How To Start Your Day For Peak Mental & Physical Performance

28:36I used to stutter severely bad. So right now, I don't know how many people we're going to watch this. You know what gives me confidence? It's not, I no longer care if I sit and start stuttering at you. That's what gives me confidence is facing these things, overcoming them. And maybe not overcoming them every day, but facing them. And facing them and facing them pretty soon like this. You know what, man? This is where it's at. It's not in that comfort zone. It's in the discomfort zone is where my confidence is getting built. That's where it's getting built. But people want to, they want an easier answer.

29:09There has to be an easier way. There's not. I'm sorry. I searched for it my entire life. I did. You lied. I lied. I did everything. And I still felt empty. I coach a lot of people nowadays, billionaires, who call me on the phone and say, man, I'm still missing something. It's because they did what they were good at. And they have this beautiful family, two, three houses, cars, everything. has everything to work on the outside looking like my God man how can you be unhappy I walk around with a backpack with all my stuff in it and no car and I walk around happiest person in the world have nothing happy as hell it's because I found out the whole key to life it's not in all that you have to face yourself so many people live to be 100 years old and they die miserable having everything because they never examined.

30:09I call it my live autopsy. You never examine this. Happiness, peace, enlightenment. It's all up here, man. It's all up here. If I start talking like this, people are like, man, you know, I don't know. It's the truth, man. It's all up here. You just got to be willing to go and face it. And that's the hard part. What's your biggest insecurity today? Not to be arrogant, I don't have one. What was the last one you had, and when was that? The last one I had was probably still me. Me. Still living, because I always talk about, I pay rent. So we used to live in a$7 a month place when I was growing up.

30:56Is this in Buffalo or is this in Indiana? This is in Indiana. So we had a lot of money in Buffalo. And when my mom left my dad, we went to nothing. for a period of time before she got on her feet. And that$7 a month place used to be, it was my, it was who I was. I was no one. I was in the sewer. My mom wasn't there. I had nothing. And you always feel like you have nothing. I had achieved so much. I was a Navy SEAL. I'd gone through ranger school. I've gone through Delta Force selection training. I'd done so much. I run 200 miles, pull-up records, everything. learned to read and write became pretty intelligent and i still was like man what is wrong with me it wasn't until i got real sick and i talked about in the last chapter of that book i got real sick and i was about um 38 years old i'm 43 now and my life got real quiet i went from running 205 miles in 39 hours to couldn't get out of bed the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me.

32:02But once again, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Why is that? In that moment when my whole life changed, I went from a guy who worked out every day, trained every day to a guy who couldn't get out of bed. My life was taken from me. The one thing that kept me going was my training. Now you didn't have that. I didn't have anything. Now you just had to sit alone. Alone. And not train. And that's what changed me. And that's That's when I realized I hadn't thought, hadn't taken time to think about what I'd done in my life. You hadn't reflected yet. I hadn't reflected. I'd done all these things, but there was no finish line.

32:38I still believe that, but you must have time to reflect. Yeah. I was just going. I wouldn't even, I finished a race of life, and I wouldn't even receive my medal. I'd go on. You're like, on to the next. I'd get in the car and I'd go. You wouldn't even take the medal? Gone. Don't care about it. Like, I'm not going to waste an hour sitting around for this ceremony? Most people sit around and that's what they like. They need the ceremony if I accomplish something. Validation. I haven't done anything. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. I'm just getting started. I'm just getting started. It's right. When I started figuring out life, that I was leaving so much in the tank, I call it my 40 % rule.

33:11Yeah. I was leaving so much in the tank. Once I realized, my God, man, I was this dumb, fat kid being bullied. And now I'm a 180-pound person who lost 106 pounds in less than three months. Learn to read. Learn to do this. Learn to do that. I was like, I need more. I was fueling my mind with everything. And I never took time to say, my God, you came from this hell and you're here. So those insecurities, and this is how I explain it the best way. SEAL training became pretty hard and a lot of guys weren't getting through it. So they designed a SEAL prep program. Like a boot camp for the boot camp.

33:49That's right. And it was two months. In my last two years before I retired from the military, they sent me there to train these kids. Wow. To get ready for buds. 18, 19, 20 years. Young kids. So when they get to Navy SEAL training, man, they were physical studs. They were running, swimming. I mean, they were hybrids. Wow. But they get to buds and the same amount of people would quit. Why is that? This is why. We were training bigger, stronger, faster quitters. Hmm. It's not about. Not the mind. That's right. We weren't diving into the sewer. Everybody's got a story. We don't share it on social media.

34:31We share our nice life on social media. We all have a dungeon. I'm just willing to talk about mine. Yeah. Most of us aren't willing to talk about it. I'm going to talk about my dungeon. I wasn't getting into the dungeon of these guys' minds. I wasn't building that so-called mental toughness. Mental toughness isn't something that you sample. It's something that you live in every day. So when something hard would happen to these kids, like in Hell Week, it would draw on something that made them very insecure. And they'd look for comfort. Whenever hardness comes, and you don't know what it is. It may be different for you than it is for me.

35:11But you go back to your insecurities. And then when you go back to your insecurities, you then look for comfort. within those insecurities. And we all look for that cookie that your mom used to give you when you were sad, when you were sick. We look for our wife or our husband. We look for comfort. It's in those moments you must retrain your mind to think differently in health. I wasn't training them to do that. Why weren't you training them? I wasn't training myself to that because at that time, I was doing what I was told. These guys need to meet a standard. Physical standard. A physical standard.

35:50The physical standard is not what they need to meet. It's a mental standard you must meet in life. So going back to when I was sick, I was hitting the physical standards. I wasn't meeting the mental standard. The mental standard is you must know how far you've come. Wow. I had come 8 ,000 miles from where I started. But if you never know that, you're still in a$7 a month place. When I was sick, I was able to slow it down and reflect back on my entire life. And in that bed, when I thought I was dying, because that story is long, that sick portion of my life is long, I didn't care if I died or lived.

36:40Because I was, for the first time in my life, happy and at peace. Because I reflected back on where I started. You said, wow, I have come a long way. That's right. And no one saved me. It wasn't like someone came down here and guided me through life. When you figure this out on your own, the amount of pride and dignity and self-respect you have, that's why I walk around the streets with a backpack and just like, I don't need anything else. Yeah. You figure it out by going inside yourself, by callousing over the victim's mentality. You're always a victim, even if you have everything in life, until you realize what you've achieved.

37:22You have to first realize what you've achieved. And my mom has accomplished so much in her life since my father. But she hasn't done that one step. Really? She doesn't acknowledge it and reflect back? She continues to go back to the dungeon of her past life. And live in that space. And live in that space versus live in the space that she's in now and reflecting back on, my God, this is what I've done with my life. So. Have you talked to her about this? We talk about it all the time. And you have to be willing to go there. You have to be willing to really go there. Not surface. I don't live on the surface of anything.

38:00Surface is what got me where I was at. It got me from 175 pounds to 300 pounds. Telling everybody I'm good. I don't give a ****. I'm good. No, they're hollow words. A lot of us speak in hollow words. I used to speak in hollow words. I don't do it anymore. Everything that comes in my mouth has substance. It's real. And we all have these feelings in our bodies, in our minds, in our souls. I act on mine. a lot of us who are afraid of something we allow our minds to choose the path of least resistance so we go a different route I'm afraid of something that's telling me you must do this thing you have to go that way and most of us don't understand that mentality we go left and we wonder why we haven't fulfilled something in our lives it's because we continue to take the journey that is mapped out and how I look at it I talk in life like a lot of us in life want to take the four-lane highway that has roadmaps and all this other stuff on it, man.

39:06It tells you where to go, gas stations. The next 10 miles up, you're going to see a McDonald's or Cracker Barrel. It's the easy route. Very few of us want to go to the right side. That Cracker Barrel is that Midwest life. That's right. That's right. I'm from Ohio. It's all about it, man. Indiana. Cracker Barrel everywhere. Dude, that's amazing. Bringing back memories. This is powerful because I've been telling people this. I've been living that way unknowingly my whole life of like whatever the thing is I'm afraid of. When I was in high school, I started doing those things. Right. And it was just like I'm sick and tired of feeling afraid.

39:41Right. So I need to do the things that scare me the most. That's right.

39:48Is there something we should be thinking before we shut it off to set our sleep up for success mentally and then to really build into the next day where we wake up feeling like clear-minded and without this brain fog where we have more motivation, where we have more energy and excitement towards the next day and then doing that in a pattern every night. Is there any science around that? Is it like listening to a hypnosis? That could be very helpful. Which will help you clean out whatever's going on through the day and get clear and ready for the next day but also fall asleep so you're not thinking about it.

40:22But is there anything that can help you have better dreams so that you sleep better? What have you found there in the neuroscience? Yeah. So glad you asked this question. There's some really interesting data from a guy named Charles Zeissler, who is at Harvard Med. He's done beautiful studies on sleep in humans for many decades and a really fantastic physician and researcher. They observed something interesting, which is that about 90 minutes or so before your natural bedtime, there's a spike in alertness, planning and almost anxiety that all people undergo. And it's a normal, healthy pattern.

41:02The idea, and it's a just so story because we don't really know. I nor Chuck Zeisler nor anyone else was consulted at the design phase, as we say. But we assume this came about because prior to going to sleep, we need to shore up everything for safety. We need to lock things down, make sure everything's in its place because we are very vulnerable in sleep. Nowadays, this might manifest as you need to go to bed at 10.30 because you have to get up at 6, etc. And then right around 8.30 or 9, you start finding yourself running around doing various things. Many people worry about that and they think, oh, I'm really stressed because I actually need to go to sleep.

41:39and here I am wide awake, it tends to subside very quickly. So just the knowledge that that's a normal, healthy spike in alertness and activity, I think can help a number of people. I want to make sure I mention that. The other thing is preparing the mind, as you said, turning thoughts off. Turning thoughts off is a skill. We've talked before, gosh, almost a year or more now, ago about Yoga Nidra, which is, there are many, many Yoga Nidra scripts available on YouTube free of cost. the ones i particularly like are the ones by kamini desai k-a-m-i-n-i-d-e-s-a-i kamini decide i just really like her voice i don't know comedy never met her these are free scripts they're uh yoga nidra scripts that last about 20 minutes they involve some breathing some meditation type stuff they but they teach you to turn your thoughts off which is really wonderful because a lot of people, they just get stuck in this rumination.

42:39Now, is there an ideal protocol prior to sleep? It depends because some people find they have their greatest clarity after the kids are asleep and they're sitting there. So I wouldn't say don't work or do work. You know, you do want to avoid strong stimuli before sleep. So do you really want to watch, you know, politically charged or violent movie right before sleep? Well, that depends on how triggered you tend to be by politics or violence. Some people aren't triggered. Other people are. But that aside, you don't want to go to bed either too hungry or too full because that can inhibit your sleep.

43:20So for most people, that's going to be finishing your last bite of food about two hours before bedtime. But I confess there are days when I work or work or work and arrive at a place, a hotel, order some food and just, you know, eat a massive meal and then pass out. Right. Again, 80-20. Try and get it right 80 % of the time. What's harmful of being too hungry or being too full before you go to bed? You'll have trouble falling asleep and you'll wake up in the middle of the day. Both extremes. Both extremes. And I'm not a nutritionist or nutrition expert, but what I've found works for me personally is I tend to, I fast until about noon-ish each day.

43:58And then my lunch is low carb. So I tend to eat some grass-fed meat, some veggies, maybe some starches if I trained and a piece of fruit. If I didn't, I don't. And then I also have an afternoon snack. But then in the evening, my meals tend to be relatively low in meat and protein and higher in starches, which activate the tryptophan system and the serotonin system, which makes it easier to fall asleep. You can repack glycogen during the night so you can do muscular work the next day. Training of any kind, but also thinking. Your brain uses glucose. Sure, sure. So at night, I tend to eat pastas and vegetables and rice and risottos and things like that.

44:34Not in huge volumes, but I tend to eat less protein. It's not that I don't eat any, but I don't tend to eat big steaks right before going to sleep. Again, 80-20, 80 % of the time. So foods, certain foods stimulate the neurotransmitter pathways like serotonin that facilitate the transition to sleep. Now, what could you take? Well, some people will drink chamomile tea. Chamomile tea is enriched in something called apigenin. Apigenin is, I take it in supplement form, 50 milligrams of apigenin, but it's really just chamomile extract. And it tends to make you a little drowsy. And many people experience excellent sleep when they take apigenin and normally they struggle with it.

45:13Again, with supplements, I don't have a relationship to an apigenin company or anything like that. I want to be clear. And also supplements, check with your doctor, of course, all that. But the one thing I don't recommend is that people take melatonin. Don't take melatonin. I am not a fan of melatonin for the following reasons. First of all, melatonin does many more things besides just cause the transition to sleep. It also is involved in regulating some of the other hormones like testosterone, estrogen, and so on. Most of those studies are animal studies, but some of the data on humans indicate that as well.

45:45In kids, melatonin is one of the hormones responsible for suppressing puberty, and then melatonin rhythms change, and then puberty happens. so you know if your kid has already been taking melatonin uh i wouldn't be alarmed but just be aware and if you talk to your physician most physicians aren't really aware of this i would talk to an endocrinologist frankly also most matthew um matt walker would also um support this statement because i'm lifting it from him so um which is that most melatonin supplements contain anywhere from 15 of what's listed on the bottle so 300 of what's listed on the bottle the regulation of supplements is an issue.

46:23Even from a trusted brand, if you were to take, say, three milligrams or six milligrams of melatonin, it's a pretty standard dose out there, you are taking super physiological levels of melatonin. Your system does not see those levels of melatonin. Chamomile tea is okay. Chamomile tea or apigenin, it's a little hard to find, but apigenin is a great, it's chamomile extract, essentially. There are a few other things. Again, margins for safety will depend magnesium threonate which is t-h-r-e-o-n-a-t-e threonate um you know 142 milligrams or so of magnesium threonate again you could just shop for cost i don't want to name brands even though my podcast is associated with one i don't want this to become about that the magnesium threonate many people take in 30 to 60 minutes before sleep with apigenin many people find great benefit yes i am not a fan of taking serotonin or serotonin precursors 5htp l-tryptophan prior to sleep for the following reason the architecture of sleep as matt probably discussed here i need to watch that episode um he's so good uh includes a lot of slow wave sleep early in the night repair and recovery of motor circuits in the brain and muscular tissue and connective tissue that might have been worked with or damaged during the day and the second half of sleep tends to be enriched in so-called REM sleep rapid eye movement sleep more dreams that are very intense etc right that architecture is exquisitely controlled by levels of serotonin at one point and not having serotonin and others having acetylcholine release being very tuned to particular times in the night when you start messing with the serotonin system you disrupt that so my experience with 5htp i took it to go to sleep or l-tryptophan as i fall asleep like i got clubbed over the head by a grizzly bear but then i wake up an hour and a half later and i cannot fall asleep for me for two days wow very intense now i'm pretty um sensitive to these things but that's why i'm not a fan of those and I rely on magnesium threonate, apigenin, and some people also take theanine.

48:37But for the time being, I think magnesium threonate and apigenin or chamomile are great. If people don't want to take supplements, chamomile tea is a terrific, mild sedative to just kind of turn off some of that thinking. Relax. Okay. And what about working out and sleep? Okay. Yeah. Work out in the morning, afternoon, night. How does that affect the sleep? when you work out and how you work out. Yeah, well, I want to be fair to the fact that people have different schedules and different constraints and that work, getting that 150 to 180 minutes of zone two cardio per week is essential. People should be doing some resistance training regardless of goals or in order to maintain muscle because it's so important to avoid injury and maintain metabolism, et cetera.

49:26So you need to get it in somehow, but you then have to ask yourself, what's happening around that workout so are you going into a brightly lit gym at 11 o 'clock at night i in blasting music and are you drinking three espresso energy drink before you go you're going to be awake you're gonna have a hard time going to sleep it's not just the workout it's the context around the work yes my preference is always to work out as early in the day as possible that's my preference i don't always accomplish that we people should also know that if you work workout at the same time for three or four days, your body builds in an anticipatory circuit.

50:01You will feel an energy increase a few minutes before that workout. So if you are working out at 10 PM at night and you're finding it hard to go to sleep, if you can shift that workout earlier in the day, you will soon become a morning person. It might not be as natural as somebody who naturally wakes up at 4.30 or 5 in the morning, but let's say you want to get on an earlier schedule you want to get that morning light but also force yourself to work out in the morning and then by the second or third day of doing that you will start to feel more alert as you arrive to the workout because there are these anticipatory circuits that's cool working out late at night some people say cardio okay but not weight some people say i i think it's highly individual and i don't think there's ever been a really good study addressing that regularity is key i think for me the best times to work out are three hours after waking up 11 hours after waking up just based on body temperature rhythms or immediately like get up and just put the shoes on and just go and i don't tend to do that last thing very often these days i tend to wake up and move through the morning a little bit like a lazy bear sunlight and being awake for my caffeine caffeine but every time i do that early morning workout i feel much better and more alert all day you fall asleep Probably easily.

51:22And I fall asleep much more easily. And the other thing you can do to fall asleep is this might seem a little counterintuitive. I said that you need to lower your body temperature by one to three degrees. You can take a hot shower or do a sauna, which you would think, well, it heats you up. But when you actually heat the surface of the body, your brain cools off your core body temperature. Unless you stay in that heat for a very long time. So you take a brief, you know, I don't want to say how long people should shower. Get in the sauna or whatnot. or hot shower and then maybe rinse off with some cool water for not cold, but cool water, lukewarm water for 10 seconds and dry off and get into bed, your body temperature will drop.

52:01If you get into an ice bath or a cold shower - You'll stay awake. It's very jolting. So I don't recommend people do that late in the day unless they want to be awake for some reason at night. But the other thing is when this is a little counterintuitive, but my colleague at Stanford, Craig Heller works on thermal regulation. If you want to cool down and you put a cold towel or ice around your neck, you're cooling the surface of the body just like you would put a cold pack on a thermostat. What's going to happen? Your brain's going to start to heat you up. So I would avoid cold exposure right before sleep, especially if it's very stimulating, like to the point cold enough that you get that adrenaline.

52:38So cold air is key to drop the temperature down. Keeping the room cool. Cool. Yeah, but you don't want that really... Not like an icebox where you're shivering. Exactly. The acute cold exposure, as we call it, of an ice bath or something. Rather a sauna or a lot of people don't have access to sauna, maybe a warm or hot shower before sleep. But people tend to be very specific about this too. Some people like to shower in the morning, some people in the evening. I like to shower whenever I have an opportunity to shower. You know, generally I try and shower after I work out because if I don't, everyone suffers.

53:10But I think that if people don't have access to a sauna, that hot shower or warm shower before sleep can be very beneficial because the body will naturally start to dump heat and cool off as you get into bed. Gotcha. And then in terms of the actual architecture of sleep and dreams, with dreams, you know, dreams in the beginning of the night tend to be kind of mundane and seem kind of ordinary. And the dreams toward morning tend to be more intense. You wake up and you remember what just happened, not what happened hours before. Right. And the early part of the night, in very broad strokes, the early part of the night tends to be when we release growth hormone, when we tend to repair motor circuits and damage tissues.

53:58And there's a real lack of emotional context to those dreams. Now, the dreams toward morning tend to have much more emotional enrichment and be very intense. And so often if people see visual hallucinations, that's in the so-called REM sleep dreams. Why is that? It's interesting. Great question. Well, two things. You're also paralyzed during REM sleep. You can breathe, but you cannot move. And there's this interesting thing that happens in sleep where when we are in REM, rapid eye movement sleep, we have high degree of emotionality of dreams, but we are unable to release adrenaline. This is very much like trauma treatment where there's a desensitization.

54:42You're coupling an intense experience to an inability for your body to move or to have a reaction to that. Now, if you suddenly wake up, which I often do, you'll notice that the adrenaline kicks in. But this is kind of like therapy in your sleep or trauma release in your sleep. And if you deprive people selectively of this rapid eye movement sleep, a number of bad things happen. but one of the primary things that happens that's bad is that when you don't get enough REM sleep you are more emotionally labile during the day little things bother you more you're more irritable yeah anytime i see a comment on on instagram to me or anyone else and someone seems kind of prickly like well i always just think to myself i'm not getting enough REM sleep wow yeah or i tell myself yeah because i want to have some empathy for them they're just not neurologically up to snuff, meaning they're not working as well as they could.

55:36Now, there are other reasons why people can be combative, but I think lack of REM sleep is one of the main reasons that we feel irritable, easily set off. There are a number of very powerful things that happen in REM sleep that we should all be seeking. So if you wake up in the middle of the night, you really do want to try and get back to sleep. And then as the night goes on, you're spending a greater proportion excuse me, of your sleep in that rapid eye movement sleep. And those are when you have your very rich dreams. And when you wake up, oftentimes spending some time with a pad and paper, maybe while you're getting your outdoor sunlight is a great thing because you'll remember components of your dreams.

56:17The meaning of dreams has been debated for thousands of years. I would say, and I think Matt would agree, Matt Walker would agree, that some dreams do have tremendous significance. Others do not. There seems to be a very powerful effect of having a dream that makes people want to tell someone else their dream. Like we have this, I think we just have this need to want to put structure on something that seems very unstructured. It is a way, in a sense, when we're dreaming, we're crazy. Like space and time are completely fluid. Everything's, anything could happen. And when we have a dream that feels powerful to us, I think we understandably want to put some sort of interpretation on it.

57:02Meaning behind it. Yeah. I've had great insights through dreams. I've also had a lot of dreams that got me nothing. I wake up in the middle of the night and I tend to write things down that come to mind. I achieve my greatest clarity for kind of psychological and relational things. When I wake up first, you know, immediately I'll have a solution in my head or I'll think, I'm, you know, the other day this happened. And as we were talking about before the recording, I've been working through a very complex set of personal interactions. And these are not traumatic or anything like that. But I've been working with somebody to try and resolve a really hard problem that we have.

57:41And we were both committed to solving this problem. And I'll chip away at this and chip away at this. And they are much smarter than I am. So I'm struggling. And then I will go to sleep and I'll wake up at 3 in the morning. and boom, the answer, at least to whatever it is that I'm trying to resolve is right there. And I think it's because in sleep, you're trying, you're getting those repeats of the different circuits. You're rehearsing things you learned during the day. You're dumping the emotional load through this trauma release type mechanism of REM sleep. And then answers just kind of geyser up to the top.

58:14But again, I'm speculating what we do know at the neural level is that there's a replay of the neurons that were active during the day in sleep, but at much more rapid rates. Stuff, a lot of stuff we won't remember. That's what you're saying. Much of sleep is there. Much of the dreaming and sleep is designed to get you to forget things that are meaningless. What is happening to the brain as you're sleeping? Is it just connecting neurons? Is it flushing? Is it, you know, creating these images for you to remember? What's like the, what's the actual mechanics of it? Yeah. So several things are happening.

58:49One is this glymphatic washout. There's this literally like a spin cycle on the brain of dumping all the junk. That's why you want your feet elevated, right? That's why you want your sleep. That's why you want your feet elevated. The glymphatic washout is one. The other is adenosine, this molecule that accumulates the longer that we are awake, that actually gets reduced during sleep so that we can wake up feeling rested. In other words, if you've been up for a day and a half, you've got tons of adenosine in your system caffeine of any kind is an index blocks adenosine function i want to be careful because it's not actually an antagonist it's a competitive agonist for the aficionados but you're basically reducing adenosine function with caffeine when you sleep you reduce adenosine which is why i delay my caffeine 90 to 120 minutes after waking up yeah so you've got adenosine getting pushed back down you've got the glymphatic system washout you have reordering of neurons neurons and creation of new connections so that what you couldn't do previously, you can do the next day and the next day.

59:48You're learning. The trigger for learning occurs during wakefulness through focused, alert, motivated states. The actual rewiring of neurons, meaning the changes in the connections, occurs during sleep, in particular deep sleep. So a lot's happening in there. And during rapid eye movement sleep, the brain is incredibly metabolically active. It's just that the body is paralyzed. And some people experience this invasion of that sleep paralysis into the wakeful period. It's really scary. I've had this happen. You wake up and you're still paralyzed and you jolt out. Terrifying. You can't move. I feel like I'm screaming, but nothing's coming out.

1:00:26It's really terrifying. Terrifying. Terrifying. That's called what? Sleep paralysis? Yes, essentially. But that's an invasion of sleep paralysis into the waking period. It's like wake paralysis. Yeah. And I know you're not a pot smoker, but many pot smokers experience that more often than non-pot smokers for reasons that probably relate to the serotonin system and the so-called atonia, the inability to move. Interesting. So there's that. What else happens during sleep? Well, there's all sorts of interesting resetting of the digestive system, the microbiome. Are your muscles growing? or muscle growth probably occurs throughout the 24-hour cycle but a lot of repair of muscles and triggering a muscle growth probably occur during sleep i he's passed now um he was 11 years old when i had to put him down but i had this bulldog costello he's a 90 pound english bulldog mastiff when he was a puppy i would take a picture of him and then the next day i'd take a picture of it when he was larger the next day that's crazy well they're just growing at such a tremendous rate, right?

1:01:27And that's growth hormone. And during puberty, sometimes kids will be kind of locked up during sleep. You'll go in and see a kid sleeping. They'll be in some weird position. They'll get growing pains because actually the bones, you know, it's a lot to orchestrate the growth of the bones and the connective tissue and the brain and all that. It's not always perfect. And so sometimes there's a few days where things are a little I remember for months, my knees would hurt when I was a teenager. Yeah. And kids, my dad used to come in and push my knees down because he was worried that something was going on.

1:01:54That's the growing, you're growing, you're growing. Bones are like spreading, right? That's right. They're psychological growing pains and they're physical. And in your case, there was a lot of growing, a lot of physical. I'm not, I'm not short. I'm, I'm six one, but you're six four. Yeah. You're, you're, you're, you're a tower. Six five maybe. So, um, wow. So the, there's a lot of stuff going on in sleep. And are you burning a lot of fat too during sleep? Yeah. A lot of metabolism is happening during sleep. There's a beautiful paper that just came out. Gosh. Uh, I forget all the micro details.

1:02:24So I'm only going to say a little bit about it, but a lot of the removal of fat from the body from when we burn fat is actually done through the breath. We exhale, there's a carbon dioxide component. Isn't that interesting? It's a sweat in the breath, right? And then what? Not so much fecal elimination, but more that you're breathing out. Breathing burns more fat than... Well, no, no. Sorry. Elimination of fat from the body, if it's going to occur, because I have to be careful because the nutrition crowd online, they have claws, pitchforks, and they like to... They come after you. And they're ready, fire, aim type trigger.

1:02:59You said this. Exactly. So I want to be very clear. I believe in calories in, calories out. Yes. That's a basic principle. There are people out there arguing different, but basically if you ingest more calories than you burn, you're going to gain weight. If you keep the motor less equal, you're going to maintain. And if you burn more than you ingest, you're going to lose weight. Okay. Whether or not you lose from muscle, fat, or other bodies, compartments is a different story, but the utilization of fat as an energy source and the elimination of adipose tissue, of body fat, eventually boils down to something where, yes, indeed, you are exhaling the eventual molecules.

1:03:38Okay. But among other, there are some other routes as well. I mean, there's - How much fat are we exhaling a week? Well, it depends on whether or not you're in a caloric deficit or not. If we're in a deficit, then we're exhaling that fat? essentially well but it's been broken down into a number of different metabolic components crazy it's really wild to think about well if you think yeah and you might think well why not just remove it through the digestive tract but it's part of a whole lipolysis meaning the utilization of fat for energy the lipolysis cycle and an energy cycle you know if those of you that um uh enjoyed or suffered through college or high school you know the krebs cycle and atp and atp production and the mitochondrion cells and so forth.

1:04:18That was a whole business there. But so in sleep, this paper shows that each stage of sleep is actually associated with a different mode of energy utilization and carbon dioxide offloading and so forth. Or in the last episode, we talked about ideally you are nose breathing during sleep. You are not mouth breathing. So some people actually will shut their mouth with a little bit of medical tape. Huge benefits to that for getting enhanced oxygenation of the brain and body. You do not want to have sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is associated with sexual side effects in men and women. It's associated with cardiac arrest.

1:04:53It's associated with a number of bad things. A lot of people who are carrying a lot of extra weight who sleep on their back or even just who are carrying a lot of extra weight, unfortunately, they have a buildup of carbon dioxide in their system at night, especially if they're mouth breathing and they wake up not feeling rested. in all individuals, regardless of phenotype, as we say, their genotypes and their phenotypes, regardless of phenotype, the kind of droopiness and the bagging of the eyes that can occur from sleep apnea and the effects on... So become a nose breather. We talked about that in the last episode, how to become a nose breather, but you want to nose breathe during sleep if you can.

1:05:31Yes. And your partner will thank you too, because you're not snoring as much. Do you nose breathe at sleep? I think I do. I think I do. I'm told I snore a little bit from time to time. And a lot of people, even people who aren't carrying a lot of fat, but people who are carrying a lot of muscle who sleep on their back, oftentimes they're kind of suffocating during sleep. Every time I hear about a bodybuilder or a very large athlete dying, it's almost always a heart attack during sleep. They're on their back. and or their side but they're they're asphyxiating and they relate there's a beautiful relationship between breathing and heart rate very simply when you inhale your heart rate goes up and when you exhale your heart rate goes down wow and this has to do with the movement of the diaphragm and the change of the shape of the heart and signals from the brain i won't go into all that but when you inhale your heart rate speeds up and when you exhale it slows down and that's respiratory sinus say rhythmia for the for the aficionados so you know you want to create an environment around your sleep where it's dim lights in the evening you've had your meal maybe a cup of chamomile tea towards sleep maybe use supplements maybe you don't you wake up get sunlight in your eyes this is the kind of landscape you want to create sure cool room you want to avoid very stimulating stuff conversations and activity you know right before sleep yeah now some stimulating activities before sleep, we won't go into details, have a rebound effect afterwards.

1:07:01Matthew Walker's actually talked about this, how certain types of activities cause a rebound and relax. So sexual activities. Yes. I'm not trying to be vague here. What does that do for sleep if you have sexual activities before sleep? So sexual activity includes, it's really remarkable at the level of autonomic nervous system. So sexual activity involves an increase at first in the so-called parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, the relaxation system. But then it involves increases in the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system. And orgasm in men and women is actually purely driven by the sympathetic nervous system, the stress system.

1:07:46And then the post-coital period is when the parasympathetic nervous system kicks back on and there's a deep relaxation. So is it good to have sexual activity before bed or not that good? According to the architecture of what I just described, yes. Yes, it's good? Yes, it's good. Yes, it's good. Yes, it's good. It helps people sleep. And actually, when Matt Walker came on my podcast, we talked a little bit about some of the data on this. Now, even then, you know, so there are all sorts of questions about this that are now coming out. Now, the interesting thing about studying sex in the laboratory is it's very hard to do, right?

1:08:25I mean, there are ethical reasons. There are complicated reasons. And good studies have to be done in laboratories or by self-report. And with self-report, people lie, right? And they make up stories in one direction or the other. They're doing more of what they would like to be. They're either reporting more of what they'd like to be reporting of or less of what they would like to be reporting less of. But doing those sorts of studies in the laboratory is very difficult. There are sleep laboratories, But it's not often that couples are coming in and staying in those sleep laboratories together, although that does happen from time to time.

1:08:54But yes, after sex, there's a rebound in the parasympathetic nervous system, which is a deeply relaxing component of the nervous system. And the reasons for that aren't clear. I mean, one idea is that it's designed to put people in close proximity, not just run off and look for another mate immediately and to smell each other and pair bond through some of the pheromonal systems. Yeah. Powerful. Yeah. Yes, very powerful. An interesting form of a pre-sleep biology, for sure. And one that, let's be fair, as we were talking about during the break, every species has two main goals, to protect its young and to make more of itself.

1:09:32And while not all sex is designed for reproduction or used for reproduction, I mean, the whole architecture of the reproductive axis, as we say, from brain down to genitals is designed for that arc of parasympathetic, sympathetic, and then parasympathetic. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

1:10:14Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.