WHOOP Podcast - A Sleep Scientist's Guide to Better Sleep Habits with Dr. Allison Brager

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

This week WHOOP VP of Performance Science, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes is joined by Dr. Allison Brager. She is a neurobiologist with expertise in sleep and circadian rhythms who works to examine the mind and body’s resilience to extreme environmental stress. She serves as a member of the WHOOP Scientific Advisory Council and wrote a popular science book entitled Meathead: Unraveling the Athletic Brain. Kristen and Dr. Brager will discuss the NCAA handbook and sleep trends for NCAA student-athletes (3:07), WHOOP member sleep statistics (8:35), the proper framework to maximize sleep performance (12:33), what happens when sleep performance is poor (16:05), how to effectively lower sleep debt (19:10), behaviors to advance and delay your sleep onset (21:35), the impact of light before bed (27:00), myths about sleep (32:55), how to get a good night’s sleep and how to prep during the day (35:47), taking the perfect nap (40:30), practicing yoga nidra (44:00), sharing a bed with a partner or pet (47:05), and sleep tourism (48:50).Resources:Meathead: Unraveling the Athletic BrainDr. Brager on InstagramSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello folks, welcome back to the WOOP podcast where we sit down with top performers. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. This week, Woop VP of Performance Science, Kristen Holmes, is joined by Dr. Allison Brager. She is a neurobiologist with expertise in sleep and circadian rhythms who works to examine the mind and bodies resilience to extreme environmental stress. Allison serves as a member of the Woop Scientific Advisory Council and wrote a popular science book entitled Meathead, Unraveling the Athletic Brain. The book ties the fields of exercise physiology and neuroscience with her experience as an elite

athlete in track and field and CrossFit. As World Sleep Day is coming up this Friday, March 17th, we figured there would be no one better to offer up some sleep tips than Allison. Kristen and Allison discuss sleep becoming part of the core three pillars of a healthy lifestyle, advancements in sleep technology, understanding what sleep tech and trends are working, how to create the optimal sleep environment, tips on how to improve sleep, the emergence of sleep tourism. To make sure you're ready for World Sleep Day, check out our new blue light blocking glasses, our new Woop Sleep Mask, and Apparel.

And also, if you're new to Whoop, you can use the code Will when you're checking out to get a $60 credit on Whoop accessories. If you're not aware, we also have new membership pricing, 239 for an annual membership. The Whoop straps included. That's our best pricing ever. You want to see a question of yours answered on the podcast. Email us, podcast to Whoop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. Here are Kristen Holmes and Dr. Allison Brigger.

Dr. Alston Brueger is a neurobiologist with expertise in sleep and circadian rhythms who works to examine the mind and body's resilience to extreme environmental stress. Dr. Brigger has written military training doctrine on holistic health and co-authored the first edition of the NC2A student athlete mental health handbook. As a former student athlete and collegiate coach, I can tell you from first in experience that this handbook book was probably the most important thing to happen in the NCAA in terms of forming their thinking on sleep and mental health, Allison, thank you for your contribution there is just so massive.

Yeah, we could talk about it, too. I would love to, honestly. Like, I, you know, it's an area, you know, I've heard some statistics thrown around and, you know, and, you know, one that relates to sleep that across NC2A population with student athletes, 35% of the mental health issues are related to sleep. Is that kind of what you found? Yeah, I heard that status. It was just mind-blowing to me.

Well, it actually came about. And so we wrote the handbook in 2015. It came about after in 2013, the NCAA had the most suicides on record in the history across all Division I, two, and three institutions. And doing investigations on what was a contributing factor, stress and points. poor sleep schedules kept reappearing. So they actually reached out to the Sleep Research Society. And since myself and a few others had just started going down this road of looking at sleep in athletes because it really hadn't been done before, we contributed to the first manual.

But the committee is still around. I actually am going to the NC2A headquarters in a few weeks for our quarterly board meeting. So we're hoping to come out with another edition of the handbook, you know, after this meeting. But, yeah, as the statistics show right now, sleep is a huge primary complaint of student athletes, and then it gets even worse if you're a female athlete. So if you look at male and female athletes, it's even worse. And then it's even worse mental health outcomes and sleep outcomes if you're a minority. So it's quite interesting.

Wow. Yeah, I think there is, I know we have a lot of student athletes on the Woot platform, which is really exciting. I mean, we have entire athletic departments who have invested in empowering their student athletes with, you know, this kind of information. You know, and I think, I think for a lot of student athletes, you know, we have a study going on right now at UCLA, and we just published the sleep characteristics. And, you know, it's looking at, we have 270 athletes, student athletes, in that study. And, you know, average sleep is is about six and a half hours. It is not enough, you know, and we're obviously part of part two of the study is now we're working on interventions to try to extend sleep and, you know, really tracking sleep consistency and providing some breathing interventions. So hopefully we kind of get them on the right side of time in bed. But, you know, this is a, it's a massive issue. And I think there needs to be not to get too much to policy, but, you know, as someone who's spent a lot of time on college campuses, you know, having, you know, libraries open 24-7, you know, bright lights, you know, cookies and Coke

at 11 p.m. You know, there's just so many things wrong with the college culture that just fly in the face of everything that I think we know is critical for, you know, short and long-term kind of performance and health. So yeah, yeah, you have to keep shouting, you know, from the rooftops. Yeah, well, I will say that UCLA is sort of leading the church in these efforts. So the chancellor of UCLA is a famous circadian biologist, Dr. Jane Block. And so we're actually working between the Big Ten and the Big 12 merge to develop a white paper. So it's a white paper we've been working on now ever since the merge came about. And it's just written by experts in the sleep in circadian field.

and it's intended for coaches and staff to recognize that, hey, well, you might be making this investment from a monetary standpoint, think about the consequences on not just on the field performance, but these students' grades, too. So, you know, it sort of gives like a plan of action in terms of things they can do to mitigate this. I did a little bit of this work during the football season with Michigan State and their basketball team when they went to the University of Washington for games. But I will say that's awesome. We're working with UCLA because Dr. Block and the athletic department recognize this is going to be a challenge that's ever increasing with the merge. Yeah. Yeah, they've been wonderful.

You know, this study's been going on for, gosh, a year and a half now. And we're just added in the football team. And, yeah, there's a lot of enthusiasm around it and, you know, some really interesting findings. So, yeah, excited kind of for this part two to see if our interventions, you know, really work. No, I'm excited for you too. I would love to see. So years ago, we did a longitudinal wrist actigraphy assessment in Towson University's football team, like preseason during season and postseason. But, you know, this is using the graveyard devices. So like, you know, the clinical sleep watches that just simply look at activity patterns, not to say they're not clinically relevant,

it's just it has no aspect of biometric. And so I'd be curious to see how close the parameters are to, but obviously what you have is way more comprehensive. Yeah, I mean, it'll be good. We also got permission to look at GPA as well. So we're trying to see if we can replicate some of the findings from Andrew Phillips paper in 2017 in nature that saw a relationship between GPA and sleep consistency. So, or his metric is he used to sleep regularity metric, but really excited to kind of see what we find. and most importantly to see if we can get those kids spend more time in bed and get more quality sleep.

Exactly. So I got some sleep stats for you, Allison, from Woot members in 2022. So for folks who are on the platform, you get an option of kind of putting in if you want to peak, perform, or get by. And, you know, that's based on, you know, Woop's going to tell you how much time you need to spend in bed. That's your sleep need. not a random number generator folks.

And we can talk a little bit about the research that kind of in a backhanded way prove that sleep need is not random. But your sleep need, you can kind of basically if you want to meet 100% of that sleep need, you're peaking. If you want to meet 85% of that sleep need, you're performing. If you want to meet 70% of that sleep need, you're getting by. So of the folks on the platform, 16.5% of the year, our members are spent peaking. 25.4% of the year, yeah, they're kind of performing and 30.3% of the year they are getting by.

And we have another metric, not enough. And 27.8% are not getting enough sleep over the course of the year. So what do you make of those numbers? Well, I would. I mean, that's just human mindset, though, right? is like we each have an invincibility complex, that that's somebody else's problem. That's not my problem. So I think that's part of it right there. But I will say, I don't think all hope is lost because I would put money that most people on the platform already have better sleep habits than the general population. You know, I think a lot of times when we work, you know, you and I work it with elite

athletes and elite military, we forget what general population is like. And then especially when you go in the clinical world, definitely forget just how unhealthy Americans can be. It's not until you, we recently did like a large-scale epidemiological study for the army. And like, even in the conventional army on the reserve and guard side, you see like how unhealthy they are compared to the conventional army or the special forces, like who I work for. So, I don't think all hope is lost. I think, I mean, obviously, though, you guys to do the right things, set up those sleep challenge campaigns, you know, connecting the community with professional athletes and

hearing success stories about people changing their lives by changing their sleep habits. So I think next year, maybe there'll be a positive delta. Yeah. I mean, there definitely, it does seem that it's kind of weird, we're going through these, like, you know, there's like phases of change. change, you know, where you kind of like recognize there's a problem. And you're like, all right, I need to kind of change it. And I think we're kind of, I think folks have recognized that sleep is important. I think people believe that. You know, I think there's enough evidence out there. There's

been enough conversations with, you know, folks like Dr. Russell Foster and Matthew Walker and yourself and Dr. Hureman. I mean, people are, you know, really screaming from the root house that sleep is the foundation of human health and performance. And whatever we try to layer on top of that is going to be inefficient if we don't have this solid foundation. So I feel like that's out there. But sleep can be hard for a lot of folks. And, you know, Allison, you've worked in, you know, the most extreme environments, you know, with military operators. And I would say professional athletes at times, including athletes, you know, really have to deal with a lot of pressure and a lot of, you know, travel and, you know, eating at weird times that, you know,

throws off their circadian rhythm. And there's all sorts of barriers, I think. So what are some of the learnings kind of from those environments, these high stakes, high stress environments that we can apply to just the regular folks in terms of inspiring, you know, kind of the behavior change. And, you know, what, what is, like, if there's just a bit of a framework that people can grasp on to, what would you say it is? I would say number one, it's having, no matter the circumstance, having a sleep-friendly environment and a bedtime routine. And you might have to get as creative as possible with this. A few years ago, we went with a high-tier unit to their overseas deployment to basically

set up their environment in a way where they could actually get some decent sleep. And they were all armed with a sleep kit pretty much, too. So they had an eye mask. They had ear plugs. We even invested in like little portable sound machines because when you're trying to sleep next to the flight path, which I can tell you is not fun. I had that unfortunate circumstance when I was deployed. It's, you know, you're definitely going to need a noise machine or earplugs.

We took out their incandescent light bulbs and replaced them with red light or, you know, went to the commissary and bought some red lighting kits or ordered them on Amazon. But it's the same thing, you know, professional teams are doing this now, too. A few years ago when I was a sleep consultant for LSU's football team, we did that in their locker room. We spent millions of dollars to reconfigure and remodel their locker room where each athlete had their own sleeping pod or napping area where they could go before practice or before the game and wind down. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the year we did that was the year that LSU won the national championship. But again, all of that comes down to routine. I love it. I was just

going to say like it's it's it's so funny like when you know i think about the washington nationals um you know it's it's all of a they win the they win the uh the world series and uh and you know sure enough you know they had this whole revamp of their sleep that's it just never through dr sing so yeah dr sing yeah i love her so much yeah yeah well it's same thing with the capitals too so she um yeah she was busy with the national so she referred me to be a sleep consultant for the capitals that year. And sure enough, the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup that year, too. So it's, I don't think it's a coincidence. It's not a coincidence. I love it. Yeah, it's so exciting. Yeah, we have some really cool examples, too, just on the WOOP platform. Of course, the Nationals

were wearing WOOP, and I know many of the Capitals wear WOOP as well. And a lot of our collegiate teams who are totally dialed on sleep and, you know, meet our in-n-that-performing. kind of range consistently on average over the course of their season and our sleep consistency is in an upper 85 to 90%. I mean, they just don't get injured and they don't get sick. And I think winning is really about availability. And that to me is the opportunity with sleep that I don't think people really understand. It's about being available for life. And I through for me, like, I haven't missed a day of training in years because I haven't been sick. I haven't been injured. right and a lot of that is just dialing on your sleep and and i and i understand you know sleep

would be hard for a lot of folks but i think you know if you're not sleeping well like getting help is so important because it's just it will it's it's worth the time and effort you know because how much time alison is wasted when you're not kind of getting the requisite amount of of sleep yeah so i mean i'll take a military study we did well It was a replication of a military study that was actually done in the 90s during the Gulf War using, again, the graveyard act of watch that a lot of sleep clinics used to have back in the day. But we use this metric called combat effectiveness, which basically means like how well you perform on a military task. So if you look at sleep within a 24-hour period when soldiers are doing training exercises, you can't really look at nighttime sleep in those conditions, right? is because in military training or deployment, you get sleep when you can.

But in general, soldiers who were sleeping 7 to 8 hours a night leading or the day before they did that military training, they performed often late. They were at 100% combat effectiveness. The soldiers who got six hours of sleep, so what is that? 30% less sleep than normal were at 50% combat effectiveness. And then the soldiers who got four hours of sleep,

which is half the amount of sleep, we're at 15% combat effectiveness. We actually use that data to change Army doctrine about how much sleep commanders were mandated to give soldiers in the field from it. But yeah, like bottom line is, you know, cutting your sleep by half the amount you need, you're going to cut your performance by 85%. So it's not a linear relationship. It's exponential. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, we see that, I think, you know, you and I've talked about this before, but our, the study that we did with, with McKinsey, their executive leadership program, and we, one of the metrics that was really interesting is that, or one of the correlations we saw was, was the folks who were not meeting the sleep need, so had accumulated 45 percent, sorry, 45 minutes of sleep debt, their next day mental control was, was reduced by 10 percent. So this is measured via stoop and M-back. So, you know, sleep need is a thing. One of the areas on WOOP is it does kind of accumulate. And it's important to pay down that sleep need kind of in small chunks. And I'd love to talk a little bit about, you know, this I think good segue to talk about night-to-night variability. Sure.

And what are the kind of safe thresholds? Because I think what happens is people don't meet their sleep need over the course of five days during the week. And then on the weekend, they try to make up for it. So they extend their sleep by five hours yet, they're sleeping until noon. And I think that probably you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that has some deleterious effects on all sorts of different types of functioning in the human system. So, you know, what is kind of the, how should people think about if they do accumulate a lot of sleep need, which is a lot of folks. on our system. How do they pay down that sleep debt in a way that doesn't actually have a negative effect on performance levels? So ideally it's the 30-minute rule. This is actually the rule that

people who practice cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia give to their patients. So for those on the line, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is the most effective form of treatment for insomnia. It's not drugs. It's behavioral intervention. where you work with a sleep-trained expert to dissect your bedtime routine and your sleep-and-wake schedule. Basically, these patients have to keep sleep diaries over the course of two weeks, and then you sit down with your therapist and they go through it. So 30 minutes is the rule because if you think about it, the circadian system, right, it's impacted by shifts and behavior, particularly shifts,

and when you wake up, when you go to sleep and when you're exposed to light. And anything beyond an hour is stressful. So if you half that, then do 30 minutes, it's less, it's minimal stress to the circadian system. So typically, for example, if you have a patient who has insomnia at sleep onset, then he or she will work with their therapist to night by night, extending their sleep by 30 minutes at a time. And it might not even be every night. It might be every two nights. So you go to bed 30 minutes earlier this night. And then two days later, you go to bed 30 minutes earlier from that time, the second night.

So you're already at an hour. You do this gradual advance in the time at which you go to sleep or a gradual delay, depending on, you know, what kind of insomnia it is. But 30 minutes is the golden rule. Yeah. maybe for folks who are trying to go to bed a bit earlier, how do we want to try to move that window of time when melatonin is released? People need to start thinking about that the moment they wake up in the morning, right? So maybe just walk through a couple of behaviors that can help advance sleep onset. And then if people want to.

want to delay sleep onset, what would the time, how does the timing shift there? Sure. It's pretty easy. If you want to advance your sleep onset, you get bright light exposure early in the morning. If you want to delay your sleep onset, you get bright light exposure after the sun has set and that will delay it. This is based on what we know, the like million circadian clock. It's called a, the technical term is a PRC, a photic phase response curve. So this is something that the early days of circadian biology that scientists basically spent two decades dissecting this photic phase response curve. It doesn't matter if you study it in animal models or humans. The human work was done in like constant conditions, so actually in a cave,

be honest with you right um it's it's the same light in the morning for advancing light in the evening for delay yeah yeah so light obviously the strongest um entrainment signal and then also obviously light is hitting the supergrat the controls that are under the brain um but there's other behaviors that we can do that um also entrain uh the clocks so they'll go you know they kind of affect the peripheral clocks um food so meal timing so So potentially shifting or like, you know, restricting food earlier in the day, as opposed to later in the day, could also work exercise timing. I know the research is a little mixed here, but that could be another leave.

Yeah, exercise timing too. Yeah. And then caffeine is the other one that we want to make sure that we're not having caffeine, right? I know you have a lot of, you've done a lot of work in the area of caffeine and sleep. I have. Yeah. And actually, what's interesting about the caffeine work is that caffeine can antagonize the light depending on what time it's administered. My colleague, she did that for a dissertation when she was working with Dr. Wright out of UC Boulder. So yeah, there's a lot of factors to consider. But that's why, you know, there's apps and also, you know, the algorithms that you guys provide can help you figure out. when to do what um you know i i would say and i think you'd agree with me the protocol for shifting when you're travel because you travel all the time too is uh light plus melatonin plus exercise like those three things will really really help you i did that a few weeks ago when

i came back from the australian open um it's yeah i do it all the time and we do with our athletes too you know if we have the ability depending on game times um yeah we're actually So we're working on a manuscript right now where, yeah, we basically have the control group. They went to the West Coast from the East Coast and, you know, just were all over the map in terms of light exposure, meal timing, and an exercise timing, match timing. And then the experiment group basically maintained their East Coast timing of all these kind of circadian behaviors. And preliminary data will not surprise you. But physiologically, these folks were, you know, had really no change in HRV and no change in resting heart rate. They were able to maintain, you know, they block light when they need to block light.

They viewed light when they need to view light to maintain their East Coast time. And they, you know, not surprisingly performed very, very well, had very small, you know, no perturbations in their physiology. And, you know, had the same amount of time in deeper stages of sleep. So it's, I think that we can pull these levers, you know, whether it's, you know, we're staying in our own time zone and it's just kind of a social jet lag situation or if, in fact, we're trying to mitigate, you know, or, you know, mitigate or opt out of jet lag altogether, you know, if our schedule allows or, or, you know, accelerate our ability to adapt. So, yeah, I think it's, it's cool that I think that more of these protocols are kind of getting out into the wild and people are able to take advantage of them so they can kind of control. their levels of alertness and sleepiness. Maybe we can kind of press on light for a second, you know, just in that three to four hours, you know, before bed. I think people maybe don't realize the impact light has on kind of every organ and tissue in cell and the body. And, you know,

when we're viewing light at a phase or, you know, during the inactive phase of a circadian rhythm, you know, just how detrimental that is to, uh, to our health. Um, so maybe talk a little bit about, you know, light exposure after the sun goes down. Um, and, you know, blocking glasses gets us, you know, a little bit of the way there, but we still have to really dim our environment and, you know, limit the stimulation from light. Um, so maybe just talk about, I know, there's some really interesting research, you know, looking at, you know, individuals who view light between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. Dopamine system next day doesn't work as effectively. You know, obviously insulin sensitivity next day, ghrelin, leftent. I mean, there's all sorts of

kind of problems. Do you want to just kind of dig into that a little bit? Yeah. I mean, it's a whole body response. It's going to be the endocrine system. It's going to be cellular response. It's obviously going to be performance. And I think, you know, clinically, where we see that the most are on shift workers. There's a reason why the World Health Organization views shift work as a level two carcinogen now, because years and years of having that light exposure from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. can lead to cancer metastatic cell growth. It's, you know, the same thing if you look at, I know there's some studies, I'll just use animal studies because, you know, they are still the trite and trude example of the impact of flight on the mammalian circadian clock.

It doesn't matter if you're a human or a rat. It's the same system. But we used to do studies all the time where we would house animals in constant light, which is also extremely disruptive to that. They suffer from the same consequences as humans. They have increased cancer cell growth, increase obesity, insulin resistance. But they also become super volatile. aggressive. So in like very social creatures like hamsters, they become super nasty when they're housed in constant light. And then if you give them things like drugs of abuse, because that's

a lot of what I used to do is look at how alcohol and cocaine affects circadian rhythms. They like go after drug seeking and reward seeking behavior. So again, the dopamine system becomes hijacked. Yeah. And it's the same way with craving fatty food, high fat, fat, high, type sugar food to and shift workers. Yeah, it's like really sobering. You know, it's it's one of those behaviors though that I, you know, for the most part, many of us can kind of control, but I get mad at societies sometimes, you know, that we kind of have normalized this just, you know, extension of the day, you know, and I, and I, of course, I research all things circadian. So I'm kind of in this world on stop. So there's that bias. Yeah, I just, yeah, I kind of, it's funny, you know, when I was

working at, when I was a collegiate coach, I had to actually counsel my student athletes through conversations with their study groups because that, you know, the study groups who want to meet at 1130 p.m. or 1 a.m. even. My student athletes are like, yeah, that's ridiculous. It's just stupid, right? But hopefully times are changing, you know, this. But yeah, I mean, there is just like this pressure to be awake, you know. And I think institutions have, you know, drive a lot of that and can help, you know, change that culture. But it's kind of a cultural thing that we have, you know. And there's just constant instability, you know. So I don't know. I don't know how to change. No, it totally is. Yeah. I mean, I think, again, like those elite populace, you know. And there's just constant stability, you know. So I don't know how to change. No, it totally is. Yeah. I mean, I think, again, like those elite populace, athletes and military, they actually, they're more apt to having a cultural change. In fact, there's a whole shift in the paradigm as we speak. I think it's, you know, it's more of a challenge for the general population. And, you know, that's going to be the biggest challenge.

Yeah, I think so too. I definitely, you know, we kind of, again, you know, work in similar circles. But, you know, I feel like, yeah, professional off these military, I feel like there's the awareness levels. have just totally skyrocketed around this. And I think the recognition that, you know, there are competitive advantages to gain, you know, if people can get a hold of these behaviors and, you know, rework schedules and whatnot.

Yeah. People still have to do, though. Well, I do think it relies on corporations, too. I actually was just reading this article yesterday about the history of UPS and the New Yorker. And it's about, you know, UPS has made so much. all those delivery services have made so much money since the pandemic. And so a lot of UPS workers are striking now because the company has made so much money

and yet there haven't been raises. And I didn't know this, but a UPS worker in Mayo, Minnesota makes just as much as a UPS worker in New York City. So a lot of these UPS workers in New York City have been on protests because a lot of them have to wake up at 1 a.m. to take two trains and two subways to get to their shift at 4 a.m. And so they've actually been like picketing and, you know, using their union to send letters to corporations about like changing work hours or at least paying them more so that they can live closer to their delivery stops.

Wow. Yeah, that is that is real. Yeah, just the cost of living. I mean, it's not even close, you know. Wow. Well, that's good that they're making this changes. I mean, it's good that people are advocating for themselves. Right. I mean, you see the same what fire too. I work with fire departments in D.C. and Boston and, you know, cost of living in D.C. I used to live there. It's ridiculous. But, you know, I had government housing for it. But there would be firefighters who would live, you know, work in northern Virginia, but have to be forced to live in West Virginia because they couldn't afford to live around the wealthy area where they were firefighters. but that's up to the organization to change not you know the actual people yeah totally um all right so let's get so are there any kind of things that are like trends that are out there related to

sleep that just get under your skin that are like total myths like not true um is there anything that comes in mind well i think one thing that's gotten under my skin recently is um i learned that you can get a certified sleep coaching certification by listening to a 45-minute lecture about sleep from a strength and conditioning coach. I actually, I did this like certification just to see like what it was. And I knew it was bogus the minute that this coach was talking about stage four non-REM sleep because, okay, there used to be in the old American Academy of Sleep. medicine like four stages of non-REM sleep but that rule that guidance changed like 15 years ago and I don't think you know they clearly got their information from Wikipedia or

some like outdated so like as soon as they said that I was like okay I'm done here but that that's really been I think getting under my skin is the amount of like lack of vetting that social media does with sleep advice that these sleep certified experts give or even just people in, you know, the health and wellness industry. I do think like, for example, the National Academy of Sports Medicine is doing a good job trying to dispel that, you know, these charlatans because they have like a coaching and wellness certification now, which focuses on sleep, but they had experts like us write the textbook and write the actual educational content. So I do think there's, you know, fitness and health experts out there who are providing accurate information,

but for every one of those, there's five who aren't. And a lot of them go back to melatonin, right? Like how melatonin, if you take it every night, it is going to improve your sleep or it replaces the endogenous release of melatonin, just, you know. Bad and wrong advice. So that's what's been getting under my skin recently. Yeah. You know, I have just being in the space and seeing a lot of people truly, truly struggle with sleep. It's not an easy behavior and have huge amounts of empathy.

You know, how, you know, as someone who's spent their entire career, like, thinking about this, what would be, like, if you're, like, if you're. talking to someone, and I'm sure you've had just a gazillion of these type of conversations, you know, with someone who is just like, I can't fall asleep, can't stay asleep. What would you, what would be your kind of first thing that you'd say to them? Or like, what would be your kind of series of, you know, thoughts that you could give them to kind of help or, yeah, what would be your advice, I suppose? Well, this happens to me every day because, you know, I do work for the military and I work with people who, you know, pretty much been at war for the last 17 years. This is like the first

time in their life in 17 years where they're not actively in combat. So first thing is sleep routine, right? That goes back to what I said in the beginning. Like, what are you doing the two hours before bed? Oftentimes I find out they do a high intensity workout in their garage. And I'm like, what are you doing doing a cross-with workout two hours before bed? you know TV in the bedroom right that that is like you're asking for sleep disruption with a TV in the bedroom it just makes it too easy so that's the first thing when it comes to middle of the night insomnia um you know it depends like if they're if they're waking up because they're really hungry I've actually seen that a lot right because I work with guys who are going through like high intense training um I make sure that, you know, at least before bed, they're getting in a case-in-way protein that has slow release and is going to keep them through the night. But if they're simply just waking up because their brain wants to be up, again, psychology of sleep, go in the other room,

do not turn on lights and just, you know, do breath work or, you know, some routine that is relaxing so you can go back into the bedroom and sleep. Like, don't do anything with your phone or anything. Right, because you don't want to sleep the other direction on the bed. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. You don't want to associate bed with something that's painful and, you know, and disruptive, right?

So you kind of get out of the environment, reset, and then come back. Is that the reason behind a different environment? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But those would be my two big things. Yeah. So, you know, we, a lot of folks I talk to, I mean, a majority of folks are like, Like, I wake up at 3 a.m. I wake up at 2 a.m.

Like, and it just might be the age bracket I'm in. It's just, you know, common. What would you say, I mean, a lot of the conversation I have when we kind of unravel it, it seems like it's just a lot of stress accumulating throughout the day that hasn't really been proactively dealt with. Yep. That seems to suggest rear its head. You know, I think a lot of these folks are exhausted, so they end up falling asleep, but then they wake up. And so what would be your advice throughout the day, you know, to kind of take a proactive approach, you know, because I mean, most people can incorporate, I would say, moments of rest throughout the day with

breathwork or whatever. But, you know, do you have some things that you can recommend for folks who are, you know, where we think it might be kind of anxiety and distress accumulation that's waking them up in the middle of night? Yeah. I mean, you know, when it comes to work and, you know, what you're doing on a day-to-day basis, you know, I, you know, I'm a firm believer in the Pomodoro technique. Are you familiar with that? It's a productivity technique that the Italians put forth many years ago where basically you work in 15 to 20 minutes bouts at a time.

And every 15 to 20 minutes, when you're doing highly engaging, stressful things, you take like a two-minute break, just walk around, like totally disengage. And you do that for three cycles. So 15 minutes, 20 minutes on, two minutes off, three cycles, and then you take a full one, 45 minute break. You know, I think those little things like just disengaging going out into the sunlight or, you know, we live in New England. So just going into a different area of the house or the workplace and talking to colleagues, just walking around, getting removed from your work.

Just doing that a simple 15 minutes a day can make all the difference in the world. Yeah. And, you know, you mentioned the pre-bed. Just a book, you know, that's not super stimulating can also kind of help with sleep onset and journaling. Yeah, book. Journaling.

I mean, even a lighthearted podcast, I'm sure this would. Yeah. As long as you're keeping the light on your phone completely. right with no brightness like I do all the time yeah I know I always like if I start all the time nobody can see my phone I know I know I have one of those like films on it too like yeah it's like yeah well that's that's really helpful I wanted to touch on naps and you know it was crazy 94% of the folks on the platform I go back to it 96.8 of our members took a nap this year. And the average nap, yeah, I know. That's awesome. That was my boy to me. Dang. I know. I mean,

I'm, you know, I'm, you know, really, really fortunate. I, you know, feel very alert during the day. I don't, I don't need a nap. You know, you can my sleep, sleep low, you know. Yeah. But yeah, I thought this was like insane. But the nap is, it averages an hour and 41 minutes. So just talk a little bit about, I know, I was blowing away. So talk a little bit. Maybe these are happening in the weekends. There's a lot of questions I want to ask these data, but that is all I have. What would you, so what is the architecture of like just the perfect nap just to make sure people are, you know, kind of deploying these in a way that's not hurting kind of their nocturnal sleep cycle. And yeah, how would you? So it's 20 to 30 minutes under like,

optimal sleep conditions. So if you're somebody who's normally, that's saying getting 80% of your sleep need or 70% of your sleep need. So enough to get by like your metric a night. A 20 to 30 minute nap can help offset that sleep debt. The only people who should be napping longer than an hour are shift workers and particularly people like firefighters and first responders who do 24-hour or 48-hour continuous shifts. We recommend for them, you know, they go home after their shift, sleep for two, three hours because that's all their body's going to allow. And then in the afternoon, they take an hour and a half nap.

Wow. Anyone who's able to nap for longer than an hour a day, that to me is a key indicator of sleep debt. Totally. And so I guess when you talk about the architecture of a net from a sleep perspective, most of that sleep is going to be like lighter stages of non-REM, but you will hit some REM sleep because during that time in the afternoon, the circadian clock dips are core body temperature, which is going to favor REM sleep.

So it's mostly night or light non-REM sleep, but a little bit of REM too. Yeah. And you mentioned, so I think folks should know too. Cortisol, it doesn't have a circadian rhythm, but it kind of oscillates like a circadian and rhythm and your kind of low point of cortisol is obviously it's peaking kind of throughout the morning and then I think like 1 p.m. 2 p.m. it's going to dip. So yeah, that would be like a perfect moment. It kind of takes that's yes the time. That's a perfect moment to kind of take a little now. Yeah. So but just making sure that it isn't longer than, you know, probably 30 minutes.

I think pairing it to, you know, one of the the recommendations, we make, Allison, you are a science advisor to whoop and have been for many years and we're so grateful for all the contributions. Oh, I'm grateful to be a part of it. Yeah. Another one of our advisors, you know, he kind of coined the term non-sleep, deep rest. Do you have some thoughts on, you know, yoga, needra, kind of these mind-body scripts? Is that something you prescribe to folks with?

Yeah, yeah. I've done a little bit of a, like, research deep dive once. So it's for some presentation at Walter Reed on sleep and meditation. So like expert people, expert meditators can voluntarily and activate like slow wave sleep while they're meditating. Most of us cannot do that. But yoga nidra is a wonderful practice. I actually, a few years ago, there was a special yoga nidra retreat with the like disciples of the Dalai Lama at Esselin. in Monterey, so my college roommate and I went and we learned how to do yoga nidra for like

five, six days, multiple hours a day. And I remember after that week, like the next week I slept really well, but I also felt like I could have gone a whole week without sleeping because I just I credited so much sleep during that those five or six days. But no, yoga nidra is a legitimate practice. And as the sign shows, there's only a few studies. The EEG, the brainwaves as someone who's in that state looks no different from somebody who's sleeping. Yeah. I think it's so powerful. Once they get the hang of it. Yeah. I work. I kind of serve as a high performance consultant for my son's ice hockey team. So. Oh, yeah. You're telling me that. I look for your idea about the shower, the red light in the shower.

when he comes home from practice. So I have them like totally optimized. But it's funny. I guarantee no one, none of them listen to this. So I think I'm safe. But it's funny. Like I sent them a yoga nita script that I actually did for my student athletes when I was at Princeton toward kind of the back of my career.

And yeah, yeah. And so they, those poor boys, yeah, they have to listen to my mind body, my yoga nidra script. But they don't know it's me. So but it's really funny. but that they um but it's funny the boys and you know and a lot of the professional athletes that I have kind of talked to and work with in the past um have said that it's such a great kind of um stepping stone to napping you know because it's just it kind of is like a beautiful entry point that is it's simple it you know doesn't it's low stress because you're just

listening to a script and you're kind of following along you're not like stressed about oh my god am I going to be able to fall asleep and it and I think just like that um skill of being able to wind your body down and kind of just relax into that state is just an awesome gateway to kind of that next step of, I was thinking it's like a gateway drug. When I think it's a gateway, I don't mean to say that. It's kind of a nice gateway into, you know, napping. Yeah. But no, it kind of is a gateway drug into napping.

I mean, that's what it is. It's got a napping. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So one of the other. interesting things in terms of the data on our platform. So three percent of our, we saw a rise in shared bed behavior, 2022 compared to 2021 and 3 percent. And it seems that our members sleep better

when they're sharing a bed with a partner. What's your thoughts on this and kind of what's, what does the research say there? I mean, that just might be oxytocin, right? Like oxytocin is the The hormone of trust, love, and feeling good. Like, I think that's probably what it is. I mean, you're familiar with those studies and dolphins and birds, how they have unihemispheric sleep where one half of their brain is awake and the other half is asleep. And the side that's awake is facing danger on the outside.

So apparently humans have it too. Like, if you sleep in an unsafe environment, there's a study came out. Yeah, yeah, hotel current biology study. Yeah, yeah, I saw that. Yeah. So I think that's what it is. It's like love, trust and the feel good effects of oxytocin. What about pets?

I know Winston, my sweet, sweet dog, falls asleep with me every night and then he leads at some point. But yeah, I just love having them, having them right there when I fall in. Yeah, I mean, I think it's the same thing with pets do. I mean, to me, they have the same effect as you mean. Just like, yeah, their family, right? Yeah. Totally.

Yeah. Cool. So one of the last things that we wanted to pick your brain on is the emergence of sleep tourism. I love this, you know, booking a hotel. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. So these luxury resorts have basically, you know, have the room.

that are outfitted in these smart mattresses of central oils, masks, and like all these other amenities that, you know, promote good sleep and love this. Like, I want to only go to hotels like that. I was recently in a hotel this past weekend and there was like a wedding going on. So the patio was just like so loud. And I was like, how was this even happening? And it was like 10 o'clock. But, you know, I was like trying to, you know, I was in bed at 830 trying to honestly. I'm like, oh my God, this is driving me crazy. And then I ended up getting my remove to, like, the other side of the hotel. Good.

But, yeah, sleep tourism. No, I didn't know there's a term now for it, but I will tell you. So when we did that study with the elite unit and, like, came up with those sleep kits, I actually had the idea for, like, that kit from that kit from. the American Platinum Lounge. So the Amex Lounge, I don't know, there was one time I went into the lounge in Charlotte and actually I still have the lavender spray from it. I don't know why it's still here, but they like gave you like this kid was like

lavender spray and an eye mask and like earplugs and was like, oh my God, this is a great idea. So yeah, I have seen those, I think the Weston was like one of the first to adopt the sleep friendly room. But no, that's awesome. It has a room now. I'm going to use that sleep tourism. I have sleep tourism. I know. Yeah. Yeah. Love it so much. Yeah. I'm always like, I definitely try to, I always book my run that. I'm like, hey, I want to, you know, not by the elevator, not by there. Wait. Like, the other thing that drives me. Yeah. Absolutely bananas are the doors. You know, people, you know, have kids. So, you know, we'll go to tournaments, like ice tournaments and you know softball tournaments and basketball tournaments and you know you've got the kids

who are just like you know they put the little um locky lock thing so the door like slams on it just the doors in general are so darn loud yeah i was like uh-huh they need to fix that too it's part of the sleep tourism um yeah the movement um well i will say um maybe you need to find somebody who's a government employee to book your hotels. Because if you book hotels at the military rate, a lot of times you get the corner room away from the hotel because for us, that's actually like an operational security requirement is like, so anytime I travel with the government and I stay in a commercial hotel, I have to like automatically the government has rooms reserved on the outside perimeter of the hotel. That's closest to the stairwell.

because that's the easiest means of escape. That's serious. No way. So I always sleep in the corner, like the corner of a hotel anytime I travel. Dang. I need to like enlist today. So I get preferential. That's what it's going to get you.

Yeah. Cool. So, well, I feel like we've covered so much. Okay. If there are three tips, you could offer anyone to simply get a better night's sleep, regardless of their situation. What would you say as your, like, top three go-to? Top three, put away your work at least 60 to 90 minutes before bedtime or whatever stresses you out in the day.

Put that, put it away, you know, have the wusa Zen moment and just, you know, two, dim the lights. You know, if you don't have dimmers, use candles. That's what I have to use here at my place in North Carolina. and number three is dark, cool, and quiet. So dark, room, cool, and quiet. Unless you live in a busy area, then noise machine. Well, Allison, this has been such a fun conversation. Just appreciate you so much.

Where can people find you to follow your work? I know, it's really good to see you. And you've written some sensational books, too, that I really want to make sure people, you know, meathead unraveling the athletic brain. Obviously, you've been an author and so many different, you know, publications so people can look you up in research gate or Google Scholar. But what's still your favorite platform for people to follow you? Instagram's fine. I'm pretty good about checking my messages on that.

I would not say LinkedIn. I try to avoid LinkedIn. Just because, you know, like my work. days are so busy that I try to have like a good work life balance so uh you know um and instagram so yeah it's fun you know it's fun exactly so if it you know if it's work it doesn't feel like it's yeah so it's uh doc joc k zzzz so amazing thank you to dr alison brager for coming on the woo podcast if you enjoyed this episode of the wood podcast please leave a rating or review subscribe the WOOP podcast. You can check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question

you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. New members can use the code Will. Get a $60 credit on Woop accessories when you sign up. And with that, have a great week. Folks, we'll be back next week. Stay healthy and stay in the green. Thank you.