Women’s Performance Psychology: Better Sleep, Stronger Mindset, Unshakeable Confidence with Dr. Raymond Prior

24:55Tough to do. This also would highlight the importance of our first established core belief systems are the ones that are most powerful for us. So this becomes really important for parents, coaches, teachers that when we are raising children, what are the core beliefs that we are instilling in them? Because they are the ones that they are going to have as adults. adults and if they aren't serving them or they're unhealthy, they are going to have to go do the work to change them. And that is much harder than establishing those beliefs in the first place, which again, far be it for me to tell people what beliefs they should or shouldn't instill in their kids.

25:32If we're looking at it from a fixed and a growth standpoint, one of the ripple effects we see from growing up, learning a fixed mindset is you are guaranteed to have anxiety as an adult. Wow. Okay. I am putting together all of these puzzle pieces in my head with all different relationships. Okay. So, and this, if we were to apply, obviously you are applying it with really high level athletes a lot of the time. But as I heard you say, this is the same. So women 40 plus that are trying to lose weight and they come in and they they may have failed a bunch of times and they come in and it's like, well, this probably isn't going to work.

26:18I've heard that so many times. This probably isn't going to work.

26:21Dr. Raymond Prior:First place I would start with someone there is empathizing with their experience. So something like you've tried a lot in the past and you haven't seen results. That's frustrating. Meeting them where they are in their experience and validating that. Now, by the way, what they're saying might not be true, at least the projection of it, but their past experience to them is their past experience. So I would start there. Next thing I would say is, hold on a second. Can I ask you to just kind of look at that thought? You said, I'm pretty sure this won't work. I probably won't even try. Tell me a little bit more about what makes you come to that conclusion.

26:53Dr. Raymond Prior:So I'm getting curious about their experience, which is telling me a little bit about what's the mindset behind this, right? Maybe what they feel it didn't work in the past because they didn't have the right people around them. Maybe it didn't work in the past because I just didn't do it like there or why didn't I do it then I can get curious well you didn't do it because you felt embarrassed about going to the gym because you didn't really know what you were doing relative to other people or maybe it was well I don't deserve to lose weight because you know whatever that might be in terms of like a self-worth and value type of situation right then from there again I kind of want to orient toward truth like would it be helpful if I provided you a little bit of information which is a lot of people really struggle with weight loss over a lifetime they try a ton of things and it hasn't kicked.

27:39Dr. Raymond Prior:But the truth is also that doesn't mean you can't. And I'd love to talk about like what would be the first step toward that. And then I might just get into, okay, let's just, I'm not even asking you to take the first step. I'm only asking you to explore it with me right now. What benefits would you stand to gain if you decided to think about this differently and maybe at some point acting on it differently? So now I'm asking them to think through a different mindset, which would be what if I applied something and I was looking at what are the natural consequences that might come with that for me.

28:11So in another way, I'm trying to get them to talk themselves into maybe taking the first step towards something without me trying to get them to do it. I do this with athletes a lot. For example, what benefits would you stand to gain if yes, during the biggest performance of your life, you actually did it freely without

28:29Dr. Raymond Prior:trying to protect from failure? I'm not telling them they should go for it. I'm not telling them they shouldn't be anxious. I'm not telling them how they should think about it. I'm only asking them to explore. If you did this thing on your terms without sacrificing your own authenticity, what would that actually look like? And what do you think you might get from it? Starts to help people talk themselves into change. It's not easy. It's not instant. But what we know for sure is people are far more likely to take action in a way that they want to if they talk themselves into it than they are being pushed into it by somebody else.

29:01Dr. Raymond Prior:In part, because not only am I exploring what that looks like, but that forces me to let go of a little bit of that mindset and explore this one a little bit. So there's a mindset shift underneath where instead of the same old same, I just can't do this. I'm asking you to see yourself as a work in progress, that if you did this with a little time and effort, you might get this on the other side of it. So that's just like a small snippet of it. But a good place for us to start with helping people is validate their experience by meeting them where they are, get curious about that experience and the conclusions they have made, the beliefs behind it, and then just invite them with some curiosity to explore a little bit of a different mindset with a different approach, meaning effort first and exploring what benefits they might gain rather than what protection that core belief is still providing to them, which it is, but that's not what they really want.

30:00Okay. I'm going down another rabbit hole and then I'm going to be done. If someone has been rescued a lot, like every time they kind of start to feel like they're going to fail or whatever, and somebody swoops in and saves them, does that reinforce this, I'm not capable. Yes. So if we think about it, the most, and this is not my opinion, this is some research, the most resilient people on the planet are children learning to walk. They fall, they try, it's baby steps,

30:36Dr. Raymond Prior:it's slightly larger baby steps, they fall, they cry, whatever. Imagine though, if your kid falls and every single time they fall, you pick them up. What is it that they don't learn to do? Trust themselves. and try again. And get up when they fall, right? So any progress we take is going to have setbacks. Progress is almost never linear. It's a series of ups and downs. So whether that's babies learning to walk or our children or our spouses or our friends, there's something to be said about human beings helping other human beings. Then there's enabling. And what enabling does is we are not so subtly telling other people, I don't think you can handle hard things.

31:19Dr. Raymond Prior:I don't think you can handle pain. I don't think you can handle setbacks, which if they start to encode that, they go, oh, I'm not the type of person, which by the way is a subset of a fixed mindset. I'm not the type of person who can do hard things. I'm not the type of person who can experience failure or heartbreak or pain or whatever. And then surprise, surprise, they're going to start avoiding it their whole life or asking for help when they kind of don't need to. So general rule of thumb for us is when we're trying to help build confidence in people, which is not I'm sure everything's going to work out.

31:54Dr. Raymond Prior:It's a I'm pretty sure I can handle it if it doesn't. That's what stable confidence is, is to let people struggle. hard to do for parents because not only is it hard emotionally for us to watch your kids struggle and be in pain and work themselves out of it but you also have to find the fine line between well where do i need to intervene as the parents so that they don't injure themselves or somebody else or or experience some real trauma but the the thing is if we don't experience hardships and give have a chance to do it we are not able to build confidence in that and so for parents or for spouses or for friends, for coaches who swoop in and take away struggle from other people.

32:34Dr. Raymond Prior:Here's your classic helicopter parent. You are not only communicating to that person, I don't think you can handle this, but also you're robbing them of their ability to be able to work through something hard and go, oh, I can do hard things and build that on their own and learn how to deal with challenges, including setbacks and failure and mistakes and heartbreak and all those things. So again, there's something to be said about us being there for other people. But I would say as a general rule of thumb, sitting with people while they are in discomfort versus trying to remove it from them is a far kinder thing to do to people because you still give them the choice to go, what do you want to do about this?

33:13Rather than taking it away from them, which takes away that choice. You've said before that confidence isn't a feeling, it's a skill. and it's not what you're talking about. Yeah.

33:26Dr. Raymond Prior:So stable confidence by depth. I'll start with this. We can get confidence from a lot of things, including outcomes or people's praise or seeing change and all those are not bad sources of confidence, but they are superficial, meaning they're fleeting. You know, for many of the athletes I work with, they got confidence from outcomes because they were just better than everybody growing up. The problem is now everybody around them is as good or better than they are. So you cannot rely on a constant supply of really good or desired outcomes to feel free to go operate. So stable confidence by definition is self-given permission to execute or perform or live freely without a guarantee, meaning I don't know if this is going to work out or not.

34:12Dr. Raymond Prior:It might, and I think it will if I commit to it or do it freely, but there's always a chance that it won't. And the challenge for us with we try to build confidence as a sense of trust that everything will go a certain way or I know for sure what's going to happen, which is another way of saying I can predict the future and create a sense of certainty. But in a lot of the most important areas of our lives, that's not available to us. Most important areas of our lives, the most important relationships in our lives, we are the most vulnerable. Things are the least predictable and things are the margins for error are the smallest.

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35:54If you haven't downloaded Animals and Coins yet, you're seriously missing out. Trust me, download Animals and Coins today. And so building confidence off of just a sense of I'm pretty sure everything is going to be okay and I'm great. there's a shelf life on that and we build a tolerance to it that doesn't hold up over time

36:13Dr. Raymond Prior:for us and if that's what we have to be confident with by definition it's limiting and i can't take a step into something that is unknown beyond my current comfort level beyond my current skill level so even if you're giving the example of someone who's trying to lose weight for the first time in many many years or perhaps for the first time in their life if the confidence is built on outcomes, they don't have those. So of course, I'm not going to be confident. I have to be able to go, I'm going to go ahead and give this a try my best, even though there might be a bunch of stuff on the other side of it that I don't necessarily like, and there's some risk involved.

36:47And again, I don't want to pretend that's easy. That's difficult, but it is that straightforward for us at times. So it's less just a sense that we have. It's something we develop over time, but stable confidence is self-driven, not externally driven. Well, I'm going off. I said I wasn't going off on a tangent again. I'm going off on one more because now I'm just hearing all of these, all of these women that either friends or in groups that now, you know, we, we have what we think of ourselves. And then we have these teenagers and these teenagers that, from what I've noticed, there is this, I don't know if it's social media, COVID, all of this, like maybe combined, but there's this subset of boys, different areas, different statuses that don't believe in themselves and just don't have this level of motivation.

37:47And they're not going out as much and they're not entertaining and they're not dating and all of this that to me, I feel like is super damaging because it's so different than maybe what my generation grew up with. Do you intervene or really you have to still under 18, like you can a little bit, but this person, even a teenager has to be the one that's had enough. To a degree. I think there are some guardrails that parents can put on in our modern world. So just as a very quick ancestral aside, our brain is designed to look for dopamine. So way, way, way, way, way back when we got dopamine by not just getting the resources we need, but by also searching for them.

38:36So it was a week. Our brain gets dopamine in two ways. That way that I just described is what we call earned dopamine.

38:42Dr. Raymond Prior:I had to go do something, put in some effort, sacrifice something, be vulnerable to go get it. The other way that it can get dopamine is what we call unearned dopamine, which is I get it, but I didn't have to work for it. I got straight to it. So in our modern world, that's swiping through our phone. It's a cigarette, it's alcohol, other forms of drugs where again, not judging them for whether they're good or bad ethically or morally on a neurochemical level, it's very easy access dopamine. so if I take a young brain that is highly neuroplastic meaning creating new neural pathways and changing very quickly and I give it easy dopamine it is going to get sucked into that thing so if we're just talking like social media on phones right now so it's not that these kids are lazy it's not if you give them the easiest access dopamine they are not going to learn to go do the things to kind of feel what we feel when we go earn it their brain is being shaped by the amount of reps that they are getting, changing their focus for dopamine, changing their focus for dopamine, right?

39:46Dr. Raymond Prior:And it affects boys and girls differently. For girls, it's very, very much social media driven. Obviously, there's body image stuff that goes into that. Unrealistic, what we might say, like advertisement of what your life is, wildly inaccurate advertisements of what other people's lives are and the comparisons between the two. All of these things are going on that are shaping young girls' brains to basically be anxious and to be worried about what everybody thinks about them all the time. Conversely, for boys, far more likely they get into things like video games and pornography because they are the easiest access to the things that typically drive boys.

40:22Dr. Raymond Prior:So when parents like my son, he won't do anything I want to. He's always playing video games like all the things you want him to do. He's doing in that video game. It's just the Diet Coke version of it rather than the actual thing. So, of course, he's doing it. Right. So this being said, if we are paying attention to how we are shaping the brains of our children, again, I'm only quoting a lot of the research and then giving kind of what it comes to. Children should not be allowed to use social media until they are, for boys and girls, probably at least 16 or 17 or 18. Not based on ethics or morals, but just based on neuroscience and what it is doing to their brain.

41:01Dr. Raymond Prior:and keeping in mind that how it shapes in those years when it is the most neuroplastic and all those pathways are being most myelinated, meaning the fastest and strongest pathways in our brains. At 25, our brain starts being so neuroplastic, which means now you're kind of stuck with what you got. So we are seeing generations of children that are growing up more anxious, more depressed, particularly women, and more boys and men that are not going outside of the cave, so to speak, in order to pursue the things they want because they don't have to. It's not as good. And they will acknowledge that.

41:38Dr. Raymond Prior:Research shows us men are like, oh, I would rather go on a date with a woman or I would rather have a job that I like than sitting in the basement playing video games. But it's super safe down there. There's a lot less risk. And I get the partial versions of the real things in life. So as much as social media and being on the internet is a tool for us and it is like for example people might be able to connect with this podcast through it there's also a downside to that that we are really not paying attention to it'd be kind of like um imagine you have your children and i said take them downtown to the biggest city near you and you were just going to leave them there you would never do that but instead i'm going to give you access to the entire internet without any safeguards on it and that is by far a more dangerous place for your brain.

42:23Dr. Raymond Prior:Specifically, also in real life too, though we know for sure that women are far more likely to be predated upon sexually in a digital life than they are their real life. And it's not zeroing either, but it's far more. Or for boys, they are also far more likely to be scammed upon or predated upon online than they are in their real life. But we often see this as a safe place because a kid's not going to get run over by a car or scrape their knee when in reality there is a cost to that for us oh and by the way the algorithms on those things the way they get your attention anxiety frustration and anger and self-righteousness which is another way of saying hey worry about everything all the time surprise surprise we get anxious to get angry about everything all the time even things you don't understand that are cut into clips taken out of context so on and so forth and self-righteousness is in the way of saying confirmation in a biased way that makes you feel good about your identity which if we just look at it for example politically that's why we have political parties that are getting farther and farther apart and cannot compromise and work together on on almost anything not to make this a political thing but all that being said that's how we're shaping our brain when we're young if we're not paying attention which is important for parents to consider, when do I give my children a cell phone?

43:44When do I allow them on social media? How much do I let them on social media? So on and so forth, because those things definitely do matter. That's really scary. If you look at the research behind what social media is doing to our brains, particularly for young people, it's pretty terrifying.

44:02Dr. Raymond Prior:There's a really good book on some really good research. I believe it's called The Anxious Generation. I was just going to say that. Really good book, yeah. So he does a really I forgot who the author is, but he does a really good job of synthesizing quite a bit of this data in terms of like what cell phone and social media use is doing to our to our young people's brains. So how do we motivate kids or even ourselves to take control or, you know, in this situation, Haley talking about her kids or especially if you have a 25 year old or a 24 year old. And because I know you also talk about motivation and discipline and how it's different.

44:47Yeah.

44:48Dr. Raymond Prior:So as a frame of reference, it's not that we are or aren't motivated. We are always motivated. It's a matter of what we are motivated for and not motivated for, or what we are directing our motivation to or not to. With particularly teenagers, I think it's really important for us as adults, and there's some significant research to back this, to meet them with the empathy we would like them to meet us with. for example, I've got a son, all he does is play video games. So instead of me harping on him, stop playing video games, you're wasting your time. What are you doing with your life? Go outside, do whatever.

45:23Dr. Raymond Prior:Hey, time out, bud. Tell me, I'm really curious. Tell me what it is about these video games you love so much. I'm not even telling you to play less. I'm going to help me understand what it is about playing this that you like a lot. Chances are they're going to, and if you meet them without judgment and just curiosity for a while, chances are they're going to tell you a bunch of things that you go, yep, you could get that in real life. Yep, you could get that in real life. Oh, I understand. Then if you meet them with empathy, without judgment, long enough, oftentimes that opens a door for you to go, hey, bud, could I just share with you why I'd really like you to maybe do a little bit less of that and a little bit more of this?

46:02Dr. Raymond Prior:And then which case then now you can try to find a middle ground where, okay, we're going to decrease the video games during this time and we're going to go try this. And they might have some choice in that. You want to try a sport? You want to try a musical instrument? You want to just hang out, you and me, doing something other than video games? But oftentimes as parents, we hit them with this wagging finger. And anybody who's been a teenager knows you get hit with that wagging finger. And it's like, it's only resistance. Or even if you think about our relationships, imagine your spouse comes to you with just the, why are you doing this?

46:36Dr. Raymond Prior:How are you doing it? go do something I want you to do. You'd be like, go stick it somewhere else instead of meeting our spouse with like, help me understand this or help me see your perspective about this. Or what is your experience like behind this? Oftentimes then opens the door for that person to be then open to us being like, I would like to see something different and here's why. Or it would be awesome if we could do something together differently, which just gives us a chance again for a different experience in a way that might be more productive. But motivating high schoolers or middle schoolers or people that are young, they're motivated.

47:12The problem is that we, the avenues with which they can meet those motivations are oftentimes those of instant gratification that, again, isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is the easiest access for them that if we don't try to understand that it's very hard for them to be motivated to try to do something else. So in our relationships, it's the exact same thing. Like if you meet your partner with empathy, curiosity, and take that same set. And just imagine if I was doing something and my spouse didn't like it or wanted me to make a change or wanted us to make a change, what would I want them to come to me with?

47:53Dr. Raymond Prior:An open-ended question and a prompt, being curious about my experience and tell me more about why this or what the heck is wrong with you? You can't do that. Like you think about most of the time, conflict in marriage. First of all, it's very rarely about the thing that it's actually about. It's usually we've bottled up something or shoved something down or we're holding resentment for something else. Or the way we have approached that conflict or that change is makes the other person intensely defensive. Have you ever watched like another couple have a fight and you're like, what do you guys do?

48:26Dr. Raymond Prior:Like, this is going nowhere because you came in like this, you got defensive like this, and now you're arguing about something that this is not even about. We do that with people all the time, including ourselves. And so there's different ways for us to meet ourselves. And again, empathy and curiosity are usually the best roads. They are a more growth mindset-oriented approach, and you're trying to understand that person. So you're trying to get it right with them, not be right to them. There's been like 10 mic drops in this. Okay. So I kind of want to move on because I know your time is limited.

49:06I feel like we could do this all day. If we go to the sleep psychology and the sleep science, because here, once us women get midlife, it is no fun when four months start.

49:20Dr. Raymond Prior:I was about to say, as you've been getting older, have you also been finding it more difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep? Yes, it's terrible. It really is challenging. So can we dive into that? Yeah. Would it be helpful if we focus a little bit more on women, particularly as they get older? Yeah. So a couple of different reasons for women that it's harder to sleep as they get older. One is there's a gland in our brain called the pineal gland. It's about a pine cone shaped type thing in the back of our brain. And it produces a chemical called melatonin, which is not creating or maintaining sleep, but it helps time sleep.

50:01Dr. Raymond Prior:You can kind of think about it like it's the conductor in front of the symphony. The symphony is creating the sleep, a.k.a. the music, and maintaining it, but the conductors kind of run in the beat. For women, that gland starts to calcify sooner than it does for men and faster. in which case then your production of melatonin starts to get decreased for sure and sometimes can be irregular now i would recommend very strongly consulting with a doctor before you just go start taking melatonin for a couple of reasons one it's really only helpful for us if you are actually melatonin deficient which depending on what's keeping you from sleeping as well that might be part of it it might not so again before you just go run to a doctor and also talking to a doctor to get an actual prescription for it, if it's necessary, is better than going and buying it off the shelf.

50:54The melatonin off the shelf is not FDA regulated. So you might get in the same bottle doses that have no melatonin in them or up to 700 times the labeled in the bottle. And these supra physiological doses are really, really bad for us in just about anything. So I wouldn't recommend over-the-counter melatonin to anyone. Springtime is almost here. And if you've been itching to redo every room in your home, Bob's Discount Furniture can help. When you shop at Bob's, you get wow-worthy everyday low prices on fabulous furniture for every room. Everything from stylish mid-century dining sets and top-rated Bob-O-Pedic mattresses with the best warranties in the business to pop-up sleeper sectionals all for a fraction of what they cost elsewhere.

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52:14like kind of a dangerous thing to mess around with, particularly if you are younger. So if you're a woman, you're having a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep, you might want to touch base on what your melatonin levels are, but do so with a either a sleep doctor or at least the physician, where if you are going to get a prescription, you are getting what the bottle says it is, and you are sure that you are melatonin deficient, which as women age, they are far more likely to be. Another reason for women is that your hormones are changing right around mid-age and there's going to be some fluctuations with that.

52:51The biggest fluctuation, at least what the research shows in terms of how it disrupts sleep, is body temperature. You're going to get hot, you're going to get cold, and it's going to fluctuate quite a bit. So body temperature is a bit of a universal language in our body. So all of our systems and organs and stuff speak with each other, but typically they only speak with the things that are kind of right next to them or in the close vicinity. Therefore, they might not speak the same language as something else. Body temperature, universal language. So if my brain goes, we're going to turn the temperature

53:21Dr. Raymond Prior:up or the temperature down, every single system in our body responds to this. So a couple of things that women can do to try to help regulate that, particularly during hormonal changes, whether it's a monthly hormonal change or a menopausal change, moving your shower to about an hour or 45 minutes before you go to bed and making it slightly uncomfortably hot. Or for those who have a sauna or a hot tub can also work to a jacuzzi type setting. What that does is a couple of minutes doesn't have to be a ton, two or three minutes. What it does is it actually increases our core body temperature. and then once it gets high enough, our body dumps all of that temperature out through our skin.

54:04It's a process called vasodilation if you're looking to impress somebody at a party with your vocabulary. And so that takes about 45 minutes or an hour, in which case that pushes our core temperature down. Core body temperature going down helps to time to create and to maintain sleep. also be very mindful of your room temperature so we're looking for basically like 65 degrees plus or minus a degree depending on how hot you are feeling you want to pay attention to what your sleepwear is if you're someone who tends to overheat you might take a couple of blankets off change your sleepwear to be like a thinner or not at all depending on what your preferences are where again you're giving your body temperature a chance to stay low enough for you to sleep a little bit more.

54:52One of the things that also keeps people up at night, which is particularly more prone for women, is anxiety. And one of the fastest, or not fastest, one of the more productive ways to be able to do that is most people, especially women, at no time during the day actually just sit with their own thoughts and do nothing with them. A mindfulness practice, a yoga, a something. And so the first time they have, I'm not doing anything else. Access to their thoughts is when their head hits the pillow. And then surprise, surprise, here comes a whole mess of my thoughts, my feelings. I'm processing this from my day.

55:30I'm feeling this from my day.

55:31Dr. Raymond Prior:I'm working through this, all these things. And again, men and women do this. We know that women do it more because they are more feeling oriented, process oriented. And in our current culture, women tend to push things away for the sake of others they are far more likely to be people pleasers than men in which case then if i don't give myself a chance during the day to just chill sit down with my own cup of coffee sit in silence for a little bit read a book do something where i don't have to do something other than tune into myself that's coming out when your heads hitting the pillow. So that can be helpful for us.

56:10And then also for women who have like a lot of thoughts come out when their head hits the pillow or men, by the way, having queued up on their phone, perhaps like a sleep hypnosis, which is not a carnival hypnosis. It's more of like a breath centered or body scan mindfulness practice to have on their phone to then help ground their thoughts. Grounding thoughts means they are moving toward this.

56:33Dr. Raymond Prior:So I'm focusing my thoughts on just listening to this voice. Also helps down regulate our nervous system, particularly our sympathetic nervous system. So that helps lower our breathing rate, lower our heart rate, lower our body temperature, all things that help push us towards sleep. And for anybody, but particularly women, again, who are oftentimes feeling like they have to do everything, having a really consistent sleep schedule as best you can, that is trying to go to bed at the same time and wake up near the same time as you can. Caveat to this, we have life demands and sometimes we sacrifice sleep for the things and the people who are important in our life.

57:14But the more consistent your sleep schedule is, the more your body wants to generate sleep and wakes more alert day in and day out. So that would be like on the top of the list for anyone trying to improve their sleep. And there's a bunch of other stuff, but those would be some real nuts and bolts for people. and then two of those for sure for women to pay attention to as you're going through some hormonal changes and those hormonal changes particularly coming from your pineal gland. What if you wake up like at three or fourth morning and can't go back to sleep done?

57:46Dr. Raymond Prior:Super common and again particularly if you're going through different hormonal changes that impact sleep directly like melatonin and a variety of other things or the types of hormones that change our body temperature. well first of all counting sheep don't do that bad news bears um oftentimes but not counting backwards so the long and short of it you want to stay away from arithmetic and that being and the reason for that is not because math is bad it's because it's stimulating for your brain like oh how many sheep have i counted how many could i get to and i've done this backward like so it takes uh what do you do connected it takes a lot of processing for our brain which makes it likely to stay awake.

58:27Other things to avoid, like a device, phone, tablet, something. It's not just that it's stimulating for your brain. There's also light coming from it. Light is one of the waking signals. So if you're awake and you want to go back to sleep, light is your enemy for that one. Some better options are, one would be to take a mental walk. A couple of rules of thumb here. I mean like a peaceful, but kind of not exciting place. So that's just like a walk down an endless beach. Nobody else is on it.

59:00Dr. Raymond Prior:No boats going by, no whatever, just like endless beach with waves forever and ever and ever. Anytime your thoughts might deviate from the beach, you just allow them to come back to the beach and you just walk and you just walk. And it's boring enough, but calm enough that your brain's like, all right, well, we might as well consider this sleep option again. and then find a setting that works for you. Some people like walking through the endless woods. Again, no animal life, nothing exciting that would keep your brain like, ooh, this is exciting. I wonder what just this boring walk through the woods that is somewhat tranquil.

59:35Other options are to read in really, really low light. The caveat here is you got to read something that is like really boring where your brain is like, you know when you're in college and you're reading your textbook and you're like hard to stay awake? Yeah, we're looking for that while we're trying to have a hard time to sleep. So low light. And if you have to, you can get out of bed. So a hard copy of something not on a tablet or on a device, low light. And then as soon as you're kind of feeling like kind of sleepy, then you can can return far better options than trying to count sheep or do arithmetic or jump on our phone.

1:00:12or by the way, just sit there wide awake. These are some things that tend to trigger sleep better for us. And then the big picture too, for many people, if you are waking up at night and having a hard time falling back asleep, one thing to check is your alcohol intake. If you're going to say, Raymond, what concoction would you create that would ruin people's sleep? Alcohol. So it creates what we call pseudo sleep, where your brain is not really asleep while it's too asleep. and it's very shallow sleep. The shallower our sleep is, the closer we are to waking. So if you drink alcohol before bed or in the evenings or drink enough of it, you don't really get into deep sleep and you're in shallow sleep the whole night as your brain's trying to figure out how to get into deep sleep.

1:00:57And it's just easier to wake there and harder for us to get back to sleep oftentimes as well. Also, drinking a lot of alcohol is a rough thing for our nervous system because turns out alcohol is kind of poisonous to us. And so your body temperature is going to be higher as your body is trying to process and deal with all of that as well. Again, not against alcohol ethically or morally. I enjoy a good bourbon myself from time to time, but it is not good for our sleep. Well, I have my book, A Tale of Two Cities. That's what I'm going to read.

1:01:29Dr. Raymond Prior:That's exact. You are looking for what it goes like almost go back to high school or college in the book that you were assigned that you absolutely hated and you said I would never ever ever read this because it is so boring that's what you want and you want to have it queued up just in case uh you wake up in the middle of the night I tried to read it over Christmas vacation a few years ago don't ask me why instant nap creator yes I kept falling asleep right at exactly right that's exactly what we're looking for which would be again a far better option than picking up a tablet or just laying there wide awake and rolling over and over again throughout the night.

1:02:10Yeah, it's the worst. Now it's done. Okay, asking for a friend. Sure. What have you been taking melatonin for a long time? Yeah, I would say you'd want to check what kind you're taking and is it over-the-counter prescription? And also you would probably just want to consult with a physician, like are you actually bellotone and deficient? Springtime is almost here. And if you've been itching to redo every room in your home, Bob's Discount Furniture can help. When you shop at Bob's, you get wow-worthy everyday low prices on fabulous furniture for every room. Everything from stylish mid-century dining sets and top-rated Bob-O-Pedic mattresses with the best warranties in the business to pop-up sleeper sectionals all for a fraction of what they cost elsewhere.

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1:03:35Dr. Raymond Prior:been it's probably been helpful for you or perhaps if you're getting on one where you know for sure what you're getting that might improve things for you if you're not melatonin deficient it's not that you can't take it but you don't nearly need to you could perhaps start doing some other things to try to help time your sleep rather than relying on on that which again one of the dangers like for example, giving children and teenagers melatonin is when you start supplementing melatonin, that's also telling the pineal gland, you don't need to make this because I'm going to give it to you, which means it's also that pineal gland, although it's also responsible for testosterone and estrogen.

1:04:12Dr. Raymond Prior:So if you give it to teenagers, you're also kind of, you can be stunting puberty and they might not get that growth period back. In fact, most of the time they don't. Also for women, again, if you're going through menopause and those hormones are fluctuating, you'll want to touch base with a physician about is it worth taking melatonin? Maybe it will be because it might help regulate those. At other times, it might make those less regular. So again, important to touch base with a physician, hopefully one who knows a little bit about or hopefully a lot about sleep before you start taking things to help us sleep.

1:04:47Most of the

1:04:48Dr. Raymond Prior:sleep aids that we take and ingest are not actually helping sleep. They're just making us either a drowsy or they improve what we call sleep latency. Sleep latency is a big fancy way of saying how long it takes you to fall asleep, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's helping you sleep better. In fact, oftentimes it might make that sleep worse. For example, alcohol, you drink enough of it. It's a depressant. You will feel drowsy. You will fall asleep slash unconscious faster and sooner, but your sleep is wrecked after that. So if you have been taking something, I would say touch base with a physician, hopefully one who is well-informed on sleep, just to see what impact that's having, whether it's necessary or whether it's helpful or not.

1:05:31Dr. Raymond Prior:And oftentimes some things might be benign, but it'd be worth exploring just to see what that is and isn't doing for your friend.

1:05:42I would have never thought to get my melatonin. Well, I never thought that the over-the-counter was, I mean, I'm using all sorts.

1:05:51Dr. Raymond Prior:Yeah, it can be. So yeah, there's a couple of studies. Any type of substance, there's going to be some studies on like, what does it say it is and what is it actually? Melatonin is one of the most egregious on the shelves where in a single bottle you can have again these doses that essentially have nothing in them all the way to these doses that are six seven hundred times what the bottle says like that's rough on your brain getting those two different levels of doses kind of day in and day out so um hopefully that's not what your friend has been experiencing but it might might be worth her just kind of touching base with what that is and how much not that i'm trying to scare people out of it.

1:06:29Dr. Raymond Prior:But what we put into our body doesn't just do that one thing. It generalizes most of the time. There are very few drugs we take that only impact this one area of our brain and none others. So it's important to kind of tune into that. I'm doing a detox. That's it. The worst part is like just lying there and having to just not. Well, OK, I'm going to be reading the book. I'm going to be reading the book. That's it. Yeah. OK. Or or you can take a mental walk down whatever beach and or by the way, maybe you're just skiing down a green forever and you're the only one there and that's it. Okay. So again, something tranquil, but semi-boring, meaning there's not a lot of changes in scenery.

1:07:13You're getting a far better option for you than just sitting there and hoping you fall back asleep when your brain's kind of awake at that point. Yeah. Okay. I'm committed.

1:07:23Dr. Raymond Prior:I should note for our listeners, like falling asleep and staying asleep is really challenging for a lot of people. Our brain evolved to sleep in the way that evolves, not at all like our modern world is right now. Like it's, it's a challenging thing to sleep well in our modern world based on what we expose our brain to. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Raymond, I'm so mad right now. I feel like I need to hire you for an entire day. I'm going to hire you for a conference. So if we're wrapping this up now, we started with, you know, the two fixed mindset, growth mindset, we ended with sleep. If our listeners are walking away, and if we kind of compile this back in and we go back to the fixed and the growth mindset, let's finish over there.

1:08:17what would be your parting words for people that have listened to this women that have listened to this that think oh i know what bucket i'm in yeah what what what parting words of advice would you get parting words they want to improve their life and they want them and they want to

1:08:36Dr. Raymond Prior:make some changes that are in their best interests or their meaningful pursuit right so i would just say, the facts of the matter are that everyone is a work in progress. Your past is not a precursor to your future unless you treat it as such. Then I would just say, what is the first step toward change and how could you make that first change as easy as possible? So if I was going to say, what if you were going to just try, where would you start? And then kind of going from there, rather than just following the narrative that has been created for you or you adopted or you created for yourself.

1:09:12What if it, well, essentially, if you were in a different story with a different narrative, what would that look like? And what would the first step toward it be where you're a work in progress and now you're putting in some work to make that progress, right?

1:09:23Dr. Raymond Prior:And then as you do that, be very mindful of the conclusions you make about things. Is it I am or I am not capable of this? Or is it this was hard and I'm going to try again tomorrow? Or this was hard and I can do this differently or, oh, that wasn't as bad as I thought it was. Hmm. Look at you trying something that was outside of your comfort zone and now actually wasn't as bad as you thought it would be. Like just kind of tuning into those things might be helpful for us, for everybody, by the way. Perfect way to end right there. Yeah. Thank you so much, Raymond. I appreciate you having me. Thanks for listening, everyone.

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