolescence hits. I don't know an adolescent who doesn't want to stay up until two and sleep until 12. Yeah. That was me.

That was me. Me too, right? Then when you hit about 20 years old, it sets for about 30, 40 years. Really? Yeah. And then it starts to go backwards, right? So if your parents are still alive and you call them up and you, said, hey, mom, I want to go out to dinner tonight, you know, she would say, oh, great, I'll meet you

at 530. Yeah, exactly. Right. My mom's taking a nap throughout the day multiple times. Right. Well, we should talk about that. Yeah. But what's interesting is your, your chronotype seems to go backwards.

So it shifts throughout your lifetime based on stress, based on gender, based on women, if they're going through menopause, men can go through something called andropause. So there's a whole host. Maybe how much daylight you get during the day. All these stuff. And I'm so glad you asked that because that's such an important factor. Light turns out to be. the biggest factor when it comes to sleep in terms of allowing you to sleep because melatonin

cannot be produced in the presence of light. Really? Yeah, we call it the darkness hormone or the vampire hormone because it only comes out at night. So your body won't create melatonin if the sun is out. That's correct. Or if you see the sun. Correct. Now, what happens with jet lag?

People always ask me this. Like, I'm on an airplane, Michael, and my body thinks it's this time. And my, that's why we get jet lag is because of this mismatch. between our brain and what's going on in our environment. So how do you never get jet lag? Believe it or not, there's an app for that. I've seen that. It's called Time Shifter.

I've seen that. Yep. So is it work? Full disclosure. I'm both an investor and developer of Time Shifter. All right. But I'm going to tell you something. The shit works.

It works. So what we do is we give you a schedule. We know where, so about 15, 20 years ago, they discovered that if they put a specific frequency of light, blue light, in fact, in front of you for a certain period of time, we can shift your circadian rhythm by almost eight hours. So it turns out jet lag is a math problem, right? So if I know where your circadian rhythm, let's say you're in L.A. And you're going to Paris, right? Well, I know what time it is in L.A. We know what time it is in Paris. And we know what time your flight is. All we have to do is time when we show you the light that squelches your melatonin.

And then we give you a little bit of melatonin when you're supposed to be sleeping on Paris time. And if you can't quite wake up because your melatonin is still trying to come through, we give you a little caffeine, maybe even take a nap, and by the time you get to Paris, I have you on Paris time. Come on. Swear to God. So is the app give you a blue light through the phone? Is that what it is?

No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. But what you do is you can just, you can bring a light with you or you can turn a light on. You can use anyone to like any light that you want. Really? A blue light, though. Yeah. Yeah.

Not blue the color. These lights have blue in the frequency. I'm saying, got you. So blue light is a frequency between 460 and 480 nanometers. And you just look at it. Mm-hmm. Now, you don't have to stick it here. Like, you can have it here while you're eating breakfast or things like that.

Like, I have a lot of clients who live in New York City, right? And, you know, during the winter, like, it's dark, dark, right? Also, by the way, we just kind of flipped over to daylight saving time. That messes you up, too. It's a terrible idea. What? I mean, it's a terrible idea. It seems like my whole last week was a mess because of this.

Yeah, and by the way, your daughters will actually be lagged behind. Oh, they were, I know. It was rough. It's awful, dude. Because it was lighter later. They were going to bed and I was like, and they were fussier for hours. I was like, why do they keep allowing daylight savings to happen? They shouldn't.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine did very clear on this. Standard time is where we should all be. The bottom line, people shouldn't wake up in the dark. Okay, because melatonin still keeps going. So what you have to do is get one of these light boxes. You can buy them on Amazon for like $100. I travel with one all the time. Really?

Yeah, I put it in my sleep kit. I create my own sleep kits when I travel. So we shouldn't wake up during the dark? Absolutely not. It's just your body wasn't designed to do that. But there are lions that wake up in the dark, right? They do. They do because their melatonin turns off naturally.

Interesting. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I'm telling you something, this chronotype is an incredible unlock. I had one entrepreneur, chronotype his entire company, and then schedule meetings based on people's chronotypes. Come on. Think about it. If I know what time of day you're going to be focused and paying attention, you're going to be able present for the meeting.

Like, there's data to now. show that an average employer loses approximately $3,200 per employee per year based on something called presenteism, which means the body's there, but the brain ain't there. If you're trying to have creative meetings at 8 o'clock on Monday morning, and most of your creatives are wolves, because that's the people who are the creatives, dude, you're never going to get anything done. What's the best time for a wolf to be creative? In the evening time. So as an example, When I work with creative agencies, like marketing agencies or some of the big brands, what I'll tell them to do is, like, don't have your 8 a.m. Monday morning meeting. Have it Thursday at 4 o'clock, bring some guacamole and a little bit of beer, and you're going to get more out of your group than you could possibly imagine because they're there, they're present. That's what greatness is. It's being present. Right? Man, that's fascinating. So as a new parent to twin girls. They're going to be rough, bro.

They're going to be five months this week. Congratulations. Thank you very much. It's a beautiful journey. It's pretty cool. What advice as a sleep doctor would you have for me to ensure that I get the best sleep possible? My wife gets the best sleep possible. Yep, yep, yep.

Knowing that things are to keep evolving as they grow. Yep. So there's a whole host of different things, but my favorite is what I call the on-call system. So here's what's going to happen. So they haven't told you this yet, but teething is right around the corner. It's coming soon. They're not. They're trying to put everything in their mouth now. Yeah. And they're sucking on things. And it's really painful. Like the teeth erupt through the gums. Like it is not fun for the baby, right? And so they're going to be fussy. They're not going to be sleeping well and things like that. So what I always recommend is, for example, you take Monday night, Wednesday night, Friday night. What's your wife's name? Martha. Martha takes Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. You flip a coin for Sundays. And here's the deal is if the twins get up, it's one person who has to get up with them. Not boat. Not boat. Why should both suffer?

Exactly. You know? And if you alternate like that, you can get one good night's sleep and then one crappy and then one good and one crappy. And then you make it through your day. And then it's just a matter of time to get through it. Yeah. Now, here's what's also cool is if you're a lion and your wife is a wolf, you could actually do it like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Take advantage of the time morning. Exactly. That's smart. Exactly. Interesting. Now, we mentioned briefly about how different cultures sleep in different ways. You know, I'm an American. I was raised here.

and there's a certain standard of living and when people eat around 6 to 8 p.m. maybe for dinner or whatever. But my wife from Mexico and they eat at 10 p.m. Yes. And on New Year's, they eat at 1 a.m. Dinner. And it's like, come on, guys, I'm going to bed. But this, you know, not all Latin cultures,

but predominantly Latin cultures have this later evening. And later evenings. 10 o'clock start, which to me seems crazy. Because you're like, don't you want to try to go to bed by 1130, 30, 12 and actually let yourself rest? So a lot of those people end up being chronotypes, but it's all shifted because this comes through culturally from hundreds of years of people evolving theirs, right? Also, they're closer to the equator, which means they get more light later.

Right. So it's still light at 10b. Right. And remember, light is the real meter or metric against sleep. You can't make melatonin with light going on. So they've had to adapt from a cultural perspective. And what happens when you take a 30 to 60 minute nap during the day? a siesta, does that mess up your nighttime sleep?

So I'm a big fan of the nap, especially while watching golf, right? Oh, yeah, you can sleep during that. Lori gets it to the T-box. You know, it's like, it's all really quiet. And if you fall asleep, you can just catch up on ESPN like that. So it's pretty easy. You didn't miss anything, right? But insomniacs should never nap.

Because what happens is when you nap, you lower that sleep drive, that adenism we were talking about, makes it much more difficult to sleep. But naps can be a good thing. Absolutely. I love it now. And 20 minutes, what's the ideal time? 20, 25 minutes is really where I like to see people because if you nap too long, what ends up happening is you pop over into a deep sleep and man, it's tough to get yourself out

at deep sleep. Wow. What is the one or two questions that most people are asking about sleep today? Well, we went through the whole idea of what do I do to wake up, like waking up in the middle of the night. I think that's really a big one. We talked a little bit about, you know, what are the sleep disorders and undiagnosed sleep apnea. So I think that those are kind of some of the big.

big, big ones. And I think we were able to cover that. But, you know, a lot of people, it's unfortunate because a lot of people don't see a sleep doctor unless they're in their office, right? And they've already been diagnosed with something. They don't really are able to get their questions answered. And so what I like to do is I like to give out as much, you know, evidence-based information about what's going on in sleep and how you can use this to your advantage. I'm a very practical guy. Like, I'm not a big theory person. I'm pretty prescriptive. I'm good about telling people exactly what to do. So I'd like to, if I can, give people a five-step plan.

Let's do it. Right? That they can roll through every single day, which can help them with sleep. So step number one is to have one wake-up time, seven days a week. Same wake-up time. Same wake-up time. Let me explain why. When you wake up in the morning, sunlight hits your eye and you have a special cell in your eye

called a melanopsin cell, right? This cell turns off the melatonin faucet in your head, okay? And by the way, it sets a timer for approximately 14 hours later, okay, when your melatonin turns back on. So what I just said was the time that you wake up directly determines when melatonin turns on at night. So if you're waking up at six, melatonin is going to turn on about eight. It takes 90 minutes for it to get up and in. You start to get tired around 9.30. You go to bed at 10, 10.30, right?

But if you wake up at 8, melatonin doesn't start until 10. And now you've got a different problem on your hands. one wake-up time. If people only get one thing from what I'm talking about today, do that one. Not the same sleep time? You will automatically metric yourself, right?

If you know you're getting up at six on Saturday, you ain't staying up until one. I can assure you. You'll do it once, maybe twice. And then you'll be done with that one, all right? Step number two is to stop caffeine by 2 p.m. We really haven't had a chance to talk about caffeine. Caffeine is a half-life of between six and eight hours.

Okay. If you stop at two, eight hours later is 10, is roughly when most people are thinking about going to bed and at least half of the caffeine is out of your system. A lot of people don't realize that they, oh, I can fall asleep. I can drink a cup of coffee for, you know, at dinner and fall right asleep. It's because you're so damn sleep deprived that you're falling asleep, okay? But if I put electrodes on your head and I look at the quality of the sleep you're getting, you're not getting deep sleep if you've got caffeine on board. I mean, a lot of cultures will have a cappuccino or an espresso after dessert. I get it. At dinner time. I get it.

And they're falling asleep. It's problematic. Really? It is. Go decap. It's not going to kill you. You still taste it and you'll be fine. Trust me on this way.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Number three has to do with alcohol. There's a really big difference between going to sleep and passing out. Right. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Like, we've all been there.

Being unconscious and being unconscious. Right. Exactly. Right. Because alcohol basically anesthetizes you. Wow. Right. And so, by the way, I like bourbon.

Okay. I like have a beer every once in a while. I'm not saying you can't. drink, right? But what I am saying is you need to be thoughtful about when you drink. So here's the schedule. Let's say you're sitting down for dinner at 6.30, right? Have your first glass of wine, then have a glass of water. You want to always go one for one because you want to be flushing the system out, you know, pretty quickly. It takes the average human approximately one hour to digest one alcoholic beverage. Now you order your second glass of wine. Maybe you finish it. Maybe you

don't. Then you have your second glass of water. Stop. And then three hours later, if that's your chrono-tipical bedtime, you are on the go. It's perfect. Right. So to limit yourself to two drinks, but step number three is to stop alcohol three hours before bed. Wow. But there is no nutritional value to having alcohol. Absolutely none. Here's the crazy thing. It doesn't help your brain. It doesn't help your sleep. It doesn't help your gut. Nothing. It does nothing. Okay. During dry January, all of my patients call me up and they're like, Michael, my sleep is so much better. I'm like, no shit. Stop drinking alcohol. You stop drinking alcohol. Step number four has to do with exercise. I know you're a fan of exercise. As am I. I work out every single day. I was in the gym this morning. But if you exercise too close to bedtime, it increases your core body temperature, right? And that makes it hard to sleep. So stop exercise four hours before bed.

Stop before hour. Not what about like a brisk walk or even just a slow walk? Walking after dinner spine. Zone two is fauna. Okay. But you don't want, you just don't want to break a sweat because that increases your core body temperature. And in fact, walking after dinner has actually been shown in studies to help with digestion. So it's probably. a really good idea to do that. What about like a hot bath, a sauna? Let's talk about it. Hot tub, like things that activate that way. So thermoregulation is what you're talking about, or the body's ability to change temperatures and how does that affect sleep. It turns out it's very, very important. And here's the one thing that you can control as a consumer. You don't need a drug, you don't need a therapy. You can actually control the temperature. A couple of different ways to do it. With our insomniacs, sometimes 90 minutes before bed, we do have them take a hot bath. Because what we do is we mimic that core body temperature drop that I was talking about earlier by raising it.

By raising it. You can do the same with the sauna, right? Sona hot bath, 90 minutes to 120 minutes before bed is okay. Absolutely a good idea. It works, really? Absolutely a good idea. It's going to help you drop your temperature. Correct.

Now, let's talk for half a second about what happens under the covers, right? So here's what's interesting is people always say, well, Michael, I'm going to, you know, crank the, AC on and go to 65 degrees or 68 degrees. The data would say somewhere between 65 and 72 turns out to be about where you want to be. But here's the thing. This unit that we're walking around in for a while runs at 98.6 degrees. It's a heater. It is.

And when you're under the covers, guess what happens? You create your own little mini sauna, right? You really do? Because the heat just bounces off the sheets and comes back and the mattress and what have you. So they now have out there these things called thermoregulatory pads. So it's a topper that you put underneath the sheet that you're lying on top of has a thin tube that runs through it. And you can run hot water or cold water through it. And you can actually cool yourself from beneath.

I work with a company called Orion Sleep. And they've developed this technology. And here's the thing. It's great for menopausal women. It's great if you happen to work out in the evening time, you know, and your core body temperature is high. Or if you're like me, my body just runs hot. Me too. It always has.

I don't know why it does. but that's just the genetically who I am. So these devices like this Orion work really, really well. Really? Step number five is for the morning time. And so when you wake up in the morning, there's three things I ask people to do. Take a hard back chair, sit outside if it's not too cold out, right? And what I want you to do is I want you to take 15 deep breaths.

This is merely to bring yourself present and activate your lungs and your respiratory system. In between each breath, I want you to drink one ounce of water. Most people don't know it, but sleeping it up itself is a dehydrative event. You lose almost a full liter of water every single night, right? And so we want to replenish that. You want to hydrate before you caffeinate. That's really, really important. And then the other thing you want to do is get 15 minutes of sunshine.

Now, people are going to be like, oh, California doctor. He's getting all woo-woo on the sunshine on us. The data is incredibly consistent. Number one, the sunshine activates that melanopsin cell I was talking about. Turns off the melatonin, so your morning brain fog. goes away. Fifteen minutes is the exact amount of time that it takes your body, generally speaking, to produce vitamin D. Vitamin D is a circadian pacemaker, right? So that's kind of where we want people to be. Now, speaking to vitamin D, people always ask me all the time. I think another thing that

we didn't get to hit on, supplements. Tell me. Right. So people are always like, Michael, Michael, should I take melatonin? Absolutely not. Really? There's only three instances where I think melatonin is appropriate. Jet lag, shift work, and if you have a melatonin deficiency, okay? Melatonin, first of all, is a hormone. Okay, you can't just walk down to the local CVS and buy testosterone, right, and estrogen, and there's a good reason. Hormones affect every system in the body, right? Here's the problem with melatonin that a lot of people don't know. Did you know that melatonin affects birth control? Really? Did you know it affects all antidepressant medication? Oh, all diabetes medication and all heart rate medication. It's a circadian,

pacemaker, it affects your circadian rhythm. This is not something to play around with. And by the way, never use melatonin with kids. Never, ever, ever. There's one group of kids, kids on the autism spectrum where we have discovered that about five or six milligrams turns out to be good for them. But by the way, that's kind of a whopping dose. Average dose should be between a half and one and a half milligrams. Wow. Now, here's what I think about supplementation, generally speaking. Go do blood work. Okay. If you're supplementing, it's because you're not getting something in your diet and it's a vitamin or a mineral. Like, to be clear, nobody has a deficiency in aschwaganda, okay? But you might have one in vitamin D or magnesium or iron or melatonin.

And those are the four that I always have people do blood work on. And let's fix that first. Bring those up to par levels in your body. And let's see how your body functions. Dude, I would say 10% of the patients that I see when I just get them to do that, there's problem is solved. We feel better. Yeah.

I keep going back to this idea of ruminating. Yeah. Thinking about stress, worry, whether it's big T, little T traumas, uncertainties, on what keeps us waking up or staying up and not able to sleep. And you know one of the things we didn't really touch on, but I think it falls into this category, nightmares. Oh, yeah, for sure. Right?

Nightmares. Yeah. So one of the things I've been spending the last year and a half working on becoming what's called a dream therapist. I want to be clear, this is not dream interpretation. okay, this is actually using the dream in the therapeutic context. So what I'm talking about are people with PTSD, right? And one of the hallmark signs of PTSD from any kind of trauma, whether you're a first responder,

you've had a terrible sexual trauma, you know, military, right? I mean, how many people are committing suicide that are coming back from our, like, I don't take it for granted when somebody puts their self in harm's way from my freedom, right? I want to be able to figure out how we can help these people and they're all coming back with these terrible, terrible nightmares. they don't want to go to sleep because they don't want to watch the movies that are playing in their head. No. Right?

This is where PTSD becomes a really big issue. And dreams are an area of study for me. I haven't quite cracked the code on it yet. I'm going to be honest with you. But what I have discovered is that there's a couple of different techniques that can be used to help people move the dream forward. What dreaming turns out to be is what I call emotional metabolism, right? And so you dream for whatever was going on in your day. Right.

So if you had a joyous day, your daughter's turn five months, you're having a party, having a good time, you might have a little bit more REM sleep and you might dream a little bit more. Or the same could hold true if God forbid something bad happened in your life. So dreams are a great way to understand emotionally where you are. People also oftentimes have these things called repetitive dreams or stress dreams. I have my own. It's kind of funny. I'm in high school and the bell has rung and I'm run into my locker and it's one of those spin combination lockers. I got to get my books out for the next class.

And I can't remember the combat. Really? Yeah. You have that dream on repeat? I do. And if I have that, that's a signal to me that there's something else going on in my life, right? I don't know exactly what it is yet. It's still maybe filtering around in my unconscious, but it's something to be thoughtful of.

A lot of people don't know the purpose of REM sleep. REM sleep is where you move information from your short-term memory to your long-term memory, right? And you create this kind of organizational substructure like a filing cabinet in your head, but you can retrieve things. But if you can't get it there because you're waking up because you're scared due to a nightmare, it never hits the filing cabinet. And you're just kind of stuck on this repeat and repeat and repeat. So the goal here is to try to get people through that. And there's some different therapeutic techniques that can be done for that. Really?

Oh, yeah. It's pretty cool. What about sleep hypnosis? So sleep hypnosis, generally speaking, is to help people fall asleep if they're having some level of anxiety prior to sleep. And so there's a lot of different things you can do. Me personally, I like breathing techniques there. I think because it's very hard to self hypnotize. I mean, there are different platforms and there are things that you can look at or listen to that can be helpful.

But generally speaking, I think the breathing techniques, before 7,8 that we were talking about earlier, I think that has a real, you know, use case right there. Where does the research lie within spirituality and sleep? That's a great question. Having, you know, faith in God or a bigger purpose or something else, if you've dealt with stress, rumination, anxiety, sleep tremors, nightmares. Yeah. Is there research around faith in God to allow people to sleep better?

There's research around faith in general. I don't know everybody, there's a lot of people who have a lot of different forms of what they call a higher power. But here's what I'll tell you is people who are thoughtful in that area, have oftentimes sleep better. And you can't be spiritual with a bad night's sleep, bro. It doesn't work. When you're so exhausted that you can't either read the Bible or look at it.

the Torah or the Koran or whatever it is, whatever your thing is, if you're too tired to be able to get those messages and to be able to have that purpose, it's problematic. Yeah. What I'm hearing you say is, is there research that if someone has faith in a higher purpose, they sleep better? I would agree, yes. Yeah. Is there any documentation of this out there?

Or is this more from your experience? I would say that's more from my experience. But if I'm fair, I'll look it up and I'll let you know. Yeah. I'd be curious about that. Yeah, absolutely. Sleep better if they believe in God or a higher purpose, or if they don't believe in God, do they sleep worse?

I think for the people, this is a guess. I don't have any data on this, but if I had to use my years of experience to kind of figure it out, I think when you don't have a higher purpose, whatever that means for you, it's hard. It's rough. Life is harder.

It is. Everything is harder, right? Purpose. I mean, isn't that kind of what defines greatness, right? Is purpose? Yeah. Right? And don't get me wrong.

People struggle with purpose all the time. And sometimes you don't always know your purpose or your purpose can change over time. I think as long as you're in the pursuit of purpose, I think that's really where sleep plays a good role. When you work with those patients that have sleep insomnia or that are dolphins for seasons, right? How many of those have a belief in God or a higher purpose versus don't? You know, if I'm honest with you, it's not a question that I usually kind of run through with them. But if I was going to guesstimate, I would say that the people that are having the more difficult time might be the ones that don't have a well-defined purpose.

Interesting. That's interesting to know. Yeah. The ones that sleep the best, the ones that have followed your routines and the practices and the principles we've talked about. And they've gone from either bad sleep to now consistently good sleep over years. Right. what are the things they are thinking and doing differently?

And do you feel like they've healed a certain past trauma? Oh, it's interesting question. I think that happens a lot. So, you know, here's the thing is when you've got a past trauma, when you get home and you get in bed and nobody's talking to you and maybe the TV's not on or the bulldogs aren't in the bed, all the thoughts come in. Yes.

Right? And that's hard because there's fear, there's elevation of heart rate, there's anxiety. So if I had to guess, I would say that if you've got all that stuff tucked in and dealt with, whether that's through therapy, whether that's through journaling, whether that's through, you know, working with your pastor, who whatever method that you use that's positive for you, I think that would actually promote good sleep. And I would say I could, I can easily say that looking at my patient population, I've seen that over time. Really? Yeah. How much does I, how much does self-identity impact the way we sleep? What do you mean by self-identity? Like if I identify myself as a bad person, as stupid, as ugly, as not good, I'm never going to be amount to anything in my life versus I'm confident, I'm courageous. Here's what I'll tell you is the more sleep deprived you are, the more likely

you are to have a negative self-image. There's a lot of data on that. That is interesting. The more sleep deprived you are, the more likely you are that the tapes in your head are negative. Yeah. The better sleep you get, the more likely it is that the tapes in your head are positive. So what I'm hearing you say so far in this conversation is that when you learn to manage or navigate your mind in an empowering way and use tools, helpful tools that support you in calming your mind, creating a more empowering self-identity versus a negative self-identity. With discipline and following a couple of those rules we talked about. Like what? Well, I mean, you cannot have a caffeine in the middle of the night or something.

Right, exactly. Like, you can't do that. Yeah, yeah, of course. Bedtimes all over the place. But if you've got the things that you're talking about with the discipline, dude, that's a winning combination. Interesting. So, and it also sounds like you can do all the things right.

You can do these five steps. You can wake up at the same time every day. You can stop caffeine at 2 p.m. You can. Yeah, but if you think you're a pilot, you know what? You're not going to sleep well. None of those that you could have the dark. that you could have the darkest room at 62 degrees and the perfect conditions. But if you're

thinking, ruminating that, I'm a piece of crap, you won't sleep. More than likely not. What we're talking about here is a little bit into the data on depression and sleep, right? So if you get to that point where those negative tapes have really started to affect you and you become depressed, what happens to your sleep? Yes. Pretty interesting. So it seems to bifurcate and we seem to be two different camps on this. One is people have a tendency to not sleep. And then the other is people have a tendency to oversleep, right? So people who they're so depressed, they don't want to be in the world, right? They want to stay in bed for nine, ten hours. When somebody comes to me and says, oh, Dr. Bruce, I need ten hours of sleep a night. Big red flag pops for me, right? Unless they're

an athlete and they're doing something crazy like that, I ask about narcolepsy and I ask about depression or undiagnosed sleep disorder like that. And by the way, undiagnosed sleep disorder can lead to those negative thoughts, which then compounds it. Like, it's such a compelling reason. Like, if you want to have a positive attitude and a positive life, get a sleep study. Like, it's not that hard. Yeah. What about narcissism? You know, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of information going around that more and more people are becoming narcissistic or having narcissistic tendencies or narcissism. Yep. Do narcissists sleep better than those who don't have narcissistic tendencies? I'm not familiar with the data in that area, but if I was going to like put,

on my clinical hat and talk about it. If you're a true narcissist, you think you're fantastic, right? And so you're probably, you probably think you're full of purpose. The rest of the world might hate you, but you probably think you're full of purpose. But if you really are like, you start to identify and you say, wow, I'm kind of a narcissistic ass. Like I'm kind of not like the nicest person. I think you trail down into sleep related problems for sure. Wow. Now, there's a lot of kind of sleep hack trends out there right now. Yep. mouth tape being one about it. So stupid. As a sleep doctor, does mouth tape work? Why do you think is stupid? So here's the thing. There's actually data on this. There was a meta analysis that was

released last year looking at 20 different studies. People have died using mouth tape. Come on. Dude, I mean, it's the data. I'll send you the study. Wow. And here's the thing, because people are not seeing if they have undiagnosed sleep apnea. If you've got undies, no sleep apnea and you taped your mouth shut, it's not a good idea. You got a stuff your nose and you can't breathe. And by the way, that's the reason why people use mouth tape or their mouth breathers because they've got nasal congestion. Fix your nose. Fix your nose. It's very simple. I think mouth tape kind of falls under the mom test, which is call your mom up and say, hey, mom, I'm thinking about taping my mouth shut while I sleep and see what her reaction is. She might say, I'd love it if you did it during the day.

Yeah. But it really sounds like a stupid idea at night. It is a stupid idea. Wow. Okay. So when before the data came out about this, you know, and it started being big maybe four or five years ago, the mouth taping as a sleep doctor, do you think, oh, maybe this is a, you know, I guess if you have your mouth open the whole time and you're not saying like, I never thought it was a good idea. Really? Biologically, it doesn't make sense. I, 90 something percent of people, their mouth will naturally close while they sleep. The question becomes, why is there a group of people out there that this isn't occurring? It's the. nose. Look, it's all about nasal congestion. By the way, it's not that hard to fix your nasal congestion. You can use a saline spray. There's that device, I think it's called the navage or something like that that rolls, you know, hot water through there. Right. You can use flonase, you know, which is over the counter now. They can squirt up your nose and be able to reduce that tissue. Like, here's the thing. When you're taking in air through the mouth, right, it's like leaded gas going

into the tank, right? There's no cilia. There's no filter. There's nothing that's pulling those particulates out. So I get it why we want our mouth closed. And I understand that there are people out who are like, look, it's the only way it's going to work for me. I don't think so. Go call an E&T. Have your nose looked out and let's figure out what's going on. Interesting. Why is it important for us to sleep? Why is it important for us to breathe through the nose when we sleep and not through the mouth? Again, you're not getting good air, right? The air that you're getting when you breathe through the mouth. When you breathe through the mouth. Because it's there's no, all the particulates are going straight into your lungs, right? The purpose of the nose, like, you've got two nostrils, you've got one mouth. Noses

are for breathing, mouths are for eating. Like, that's really how it was, you know, however the big guy upstairs, you know, planned it all out. That's pretty much we should be, how much should we be breathing through our nose throughout the day and night versus through the mouth? Because when you're speaking, you're going to breathe through the mouth. Absolutely. So in my fifth book, it was called sleep, drink, breathe, wellness is too complicated. These are some of the most important habits. We've talked a lot about sleep, but let's talk about breathing and then, of course, hydration is the other one. People always say, like, why did you write a book about things your body naturally does? It's like, well, because our body is, we're kind of putting hurdles in front of ourselves to do some

of this stuff. And so what we need to think about here is getting clean air in, humidified clean air in, actually is better for oxygen exchange, right? Most people are shallow breathers, right? They're not, right? And so what ends up happening is when you're a shallow breather, your heart has to be twice as fast in order to distribute oxygen in an effective manner, right? So this 478 breathing, right?

It's perfect because you slowly breathe in, you hold and use all your oxygen, create your carbon dioxide, and then you push it all out. Your heart is more efficient, which lowers the load on your heart, right? We don't need our hearts beating any faster than they need to be beating.

We need efficient hearts. And breathing in through your nose is one of the best ways to do that. Gotcha. So how often or how much of the time should we be breathing through our nose, while we're sleeping throughout the day and night, the night, the whole night. Well, I mean, generally speaking, 90%. Yeah. Something like that would make sense to me. Sure. I guess if you're

speaking part-time and you're breathing throughout your mouth, it's different. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm, I'm a public speaker, you're a public speaker. Like, when I'm on stage, what's happening? I'm, I actually pace myself. Like, I actually know when my breathing is off when I'm on stage because I'm, I'm out of air at the end of the sentence. Right. You know, and when you're on, I mean, like, I mean, I speak in front of you do too like big crowds like you know one time i was on stage for tony robbins 12 000 people in the audience right and you know your heart starts beating fast because it's exciting and it's a lot of fun you got to chill yourself i do 4-7-8 breathing before i go on stage chills me right out not 20 cycles because i don't want to fall asleep right i do about five six cycles chills me out and now my body is being

efficient then i don't have to worry about my body my brain can do what it needs to do to educate So I've heard you say mouth taping is stupid. It is. And what about kind of the nose strips, the opening the airways? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's talk about those. And so I like those, right? So anything you can do to open up the pipe is going to be a good idea.

I will be honest with you. For me personally, whenever I've tried those nose strips, I have slightly oily skin. They have a tendency to migrate. And all of a sudden it's like across my eye and I'm like waking up like, you know, what's going on. They now make internal nasal dilators, right? these little, like almost like a little stent that you put right here inside your nose. I use one called a mute and it's like, turn the mute button on.

My wife always says, like, if you had any whiskey tonight, put in that nose thingy because here's what happens. Alcohol causes inflammation inside your nose. Congestion. Yeah. Why do you think people snore when they drink alcohol? This is the reason, right? So internal nasal dilators, I think, well, don't get me wrong.

There's nothing wrong with the strips. I just personally, they just don't work greatly. Sure. So what I'm hearing you say is don't. fix your mouth, fix your nose if you can't breathe. Absolutely. Try to expand the nose, try to find ways to enhance it, reduce inflammation. Yeah.

Before shutting your mouth. With a piece of tape. With a piece of tape. Exactly. Your mouth should close. It should naturally get there for you. Keep your mouth shut, but not like trap your mouth. Exactly.

Exactly. Now we've talked about, you know, one of the things we haven't touched on is noise at night. Snoring, right? It's a big one. Yeah. So a lot of people are thinking about like noise at night and what's going on here. We want people to snore. By the way, if you sleep next to a snoring bed partner,

you lose approximately one hour of sleep a night. Do you say we want people to snore? No. Snoring is bad, right? Snoring means that there's some kind of disruption in your airway. Snoring is like on the way to apnea. Now, to be snoring related to the nose or the throat? Great question.

So you can have snoring in three different places. There's a nasopharynx and oropharynx or a hypo pharynx. And so anywhere, so let me back up. You ever been in the garden and you've stick your thumb? over the end of the hose and the water squirts out faster yes right your nose is the hose in this analogy so air is coming in anywhere that you close the aperture like putting your thumb on here makes the air move faster uh-huh causes a vibration causes a cadence causes a snore so we anything we can do to open up the pipe works better so that's why that mute thing works really really well sometimes

there are oral appliances where you can slowly move the jaw forward open up the oral pharynx or there are surgical interventions for the hypoferrence yeah surgery is probably the last thing you Absolutely. Last, last, last case scenario. Yes. Yeah. But noise in general is kind of interesting. They're now making earbuds that made to sleep in, like so they don't hurt the auricular canal. And there's one on the market. It's called Next Sense, which is really cool. And what they do is they measure your EEG. They measure your brain weights because it's so close to the brain. They figured out a way to do it. Don't ask me how because I haven't figured it out. But it's pretty cool. And then they know when you're moving into a lighter stage of sleep, they can send in a frequency to help you move back to a deeper. That's crazy. Dude, the tech is cool. So how important is it to keep things quiet when you sleep then? I mean, dude, I sleep with the television on all night long. You can adapt to almost anything. But does it disrupt your sleep?

It does. Absolutely. That's why I have those next sense things is. You put them in. Yeah, I got my seat back on. I got my neck sense in. I'm golden. Do you sleep alone or do you sleep?

No, my wife's there and the two French bulldogs are right next to it. So is she losing an hour of sleep because of the noise and the dogs. This is such a good question. Of the machines. I have tried to convince her that she is. But here's what's interesting. There's actually data to show that people feel safer with animals in the room. And she grew up with animals in her bed in the room.

Now, you know, when we first met, she told me, Michael, if we ever have a sleepover, right, I don't need to let you know that I sleep with the TV on. She said this. She said this to me. And I said, you know, hey, honey, I'm becoming a sleep doctor. I'm going to fix that, right? What was this like 30 years ago or something? Yeah, we've been married for 26 years.

So you ever try to fix it? something in your bed partner doesn't go particularly well right ever so you've always slept the tv on it since you've been with her absolutely so i studied her to understand why because if you live in my house the sleep doctor is going to take a look at you right and here's what i discovered is she's not watching tv she's listening to it kind of out of what i call the corner of her ear it's a distraction technique for her for monkey mind so you know what i do i set the timer right so the timer goes off 90 minutes later she falls asleep right the time she never wakes up again and the TV's off all night long.

The only thing I hear is the bulldogs. Now, the bulldogs are an interesting story. So we used to have an older bulldog. And my wife went back east to visit her family, and I was taking charge of the dogs. We had a younger one and an older one. And with the older one, she turned to me and she said, his name was Hugo.

She said, he passed away now. She said, if Hugo is not snoring, it's a problem. Right? So it changed the emotional valence of the sound to me. So it created a sign when she heard. snoring, she felt emotionally safe and allowed her to sleep better. Exactly. Even though snoring based on the data makes you lose an hour of sleep a night in the partner. This is the difference between a sleep expert and a sleep doctor. Interesting. Right. There's data

and then there's practicality. Yeah. Right. People can sleep through almost anything depending upon what's going on. If you if you understand the emotion that's attached to whatever the sound is, it makes a lot more sense and you can really do pretty well with it. It's the, it's the way we interpret the emotions of everything in our life. Exactly. Which allows you to either sleep better in horrible conditions, correct, or bad in perfect conditions. Right. Talk to somebody in the military, right? They can rack out anywhere on the middle of a B-52 in a tank and a submarine. It doesn't matter how loud it is down there or any of those places for those guys. Why? Because they know they're safe. Well, somewhat safe. I mean, it's like, yeah. And you have to sleep also at some point. You can't just be

up five nights. Correct. Your body will crash out. Now, what about kids? Because there's a lot of different parents online that say, that swear by sleeping with your kids and other ones are like, this is the worst thing you could ever do, put them in the crib in a separate room and you never see them, let them, like, sleep on their own. Yep.

As a sleep doctor, not a sleep expert. Right. What would you recommend? Should parents or what are the benefits, the pros and cons of sleeping with kids? Yep. in the same bed versus not sleeping with your kids. It depends on the child and it depends on the age of the child, right? If you have a special needs child that has got something else going on,

you probably want them close by. Okay, let's just be fair, right? If you've got a child who's got RSV, who's got major medical situations going on, who's got autism, you know, God forbid any of these things happen to a child, you're going to feel better. You're going to not worry nearly as much

if the child is in the room with you. Now, there's a difference between being in the room with you and being in the bed with you. Right. And so children in the bed can be highly problematic, especially if there's alcohol involved or if you have big fluffy pillows and covers, right? When babies are born, when you go home tonight and you look at your daughters, they do not have protruding noses. Their noses are actually pretty flat because their noses haven't had a chance to grow yet. So if they go over on their face, they can suffocate. Right? What you want. For the first three to four months, we had what's called a Moses basket. So it was in between my wife and I.

We put my son in there. And if he woke up and was hungry, she'd scoop him up. She'd put him on. She'd take him off. She'd put him back in the basket. And everything was fine. Over the course of time, maybe four to six months, we started rotating him, the bassinet in there, rotating him out, finally got him into his own room.

I would argue that you really want to get your kids figuring out how to fall asleep on their own. Why? Because it's a skill that they need to learn. Okay. If you put a child down every single time and they're out cold, here's what happens is there's this idea called object permanence, right? And so it doesn't really kick into gear until like year like one or two. And so here's what happens is when the baby goes to sleep and you go away, they think you're gone forever. But if you put the child down while they're awake and they see you and then you start moving out and they know that they're okay and safe. Maybe you've got to monitor so you can talk to them, maybe sing them a song, read them a poem, Bible verse, whatever, whatever your thing is, you know, say your prayers, whatever,

that actually has a tendency to work a lot better. Now, the age of the child also becomes a big determining factor. I mean, I had one patient who turned to me and she said, you know, she had her seven or eight-year-old son sleeping in bed with her. And I hate to say it this way, but the moms are like, it's so cute and it's so cuddly and I'm going to miss it. What happens when the young boy starts to have erections when he wakes up in the morning and he's sitting next to mom. That's pretty inappropriate, right? So you need to be thoughtful about the biology that's going on, but I would say generally speaking, it's probably a good idea to get him out. Now, to be fair, there's some cultures where the family bed is where everybody sleeps. I think that's a whole different ballgame. But here in the

United States, I would say generally, you really want your child to have their own room, their own bed, and put them down awake. Now, what about, and what happened, I don't know, thousands of years ago? It was pretty different thousands of years ago, but generally speaking, everybody lived in the cave, you know, and they sat around the fire and that's how they did it. As we've gotten bigger and bigger, things change a whole lot. I would argue that sleep really changed when that idiot Thomas Edison invented that thing called the light bulb. I think that screwed up everybody's sleep pretty bad because it used to be when we were in agrarian society, right? We'd go to bed when the sun went down, right? Then we'd wake up halfway through the night, have a meal, have sex, have whatever, then go back for the second sleep. Really? Yeah, this is well documented. We used to wake up in the middle of night and have meals? Why?

Yeah, you were hungry. Ah. Right? And then you'd wake up at dawn and then plow the fields and do that. When old, you know, Tom came around and everybody could have light at night, everything started to change. I don't know this as a fact, but my guess is we probably didn't have insomnia before the light bulb. Yeah, I'm sure people went to bed.

Yeah. Like maybe within an hour or two after it got dark, I start to wind things down. Exactly. Yeah. Got a little lamp on maybe. Yeah. You know, right? Abraham Lincoln supposedly, you know, wrote by candlelight.

So I think that society has evolved from back those days to where we are now. But I'm going to be honest with you. I think some of the evolution is not going in the right direction. I mean, the phones before bed, you know, and by the way, it's not the blue light that's keeping you up. It's the, if you're trying to get your heart score on candy crush, you ain't trying to go to bed. Right. Trust me on this one. Oh, man.

So, yeah, do you think, I mean, people probably had a lot less depression or insomnia, you know, hundreds of years ago. I would guess so, yeah. Or at least it wasn't recognized. Yeah. Now, let's talk about phones. Yes, since you brought it up. Sure. That's also something we didn't have 20 years ago. Thankfully.

You know, I just saw this video online yesterday. Who was the guy who wrote The Anxious Generation? Jonathan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jonathan, something. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Great book, by the way.

Yeah, yeah. He really talks a lot about anxiety. what's going on. He had a video. It's kind of funny because it was on the phone, but in class about not having phones, but he had a video go out on social media of like an AI video from back in the 90s of like kids when they're 8, 9, 10 in the 90s reenacting. They're like, wait, so you, you had a box that would like call people. You didn't just like go to your home phone and like pick it up and make a call. Yeah. Wait, you didn't stay out till like the lights went on, you know, and then come back home. Right.

Wait, you were just on a phone all day? Like, yeah. I mean, when I was growing up, you know, here's how it worked. You got home from school. You played out. You went outside. Yes. You played all day.

And then your mom yelled from the porch. Dinner. Dinner time. And if you didn't hear your mom, you know what you did? You just went with your friends to their house and had dinner at their house because everybody's mom was having dinner at a particular time. And, you know, then you'd get in the house and the mom would call your mom and say, hey, you know, Lewis is over here.

Right, right, we got him for dinner tonight. You take him, you know, my son tomorrow night. Now that's just kind of how it worked. That was it. Yeah, very different. And with phones, if someone is on their phone, first thing in the morning and last thing in night, it's not good. It's not easy to sleep probably.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just so much stimulation. Like, here's the thing is you can do all the things we've been talking about today. You can follow all the five steps. You can figure out your chronotype. But if you're causing a significant level of auto, of brain. arousal, it's really hard to overcome that. Right.

So if you're watching videos and all of a sudden, you know, something comes on about a conflict or something comes on about, you know, a award show or something, you know, whatever it is and it peaks your interest, it dials up your cortisol, it dials up your heart rate. And now you really haven't done yourself any favors. Read a book, okay? Read one of your books, okay? Like, this isn't tough. Like, keep, you know, greatness right by the bedside and read it.

You'll be surprised at how number one, you'll retain the information, but number two, it really helps ease you in. You need runway to land the plane. Yeah. Oh, man. This has been powerful. I want people to get your book, The Power of When, Discover your chronotype, and learn the best time to eat lunch, ask for a raise, have sex, write a novel, take your meds, and more.

This is really inspiring. So I want people to get this book. You have a lot of other books as well. Yep. They can check out your website, the sleep doctor.com, the sleep doctor on social media as well. Oh,

and we actually created a special landing page for all of your viewers. Okay, what is it? So if people go to sleepdoctor.com forward slash greatness. Perfect. They can check it out. Yeah, they can check out the book.

They can take the quiz. They can hear some of the products we were talking about. Whole thing. And there's a home sleep apnea test as well, right? Yeah. And so that's one of the things that our company does.

And again, I was trying to tell people, don't be afraid of the test. let's figure it out. It's less than 200 bucks. It comes to your door. You don't have to go see a doctor. And then a doctor interprets it. It's all done online.

It makes like much, much easier. That's cool. Michael, I got a couple final questions for you. Sure. Before I ask them, is there anything else that you're seeing online that could be harmful for people to start believing is good around sleep or sleep

practices that is actually potentially harmful? Well, I'm going to be honest with you. even though I do have my own TikTok channel where I'm trying to give people, don't get your information from social media about sleep. You know, like for a while there's this thing going around called the Sleepy Girl Mocktail, right, where you would have two scoops of magnesium,

fizzy water, tart cherry juice. And again, the practicality of this is like, you shouldn't be drinking large volumes of water before bed because you're going to have to get up and pee. By the way, too much magnesium and it's going to give you gas and make you go to the bathroom. And then that fizzy water is also going to give you gas. So, like, really, if you're going to get your sleep information,

get it from somebody who's well-versed, who has an educational background that's going to be important for you to understand. Like, vet your sources. Because nowadays, anybody can seem to be talking about stuff and they really don't know what they're talking about. Yeah. Or get it from Michael's book, The Power of When, or one of your other books as well.

This question is called The Three Truths, So you shared a lot of advice today. You have tons of great books. You have a lot of great content. Thanks. But let's create a scenario far in the future. You get to live as long as you want on this earth, but then it's eventually the last day on earth for you.

Okay. And you get to create and accomplish everything you want and experience all of life's magic and you see your kids grow up and all the great things happen. But it's your last day on earth. Okay. Far in the future.

Okay. And for whatever reason, we don't have access to any of your content anymore. So this episode is gone. Your books are gone. Nothing is around anymore. Hypothetical. But you get to leave behind three truths,

three things that you know to be true from all of your experiences that you would share as lessons to the world. And we would get to keep those. What would those truths be for you? I think the first one that comes to mind is sleep matters. It's important.

People take it for granted all the time. Oh, I'll sleep when I'm dead. I can't count the number of times people have said something to me. But, okay? sleep matters. It's important. It's something you need to be thoughtful about. And if you're not thinking about it, that's okay. But do yourself the favor. Take a few minutes and think about your sleep because I think sleep matters. Number two, be present, right? Be a present husband, be a present father,

be a present employer. Be there. Be able to help people in whatever way, shape, or form that you can. And by the way, you can't do that without good sleep, right? I think those two are the two that definitely hit me, hit me kind of hard. I think the final one is probably be open, right? Be open to other people. Be resilient. You know, listen to what other people have to say. Everybody's got some good ideas, right?

Be open to the new ideas and see if you can, you know, make them part of your life. That's beautiful. I want to acknowledge you, Dr. Michael Bruce, for being, a leader in this space because I think, I think for me, sleep definitely has given me a better life when I'm consistently sleeping well. And you feel it specifically having, you know, twins now. I can feel, feel it when I don't sleep well. My wife can feel it when she doesn't sleep well. And it impacts everything you do that day or for potentially days. Oh, you don't get a good night's sleep. And so I want to acknowledge you for being a leading voice and

researching these things and constantly learning about what is going to support your quality of sleep, what's not going to support your quality of sleep. And I think also reminding people that you don't need medication to sleep better. I think I get really worried when doctors come on and they prescribe medication first rather than that should be the last result. Last result. Do all these other things. Heal.

Create peace. Learn breathing. Meditate. You know, find purpose. All these other things, you know, mend your relationships. All these things that cause stress. anxiety and worry first. And then, okay, last resort, have some pill that maybe can help you next. And maybe it's just temporary. Temporary, yes. Right. Pills are really good on the temporary

when we're talking about sleep, not on the regular. Exactly. So I don't acknowledge you for all the work you're doing. Thank you. And the final question I have is, what's your definition of greatness? My definition of greatness, I think, I think it's about being present. I really do. I'm going to go back to that one. It's about. being able to be in the moment. You know, I saw a great interview with Michael Jordan, and one of the things he said is he said, the second his foot touched the court,

he was present. He was there. Don't be someplace else. Be here because here is really the best place to be. Absolutely. Thanks for coming. Thanks for a good. Thank you very much.

Appreciate it. Powerful. I hope you enjoyed today's episode, and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show, in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward and I want to remind you if no one has told you lately that you are loved you are worthy and you matter and now it's time to go out there and do something great