0 (1s): Coming up on the get lean, eat clean podcast. 1 (4s): Well, as I educated myself, come to find out, well, all of your hormones are actually regulated while you're asleep. So if you interfere with the cycles of sleep, then you interfere with their production and sensitivity to hormones. And then all these other complaints like sex drive and emotional stability and mood and concentration go figure all of that gets repaired, regenerated, restored, and set while you're asleep. So once I learned, you know, how the sleep drugs can interfere with the processes, the normal processes that go into sleep, and we can talk about to whatever detail you want. 1 (47s): But when I, once I learned kind of what's supposed to happen when you sleep and then how can these drugs interfere with that? Well, then it made perfect sense that Ambien was a big contributor to what they were doing. 0 (58s): Hello and welcome to the get clean, eat clean podcast. I'm Brian grin. And I'm here to give you actionable tips to get your body back to what it once was in five, 10, even 15 years ago, each week. I'll give you an in-depth interview with a health expert from around the world to cut through the fluff and get you long-term sustainable results. This week I interviewed former Navy seal and sleep expert doc parsley. We discussed how prioritizing sleep will optimize for hormones, how much the body actually repairs itself during sleep, along with aging and sleep, sleep, and its effects on athletic performance ingredients that might aid your sleep quality and his three tips to optimize your sleep well. 0 (1m 42s): This one was all, as you could tell, all based around sleep. I really enjoyed my interview with doc parsley. I know you will too. Thanks again for listening and enjoy the show. All right. Welcome to the get lean eat clean podcast. My name is Brian grin and I have doc parsley whilst welcome to the show doc. 1 (2m 1s): Well, thank you very much. Thanks for having me on. 0 (2m 4s): Yeah. And I'm glad to have you on, I was telling you off air that I haven't, we haven't done a full podcast around sleep. We tuck it, we touch on it as like a huge pillar of health. So I'm excited to have you on and just talk about, you know, your business and sort of what got you into this, this realm of, of health perhaps before maybe you go into that. I know your, your background is pretty intricate regarding, you know, Navy seals and then med school. So I'd love to love to just share it. I'd love for you to share your story. 1 (2m 39s): Yeah. All right. Well, so I, I grew up and, you know, kind of small town, small town, Texas, you know, grew up from, in a very, yeah, almost rural. I would say I was on the borderline of rural Texas and, and, you know, came from a very, you know, traditional blue collar family. I'm like 12th generation Texan. And it was just, you know, it was just, something always assumed that if you're able bodied, you know, you go do your military time. And so I, you know, I just always assumed I would do it. I didn't really have a plan for what it was going to be, but I, I played a lot of sports. 1 (3m 26s): I was, I was a pretty good athlete. I was a terrible student. So after four years of high school, I was, I just accumulated enough credits to be a sophomore. So I just, I just dropped out and got a GED, but one of the sports I played, I, I, one of the sports I did, I boxed and my, my boxing coach was the Marine recruiter for my hometown. And so it was kind of this unspoken idea that I was going to go Marines, probably Marine recon, you know, I wanted to do something challenging. And then, you know, this documentary came out about Navy seals. He was a, it was called 48 hours. 1 (4m 7s): It was a news documentary show, like 60 minutes or something. And they covered the first 48 hours of, of hell week. And they kept emphasizing how this was the toughest training and the military toughest training in the world, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, well, I want to do the toughest training in the world. You know? So one day when my, when I knew the Marine recruiter, wasn't in town, I went down to the recruiting station. I joined the Navy and I wanted to go through seal training. I didn't really know what a seal was. I mean, very few people did, so I didn't know, a hundred percent what I was going to do, but I figured, you know, something like Rambo. So I, I honestly, I didn't even know I was going to get paid. 1 (4m 49s): I'd I'd been in military for several months before I realized they were going to pay me to do it. I just thought, you know, they're going to give me clothes and place to sleep and food, and I'm either going to be training or, you know, operating. So yeah. 0 (5m 4s): What year were you in the Navy seals? I'm 1 (5m 7s): Just curious. So I, I joined, I joined the Navy in like December of, of 87 and then I actually left for boot camp. And I want to say like June of 88, or maybe before that my might've been may and did, did my bootcamp in Orlando and then went up to great lakes to do Gunner's mate, which is called a school apprenticeship school. Since, you know, 90% of people fail seal training. They train you to do a job beforehand so that when you fail, you have a place to go, they have a place to send you you're qualified to do something. 1 (5m 47s): So I did that training and then went through seal training, obviously made it through. I got stationed in San Diego as a seal, you know, obviously living in San Diego. I, I ended up meeting a girl out in San Diego, fallen in love, getting married. And she was from San Diego. So, you know, when I got out of the seal teams, there's really just because I, you know, I just wanted to do other things, you know, it, you know, we didn't, we had the Gulf war I, while I was in, but that lasted like six minutes. So just kind of redacted, a lot of the same redundant training cycles over and over and over again. 1 (6m 30s): And, you know, it was, it was a fun job, but it just didn't seem like it was going anywhere other than to just keep doing what I've been doing. And, you know, it was kind of a young, single man's job and I was becoming neither. So I started, you know, go out and do something else and didn't have any aspirations of medical school or anything. I mean, I, like I said, it wasn't even a high school graduate. I thought, you know, maybe an athletic trainer, you know, something like that and that world. And so I started working at San Diego sports medicine center to get, well, I volunteered there to get my hours. Cause I was thinking about maybe a physical therapy school and they hired me on and I worked there the whole time I was in college. 1 (7m 11s): I worked there for six years cause I did, I had to go to junior college obviously, cause I, I couldn't even qualify for college. And I did, you know, five years with junior college and a w and a S D combined. And you know, along the way that the doctors at San Diego sports medicine center talk me into, you know, throwing my hat in the ring for medical school really kind of shamed me into it. Cause I was like, there's no way I could get into medical school. Like, you know, you guys need to slow down. Like, I, I just, I just barely, you know, I, I didn't even get through high school. I mean, we're, we're, you know, we're, we're, we're setting the goals a little too lofty here and there's one doctor said to me, he said, well, it isn't a matter whether or not you could get in it. 1 (7m 57s): The question is, would you go as you got it? And I said, of course, I'd go. And he said, well then why wouldn't you try? And I was like, right. Well, I mean, you kinda, that's, that's a pretty good point. So, all right, I'll try. And so I got into, I got into the military medical school that didn't even know that had a medical school until I was applying. And, you know, since I was already married and I already had a kid and I had another kid on the way, it just made sense to go where they would pay me to go to medical school instead of the other way around. And the way the military always works is they'll do, you know, they'll train you to do anything, but you, you pay it back with time. So it's basically, it's usually the contracts about two to one, so four years of medical school, and then you have to be a doctor for them for eight years. 1 (8m 47s): And so I, you know, I, I figured that I would get back to the seal teams, be able to give back to the community that, you know, really shaped as a, as an adult, but as a, as a human, I mean, it, it was, you know, very formidable years of my life. And so I figured I would go back there and do a bunch of sports medicine, which is what I was, you know, it was what I was good at is what did I spent all my time training as, and I was planning to go back to training and finish a residency in orthopedic surgery. And I got to the seal teams and they just received the funding to build their first sports medicine facility. 1 (9m 31s): And so they, they put me in charge of supervising the build out of that. And then I was, you know, one of the people involved in hiring, you know, all of our health care practitioners, which we'd never had before. I mean, people would have, you know, this was 2009, 2010. So people would have assumed probably that seals had this big healthcare network around them and that we treated them like professional athletes, but nothing could be further from the truth. We didn't have any kind of treatment for them really whatsoever. They would have to go through it on their own, cross the bridge and to San Diego and like go to the Navy hospital and do everything up there. So, you know, obviously my, I was, I was a really good fit for that, given what I'd done in college and what my intentions were afterwards. 1 (10m 20s): So, you know, we supervise the build out of the clinic and the facility, and then we hired physical therapist and that's like trainers and PT assistants and nutritionist and strength and conditioning coaches and exercise physiologists and all this stuff. And we hired, we built this great center. Then I, I negotiated with the hospital to have like orthopedics rounds come through there twice a month. And pain clinic come through a couple of times a month and acupuncture came through and chiropractor. He came through. And so we had this healthcare Mecca at that point. And then that made me the dumbest guy around, right. 1 (11m 1s): Because we did, we hired great help. I mean, we'd hired, you know, Olympic Olympic training center, practitioners and professional athlete, a professional sports team, practitioners and division one colleges. Like we, we got the best of the best. And you know, when you're the dumbest than when you're the dumbest guy in the military, their solution as well, you should be in charge then. So, so they put me in job in charge of supervising this clinic. And you know, what seal your seals are a lot, like, you know, you know, I, I, their jobs athletic and I wouldn't, I wouldn't call them athletes because it's too, it's too limited and you're right. 1 (11m 49s): Cause they, they don't, you know, it's not a, it's not a game and they don't have quantified rules and regulations and they don't have a non and an off season. Like, it's, it it's a much tougher job than being an athlete, but, you know, and, and the, their mentality is a lot like an athlete and that their performance is everything. And the worst thing you can do to them is put them on the bench. And the, and the number one person who can put them on the bench is, is the healthcare practitioner. So usually when they, when they go see doctors, you know, and other healthcare practitioners, they just, they just lie. They just say, everything's great. I got, I got no problems whatsoever. They don't want to share their problems with you because you might put them on bench. 1 (12m 33s): But because, because I'd been a seal and I'd been a seal recently enough to where there were a lot of sales there who I'd been a seal with. And I had a, and I had a good reputation amongst those guys. So they started coming to my office and closing the door and saying, Hey, man, let me, let me tell you, what's really going on with me, you know, just between us. And, you know, they would come in and say, you know, my mood, my mood is terrible. I'm, I'm super moody. I'm all over the place. I snap at my kids just snap at my colleagues at work. I snap on my wife. I, I go from elated to feeling like crying, like instantaneously all throughout the day. I don't know what's going on. My memory sucks. My concentration sucks. 1 (13m 14s): My motivation sucks. You know, I'm getting fatter, I'm getting weaker. I'm losing muscle. My sex drives poor my sexual performance. Isn't where I want it to be. But I'm doing everything. You know, I'm doing everything you tell me, you know, you guys are telling me to do, I'm working with the nutritionist. I'm working with the strength and conditioning coach. You know, I'm doing the meditation, I'm doing all the stuff you guys are telling me to do. And my performance, isn't where I wanted it to be. Now you have to take that with a grain of salt, because these are Navy seals. So what they consider fat and what they consider unmotivated, what they consider weak is, you know, it's a lot different than what the average person would consider, but it didn't matter because what they were concerned about was their performance. 1 (13m 58s): And they're relying on me and trusting me to do this, but I was the Western train MD. Right. Like I knew how to recognize and treat disease. They didn't have any diseases, so I didn't really know what the hell to do. Right. I'm just like, I don't know, like maybe, you know, we'd all heard about combat fatigue and shell shock and previous wars, right? So we're going on like eight or nine years of combat for these guys. I'm like, well, maybe it's something to do with that. And what, what could that be? And so I started, I started looking in sort of the alternative integrative functional medicine kind of world, which is more performance oriented, obviously. 1 (14m 40s): And, and, and what I had going for me was that I was the doctor for the west coast seals. And they, you know, the seals had a reputation by that point, you know, they'd been in the media, they'd killed bin Lauden, they'd, you know, whatever they'd had all these successes and, you know, and traumatic stories like, you know, Redwings and extortion and all that. So, but because, you know, they, they had a very public image. I, you know, I could hear someone's Ted talk or, you know, go to a symposium and hear someone lecture, read someone's book, and I could just call them up and say, Hey, I'm the doc for the west coast seal teams. 1 (15m 23s): And, you know, I'm having these problems. And I kind of seems like it's in your wheelhouse. Would, you know, could I train with you? Could you recommend books with me? Could I, do you know, for me, could I, could I, do, you know, could I consult with you on one of my difficult cases and all this? And so I got to learn a lot really quickly, like, you know, my, my learning curve was insane and, you know, I, my original postulate, you know, just because I didn't know, I was just getting these enormous lab panels. I was getting 98 different Sarah markers on these guys, 17 vials of blood. They were, they were giving. And, you know, I was just testing everything. Cause I didn't, I didn't really know what I was looking for. 1 (16m 3s): I just knew that they weren't performing well. And, you know, w what came back was a picture that looked like, you know, 55 year old man, who's 30 pounds overweight and metabolic syndrome, or like flirting with metabolic syndrome, sort of pre-diabetic, which didn't make sense. It didn't match the guy in front of me who was, you know, 30, 28 to 32 years old, still has six pack. Abs, you know, is in, you know, looks to be in great shape. And if you measure their performance against the average population, they would be really high performing, but they weren't performing to where they should be, obviously, which is all that matters or where they thought they should be. 1 (16m 47s): And so I, you know what, I was getting a Mrs picture really low anabolic markers. So things like testosterone and growth, hormone and DHA, and those are really low now, not, not clinically low, like the say like normal testosterone is between two 50 and 1100. And these guys would come in at like 2 83 or 2, 2 60. But if you know anything about that stratification of two 50 to 1100, that includes all males 18 and older, who have their testicles and they're alive. Like, that's really the only criteria for being in that normal group. 1 (17m 27s): So, you know, what, what do you make of a two 80 testosterone level and, and a guy like that? It's like, well, it doesn't seem ideal, but you can't treat that because it's, it's within the normal range and you can't treat it anyways because the Navy wouldn't let you do it. Like, I, I couldn't have put the seals on testosterone replacement therapy because they would have that would have disqualified them from the job. So, you know, their anabolic markers were low. Their catabolic inflammatory markers were really high. Their insulin sensitivity was marginal or poor, you know, I, so I was originally thinking, well, you know, and I was also looking at micronutrients, right? 1 (18m 11s): Vitamins and minerals and things like that. And, you know, they, they had the typical sort of low magnesium levels, low, low red blood cell magnesium. They had low vitamin D three levels. And I was thinking, well, maybe this is like, you know, maybe this is an adrenal thing there, you know, going through some sort of adrenal mismatch, fatigue, whatever you want to call that. And so I started treating them for that. I was giving them, you know, Myers cocktails, like IB, IB, vitamins, and minerals. Essentially, I was doing cortisol tapers on 'em to sort of help their adrenals recover. I was giving them adrenal support. I was giving them, you know, supplements like D HEA some zinc to block the conversion of testosterone to estrogen. 1 (18m 55s): And I was trying just do what I could do that way. And I was having marginal success. Maybe 30% of the people were getting 50% better or something like that. It wasn't great. And after about a hundred guys came in my office and told me nearly the identical story, one guy, you know, sometimes you hear something that just sparks, you know, like, you know, it's just a profound moment and it was nothing profound, sad, but it was a profound moment where one of the guys said something to me about taking Ambien. You took Ambien every night. And I, I remember making a note in the margin going, it seems like a lot of guys that said that, I wonder if that could be playing into this. 1 (19m 40s): And so I went back after he left, I went back through my, my records and looked at all the people who've been in my office and every single one of them was taking Ambien. And I said, well, that seems like a hell of a coincidence. Let me see what's going on with that. Well, you know, the problem with pharmaceuticals is that when they apply for FDA approval, they, the pharmaceutical company itself does the research, right? And so they own the research and they give the FDA what they want to give them, and they don't give them what they don't want to give them. And so it's obviously skewed in their favor. However, once they get dragged into court for possibly knowing about some side effects of a drug that they didn't disclose, which was the case with ambient, they, they had been taken into court recently. 1 (20m 33s): Then they have to give up all their research. They have to give up all the data. And so it had, it had come out that, you know, once I started digging into it, now, first of all, I didn't know anything about sleep. I never had a single class on medical in medical school, on sleep, neither at any other doctor at that point. So I knew what ambient was. I knew its mechanism of action, as they say, but I didn't know enough about sleep, to know how this could be impacting what I was seeing in their labs. Well, as I educated myself, come to find out, well, all of your hormones are actually regulated while you're asleep. So if you interfere with the cycles of sleep, then you interfere with their production and sensitivity to hormones. 1 (21m 19s): And then all these other complaints like sex drive and emotional stability and mood and concentration go figure all of that gets repaired, regenerated, restored, and set while you're asleep. So once I learned, you know, how the sleep drugs can interfere with the processes, the normal processes that go into sleep, and we can talk about that to whatever detail you want. But when I, once I learned kind of what's supposed to happen when you sleep and then how can these drugs interfere with that? Well, then it made perfect sense that Ambien was a big contributor to what they were doing and then to the symptoms they're experiencing, but also they were, most of them were taking Ambien with alcohol, right? 1 (22m 12s): So they're having a couple of beers or a couple of cocktails with their Ambien to make them feel sleepy. And if you know anything about the seal mentality, if one's good, then two's better. And three's great, right? So they were taking way more than they should drinking way more than they should. And they would go to bed and they'd wake up around four o'clock in the morning and they couldn't go back to sleep and they'd go to the gym, workout really hard and stay at work all day and not take a nap. And thanks, they'll come home and go to sleep tonight and everything will reset. And they, you know, they've been doing that for a couple of years. It hasn't worked yet. It's probably not going to work. So, you know, so I, I thought, well, let's get these guys off of Ambien and control their alcohol intake, minimize that. 1 (22m 53s): I didn't want to try to get rid of it, you know, cause you don't want to sound, you know, to puritanical or whatever about any of this stuff. So, and doing that, I mean, I know I wasn't naive enough to think that it would explain or correct every symptom, but what did I, what I had learned was, you know, once I learned a lot about sleep was that it could explain every symptom they had. Right. It was definitely contributed to everything. And then I went from, you know, 50% improvement in 30, 30% of the people I went to about an 80% improvement and about 80% of the goddess. 1 (23m 35s): Right? So that was night and day. I had, you know, I had 45 year old men getting PRS in the gym, you know, personal records on their lists, personal records on the runs or whatever sports they were into. They were, they were performing not just better, but better than it ever performed in their life. And I was like, wow, that's pretty profound. And honestly, it was still in me. It was still in me that I just wanted to go in there and correct everything. Right. I just wanted to go fix their cortisol levels. I wanted to go fix their insulin sensitivity. I wanted to go fix their hormone levels, but I couldn't do that. You know, that the Navy wouldn't have, let me, and it wouldn't have been right for them. 1 (24m 17s): You know, in retrospect, knowing what I know now that would have been the worst solution. You know, at some point in your life you'll need hormone replacement therapy, but not when you're 30, right? I mean, if you started doing it, once you start doing it, you kind of buy into it for life. So, you know, we, yeah, the, you know, the, these guys were tripling quadrupling their total testosterone levels, quadrupling their free testosterone levels, you know, improving their insulin sensitivity, you know, 30, 40, 50%, you know, all of their inflammatory and oxidative markers were going down, they felt better. They're performing better. 1 (24m 57s): Now, the seals are mixed with a lot of traumatic brain injuries too, just from the blast force of weapons and, and hitting their head and training and whatever. So that was contributing to their dysregulation, which was that other 20% that we weren't getting to. So over time I figured that out and we started working more with that. And so now it's, you know, now I still work with a lot with a lot of seals and a lot and hundreds and hundreds of 'em have retired seals and other special forces guys. And now it's a more complete thing. Like we're, you know, we're still working with sleep obviously, but you know, we do a lot with now. 1 (25m 38s): I, I do a lot with the TBIs as well. So I, you know, when I, when I work with them now and when I work with private clients, I do sleep nutrition, exercise, stress mitigation, right. And then, and then we work on anything specific with them. Yeah. But, and when I first started this lecture series, again, like I was planning on being an orthopedic surgeon, like, I, I wasn't, I wasn't, I didn't have any burning desire to be as an expert in sleep, but, you know, the seals had these pre-retreat pre pre deployment and post-appointment deployment symposiums. And we would take the entire seal team out to a resort for three days before they deployed and bring their families out. 1 (26m 27s): And you bring in all these services, you know, and, and teach them about what they're going to be going through with their families. You can be going through what are the resources they have so on and so forth. And we'd bring in guest lecturers, you know, we'd have like Dave Grossman come in and talk about the psychology of killing. We'd have Rob Wolf come and talk about nutrition and we'd have Chris Kresser come and talk about nutrition and whatever. We'd have John Wellborn come talk about strength and fitness and whatever. And so these were all the health and wellness influencers in the, you know, 2009, 2010 through 12 kind of timeframe. And so I would be one of the lecturers at the symposiums, and I got to know these guys and they started inviting me on their podcast and invited me to other symposiums. 1 (27m 8s): And then I just became this sleep guy. And at that time I was really the only one talking about sleep. You know, there was a, you know, there was a Dr. Bruce up in, in Canada, he he's a much more conventional sort of traditional guy. And then, and there, there was me and that, and that was it. Now, you know, I, I literally got laughed out of the office of the leadership when I was telling them, Hey, the guy's hormones are low because they're not sleeping well, and they're not sleeping enough. And they're like, dumbest thing I've ever heard get out of here. You know? And now as common knowledge, now, the average person knows that their hormones are regulated while they're sleeping. And their appetite is regulated while they're sleeping and, you know, their concentration and emotional, emotional stability, the next day hinges on the sleep they got that night and all that. 1 (27m 57s): So now it's much more accepted, but it was, it was, yeah, it was, it was learning to take fringe stuff. When I was talking about it back then. 0 (28m 7s): Yeah. Now it's become a lot more mainstream, we should say. Yeah. Talking about sleep. And what were some of the things that you learned or what can people apply that could help perhaps, you know, just in general improve sleep and, and, you know, get them not only just, you know, the time, the amount of time that you're spending sleep, but the quality of your sleep as well. Right. 1 (28m 30s): Right. 0 (28m 31s): What are some of the type of things that individuals could do? I mean, obviously, you know, with screens and everything, that's like a big thing. I'm actually wearing some, some Blake blue blocking glasses during the day here right now. But w I, I love talking about routines and things that people can do to help, you know, solidify a solid sleep, a night's sleep. 1 (28m 53s): Yeah. So the most important thing, and, and this is true, you know, I now, you know, I've had the privilege to work with professional sports teams and international corporations and, you know, C level executives, big time entrepreneurs like run the gambit. And what I have found over doing this for over a decade now is that the most important step is convincing yourself how important sleep is You're wired to sleep already. Right. You know, you, you were, you were born into a world where one you're going to die. 1 (29m 35s): And two, it takes about eight hours to recover from being awake from 16 for 16 hours. You don't get to negotiate that. Right. But we think we can, we think we can negotiate it. And, and, and like, when I did my Ted talk, I did this metaphor about your surgeon taking a shot every couple of hours during the day, just to kind of, you know, keep his nerves steady and how we wouldn't accept that. But, you know, we've, we've correlated sleep deprivation to intoxication and hundreds, if not thousands of published literature will show this. And so not only are you impaired, and as far as like your cognition, your problem solving ability, your mood, your coordination, all the things you think about when you think about being intoxicated. 1 (30m 24s): But the thing that people don't think about the most is what your self-awareness like when you're intoxicated. Right? The biggest problem with being intoxicated is you usually don't think you're intoxicated, or you don't think you're nearly as bad as you are. The same thing is true with sleep deprivation. So if you're using your subjective experience on life to determine whether or not you're sleeping well, that that's not going to be very helpful because you don't have a great subjective experience of sleep. In fact, one of the things that makes my job so hard is if I do my job really well, and you sleep really well, if you're my client and I coach you and you sleep, you start sleeping. Amazing. 1 (31m 4s): All you're going to remember is going sleep, and then you're going to wake up. Okay. So you don't have any experiences. And that's like, oh, perfect. Oh, perfect. That's ideal. You don't know if I did anything or not. Right. You don't know if you're better, cause you don't remember sleeping. But one of the things that happens when we don't get enough sleep is we release a bunch of stress hormones to compensate for our lack of sleep. And those stress hormones make you feel more alert. That's the whole point of releasing them. So the first thing I tell people is to convince yourself how important sleep is. And this is easy to do because unlike nutrition and unlike exercise research, if you go on something like pub med or Google scholar, and you put in anything about sleep research, it's very consistent. 1 (31m 51s): You know, it's a, it's a young field. It's sleep. Science is about 65, 70 years old, but there's not a, there's not a lot of conflicting information in there, right? It's not like the vegan carnivore debate and nutrition, nothing like that. There's no one out there saying you don't need sleep. And anybody who's telling you, you don't need eight hours of sleep is trying to sell you something. I mean, literally they're probably trying to sell you their product. 0 (32m 17s): And just on that note, like, yeah, you hear like seven to nine hours. Is that, and depending on like, as you age, do you necessarily need a little bit less sleep than someone obviously that's younger? 1 (32m 31s): No, if anything, you would need more, but people tend to sleep less as they get older. And that has, there's lots of reasons for that. One of the reasons is we tend to accumulate more stressors in our life as we get older up until a certain point, right? Kind of when you hit elderly, it kind of starts going the other way, but we have a lot more stressors, but we also, by and large, as a society, tend to get in worst physical condition and we drink more alcohol and take more medications and things like that. And one of the big things that interferes with sleep, he was just simply discomfort. So if you're, you know, if you're metabolically sort of unstable and you have a lot of aches and pains, cause you don't exercise that regularly and you're not in that good of shape and your circulation is not all that good. 1 (33m 18s): You're going to have a harder time sleeping. That's just all there is to it. And when we're young, we have more sleep pressure. We like, we have more sleep drive, you know, building up a Denis into the breakdown of ATP adenosine. Triphosphate you break it down to ADP and an amp. And then just a, which is a dentist, seen a dentist and causes the sleep pressure. Well, the sleep pressure, if driven by adenosine is then dictated by how much adenosine you're producing, the more lean mass you have, the more dentistry and you produce. And as we get older, especially when we don't exercise, we lose muscle and we lose lean tissue and we lose the ability to produce a dentist scene. So there's that in there, there's some calcification of the pineal gland, secretes melatonin. 1 (34m 1s): So you can have a slight decrease in melatonin production, but by and large. So think of it like this. I told you, it takes about eight hours to recover from 16 hours of sleep. And this has been validated in a lot of different ways. One of the ways we've done it is something called the Barker trials where we just put people in a cold dark room with nothing but a bed and a toilet for 14 hours a day. And then we let them out for 10 hours a day and put them back in for 14 hours a day. And this is way before cell phones or anything like that. So there's nothing for them to do in this room and the room's dark, so they can't even read or anything. And what we found is that when you first put people in the room, they'll S the average person would sleep for about 12 and a half hours. 1 (34m 48s): And then over the course of about three months, well, anywhere from six weeks to three months, it would take people to get down to where they slept about eight hours a day, which meant that they were laying awake for six hours a day in a bed, in a cold dark room. So most people can't do that. If you can't lay awake in a cold dark room, lay in a bed, what was 2 (35m 9s): The purpose of falling asleep? What was the purpose of this? 1 (35m 12s): Well, it was two fold. So one, it was to figure out how much sleep people need, okay, how long it and how long it takes to pay back sleep debt, right, as they call it. But the other thing it was doing was to give a baseline for performance. So once you do that, once somebody slept consistently for eight hours a night with the opportunity to just sleep a lot more, but they just, they still just slept 18 or eight hours. We call that their base line and then you can test them on anything. You can teach them anything then that following morning, and you can say, well, that's your baseline ability, right? 1 (35m 52s): That's, that's sort of the genetic you. Now we take away a couple of hours of sleep and test you have you sleep. We short sleep. You've six hours. Have you come in the next morning and tested whatever skill we're testing on a performance thing we're testing on and you'll do worse. And initially you'll know you did worse. And when they ask you, how do you think you did you say I did worse? I was tired. And then day two, maybe day three, maybe, but valley day for every single person will say, I feel like I've completely adapted to the six hour thing. And I think I did as well as I've ever done. And you can show them, Nope. Your performance is still getting worse every day. You've gotten worse. And I'll argue with you because their subjective experiences that they felt great. 1 (36m 35s): But anyway, so that was one way we've done it yet. Another thing we've done is there's still almost a hundred thousand hunter gatherers around the planet who have never experienced electricity at all. And they still live in hunt and Hutson, near shelters. They make themselves and they hunt and gather, and that's all they do. So they live like our ancestors. And when we studied them and we put actigraphy on them and they they'll lay down about two or three hours after the sun goes down, they'll fall asleep, no, wake up around the time the sun comes up. And that averages out to about seven and a half to eight hours a night. So we, we know this is, we know this is the ideal, it's the way we're designed to be. 1 (37m 17s): So if you, if you have people sleeping eight hours a night, then we know you're, you're basically doing, you know, recovery to the way you're designed. So going back to my, my sort of metaphors, you know, the reason I, the reason I'm going to sleep eight hours tonight is because I've depleted a bunch of resources today. And I've damaged myself to some extent today. Obviously when I work out, like if I lift weights to get stronger, I don't get stronger while I'm lifting weights, right? I get weaker while lifting weights because I'm damaging the tissue. 1 (37m 58s): Once that tissue regenerates, which happens while I'm asleep, once that repairs, it will repair in a way to be able to lift more weight, it'll repair, to be able to contract harder. It will be thicker. It'll have more little acting heads and it'll, it'll be able to do more work. And if I'm doing endurance activity, you know, the cellular organelles will change. They'll have more mitochondria, I'll be able to do more out FOS and all that stuff. So my brain and my body are going to use today as a template to repair and re restore. So it's going to replenish, right? I'm going to, I'm going to repair from today and we're going to prepare for tomorrow. 1 (38m 44s): So if you think about it, logically, if I could repair a hundred percent and I could prepare a hundred percent when I wake up tomorrow, I wouldn't be any worse off, right? By definition, I've repaired a hundred percent. So I'm exactly the same tomorrow morning as I was this morning. Well, that means I didn't age. And if I could do that every night, I would never age. And if I never aged, I wouldn't, I would never have the risk factors that are associated with age, which is basically fewer resources. And I'm not as resilient, or I'm not as resilient. I can't repair from energy, from injuries. 1 (39m 25s): And I can't fight off infections and parasites and things like that as well, because really what being elderly means is that you have fewer resources. You have less muscle mass, you have fewer anabolic, hormones and fewer anabolic processes going on. You have a weakened immune system. You don't store energy as well. You don't have as good of circulation. You don't have as much oxygen flowing to your tissues. And all of those things make you more fragile. And the more fragile you become, the more likely you are to die from any costs. So if I could sleep eight hours and recover a hundred percent, I would just go on forever that way. But I can't right when I'm younger, I do like when you're a little kid, you actually getting better, right. 1 (40m 10s): You sleep more than eight hours, but you sleep for 12 hours. And the kids wake up the next day, smarter and stronger and taller and faster. Right, right. Right. And then at some age, somewhere around 25 to 35, we sort of plateau and it's a net zero. And then after that, we start repairing maybe 99.9, 7% every night. And we're losing a little bit and we're getting eight older. So if you think about it, that means if I choose, and by the way, humans are the only mammal on this planet that chooses to sleep deprive itself. Okay. The only time any other animal will sleep deprive itself is when it's starving. 1 (40m 54s): Right. It's, it's under famine. So it needs to be able to wake up earlier to travel further, to forge more, to find food, or if it's being stalked and preyed upon. Right? So if it's an, a dangerous environment, it'll only sleep as much as it needs to be. There's good reason to suspect that we're the same way, right? I mean, this is a hundred thousand year old body at minimum. So we evolved in a very similar fashion. So there's good reason to suspect that our brain is perceiving us as possibly under a famine or possibly being stocked. If we're choosing to sleep deprive ourselves and our physiology and our behaviors is the next day, support that because you, when you're sleep deprived, when you're a little sleep deprived, you make worse food choices, you make the food choices of somebody who's starving. 1 (41m 44s): And one of the, one of the things that you, that you want to do when you're in famine, which all animals do is you want to kind of shut down the prefrontal cortex and you want to take more risk taking behavior. You want to be able to try novel food. This is what happens. And you know, when you start putting houses in the middle of, of an area where, you know, the natural, the natural habitats of animals, and they'll stay away from houses and people's trash cans and stuff until they start starving, and then they're going to go take that risk. So that risk taking behavior is the same in humans. When you're sleep deprived, you take more risks. 1 (42m 25s): You say more dumb things. You're more willing to do sort of irrational, irrational things. And your appetite regulation is that of something starving or being preyed upon. But anyways, I digress that. So if the, if the point of me sleeping eight hours tonight is to repair the best I can to try to not age. If I choose to sleep six hours, I'm choosing to age 25% faster. Okay? There's no way around that you can't sleep faster. You can't say, well, I'm going to increase the quality and just get all the sleep I need in six hours. It doesn't work that way. Ideal quality still requires about eight hours of sleep. And if you don't have ideal quality and you're sleeping six hours, maybe that's more like five hours or four hours. 1 (43m 7s): So maybe you're aging, you know, 50% faster. So back to your original question, those are the types of things that I, I tell people, the focus on like go to Google scholar, go to pub med, put in sleep and whatever you care about, like sleep. I don't care what it is, sleep and business, sleeping, problem, solving, sleep, and parenting, sleep, and mood, sleep, communication, sleeping, immune, sleep, and strength, sleep, and whatever, and read until you're scared. Right? And once you convinced yourself, then you don't need that much coaching. Right? You don't need that much information. 0 (43m 45s): I was just going to say, what about alcohol's effect on sleep? Because I just think a lot of the times people will probably use alcohol. They think that'll help them sleep, but does it, does it hurt the quality of that sleep? 1 (44m 0s): It does. So, so when you, you w when, when we track people's sleep. So the first thing that's important to realize is that no people, one of the questions I get all the time is what happens when we sleep. And my retort is what happens when we're awake, right? A million things happen while you're asleep, a million things happen. You're awake. Good. Right? So one of, so we basically have two flavors of sleep. It's a little more complex than this, but I'll, and this in a simple way of explaining it, we have deep sleep and we have REM sleep, right? So deep sleep is what we call slow wave sleep. 1 (44m 40s): So when we do a sleep study on somebody and we're measuring, we're measuring their brainwaves and a mass sort of way. So it, yeah, a good metaphor I've heard is like, if you lower down a microphone into a support stadium, you could hear people doing the wave, right. If they're doing it, and that would be like slow wave sleep. Or if everybody's just chattering individually, that's more like REM sleep or maybe more like being awake. So you have REM sleep, which is primarily working on your brain is primarily working on your learning. So everything that you learn today, you're going to rehearse tonight. Every conversation you have today, you're going to rehearse tonight. 1 (45m 23s): Everything you've thought about today, whether it's related to those other two things or not, you're going to think about again tonight. And the things that you learn will be taken from your short-term or working memory to your longterm memory. And then the more important that information is in the more things in your brain that you could connect to, that you form these really durable pathways and the more durable the pathway you can think of it. The difference between like a little varmint trail going from here to across the street, to like a super highway, that would be the really durable pathway. And that allows you to access this information from multiple different angles and think about it in novel ways, other than the way you've learned it. And now you really learn. Now, you really know that information and you can work with it. 1 (46m 6s): Also, if you say, like, if you have a fight with your spouse over something trivial, like dirty dishes in the sink, well, any emotion around that conversation logically should be gone. As soon as that conversation is over, because that's just not a big deal, right. But if you don't sleep well, you actually emotionally categorize that argument while you're sleeping. So if you don't sleep well and you miss file that, or don't file that, then the next time that comes up, that can cause a lot bigger, emotional response then is then is warranted. And so you want to make sure that you're getting enough REM sleep to stabilize your mood and emotion, your cognitive processes. 1 (46m 50s): It re it's replenishing. Also the nutrients in your brain. You have storage sort of, so to speak in there, it's getting rid of waste products in your brain to make allowing your brain to work. And it's ideal fashion. And like I said, it's regulating your appetite as well. During the deep sleep, the slow wave sleep. That's the wave inside the stadium, right? That's, that's, that's the most anabolic time in your life. So most people have heard of fight or flight fight or flight is the maximum amount of stress hormones, right? And we'll just say cortisol to make it easy. So maximum cortisol. And I mean, really the maximum, the, the, the best your body can do to secrete cortisol right now, as much as it can possibly produce that's fight or flight, the exact opposite of fight or flight is deep sleep, right? 1 (47m 42s): You're sort of superhuman when you're in fight or flight. If you've ever been in fight or flight, like, you know, you get in a fist fight or you get assaulted, you almost get in a car crash or get in a car crash, or somebody shoots at you, or like, whatever, some kind of really big threat, your PR your superhuman, right? You can see better smell, better, tastes better. Like your reflexes are faster. You have more endurance, more strength, your cardiopulmonary systems ramped up, but it's catabolic. You're using a hundred percent of your resources to fuel your body to get out of that situation. So if you lived in fight or flight, you'd probably die in about two days. The exact opposite of that fight or flight when you're superhuman is deep sleep and deep sleep, if fight or flight is maximally, catabolic, deep sleep is maximally, anabolic, anabolic. 1 (48m 31s): We're taking small, simple things and building big, complex things. So by eat a steak, I break it down into amino acids. Those amino acids go through my bloodstream in mice. My body can use those amino acids to do lots of things. One of the things it can do is say, like build a muscle. So I turned that, I mean, acids into protein structures that then build my muscles up. And now that I've done an anabolic action, actually, when I'm in fight or flight and I'm releasing all these catabolic hormones, one of the things that happens in definitely happens when you're in a famine, starvation is my, my cells will need amino acids. 1 (49m 12s): If I'm not eating amino acids, I'm not. If I don't have the opportunity to eat steak, well, then my, my body's going to use my muscle as a source of amino acids. And it's going to break down my muscle and release amino acids for the other cells to use. So that'd be an example of catabolic behavior. So anabolic behavior is when you're getting stronger, right? You're repairing your damaged tissues like a saying from exercise. Or if you have a strained ligament or tendon, you've injured yourself a little bit. You've been cut. You have a little bruise, whatever. Like you've damaged yourself a little, you have a viral infection or bacterial infection, a parasitic infection. 1 (49m 53s): Any of that stuff is anabolic to, you know, requires anabolic activity to repair that. And so all of your anabolic hormones are being regulated during deep sleep. So about 90 to 95% of all the anabolic hormones you produce, you're going to produce in about the first four hours of sleep and every day. So if you're shorting yourself that deep sleep quality, whether it's quality or quantity, you're shorting your anabolic activity. And if I don't repair anabolic really well, then I'm essentially catabolic, right? Because being alive is catabolic. I'm, I'm more Canada Bolick than anabolic right now because I'm awake. 1 (50m 36s): I'm not eating, I'm using energy. Right. 0 (50m 39s): Right. So like, so I'm working out, I'm sorry to interrupt you working out is catabolic. Right. You're breaking the ball down and then going to sleep as antibiotic it's when you're building it back up. What about, what about disruptions of sleep? You know, this is a common complaint. Like they, you know, they get the sleep and then they have to go to the bathroom, right. Two times, three times during, can you, can you regain that sleep some way? Or, you know, how does, how has that process 1 (51m 14s): No. So, so, so like you said, the first half of the night is primarily deep sleep. And then the second half of your sleep through the morning hours, those are primarily REM sleep. And you're doing the different things. Like I've talking about, like I talked about earlier, right? So if I wake up during deep sleep, I interrupt my antibiotic behavior. And now I have to go back to sleep and get back into it. Now, if I'm only awake a couple of minutes and I go right back into deep sleep, but if I have to get up and go to the bathroom, big deal, right. Same thing in the morning. If I wake up at four or five o'clock in the morning, I'm probably in REM sleep. 1 (51m 56s): I'm interrupting my REM sleep. So if it's strictly episodic like that, I would say, even if you had to get up and go to the bathroom four times, if you're going right back to sleep, probably not a big deal. Okay. What's a bigger problem. And people oftentimes don't even recognize this. They just know that they don't feel great when they wake up. A lot of, a lot of people will complain. They'll say I feel worse when I wake up. Then when I went to bed, like, I don't want to go to sleep because I'm going to be more tired. When I get up in the morning, I am right now, I'd prefer to just stay up. And that obviously can only work for so long. But what happens more often is people just have really poor quality of sleep. 1 (52m 41s): So take something like, w just do something simple. Like you don't say you don't have a really comfortable bed. 0 (52m 50s): Right. 1 (52m 51s): And whether it's too hard or too soft, ends up kind of the same thing, you become uncomfortable. And that triggers your body and your brain to wake up and move to a more comfortable position. Well, if I'm in REM sleep, I'm completely paralyzed. If I'm in deep sleep, I'm almost paralyzed, right. So I have to wake up and come out of that in order to roll over move. Now I might not remember that. I might not have no conscious awareness of that whatsoever, but if I do that 50 times an hour, I do that night. Yeah. I'm going to wake up tired the next day. And so if you have a really hard bed, if your mattress is too hard, it can compress your, your blood vessels. 1 (53m 34s): Right? And if you comply, if you compress the capillaries in your skin, you decrease, decrease, or stop the circulation. You can start building up an inflammatory response in your body. You'll want to move because it's like, it's uncomfortable. You know, when we're asleep, our eyes are still working. Our nose are still working. Our ears are still working. We can still feel things. We just aren't paying attention to it. But enough of it can make us pay attention to it. Right? As evidenced by you can flip on a light and wake somebody up or make a loud noise and wake somebody up. Everything's still working. So when I'm laying in bed, when I go to sleep, I'm not consciously processing how comfortable my bed is, but if my bed's too hot or I'm compressing my blood circulation too much to where I have to move, or if my bud bed's too soft, it sinks down. 1 (54m 20s): It compresses my joint and a weird angle. And that causes some pain. Now I have to move over. You know, the mattress is too hot. I have to move around and find a cool spot, whatever it is. If you do that all throughout the night, you're going to be exhausted. You're going to wake up the next day. And again, feeling like you wish you wouldn't have gone to sleep, but if you're getting good quality sleep and you have to get up, let the dogs out once, get up, go to the bathroom. A couple of times, not a big deal. It'd be ideal. It'd be ideal not to do that. But, you know, I was, when I work with my clients, obviously, you know, there's ideal. And then there's reality. You know, we do what we can to mitigate, you know, we do what we can to supplement and, you know, mitigate and between ideal and reality, 0 (55m 6s): Is there a, I wrote this down. I wanted to ask you, is there a best sleeping position that you recommend? 1 (55m 12s): Yeah, it's called, it's called the semi-pro prone where it's essentially, your chest is flat on the, On the flat, on the bed as though you were laying on your stomach, but your hips are almost on your side to where your legs are like out a little bit, I think creates that creates the less, the least amount of tension on the low back, which is the most commonly sort of compressed joint. And it distributes your weight pretty the most evenly. 0 (55m 41s): And then what about putting something in between your knees? So, so that you're, 1 (55m 46s): If you lay lake. If you lay completely on your side, then your knees will bend forward and out a rotate your low back a little bit. And you can see, you can compress on that. I mean, if you do yoga everyday or something, that's probably doesn't matter. But if you're, you know, an average man, you know, you weigh a couple of hundred pounds and you know, you don't do yoga every day then. Yeah. That's probably going to compress your spine. It's hard to keep something between your legs. Cause that's like, that kind of requires some awareness. So I would recommend trying to do the semi-pro thing. 0 (56m 23s): Okay. Gosh, I feel like if it's in an hours pass, I feel like we can do another hour. Maybe we'll do a part two. Yeah. And sleep. I think, I think I would like that. Cause I wanted to get into, I know that you have, you know, you have a product line asleep remedy product line and you know, with melatonin tryptophan, maybe tell us a little bit about your formulation and how it can be beneficial. 1 (56m 53s): Yeah. So my formulation, I, I, I didn't develop that as a, as a product to sell. I developed that when I was working with the seals because I wanted to get them off of Ambien and I couldn't just, they were taking Ambien because they couldn't sleep. So I had to give them something else and I was telling him to quit drinking alcohol. So what was I going to give them? And so th that was just through my own research and then working with the seals. And we just came up with a concoction of everything that made sense to put in there. So things that I could measure that I knew were low, like things like vitamin D three and magnesium, obvious those things are in there. A light dose, a very light dusting of melatonin. 1 (57m 33s): You don't want to take over the brain's job of producing melatonin, but you can give enough to sort of initiate the cascade. So most people who, who think of, who've heard of the trip to fan coma that Thanksgiving day nap on the couch. Right? Right. It's not that Turkey has more trip to them than any other meat. It's just, nobody tends to eat two pounds of steak, you know, but you probably eat two pounds of Turkey. And then yeah, we're throwing in some carbohydrate crashes and stuff in there too. But so the production of melatonin is tryptofan becomes five hydroxytryptophan with the help of magnesium and vitamin D three, five hydroxy, tryptophan becomes serotonin and serotonin becomes melatonin. 1 (58m 15s): Melatonin. As most people know, is the initiation sort of the starter pistol of the sleep cascades that make you feel sleepy a few hours later. So that's what my product is. Tryptofan five hydroxy trips and magnesium vitamin D three light dusting of melatonin. And one of the big chemical changes in your brain is the production of this neuropeptide called GABA gamma-Aminobutyric acid. And that makes it, like I was saying earlier, all of your senses still work. You're just not paying attention to your environment as much. So that's, we're doing, what's called lowering the resting potential of the brain. 1 (58m 57s): And that's what GABA does. Is it, it makes it harder for this neurons to fire. So you aren't paying attention to your environment as much. So the product is the production pathway of melatonin and a little bit of melatonin and GABA. And then recently I added some phosphatidylserine in there to decrease cortisol because high cortisol, all those interfere with your ability to sleep well and get quality sleep. So there's nothing magic in there. There's nothing in there that makes you go to sleep. All it does is it sets your brain up with everything that it needs and kind of initiates the cascade to help you initiate what you need to go to sleep and to make sure you have all the resources to go to sleep. So you like, you can take it right now and it's not going to make you sleepy. 1 (59m 40s): Cause you're not, you're not, not 0 (59m 42s): That's right. So it's sort of just, it obviously it's obviously all natural. So it's the sense that it's just sort of helping you. It's like 1 (59m 50s): True. It's truly supplemental. I mean, it's the actual definition of supplement. Like it's it, we're just supplementing your natural storage to make sure everything's in there anything you don't need, it's going to be in your urine. You know, it's going to be in your bladder or your colon within like three or four hours. So there's nothing in there that makes you fall asleep. There's no trick in there. Like all the pharmaceuticals there's are trick. Like ambient is a trick. It, it acts like GABA, but at a thousand times more powerful than Gabba. Right. But that has some consequences. Right. 0 (1h 0m 21s): Drowsiness knocks you out, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you have it in a T or a, or an a pill form. Is that right? 1 (1h 0m 28s): Yeah. So, so I, I prefer the T partially because it, it kind of creates a bedtime ritual and that's a big part of getting good sleep is to have some sort of, you know, ritual that you're doing to get ready for bed. Just like when you get a little kid ready for bed, we need to get ready for bed as adults as well. And then the liquid absorbs faster, obviously, because you're not having to dissolve capsules, but people who don't want to take the drink or don't like the taste of the drink, they have prostate issues. They don't make them go to the bathroom too much can make it. So they'll, they'll do capsules. 0 (1h 1m 5s): Okay. Yeah. I'm looking at it right now. That's great. Well, this was good. This is, this went by fast and perhaps we'll do a part two and just keep going. Cause I have a lot more questions for you regarding sleep. They 1 (1h 1m 18s): Weren't happy. 0 (1h 1m 18s): Yeah. That'd be great. I'll be 1 (1h 1m 20s): Happy to do another one. 0 (1h 1m 21s): Okay. Yeah, let's do that. I guess on that note, what my, my last question that I have for you is this is a question I ask. A lot of guests is, you know, we talk about how you can get your body back to what it once was when you were 20 and 30, what would you tip? Would you give someone maybe to get their sleep back to what it once was when they were in their twenties and they could, you know, potentially maybe even sleep in sometimes and, and get good quality sleep. So what, what, what type of tips would you give that individual to get their sleeping patterns back to what they once were? 1 (1h 1m 57s): Yeah. So again, the most important, the most important step is convincing yourself of how important it is, 0 (1h 2m 4s): Right? 1 (1h 2m 4s): Once you get there, like you're already wired to sleep, it's pretty easy to get sleep. But If you look at, you know, sleep hygiene and all these sleep programs, sleep, ritualization all this stuff that people talk about. There's three things. If you think about your ancestry, just think about a thousand years ago, how did people go to sleep? Well, the sun went down, so the blue light left their eyes that initiated melatonin that initiated a bunch of cascades. Their Gabba increased. Their brains, started slowing down. We're a very visual animal. It was dark. We couldn't see at night, we didn't have flashlights. We didn't have electricity. So there wasn't much to see there wasn't much to interact with. 1 (1h 2m 48s): And because the sun went down and we didn't have HVAC, we got colder. So that's really, those are really the three cues for being ready for sleep. So one, you need to block the blue light in your eyes, a couple of hours before bed. There's a million ways to do that next though. You need to decrease your interaction with your environment. So it's not enough to wear a blue blocking glasses and sit down at your computer and work till 9 59 and getting in bed at 10 o'clock you're, you know, you're, you're not going to go to sleep quickly. So you need, you need a protracted period where you're slowing down and you're not, you're not paying attention to your environment very much. And if you're watching television, you watch something dumb and trite, you don't watch the Texas chainsaw massacre. 1 (1h 3m 31s): You don't watch something that's super emotionally stimulating too. And then you have to decrease your body temperature, and you can do that with showers and baths and air conditioner in your house. But really if now the other part is that, you know, exercise nutrition and stress mitigation, all of that matters in your ability to go to sleep, right? So you have to, you have to do the other stuff right in your day as well, to help you to help you go to sleep. But if you just, if you, if you take it seriously and give yourself, you know, at least an hour to, no, I'm not saying you have to turn off all the lights and start meditating and all that and an hour, but you need to start thinking about going to sleep and decreasing your attention span and all that. 1 (1h 4m 19s): So I, and all my website, one of the things I have is I have a PDF on like how to get stress out of your life when you're sleeping, how you know, how to deal with it. You know, everybody has stressors and how to deal with that so that it doesn't interfere with sleep. It would take me an hour to explain that, but it's just kind of a ritualization, it's just like some ways to think about things and some things to write down. And, and 0 (1h 4m 45s): I'm a big fan of journals. I got, I came out with the intermittent fasting journal. So I, I loved journals and writing things down and, and keeping track. And one of the things I was just going to say is going better, going to bed around the same time. I find that for me is very helpful. Is that something that you, 1 (1h 5m 7s): Yeah, I mean, we we're, we're, we're never going to get back to using the sun as our exclusive cue. Right. But the closer, the closer you can be to going to sleep two to three hours after the sun goes down and waking up around sun up, I mean, that's the way you evolved. That's the ideal performance out of this machine that you inhabit. So, you know, I recognize people work night shifts and have, you know, again, there's ideal and there's reality. And we can talk about how to compensate in between those two, but, you know, th the ideal would be, yeah, go to sleep two to three hours after the time after the sun goes down and wake up around sun up every day. 1 (1h 5m 53s): Now that's the way you evolved. 0 (1h 5m 56s): Well, doc, this was good. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. And like I said, I think we got a lot more questions lined up, so maybe we'll do a, we'll do a part to add on to it. Cause there's a lot, you know, a lot we can go into, so I appreciate you coming on now. 1 (1h 6m 13s): Yeah, man. My pleasure. Look forward to the next one. 0 (1h 6m 16s): Thank you. All right. Thanks for listening to the get lean eat clean podcast. I understand there are millions of other podcasts out there and you've chosen to listen to mine. And I appreciate that. Check out the show notes@briangryn.com for everything that was mentioned in this episode, feel free to subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend or family member. That's looking to get their body back to what it once was. Thanks again, and have a great day.
