Will Cain Country - The Science Behind Sleep With 'The Sleep Genius'

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

As over 60 million Americans struggle with sleep disorders, and over one-third of Americans get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep a night, Will sits down with former Navy SEAL and the so-called 'Sleep Genius' Robert Sweetman. They discuss the best strategies for an effective night's sleep, and the long-term and shocking health benefits of consistent, solid sleep.     Plus, he shares the emotional moment after his military service that led to his passion for bio-hacking, sleep, and health optimization.   Tell Will what you thought about this podcast by emailing [e-mail]   Follow Will on Twitter: @WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown and a small iced coffee for five bucks plus tax. Available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants. Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery. The science behind sleep. and personal play and personally curious about how I can optimize my sleep. This is not an advertisement. This is a conversation that I've been looking forward to having with former Navy SEAL,

Rob Sweetman, who has become the sleep genius. It's the Will Kane podcast on Fox News podcast. What's up? As always, I hope you will download rate and review this podcast wherever you get your audio entertainment. at Apple, Spotify, or at Fox News podcast. You can watch the Will Kane podcast on Rumble or on YouTube and check me out on X at Will Kane. Just like every other middle-aged male, my midlife crisis is self-optimization. I want to eat right. I want to exercise right. I want to sleep right. A couple of weeks ago when I was swimming in the New York City Navy Seal Swim, I was assigned a personal

security detail on land with a real, at one time, self-described knuckle dragger, rock chewer, door kicker, Navy SEAL Rob Sweetman. Rob was an awesome dude with me that day, and we got to talking, and he said, now, Will, what I'm passionate about is sleep, all my buddies, the entire community. I become known as the sleep genius. He went to graduate school. He's focused on what it means to have good sleep, what it does for your mental health, for your mood,

for your hormones, how to optimize it, how to build good habits, how to measure sleep. And as somebody who has bad sleep habits and inconsistent levels and times of going to bed and waking up, man, I was all in right away.

I said, Rob, I want to know more about this. Let's talk about this on the podcast. You can check out, Rob, at 62 Romeo.org and sleep genie.us. That's S-L-E-E-P-G-E-N-I-D-U-S. Rob Sweetman's a patriot. He believes in America. He tells you in this podcast why he became a Navy SEAL.

He also tells you why, the moment, a very traumatic moment, where he changed his life and focused on sleep because he saw its impact on his teammates. Here is Rob Sweetman. Fox News Audio presents Unsolved with James Patterson. Every crime tells a story, but some stories are left unfinished. Somebody knows. Real cases, real people.

Listen and follow now at foxtruecrime.com. Following Fox's initial donation to the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund, our generous viewers have answered the call to action across all Fox platforms and have helped raise $7 million. Visit go.comfx-fud relief to support relief and rebuilding efforts. Rob Sweetman, former Navy SEAL, sleep genius, my personal security detail during the New York City Seal Swim, my land-based, not water-based, personal security detail. What's up, man? Living the dream. Thank you for having me, Will.

Now, why is it that you were assigned land duty and not water duty for my personal security? It must be my jujitsu skills. I have been. been doing jiu-jitsu for so long that maybe bill thought that I would be a lethal asset on the ground and he told you to pursue that assignment with um extreme prejudice so i felt i felt very secure you took that seriously you had uh you had on some personal body armor uh and you were ready to go man i'm not i'm not i'm not sure if you were armed or not that would have had to fit in your swim buoy but you were ready you're ready to do whatever it took i can't tell you all the secrets of where the weapons or where the defense mechanisms are at but just rest assured you were taking care of

except in the water and that was really what i was asking about not so much your lethality on the land but why you weren't assigned to me in the water you know what i think that they wanted somebody that was the exact pace you're very fast you're very fast in the water i'm probably slower than you so Maybe he picked somebody that was more your speed. You know what I did, I'm not bragging. I'm just here to tell the truth and the facts. But I had to even leave my water detail behind because I've got a little bit of a competitive streak in me. And I had to go, man.

It was Shane McKenzie, as relayed to me by Bill Brown, is a legend in the field. But on that day, I had to break protocol and leave behind my swim buddy. And I had to go. I had to see if I could beat some Navy SEALs, Rob, and by the way, when I was a kid and I was in high school and I toyed with the idea of being a real-life superhero, and I mean that, being a real-life superhero, maybe trying to get into the Naval Academy, maybe one day pursuing being a Navy SEAL. I thought, well, I'll be well-suited because I was a competitive swimmer growing up. I played water polo eventually in college. And so I just assumed Navy SEALs were all badass swimmers. Bad assumption?

I think that is a great assumption. We are good swimmers, but there's a very big difference in tactical swimming and what we did. What we did out there was more like a monster mash, right? It's all for fun. When you're rigged up with all types of equipment, some of that stuff is classified, so I can't share it with you. But when we're rigged up with a bunch of equipment and we have a nighttime mission to hit a specific target of, there can be a number of different types of targets, right? We're being explosives, we have weapons, we have all of these things. It's a very different skill set.

And so it's less about how fast can you swim in a straight line in open water, which is very important. And we do that in Bud's training. But it's more important about do you have the right equipment? Are you on time? Are you safe? Because you can drown in the darkness of night underwater, and it is some scary stuff sometimes. And so those skills come into play. So, yeah, maybe, you know, Navy SEALs are.

aren't all the fastest swimmers in a straight line. And I think you beat most of them. You're a very good swimmer. But tactically, there's a whole lot more that goes into that tactical swimming. You know, and part of that reason I asked that question is at the end, when you and I were both there at the 9-11 memorial for that final round of push-ups and pull-ups and then a good, maybe hour of speeches. One of the speeches said, somebody said, you know, everyone knows Navy SEALs hate swimming. So I was like, oh, I didn't know the Navy SEALs hate swimming. And by the way, for the bulk of our conversation,

what I want to get into in the meat of our conversation is your career post being a Navy SEAL. I want to talk about sleep. But before we move on, let me pursue this personal curiosity. You brought up Buds. And, you know, I've gotten to know quite a few of you guys. I follow, obviously, various accounts on Instagram. Hey, what is the water test? I'm just curious with what you can share with buds.

I mean, I've seen the videos, it seems like, where you guys have had your hands and feet tied and then have a 10-pound weight or some kind of weight sent you to the bottom. So, like, what can you tell me? Is there a lot about holding your breath, freeing yourself from entanglement while in water? What do you have to do as a swim test as a Navy SEAL? Well, I do want to be careful about what I say because we have lost some guys in training. It's very, very difficult training, and it's very important. Right? Part of this whole thing is being able to keep your composure under pressure, and there's no greater pressure than the threat of drowning. It's a horrific thing. So I think probably what you're asking is how do they do the drownproofing and some of the more complex skills in the water? And it's true. They tie our hands up, they tie our feet up, and they throw us in the water, in the deep end. So while you're in the deep end, contemplating life and death, Did I really want to sign up for the Navy SEAL teams?

You will be going to the bottom, which means you have to expel all your air, which is your last hope, right? You need air. You expel the air so that you drop buoyancy, you fall to the bottom with the confidence that you will get to the bottom eventually. And when you do, you gently bend your knees and you push off, maybe a little dolphin swim, depending on how much propulsion you get with that push, and you surface. And in that surface, you must have perfect timing. So as your mouth comes out of the water, you can get some more air and then come back down and go through the process again. So that stresses a lot of people out.

I don't know why I did well in water. They called me the underwater Buddha. One of the biggest things that really gets people. And by the way, when we get into some of the water stuff, these guys have already finished Hell Week, which eats people. up and spits them out like you wouldn't believe. I mean, everybody is gone. We have these helmets that we wear in training and they're lined up with all of the quitters and the people who are medically dropped because they were injured. I've seen a lot of broken neck, shoulders, hips, everything. Very difficult training. So these people have already made it through buds. Now they're doing the water

training and they will put on tanks drop to the bottom with a blacked out mask and have instructors If you've ever been surfing, you know that if you get hit at a turbulent surfway, it's tremendously difficult to, you don't know if you're up or down. That's what they're trying to do. They're trying to simulate being hit with a surf hit. So even after you finish buds, you make it to second phase, not buds, but the hell week. You make it to second phase. You're there in the water.

You can still fail. You can still fail at every single test gate all the way through the six months of buds, and that's what makes it so difficult. You have to be good at almost everything, or at least adequate at almost everything. It's really, really difficult. All right, I want to talk to you more as we go along about your experience as a Navy SEAL, but when you and I were hanging out that day at the New York City Seal Swim, you know, you began to share with me some of what you've done in your career after serving in the military.

And you focused a lot of your attention, your effort, and your business on sleep. And you immediately got my attention. I was, my curiosity was immediately peaked, partly because I'm a middle-aged man, and I'm like every other middle-aged man in this generation interested in sort of self-optimization, but also because, Rob, I know that this is a part of my life that is suffering. And I would love to just walk through some stuff with you. You can share your expertise, but maybe the way to do this is for me to sort of explain to you my sleep situation. And as we walk through that together, you can tell me the mistakes I'm making and some of the corrective, measures and the importance of making these corrective measures in sleep. And I think there's a lot of people listening out there who may not have my job, but have

some similar problems and in some similar curiosities. So let me just say this. Like my job requires, Rob, that, you know, I don't have a good circadian rhythm. I think many people listening probably know what a circadian rhythm is. That's a regular routine of go to bed at a certain time, wake up at a certain time, so that your body has a sense of repetition and expectation. You know, two or three days a week, Rob, I'm up at 4 a.m., and I try to get in bed by 9 p.m. on those nights. I don't do a good job of that. I probably am in bed between 10 and 11. And then the other four days a week, you know, I'm like an 11 to 6.30 or 7 type guy. But it's constantly interrupted. And it feels like several times a month.

There are other days where there's a 2 a.m. wake up or have to stay up through 3 a.m. because of the broadcasting schedule across various time zones. I'm also jumping time zones all the time. So I know, I can feel it. I know that I'm not, not only am I not helping myself, I'm hurting myself through what's going on in my sleep. But walk through me some of the importance and the problems that maybe me as an example for others out there listening are subjecting my body.

What am I doing and what should I be doing? That is an excellent question. I'm glad you brought it up because I would love to share a little bit of my knowledge with your viewer base. I do want to tell you we can come back to that why I started in this. It's a very tragic story. I'd love to share that with you because it has deep meaning to me. And it's the reason why seven years later I was named the sleep genius. I went from a knuckle-drager knowing nothing about something.

sleep, the worst sleep in the world. I'll describe it to you if you'd like. Pretty bad to now I'm helping people across the globe in really special ways. So as the sleep genius, I didn't come up with that name. I was named that by another Navy SEAL for all of the work that I've done with active duty and retired Navy SEALs to help them with their sleep. Sometimes SEALs have the worst sleep of all. So in your situation, it's very difficult to get some consistency within that schedule because you have demands from your career. Now, I work with firefighters who are active duty, especially here in California, where they're 24, 48, 72 hours straight. So how do you get sleep when you're on watch that long? And so what we do is we try to build as much consistency into the

schedule as possible. Now, that's not always going to happen the way that you want it to, and this is the career choice that we've made. You may have some negative side effects to, having your sleep disrupted because of the career choice you have. But these are sacrifices we made. Any parent will tell you that they will sacrifice a hundred times over for the sleep that they lost with their child. So you have an excellent career. You're passionate about it. This is the trade-off. But we can do the best that we can with the time that we are given. There's a number of different skills. So what it might look like, for example, in my career, as the sleep genius, Sometimes I work one-on-one with people directly.

I can do things like, I have some equipment here. I can show you. I can send you something like this. Now, this is a Muse S. We have a software team behind the scenes of the sleep genius. And I can read your brainwave activity with this. So this is something I can send to your house. You can put it on your head.

You can do relaxation techniques. Or you can wear it to bed and measure your sleep. And what this does is when I tell you how to do relax. Relaxation techniques that will help with the going to sleep process and frankly help with any kind of anxiety throughout the day, you know, let's admit it. Life is stressful, right? But when we have these techniques, for example, breathing exercises, relaxation techniques, how do we know that we're doing a good job? Well, we can measure it with brainwave activity. So these are some of the things that we look at, like, what can we do while we're awake? Other things that are very helpful are to get a lot of sunlight in the the morning, right? We have these melanops and ganglion cells within the retina that communicate directly with the supercosmatic nucleus. We also call that the SCN. I'm not trying to use big words, but that's our body clock. That's our main circadian rhythm, right? Circa dia just means the evolution of one day, a 24-hour period. But we also have different circadian rhythms within our

body. There's one for every single hormone that we have. And so how do we keep all those in synchronization. Well, we can get sunlight in the morning. We can get some light exercise in the morning, heavy exercise, whatever you're into. But we want to increase the temperature of the body. We want some respiration, some perspiration. We want to let the body know that we're alive, that we're awake. And then it becomes easier to fall asleep at nighttime. I look at it like a pendulum, right? We want to be fully awake and fully asleep. So those are just a couple of tips that really help out. let me ask you a couple of questions as a follow-up. My curiosity runs so deep on this. Let's stay on technology for one moment. People are more aware of sleep than they ever have been,

and a lot of guys are wearing a whoop or an Apple Watch or whatever it may be, and they're measuring their sleep. I used to wear a whoop. I don't right now, but if I remember correctly, it divided my sleep into several different rhythms throughout the sleep process, light sleep, Um, SWS, I believe, uh, if I, and I'm sure you know what that means. That's correct. Um, and then there's, there's, there's rim, rapid eye movement sleep. And then a, I think there's a deep sleep, which may be SWS sleep on the whoop. And I don't know, maybe the Apple Watch measures it the same or differently.

And maybe what you just pointed to, the muse is in the same, is in the same vein of measurements. But tell me about that. Like, what should, do you, do you believe this is good that we're all measuring it now through these, these different pieces of technology? and if that's the case, like, what should we be targeting? Because if this random piece of technology, Rob, wasn't giving me a green or yellow, I'm not sure I would know. Maybe I'd know when I wake up, oh, that was a good night or a bad night.

I do know this. If I had one drink, one alcoholic drink the night before, the whoop would say the next day, you're compromised. I'd be in the yellow. Almost invariably, I would be in the yellow. So what do we need to know about these measurements? That is a question that really spiraled back in 2018 because at the Consumer Electronics show, I'm not sure if they want us to call it that or the CES, but at that show, they had so many,

anybody who was a player in the game brought a sleep measurement device. They wanted to show off their technology, whether it's a wearable or I have some other types of technology to measure sleep. I can share with you. Everyone wanted to measure sleep. Now, here's a problem with measuring sleep. Everybody wants to measure sleep, but nobody has a solution to do anything about it. So now we have a brand new diagnosis called orthosomnia, which means the effect of being obsessed with your sleep data and having that negative effect on your sleep. So basically scrolling through, oh, I didn't get that great of a score on my whoop.

And now that psychologically negatively impacts your sleep. And that's not good, right? So we tell people don't obsess over the numbers. And by the way, none of these things are extremely accurate. They're getting pretty good. But if you talk to any of my colleagues in sleep science, they just laugh at all of the sleep devices are out there because there's only one gold standard, and that's polysumography. Now, with that said, what we're talking about, what you're describing, and you did a great job of describing it, is a hypnogram. So a hypnogram, you know, we don't know that much about sleep. We can't quite. read dreams yet. That would be kind of nice. So the only thing that we have are these instruments to kind of measure. Now, when I say EEG, that's electroinsplogram, basically it's little electrodes on your brain. So we're reading brainwave activity. That's the best way to analyze what stage of sleep we're in. So about half of your night's going to be in light sleep. Sometimes we have some sleep spindles during light sleep, but otherwise it's somewhat uneventful. However, we also have two other stages that you identified are very important.

And within the first 15 minutes of falling asleep and a normal night of sleep, we're going to go into deep sleep or SWS slow wave sleep. They call it that because the brainwave activity is so slow, right? I mean, we're talking like 1 hertz. And hertz is a frequency, right? If we look at like frequencies while we're awake, we might be having a 25-hertz brainwave frequency right now talking to each other. We're fully engaged. So the brainwave activity goes all the way down to almost nothing.

It's wild. And I'll tell you something that I bet your listeners didn't know. Your brain can reduce in size by as much as 60% during deep sleep. Allowing the cerebrous spinal fluid to get into the crevasses of the brain, wash away some of that protein buildup. that's what we're identifying is the problem that's causing Alzheimer's, right? It's the beta amyloid plaque buildup within the brain. If you're not getting good deep sleep, how in the heck can you wash away the waste from the day? Our brains are firing all day.

We need this process. The other part that you talked about was REM sleep, rapid eye movement. That's also known as dream sleep. Also very, very important. This is where we sort out our cognitive dissonances, our emotional traumas, all of these things. And a lot of times people say, oh, I don't dream. Most of the time that's not true. Most people are dreaming, but do you wake up during a dream and remember it?

Or did you wake up at a different period and you just weren't aware of your dreams? So I love unpacking this stuff. Well, let me pause there to see if, is that all making sense? Yeah, it's all making sense. You know, I've heard, and I'm just going to keep firing curiosities as you talk throughout this, that you mentioned the different things that are accomplished through SWS and, and REM sleep. It's my understanding, this is when, as well, like, I think long-term memories are stored. Is that right? It's when it's basically, like, what gets accomplished? It's something,

I mean, it's obviously reductive for me to say, that's when you become smart or stupid. But, I mean, it's like your body is doing something very specific during those rotations that we all need. Absolutely. You know, these are all theories. and scientists who have determined that there are long-term memory, short-term memory, muscle memory, all these different types of memories that are getting stored, we don't really have the technology to determine exactly what's happening within the brain. So these are all theories, and they all make sense, and they all have very good science backing them to say, okay, this is a good indication. But absolutely, while we're sleeping, we're forming memories, we're storing memories.

And in fact, if you're getting better sleep, you're going to perform cognitively better. You're going to have better memory. You're going to do better on your test if you're a college student or you're preparing for an exam. And in fact, you can try to do something perhaps that you're passionate about like playing the violin or training jiu-jitsu. I love jiu-jitsu. And you can train, train, train, but it's within the sleep that those memories begin to turn into hard coding. And you really can make advances. You can really get next step. I read about that. I read about that, Rob. I think it was in a Malcolm Gladwell book or, no, it may have been in one of these books about, you know, essentially the 10,000 hours of practice rule or determined practice rule on whatever it is you do. And it was talking about the biology of that, of what happens when you practice a specific movement. My boys play soccer. This would also apply to anybody that plays the piece. It's called myelin. It's the insulation around your nerve fibers. And what happens is when you practice a specific movement, my boys play soccer. This would also apply to anybody that plays the piece.

piano or whatever it may be, and you translate specific physical movements that you repeat over and over and over, you're trying to not only code your brain into understanding and being able to repeat those movements, but be able to repeat those movements with speed when called upon versus me, for example, who's never practiced the skill moves in soccer that my boys practice, right? But the way that their body codes that for rapid recall when needed is the insulation around the nerve fibers, which I believe, again, is called myelin, but that myelin is built up during sleep.

So it understands what it needs to do. You go to sleep during those deep sleep moments, your body is now creating that insulation so that for you and jujitsu, you can remember, it's essentially in common language, you can remember. You can remember quickly what it is you need to do, and your body can execute that because of what you've done during your sleep. By the way, I think just in my head, I believe that I've come to understand, you need like three rotations of REM and SWS. Is that right? Is that a healthy night's sleep if there is one for everyone? A normal night of sleep, just a blanket statement for a normal eight-hour sleep period or seven to nine is a recommendation for the average

person should look like you fall into deep sleep and then you come back. into REM sleep, that's one cycle, and five or six cycles throughout the night should make up a good night. Now, that's not always true. And with these firefighters, a lot of times we'll do something called polyphasic sleeping. Now, polyphasic sleeping just means breaking up your sleep into multiple periods. A lot of times, that just looks like napping, right? So we can achieve a lot of restoration through napping. For example, if a firefighter is only going to get four hours of sleep per night, They can either sleep deprive or we can polyphasic sleep, meaning they can take that four-hour sleep period and then add on two 30-minute naps scheduled at the same time every day.

Consistency is very important. And they can achieve almost an adequate night of sleep given their career choice. Now, that's powerful. And I got to tell you, we just graduated a class of firefighters through the 62 Romeo program, something else I'd love to share with you, and there were tears. This is life-changing stuff. When you're able to turn someone's sleep from garbage to a dream come true, everything in their life improves. This is really, really powerful work we're doing.

So on that note on the nap, I want to ask two questions. I don't ever feel good after a nap, Rob. After a nap, I feel super groggy. And I don't know, other than the device, the whoop in my case, telling me that it helped me accomplish my sleep goals for the day. I don't know that I feel better after a nap. The first time I paid attention to sleep, Rob, was I played water polo in college at Pepperdine, and we had morning practices. And I was a college kid, so to ask a college kid to wake up at whatever it was,

we were waking up five, you know, and in the water by 5.30 or whatever it was, we were all hurting because I'm not sure we partied every night, but we didn't go to bed on time in college. So it's the first time I remember learning about REM. And I remember people, guys talking about how bad it is. And again, this is just guys talking, but to wake up in the middle of one of those cycles. Like, you want to complete it. So if an alarm goes off and you're in the middle of one of those cycles, you're in bad shape for the day.

And that's kind of how I feel after a nap. So I guess that's my next question for you. Is that true? You need to let a rim cycle complete itself or you're really jeopardizing your day. And why do I feel so bad after a nap? some of that we would have to dig a little deeper right to find out what's going on but i would say that i don't think it's bad to wake up in a rim cycle or in a deep sleep cycle but what we see traditionally is that if you're remember we said that deep sleep so slow wave sleep your brainwave

activity is very low right now when you're in dream sleep your brainwave activity is much higher and it kind of looks like brainwave activity when you're awake. So if you wake up out of a dream state, it's a smaller gap to bridge, and you can instantly be awake and feel normal. Meanwhile, if you're in deep sleep, your brain has to kickstart and increase its activity. Remember, there's some atrophy within the brain. You've got muscles rebuilding, your hormone production, all this stuff. If you wake up during deep sleep, you can feel groggy.

So if we're going into deep sleep immediately when we begin a sleep period, it could be very possible that during your nap, you actually need some deep sleep. You're getting into deep sleep very quickly. And based on the timing, which I'm not sure how long you're napping, you could be in the recovery process. And then your alarm goes off, you wake up, and of course you feel groggy, right? you just pulled yourself out of a major recovery process. That might indicate that you need more sleep. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the appropriate amount of time.

I've never been a napper. Like you just described a 30-minute nap twice a day. Every time I nap, I feel like it should have been longer. Like, I never wake up from a nap and go, who, that was nice. It feels like you should have been asleep for a lot longer. It's like those mornings when your alarm goes off at, you know, 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. And you're like, that's way too early.

Yeah. There's two strategies. There's two trains of thought with napping, right? And by the way, polyphasic sleeping is a very advanced level of sleep science. And we don't recommend that for everybody. But in the situation with shift workers and firefighters, it's either sleep deprivation or we do some polyphasic sleeping. We've seen a lot of success with that.

There's two trains of thought with napping. One is the 20 to 30 minute nap. So if you have a 30-minute window, you try to nail a 20-minute nap. However, in your situation, you may not like that because you're experiencing some groginess after you wake up. With a full sleep cycle, a 90-minute sleep cycle, we're able to get into deep sleep and back into REM sleep, that dream sleep. And some people report having much better results with that, meaning that gap to bridge is much smaller and you have less of that groginess effect. The challenge with that is who has 90 minutes to take a nap throughout the day. If you can do that, that can be extremely powerful.

But probably what we want to look at is if you're not really feeling the naps, let's just take a look at like how do we schedule your sleep period at nighttime to best serve your recovery. 90 minutes. I remember that. I remember that on the average sleep cycle. And that adds up to what you were saying earlier, five to six rotations, which puts you at that seven to nine hour target. Let's talk about, I have so many other things I want to follow up on when it comes to sleep and how to optimize sleep.

But, you know, certainly for guys, Rob, I think most of us go through a process where sleep is seen as weakness. You know, I mean, there's people say, you know, you can sleep when you die. You know, I know I have buddies and I have family members who treat sleep as like a badge of honor if you only need four to six hours of sleep. you know, instead of being somebody that needs nine hours of sleep. I know this kind of leads into why you got into this in the first place and the benefits of sleep, but what would you say? I mean, as you mentioned, you were a knuckle-drager, you were a Navy SEAL. There's not many resumes that are tougher.

So what would you say to the guys that kind of think, like, sleep is weakness? Well, it is absolutely a thing to have this cultural bias towards sleep deprivation, especially in the United States. As a knuckle dragger and a door kicker, as a Navy SEAL, I am doing nighttime missions, right? We're kicking open doors, and when we can't kick it open, we're blasting it with explosives, and we're going in and eliminating terrorism. No question, right? There's no room for weakness.

However, what I experienced over a career of doing this, which I only did eight years, a lot of people have done 30 plus years, sometimes, I think the 20-year mark is kind of the gold standard. I did eight years, and my experience, while I was in the SEAL teams, was that guys will do anything, including things that hurt their body to be able to perform at the highest levels. And so what that looks like a lot of times is the Navy issuing Ambien so that you can force yourself into sleep. Now, this is sedative-induced sleep. it's not real sleep. It has a lot of bad side effects. But when you don't get adequate sleep because you're simply drugging yourself up to sleep, then you feel groggy when you wake up. But you have to wake up and you have to do the mission. And so what do we do? We reach for the stimulants. And it's a vicious

cycle of using sedatives to go to sleep and stimulants to wake up. And when we're not on the clock, what are guys doing? Well, a lot of them are turning to alcohol. And I don't mean to single out Navy SEALs, what I mean is the military and first response in general, we see a preponderance of alcohol use to go to sleep. And the reason why is because if you don't know any better and you have to go to sleep and the demons are in your head and you're always spinning the wheel, how do you turn it off? Well, you numb yourself up with a legal sedative, the alcohol. And unfortunately, it's a terrible cycle. I watch my buddy Ryan Larkin, Navy SEAL, drink himself and use Ambien to go to sleep, not get adequate sleep, and then use

stimulants to wake up. And I watched that degrade his mental health to the point he never even saw the age of 30. He committed suicide. And this is one of my platoon mates. And at the time, I was doing the same thing. I was using Robitussin to go to sleep. I was using stimulants to wake up. And I watched him go through that process. And after he took his own life, a sniper a medic, a real badass, an American hero, and he took his own life, it never should have happened. That messed me up, man. It put a fire inside of me. It's like, I'm never going to let this happen again. And my best estimation of the problem was that his sleep health was impacting his mental health. And I found out years later, along this journey to becoming the sleep genius,

that, oh yeah, that's a real thing. Sleep health and mental health have a bidirectional relationship. I didn't know that at the time. I didn't know anything. I didn't know anything. thing because we have this cultural bias, this BS, that we have to sleep deprive ourselves to the point where look at 22 veterans a day. We think it's okay to sleep deprive ourselves because we're tough and then we fall apart in the end because we're not taking care of ourselves. We have to take care of ourselves. We have to change that culture. And it starts with just communicating the reality of this. That if we look at Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism, there's nothing about sleep deprivation there. It's about taking care of yourself. It's about having a

morning routine and an evening routine. And the more you take care of yourself, the better equipped you are to be a warfighter, to be a podcaster, all of these things. And so we must take care of ourselves. And that should be the culture that we look for. Talk to me about that connection between sleep and mental health. Again, I think that people can anecdotally, through their own life, probably make some connections. I can. You know, it doesn't happen the first day me, Rob, like, if I have several days in a row of bad sleep, I told you, by the way, when I was in Maui following the fires on August 8th and spent a week there, which was a total shock to my system in terms of a circadian rhythm. I had none. I never had slept less,

probably and consecutively in my life, because I was broadcasting live from midnight to four Hawaii time, and during the daylight hours, I was out in the field interviewing people and doing works like i was i was um sleeping maybe three hours at a time but i i weirdly felt like it was enough rob like i don't know i don't know i told you when we were swimming because i swam at the end of that week after that week i flew new york and you and i were together and so based basically straight off that schedule i did that physical challenge that we did together and i told you i actually feel pretty decent i don't even know how to explain it and i don't know if it's, adrenaline is just pouring through my system for like, you know, five days straight

or whatever it may be. But I do know that back in my regular life, if I have a couple nights of bad sleep, my mood is down, you know, and I, and I, and it takes me a minute to think, like, why? Why are you kind of grumpy? And it's like, oh, my wife's good about saying, remind him me, is like, you haven't slept well. Like, that's what's going on with your mood. Yeah, in a normal situation, if we're not getting adequate sleep, we're going to start to get moody. our memory will be affected, our cognitive performance will be affected, for example, some statistics. If we're awake for 20 hours straight, we will have the same cognitive performance as if we were legally inebriated, meaning like a 0.08 blood alcohol content. How do we know that?

Well, we can do psychomotor-vigilant task testing, right? Think of it like that app, Lumosity, where you're on the computer, bebopping around, and you have to process it. everything. We know that that is true. We also know that if you sleep deprived just one hour off of your normal sleep schedule every night for five days straight, you can achieve the same cognitive decline. So there's no question that you're being affected. This also affects your hormones. This also affects a ton of different stuff. But trust me, I know when there's a serious situation, if you have a mission, a time sensitive target, in this case, your mission was to get out there and help those people in Hawaii, you can feel so empowered that nothing can stop you.

And, you know, if you don't sleep at nighttime in the morning, your hormones are still going to start producing. They try to follow some level of a circadian rhythm. It's just that if you do this long term will, it will come back in the form of health problems, whether it's hypertension or low testosterone. Your body will be impacted this. So in the short term, in an emergency, I think we're designed to be able to do that, but long-term, that will come back and bite you. And that's about those long-term health consequences, like, that's a cascading effect, right? But am I correct, Rob, and kind of understanding the first sort of water over that waterfall of the cascade is that your hormones are jacked, right?

So if your hormones are jacked, now your body is going to end up jacked. In the Navy, and with the Naval Postgraduate School and Dr. Nita Shattuck, I love her. she's done a ton of research as well as rachel markwald they have the crew endurance team and they've been testing people on these navy ships for years and what they've determined is that if you have a five and dime which is like five hours on watch nine hours off it's not circadian at all it doesn't follow any sort of 24 hour rules that your body is always trying to keep up you have all these circadian rhythms for all of your hormone functions within the endocrine system they all get out of sync and what we start to see over a career of service

in the Navy as people are coming out with hypertension, mental health issues, all these different things. And so what they've been trying to do is help people get on a 24-hour watch. Now, this is interesting. This is getting a little deep into the science, but a 24-hour watch, all they're doing is providing a consistent watch period and sleep period with respect to a 24-hour day. Just changing it to match a 24-hour day, even though they might be awake during nighttime, has incredible health benefits. So the consistency part is extremely, extremely important. So we have consistency. We have the duration of sleep. We have the quality of sleep. How much deep sleep are you getting? How much REM sleep you're getting? These are things I look for in the Sleep Genius program and the 62 Romeo

program. And then we look at like sleep latency. How long does it take you to fall asleep? How many nighttime awakenings are you having? What are the type and quality of those nighttime awakenings? Are you able to go back to sleep? This is all stuff that we can refine with the and tools that we have. Let's talk about those things for a moment. Let's talk about habits. Okay, you've mentioned one. It's good when you wake up to get sunlight.

Put sunlight into your eyes, start to get the corrective mechanism of your circadian rhythm. Tell your body, it's time to wake up. You also mentioned to exercise. So would you say, let's, and I acknowledge that everyone's body is different to some extent. Everyone has different optimization periods and levels, but let's just kind of speak on the average, right, if we can. um if there is such a thing um you mentioned morning workouts as well is that on the average more optimal than a nighttime workout for example i have heard before like if you work out at night you flooded your body with all kinds of hormones and and um chemicals that are beneficial

to you but not beneficial to falling asleep so like talk to me about exercise habits as it relates to sleep? Well, so what are our goals, right? You know, I just competed in the world championship of Jiu-Jitsu. I was working out three times a day. But if we're focusing on sleep, what is the science indicating for the best sleep? And what the science is telling us is that a cardiovascular exercise in the first part of the day is likely best. A weight training, if you do weight training, would be better suited to the afternoon, and then a very light exercise in the evening, something like yoga, stretching, nothing too crazy because what we're trying to avoid is exciting the system and making it difficult to fall asleep. There's metabolic reasons for that. There's psychological reasons for that.

The biggest thing I think I hear on social media these days is the cold plunge, right? Everybody's getting into the cold plunge and some people don't want to do the ice that they do the cold showers. And then some people ask me, like, should I be doing that before bed? Maybe I get done with Jiu Jitsu. I had one client that says I get done with Jiu Jitsu at like 7 p.m. and then I do cold plunge right before sleep. They go to bed at like 9 p.m. My recommendation, what the science is telling us, is that we want to stay away from any of those crazy things right before bed, meaning we don't want to do the cold plunge, we don't want to do a freezing cold shower, we don't want to do extremely hot shower or a sauna or a hot tub before bed.

We just want to ease into sleep and make our body and put the environment around us the most conducive to being able to relax and slip into that sleep naturally, if that makes sense. Yeah, and at this point on that, I'll skip to the end of the day now. We'll come back to the middle of the day. But at the end of the day, I mean, I think everybody listening has been told, don't look at your devices. We all don't care. We do it anyway.

You know, so the blue light from my iPhone or my iPad is bad for my, my, my, I think everybody's heard this. They've read this at this point. They know. In fact, they're making glasses now that's supposed to filter. out the blue light so your body can start to go to sleep. That's never been a problem for me. I have never had trouble falling asleep throughout my entire life, and I don't, to this day. Like, I can lay in bed, and I'm usually asleep within 15 minutes. It's more of a joke of

like, let's put on a TV show, and I'll watch 10 minutes of it. But my wife does have trouble. She has trouble to the extent that I think she has, I know she has insomnia often. And I don't know if it's mind racing. I don't know what it is. But, you know, beyond the normal, like, hey, you need to start cocooning yourself and waning yourself off of technology. Like, what is it? Why are some people having such a hard time falling asleep and what can they do? There are a lot of different reasons why someone will have a challenge falling asleep. We look at that in a category called sleep latency, like how long does it take you to fall asleep?

15 minutes is totally healthy. You're doing a great job. However, if it exceeds that, sometimes that's a problem, but there's a ton of different reasons why, right? Some of the things that I just mentioned are the cold plunge or hot showers or whatever, working out heavy right before bed, you know, drinking before bed. Alcohol doesn't help out. We want to reduce caffeine after lunch. We don't want any caffeine after lunch. All these things lead up to that transition into sleep. But what I will say is that the best path forward is to take one hour, before bed and make that your wind down routine now it's going to be different for everybody but yes we should put up the devices if you're a firefighter and you're on call and you're in front of a screen with the blue light exposure to those melanops and gangling cells we talked about okay maybe you need to put on some blue blocking glasses they sell them online on amazon for relatively cheap dave asprey is a big promoter of those they do work right not in the daytime we want

plenty of blue light in the daytime. Remember the pendulum, right? But at nighttime, we should stay away from the blue light. So if you can, if you can be disciplined enough, and perhaps it doesn't affect you as much, everybody's different like you identified, but that one hour wind down period, right? Imagine you're going to bed at 10 p.m. At 9 p.m., we want to turn down the lights. We want to make sure that it's cool within the house. Cool is better for the body to sleep. It's easier to slip into sleep. We want to make sure that it's quiet. We want to, turn off any additional noise that might wake us up. And we don't have time to go into why neurologically, that's a thing. But trust me, right? If you can't reduce the noise spikes, noise pollution within your sleep environment, perhaps you can use something like white noise. White noise, I really like a thunder shower with, that's just my thing, right? Or a bad thing.

Do you do that, Rob? I like that one, too. You do those? I love it. I love it. Oh, man. I would have assumed, I would have assumed, I would have assumed. I would assume you had the firearm by the bed ready for some dude to enter your house and you're going to be able to spring at the slightest noise.

Not you in the middle of a rainforest, Rob Sweetman. How are you going to take on the intruder? You know, I love that I still carry the Navy SEAL aura, but you would laugh, Will, I'm actually a peaceful warrior. And I get into the meditation. I'm totally at peace with myself. And I do not keep a firearm loaded and ready to go. I am ready to go based on when it's God's time to take me. You know what I mean? So, yeah, I'm totally listening to the white noise. I just want to say on that note, I once had a cop who worked as my security detail in Nashville,

Tennessee, and my wife was with me that day. And he said to me, and I'm saying this to the guy who was assigned as my personal security detail in a less serious situation. I don't think anybody was going to do anything with 200 or 70 Navy SEALs and 200 military members around me during the New York City Sealswim. But the last thing you want to hear from your security guy is, hey, when it's my time, it's my time. I want to hear that there's going to be a little bit more of a fight put up to ensure that

it's not our time. Yeah. Amen. Well, that's when I'm by myself. I still have some skills to protect you, Will. We'll be okay. You know, what's funny is in our mind, we think that we run out this scenario like Batman where his parents get shot in an alley or something like that.

And that very well could be the case, but most likely the best avenue to prevent something from happening is being aware of your surroundings. And that's the difference in somebody who's skilled and knows what's going on and somebody who just carries a gun, right? We're able to notice and pick up on threats before they ever happen and potentially, hopefully eliminate those things before you ever even notice them will. Okay, back to sleep.

Um, okay, so here's another thing that has washed over me in time, whether or not I've read it or heard it or watched it, um, that look, at about 9 p.m., so that's a little bit after sundown. My dog, Rob, is done. Like, she's done with the day and she's irritated that we're still up. She is the most, um, affectionate seeking dog to the point of like, you're annoying. how much you need someone to pet you. But come 9 p.m., she's done. No more. I don't want pets. I don't want anything. I want you to leave me alone. And then when the sun rises, boom.

She's an annoying alarm clock. She's up and at it. But in a way, I know that this is actually how we should all be operating. Like, it's a little bit after sundown. It's time to shut this thing down. And when the sun rises, it's time to get going. Like, nature gave us a pretty clear circadian rhythm. Sun up to sundown.

now this is the part that's washed over me whether or not it's the you know the primal hunter-gatherers or i believe i kind of think it's again washed over me that it was viking culture like you go to bed early but you have a period in the middle of the night when you wake up and that we all kind of might still have that latency in us that you wake up in the middle of night maybe that's the pee break for a lot of us but you know historically that was honestly that's when we had sex. That's when babies were made. That's when some, there's a reason that your body woke up in the middle of the night and you had about 30 minutes to an hour of like, oh, for some reason, I feel awake. But then you went back for a second sleep. Is there anything like, any, am I right?

Is there any truth to what I just described? Yeah. So there's a, there's a lot there that you said, right? So let's try to unpack that. First of all, people have different chronotypes. So, By ourselves, we're extremely vulnerable, right, when we're sleeping. So imagine you're by yourself in nature, you're going to die because you're just not going to last during the sleep period. In a tribal setting, which has primarily been how we've existed as humans until more recently, and there still are some tribes living this way, the tribe protects each other. So when I talk about chronotypes, what I'm saying is some people are morning larks and some people are night owls, right? So if the morning larks are falling asleep early, the night owls are still awake to protect the tribe, right? And then in the morning, the night owls are still passed out, but the morning larks are awake, right? And this is how we protect each other. So there's a balance and I think it's just a random draw on what type of chronotype you are. I think it's probably given to you at birth. But that is your sleep type, right? So getting a little bit deeper into that, have we always done an eight hour sleep? period or seven or whatever your sleep period is. By the way, everybody has a magic number. Mine is

seven hours and 15 minutes, but it's totally fine to be eight and a half hours, right? It's important to find out what your exact amount of sleep is to recover and feel 100%. So anyways, we thought that we had this eight hour sleep period because that's what society told us. But in fact, over time, there have been multiple different types of sleep periods. You're exactly right. There have been times when we have a four-hour sleep period, and probably more recent than, you know, we realize, but there have been times when we have multiple sleep periods. For example, four-hour sleep period, let's say 8 p.m. to midnight, right? And then we wake up and we go about doing things, and then we go back to sleep at 4 p.m. or 4 a.m., 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. So that's two

four-hour sleep periods. That's okay. We know from polyphasic sleeping that if you have multiple phases of sleeping, that's okay, as long as you're getting the adequate amount of restoration. But what you're also telling me is historically, like, I think there's a modern movement to reach back to, like, traditional human patterns that technology and industrialization have pulled us away from. And I think that's across the self-improvement landscape. But you're telling me that there's really no, not just magic number that applies to everyone, but there's no magic rhythm to it either. There is no historical truism that, you know, you went four, up 30, back to four. There's nothing that we need to get back to that necessarily held true

throughout history. There are social pressures, cultural norms that sort of push us to sleep in a certain way. I would say historically the most common thing, if we're to kind of go with the flow of our own circadian rhythms and metabolisms and energy levels would be to probably have like a six-hour sleep period and then a siesta in the afternoon. We have a dip around 2 p.m. for most people, and that's a great time to take a nap. And that historically has been a thing that humans do for as long as recorded history, but we've kind of gotten away from that. I think a lot of that is the technology arena and also like the modern need to just constantly stay productive and working like I don't have time for a nap getting back to the culture right I don't need

any sleep I can sleep when I die but I think most naturally we would fall into a six hour sleep period and then a nice big nap in the afternoon all right and then the last thing to complete this this cycle of building good habits midday You just laid out one, which was the siesta. You did mention caffeine, so I'm going to take it that you're not. You mentioned stimulants earlier as well as a negative in these bad habits that you and others had adopted. But, I mean, it's safe to say that, I don't know what we're probably looking at 70%, 75% of the American population is attuned to some type of stimulant first thing in the morning in the form of caffeine. So you said no caffeine afternoon.

but also the last component of this has got to be diet, what we're eating all day long. And I know that there's plenty of reasons not to eat sugar, but that end of the day, sugar's got to be something that's inhibiting sleep. You know, in the Sleep Genius program and the 62 Romeo program, we don't delve too much into nutrition, but I will say that gut biome is extremely important. Now, you mentioned sugar, sugar, I don't think is good for us at any level, especially the pure refined sugar and the corn sugar and all that stuff. I don't think that's good for us. I don't eat sugar. I try to avoid it as much as possible. I also don't drink alcohol.

I don't do drugs. I really respect my body as a temple because I've been in a bad place and I just don't want to be there. I only want optimal health, right? But if we're looking at gut biome, I think the biggest transition in our understanding is that through the vagus nerve, our stomach, we call it the second. brain has so much more communication with the brain and hormone function than we ever understood 20, 30 years ago, right? So getting a good gut biome, which means eating plants and things that are good and healthy natural sources, no, you know, try to stay away from pesticides, herbicides, anything canned, processed. We know we're not supposed to be eating processed foods, so just don't do

it. Try to eat as much organic as you can. And then it's your choice whether you want to eat more meat or more plants. I tend to eat a more plant-based diet, but I'm totally okay with my friends who have the carnivore diet. I think it's important to look at what foods better suit your particular makeup, metabolism. Some people will get inflammation from red meat. Some people will get inflammation from broccoli, right? It's important to dig deep and find out what is your particular makeup. But once you get your gut biome super dialed in, you can expect to have good hormone function, and I think that aids in getting good sleep as well. So we don't really focus on nutrition in either of these programs, but it absolutely is a

pillar of health, and I think it's something that everyone should explore on their own. So let me get this straight. You're like 6, 3, 2.30, be my guess. Is that, am I in the ballpark, Rob? Just shredded. You are shredded. You're not allowed to make that joke when you actually are shredded. You are, I was there.

Our shirts were off. We were swimming in the Hudson. And you have accomplished shredded at 2.30 on plants on a vegetarian diet? I eat mostly plants because when I left the Navy, I had a drinking problem. Like I said, I was using NyQuil to go to sleep at night. I was eating fast food. We have in and out here in California. I was eating in and out.

And I had depression. And I was struggling with PTSD. I had so many different issues conflicting. me. And then, like I said, my buddy committed suicide. I was in a bad place. And so I made a choice to clean up my act. And it started with learning about sleep health, going to graduate school. And then along the way, it's like, well, geez, you can't drink alcohol and expect to get good sleep. You know, red wine watching Netflix. I was guilty of that, right? I stopped drinking alcohol. I stopped using marijuana. When you get out of the Navy, the first thing they say is, oh, you should

try a pot gummy for your back pain or for your PTSD or whatever. I stopped any of that and I wanted to focus on what is the best thing for me. Now, you know, if I go to my CrossFit gym, they're going to tell you eat red meat, eat red meat, eat red meat, I get it. I respect that and for some people that works. But I had an elevated cholesterol level. I wanted to reduce, I wanted to feel better. And so I stopped eating meat. I didn't eat any meat for about a year. I've integrated a little bit of meat, but I'm very, you know, careful about what types of meats that I eat, probably. no red meat or pork is going to be my thing. But what I've noticed is that for me personally, a plant-based diet allows me to feel good and perform optimally all the time. And it's a fallacy

that people who eat plants cannot be big or shredded or get muscle mass. It's really more of a matter of how much protein you're consuming and how much sleep you get for good hormone production. Because all of the muscle, if you ask John Defendus, I used to work for Mr. USA years ago, if you ask John Defendis, when are you building muscle? It's not in the gym. You're shredding, you're tearing apart your muscle fibers in the gym. All of the muscle building happens during sleep. There we go.

Where are you from, Rob? Carolinas. Yeah, I had to ask because I met your parents and your dad was in overalls in New York City in downtown New York City. So I knew you weren't. from, I knew you weren't from the Upper East Side. I want to end this, I want to end this conversation with two whys, okay? First of all, why did you from, from, I'm assuming North Carolina, could be South Carolina. Why did you become a Navy SEAL? At the age of 28 years old,

now I always wanted to serve my country. I've always felt like a patriot, but I felt a lot of guilt that my brother joined right out of high school. He's four years younger than me, and I never did it. I built an insurance agency. I was an entrepreneur. I did all of these self-serving things. Now, you know, I did help a lot of people with the insurance agency, but I was really just trying to build myself up as a business person, an entrepreneur, and I found myself unfulfilled. And I wanted to fulfill my patriotic spirit and earn my right to be here in America. Not saying that you have to join the military to be a good American citizen, but that's how I wanted to show my patriotism. I knew that I had a warrior spirit, and I wanted to find

out. And truthfully, I think that there was something deep down inside of me that I wanted to prove myself as a man. That's just something that was inside of me that was just burning. And so at 28 years old, I signed the dotted line. I went through Bud's training at 29 years old. I went straight through, went into the SEAL team, served at SEAL Team 7. And, you know, it was an incredible experience. But now that I've served my country, I can sit back and say that, you know, know, I love this country, and I've done my darndest to protect it and do the best that I can to be a good American. What a beautiful, honest, awesome answer, man. All right.

And the last thing, then, you've told us some of this. You've talked about your teammate. You've talked about your own experience after serving why you got your life together. So tell me, in short then, why you decided to do 62 Romeo, sleep genius, why you decided to make sleep your focus. Yeah, so you can find SleepGenius on my Instagram or SleepGenie.us is the website, 62R.org. It's only six letters, especially if you're a veteran or first responder. You can go there right now and apply. We have scholarships for people, right? This is changing lives. But the reason I chose to do this was because I believed my friend that committed suicide, Ryan Larkin, his sleep was impacting his mental health. I wanted to save people like Ryan. Now, I can't save Ryan, right? But perhaps there's something good that can come out of his suicide. And so I wanted to save other people like him that took me on a journey left and right. I started working with civilians. I wanted to build sleep pods and sleep technology.

I wanted to work in all types of space. I submitted six proposals to SOCOM and to other government agencies. Then I came back full circle with this 62 Romeo and ended up with a sleep program that I'm telling you is the best in the world. There's a ton of different reasons why it's the best in the world, but just trust me. This stuff is changing lives and nothing else out there is doing the same thing that we're doing for a ton of different reasons, the technology for everything. But the reason I did this was to really help people. I'm on the second mountain, if you know what I mean in my life. Once you realize that there's only one mountain in life, the second mountain begins.

And I'm just here to help people for the remainder of my life. I only want to serve others. and my skill and my technique is through sleep and sleep health. I think everybody needs a little bit of help with sleep. And that's my mission. I'm driven, and that's why they call me the sleep genius. That is awesome. Man, Rob Sweetman, Sleep Genius.

I really am so happy that I met you. And I look forward to continue our relationship, both professionally and personally. And, man, I'm appreciative of you indulging my curiosity and sharing this with us today. It's my honor, Will. This is Jason Chaffetz. from the Jason and the House podcast. Join me every Monday to dive deeper into the latest political headlines and chat with remarkable guests. Listen and follow now at Fox News Podcast.com or wherever you download podcasts.

There you go. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Rob Sweetman. Again, check him out at 62 Romeo.org or sleep genie.us. That is, S-L-E-E-P-G-N-I-U-S. I will see you again next time. Listen to ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members, you can listen to this show, ad-free on the Amazon Music app. It is time to take the quiz.

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