The Sleep Doctor's 5 Rules for Your Best Night Ever | Dr. Michael Breus

20:58So it's kind of funny. So I'm the sleep doctor, right? And about a year and a half, two years ago, I wasn't feeling up to snuff. My workouts weren't as good. My times weren't as good on the treadmill. So I called my doctor, the woman who takes care of me, Carrie. And I said, Carrie, you know, God, I'm kind of dragging ass. She said, let's do some blood work. Let's see what's going on with you. And I said, okay, great. So she thought maybe I was iron deficient, like I had anemia. Maybe there was some kind of deficiency, something was going on. So we got back and my testosterone was around 400. Now for a guy my age, that's still okay.

21:35But she was like, you know, let's put you on testosterone and let's see what happens, right? So she puts me on testosterone, almost nine months goes by. No change. All that happened was I lost more hair. Really? Yeah. Let me tell you, that was not the side effect I was looking for, brother. You're like, I want to get jacked. I want to get strong. Exactly. Exactly. And so then she turned to me and she said, Hey, Mr. Sleep Doctor, why don't we do a sleep study on you? And I was like, you know, I hadn't done one in a few years in the clinic when, when I used to be practicing on the regular, I would test out all the new equipment on myself.

22:07So I had a pretty good idea what was going on. So I actually, my company called Sleep Doctor, we actually do home-based sleep tests now. So by the way, since COVID, almost nobody really needs to go to the sleep lab if you're looking at sleep apnea in particular. So I got a machine, comes to the house, you wear it on your wrist with a little thing on your finger. That's it, by the way. That's the whole thing. You sleep with that. Sleep with that. Information ports over to an app. The next day, you're online talking with the doctor. Turns out I stopped breathing in my sleep 24 times an hour. Wow.

22:39Right. That's a lot. That's moderate sleep apnea. How long do you stop breathing for? So the definition is anywhere from 30 to 90 seconds. Come on. For real. You stop breathing

22:50Lewis Howes:for 30 to 90 seconds, 24 times an hour? Correct. That is sleep apnea. And you can't hold your breath for seven seconds? Right? Right. It's a little bit different. So it's fascinating when you start to kind of look through these ideas, but for everybody out there, obstructive sleep sleep apnea is where there's a blockage somewhere in your throat. Now, a lot of times we think of sleep apnea as a big person's disease. Look at me, dude. I'm 160 pounds soaking wet, right? I'm not one of those people, but I've got some level of obstruction that's here in my throat. So I ended up using a CPAP machine.

23:24So CPAP stands for continuous positive airway pressure. So literally it's an air compressor with the hose and a mask that sits on my face and pushes air down my lungs and opens the area that has collapsed and ascends the air to my lungs and I breathe all night long. Now, here's the thing. A lot of people say, I don't want to get sleep tested. I don't want to sleep with a mask on my face. Michael, it's not sexy. There's no way I'm going to do it. I'm claustrophobic. And they come up with every excuse in the book. CPAP's not the only solution, Lewis. Like there are mouth guards that you can wear with no hose, no mask.

23:57There are surgical interventions. Weight loss can help. There is a dramatic number of treatment modalities that we can do for people where you don't necessarily have to wear the mask, but people won't even get tested, right? Because they're afraid to wear the mask. If you've got undiagnosed sleep apnea, you are on the road to diabetes. You're on the road to atrial fibrillation, congestive heart failure. Like it's a mess. Cognitive decline for sure, right? Like this is a significant medical issue. And we want people to at least get tested for it so they know and understand what's going on. I had a question the other day I thought was really interesting.

24:36They said, Michael, are GLP-1s the new CPAP? Right? Because, you know, people are losing weight with GLP-1s. I think it can be helpful, but I don't think it's the only solution. And by the way, there's a pill now that's in progress. It's in the research trials. I would say 18 months from now to two years from now, there's a pill that you'll be able to take that will be able to help you with your sleep. So people need to get tested.

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27:45Lewis Howes:While supplies last, selection varies by location. See associate or lowes.com for details. Is it true that one of the greatest things that an individual can do to reach their greatness is to have better sleep? 100%. I think sleep is kind of like the volume knob for greatness, right? When your volume is low, nobody can hear you. You can't hear you. You can't perform at the levels that you want to perform. Sleep affects every organ system and every disease state. Literally everything you do, you do better with a good night's sleep. I mean, cancer has a circadian rhythm. I mean, we can actually help people with cancer faster and better if they're sleeping better.

28:29Really? It's unbelievable. There's now data to show that if you administer chemotherapy at a particular place in someone's circadian rhythm, we need less chemo and it works better. Come on. Dude, there's research out there. Wow.

28:42Lewis Howes:Absolutely. So wait a minute. So you can, if you have cancer and you get treatment, if you get chemo at a certain time. In your circadian rhythm. It could potentially, the research is showing that it helps you recover faster. And you need less chemo. Less poison is going into your body. Really? Oh, yeah. The research has been around for a little while. I mean, okay. So tell me about circadian rhythm. Why is this important for us to understand? and what should we know about our own circadian rhythms? So sleep is basically two separate systems in the brain. One is called your sleep drive. The other is called your sleep rhythm.

29:16Sleep drive works a little bit like this. When a cell eats a piece of glucose, something comes out the back end. That thing is usually called adenosine. Adenosine works its way through your system, goes through a very specific receptor area in your brain. As that accumulates, you get sleepier and sleepier and sleepier. That is sleep drive. By the way, as an aside, I'm kind of a sleep geek, So I'm all into the research. If you look at the molecular structure of caffeine and the molecular structure of adenosine, they're off by one molecule. What does that mean? So I'm going to tell you what it means.

29:48I figured out this thing. I call it the Napa latte. So here's what we do. The Napa latte. Yeah. You're going to like this. All right. So if you're a dragon ass, you've only got four hours, you know, the night before, you got a big presentation, going to be on a podcast, you're going to do something cool and fun. You want to be able to be present and be able to be at your best. Here's what I want you to do. Take a cup of drip black coffee, no cream, no sugar, throw three ice cubes in it merely to cool it down, slug it as fast as you can, and then take a nap for 25 minutes. You burn through the adenosine, right?

30:19And since caffeine and adenosine are off by one molecule, caffeine fits into that place, blocks future adenosine for up to four hours. So what does that mean? That means you're wide awake and not dragging it for four hours. Really? Absolutely. I do it with athletes. I do it with CEOs. videos all the time with my entrepreneur set. Don't do a Napa latte every day. Right. That's not, that's not what we're looking for.

30:42Lewis Howes:Once a month. If you have, if you didn't get a good night's sleep or something. Right. Exactly. But you can definitely use something like this to your advantage. So give me an example. You're, you're up all night ruminating, thinking, excited, you can't sleep. Maybe you only get a couple hours and you got a game, you got an event, you got a speech, you got something the next day. Right. I would say somewhere around 60 minutes before you're going to go on, right? Do this 25, take the coffee, cool it down, take the coffee, drink it. Why not hot coffee? Because you have to drink the whole thing fast.

31:11Okay. You can't sip it for an hour. No, that's not the goal. The goal is to put it in and close your eyes. And what if you can't sleep right away? Doesn't matter. It still works. Even if you never actually fall asleep, but be in a room that's quiet, that's dark. Give yourself a good opportunity to be able to do that, right? And sleep for 25 minutes? 25 minutes. You don't want to go over that. You ever taken a nap and felt worse, not better? That's because you sleep too long. This is a very subscribed nap, 25 minutes, right? With the caffeine in front of it, you'll be shocked at how well it works.

31:43That's sleep drive, all right? Now let's talk about sleep rhythm because that was the question that you asked me. What is circadian rhythm? Why do we care? This whole cancer idea, what's happening there? So circadian rhythm is kind of my area of expertise. It's one of the areas that I really love because within circadian rhythm are these things called chronotypes.

32:01Lewis Howes:Okay. So a circadian rhythm is a lot like hunger. You ever notice that you're hungry around breakfast time, around lunchtime, around dinnertime? That's your circadian rhythm for hunger, for sleep. At least here in North America, most people are sleepy somewhere between 10 and 1030. You go to Latin America where they take a siesta during the day, eat at 1030. I mean, these people are up, up, up, right? That's a whole different ball game. And we can work with those people, but circadian rhythms are basically your brain is telling you when to go to bed. Melatonin is really the big factor on the circadian rhythm side melatonin is a sleep regulator not a sleep initiator okay initiator would affect adenosine melatonin affects the circadian rhythm so i was looking i had a patient who came in and if i'm honest with you dude i failed i mean i failed with her we were trying everything we tried she had terrible insomnia i tried cognitive behavioral therapy which is my drug of choice if you will for my patients we tried medication we tried sleep hygiene.

32:59We tried everything. When I have a patient that doesn't do well, I bring them in for free and I just assess, assess, assess. Because clearly I must have missed something that's going on here. About halfway through the interview, she turns to me and this is when I was practicing on the East Coast. She said, Dr. Bruce, she said, if I just lived in California, everything would be great. Like explain that to me. She said, well, everything there is three hours later. She said, if I could just go to work a couple hours later and stay a couple hours, I think it'd be fantastic for me. I said, well, why can't you do that?

33:28She said, well, I don't think my boss would like it. My husband probably wouldn't like it. I take care of him and the kids, you know, waking up in the morning, that kind of stuff. She said, and by the way, I'm not doing well at work. I'm on like probation. Like my work product is down. I said, well, can I call your boss and ask him if you can come in two hours later? And she said, you can try. So I call up her boss. This was on a Monday. And I explained who I was and what I was doing, who I was working with. Of course, I got her permission in order to do all this. and uh he said you want to do what i said i want her to come in two hours later so so in this particular job she had to be there at 8 a.m right so i said i want her to come in at 10 and i want her to leave at 6 i said can we do that she leaving two hours later yes okay so you're still the same work hours but we're just starting two hours later exactly he said michael you can try whatever you want i'm firing her on friday wow i'm like no pressure great right wow so we run Did you tell your client, the patient this?

34:23Like, hey, no, no. Because then she really wouldn't sleep, right? Right, exactly. So I didn't tell her that part. So I call him back on Friday and he picks up the phone. And you know what the first thing he says to me is? I got three more employees I want you to talk to. Wow. Okay. This is what's called a chronotype. It's genetic. You don't actually get to pick it, by the way. I got interviewed a couple of weeks ago by the Wall Street Journal. And they said, what do you think of the 5 a.m. club? I said, I think it's the second stupidest idea I've ever heard other than mouth tape. Okay. Okay. Tell me why.

34:54Because 85 % of the world can't wake up at 5 a.m., Lewis. 85%. They're going to fail no matter what, genetically speaking. I can actually look. If you had your genome sequenced, I can look at your 23andMe or your Ancestry.com. I can show you where it's an area called the PER3 area. I want to be clear. There's about 30 areas that control this. but PER3 is kind of the big one that we look at. And if you have something called a single nucleotide polymorphism, which is a SNP, which means that the building blocks, if they flip one way, you're an early bird. Now you've heard of this term before. A lot of people out here have never heard of chronotypes, but they've definitely heard of early birds.

35:31If it's flipped another way, you're a night owl. If it's not flipped, you're what we used to call a hummingbird. Okay. So I was looking at this system and I said, now I've heard about this system. I was in school. I heard about it. Like it's kind of a well-known system. I said, but it doesn't encompass this woman I was talking with because she also had kind of a strange system. Sometimes it'd be late. Sometimes it'd be early. So it turns out that there's a fourth chronotype. Once again, this is genetic.

35:58Lewis Howes:So this is not just some social construct of just saying, ah, I'm a night owl. I'm an early bird or this is like, if someone's saying that they're actually, it's their body saying it. It's not, it's not, they're just like, ah, well, I just don't want to wake up early. That's right. Interesting. actually their body okay now i have always been you can test this yeah is this through blood work you're saying or is this through i've got a quiz online okay people can take and and look 30 questions online it doesn't take you but about three or four minutes um and it's it's not hard like this isn't like some oh my gosh i've got to figure all this stuff out like you can figure this out reasonably quickly to be fair i'm a mammal not a bird so i decided to rename the system so early birds are now lions because who wouldn't want to be the king or queen of the jungle right Right.

36:42And lions are very interesting people. They make up about 15 percent of the population. Right. And these are the early birds. So these are the people that wake up at five o 'clock in the morning. They're all chipper. I mean, honestly, the only thing I hate more than mornings are morning people. Right. I mean, come on. They're just too into the morning scene. Right. Right. They exercise early. these are the people that'll make a list and go from step one to step two to step three during the day. They have a very interesting personality kind of characteristic. Once again, only 15 % of people do this.

37:15So they're great for the 5am club, but 85 % of the rest of the freaking world is not going to do well at the 5am club. The next group, I call them bears. They're the ones in the middle. These are more solar sleepers. They go to bed around 10, they wake up around seven. And by the way, 50%, 5-0 % of the population is a bear. And I got to be honest with you, dude. I wish I was a bear. Life is built for the nine to five schedule works perfect for a bear, right? Absolutely perfect. And these people are a lot of fun. They're really good to work with. And, you know, a lot of times it makes a lot of sense.

37:53We've had almost three and a half million people take my quiz now. And so, yeah, it's amazing. And so what we've discovered is there are actually early birds, early bears and later bears within that category. Right. The next category I call wolves. These are the night owls. This is me. I've been a wolf my entire life. I'm the guy who like, it was crazy. When I first went to college, I took, you know, the classic freshman 8 a.m. The worst. It's the worst. It's awful. Number one, I missed it half the time because I was asleep. Right. Like my body just doesn't work. Then I was labeled lazy. Right.

38:27I was told that I wasn't intelligent. I was told all of these different things. And if all I had done is just taken some of those classes later in the day, dude, I would have crushed it. Right? Now, what's interesting about my night owls is this is where my creatives are, my CEOs. Right? These are my artists, my actors, my inventors. Because who gets an idea at 2 o 'clock in the afternoon? Nobody. I get it at 2 a.m. Right? Why is that?

38:52Lewis Howes:Is there something around brain chemistry? Yes, there is. Like the ability to dream or to let go or talk about dreams in a second. That's a slightly different category. But what's interesting is right after or right before REM sleep is when you turn out to be the most creative. Interesting. So, so far, I'll be honest with you. I haven't told you a whole lot. You probably didn't already know. You knew about early birds. You knew about night owls. You figured there must be people in between, right? My real kind of the thing I'm most known for is the fourth category, which I call dolphins. Now, people always ask, Michael, why?

39:22Why do you call them dolphins? so it turns out that dolphins sleep uni hemispherically so half of their brain is asleep while the other half is awake and looking for predators i thought they don't sleep right i

39:33Lewis Howes:mean they're just swimming in a circle exactly like if you see at the zoo or whatever just like exactly they're swimming 24 7 exactly so half of their brain has to sleep while they're swimming and then it rotates to the other half crazy right that is my insomnia groups that's what this woman was she was a dolphin and you know what percent is that it's about 10 to 15 percent closer to 10 And what are the wolves? The wolves are about 15%. So we've got 15 % lions. We got about 55 % bears. We got another 15 % wolves and about 10 % are dolphins. And then some people can float around. Now, I want to be clear about something.

40:08The dolphin is interesting because sometimes it's not genetic for a dolphin. Sometimes it's circumstance, right? So if you're a woman and you're going through menopause, you're a dolphin, dude. Yeah. Because your hormones are all over the place. This is all based on your melatonin and your cortisol moving up and down. So this is how it works is if you're a lion, your melatonin turns off at 430 in the morning, the cortisol comes up and now you're awake. But if you're a wolf like me, my melatonin doesn't turn off until seven, like a full almost 90 minutes later. So here's where it gets in really cool.

40:43So my book is called The Power of When, as in when to do something. What I tell people is don't change your chronotype, embrace it. change your activities to the time when your body will naturally have the hormones that you're looking for.

40:57Lewis Howes:So how do you know once you go through your quiz and you find out your chronotype? Yep. Then you should know when to have sex. 100%. So you can learn when to have sex based on your chronotype to have the best night's sleep? Absolutely. So when is that? So let's talk about it. So everybody always wants to know. So I'm going to give a general recommendation and then I'm going to get some specific recommendations based on people's chronotypes, right? So in order to have sex successfully, you need five hormones to be elevated. You need estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, adrenaline, and cortisol all need to be high.

41:31And melatonin, the sleep hormone needs to be low. So when we surveyed people, 75 % of people have sex between 10.30 and 11.30 at night. What do you think their hormone profile looks like? It's the opposite. Melatonin is high and all five of those things is low. So that's hint.

41:47Lewis Howes:You need that to switch. exactly so you should be having morning sex not night sex so you you're already caught on you're quick you've already caught on right so then the second thing is if you happen to be having sex with somebody who was born biologically male what do most men wake up with in the morning an erection if that's not mother nature telling you when to use that thing i don't know what is yeah if you're exhausted at night and you can't get an erection why force it exactly it's not not tonight I have a headache. It's not tonight I'm too fucking tired. Like that's what's really going on here.

42:19So everybody here who's watching and listening has a prescription for with their partner to be able to, if you want to have sex, try it in the morning time, go to the bathroom, throw in a little mouthwash first, right? Then hop back in bed. Here's what's interesting. We surveyed people when we asked them to do that. Men actually have better performance. They have better erections and they last longer. Women have better emotional connection, right? Now, Now, here's the question that I get asked all the time. Michael, this all sounds great, but what if I'm a wolf and my wife's a lion? What do we do then?

42:50So in the book, I created a matrix. Sure, sure. So I've got male on the one side and female on the other side. And then I also created one for gay and lesbian couples because the hormones are different. Right? So we can figure this out, dude. Like it's not hard to do. I can tell people the best time to have sex, eat a cheeseburger, work out, drink caffeine, have alcohol. all of it runs on these circadian systems based on your crown. It's like, this is the biggest unlock that anybody could do. Wow.

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44:18Lewis Howes:Learn more at directtv.com. Restrictions apply. Okay, so here's the thing. I feel like when I was growing up, I was more of a wolf. This is such a great question. I know where you're going. Yeah, you are. But then through social conditioning, through sports, where we had to wake up at 5 a.m. for lifting, And it's like, yep. I had to condition myself, essentially go against my nature or the way my brain was working at that season of life. So to try to fit in with, you know, high school, college, then pro sports, then. Yeah. But then I flipped back to being a wolf when I was an entrepreneur because I was like, oh, I'm just up all night thinking and now I can create and do.

44:57Lewis Howes:And there's, there's everyone's asleep so I can actually get some work done. Yeah. But then I was like, okay, well, 2am every night doesn't work also because now I'm gaining weight and i'm that it's like my healthiest yep so i feel like i've become more of a bear and probably more of an early bear now yeah just so i can get up and get my workouts in first and now with twin daughters like i gotta spend time with them in the morning so it's like fitting things in the morning so it's called chrono longevity okay so you go through all of the phases in your lifetime yeah i'm sure i've been a dolphin in the same season also you know Your daughters right now are lions.

45:32They go to bed early. They wake up early, right? Once they hit middle school, they're going to be bears. They're going to go to bed around 7.30. They're going to wake up around 7.30. Then adolescence hits. I don't know an adolescent who doesn't want to stay up until 2 and sleep until 12. Yeah, that was me. That was me. Me too, right? Then when you hit about 20 years old, it sets for about 30, 40 years. Really? Yeah. And then it starts to go backwards, right? So if your parents are still alive and you call them up and you said, hey mom i want to go out to dinner tonight you know she would say oh great i'll meet you at 5 30.

46:03yeah exactly right my mom's taking a nap throughout the day multiple times because well we should talk about that yeah but what's interesting is your your chronotype seems to go backwards so it shifts throughout your lifetime based on stress based on gender based on uh women if they're going through menopause men can go through something called andropause so there's a whole host maybe how much daylight you get during the day all these such and i'm so glad you asked that because that's such an important factor light turns out to be the biggest factor when it comes to sleep in terms of allowing you to sleep because melatonin cannot be produced in the presence of light really yeah we call it the darkness hormone or the vampire hormone because

46:40Lewis Howes:it only comes out at night so you your body won't create melatonin if the sun is out that's correct or if you see the sun correct now what happens with jet lag people always ask me this like i'm an airplane michael and my body thinks it's this time and my that's why we get jet lag is because of this mismatch between our brain and what's going on in our environment so how do you never get jet lag believe it or not there's an app for that i've seen that it's called time shifter i've seen that yep so does it work full disclosure i'm both an investor and developer of time shifter okay all right but i'm going to tell you something the works it works so what we do is we give you a schedule.

47:18We know where, so about 15, 20 years ago, they discovered that if they put a specific frequency of light, blue light, in fact, in front of you for a certain period of time, we can shift your circadian rhythm by almost eight hours. So it turns out jet lag is a math problem, right? So if I know where your circadian rhythm is, let's say you're in LA and you're going to Paris, right? Well, I know what time it is in LA. We know what time it is in Paris and we know what time your flight is. All we have to do is time when we show you the light that squelches your melatonin, and then we give you a little bit of melatonin when you're supposed to be sleeping on Paris time.

47:52And if you can't quite wake up because your melatonin is still trying to come through, we give you a little caffeine, maybe even take a nap. And by the time you get to Paris, I have you on Paris time. Come on. Swear to God.

48:04Lewis Howes:So does the app give you a blue light through the phone? Is that what it is? It doesn't have, no, it doesn't. But what you do is you can just, you can bring a light with you or you can turn a light on. You can use any one to like any light that you want. Really a blue light though. Yeah, yeah. does not not blue the color these lights have blue in the frequency saying got you so blue light is a frequency between 460 and 480 nanometers and you just look at it now you don't have to stick it here like you can have it here while you're eating breakfast or things like that like for i have a lot of clients who are live in new york city right and you know during the winter like it's dark dark right also by the way we just kind of flipped over to daylight saving time that messes you up too it's a terrible idea why i mean it's a terrible idea my whole last week was a mess because of this yeah and by the way your daughters will actually be lagged behind oh they were i know it's rough it's awful dude because it was lighter later they were going to bed and i was like and they were fussier for hours i was like why do they keep allowing daylight savings to happen they shouldn't the american academy of sleep medicine been very clear on this standard time is where we should all be the bottom line people shouldn't wake up in the dark okay because melatonin still keeps going so what you have to do is get one of these light boxes you can buy I'm on Amazon for like a hundred bucks.

49:14I travel with one all the time. Really? Yeah. I put it in my sleep kit. I create my own sleep kits when I travel. So we shouldn't wake up during the dark. Absolutely not. It's just your body wasn't designed to do that. But there are lions that wake up in the dark, right? They do. They do because their melatonin turns off naturally. Interesting. Yeah. It's pretty cool. I'm telling you something. This chronotype is an incredible unlock. I had one entrepreneur chronotype his entire company and then schedule meetings based on people's chronotype. Come on. Think about it. If I know what time of day you're going to be focused and paying attention, you're going to be able to be present for the meeting.

49:52Like there's data to now show that an average employer loses approximately$3 ,200 per employee per year based on something called presenteeism, which means the body's there, but the brain ain't there. If you're trying to have creative meetings at eight o 'clock on Monday morning, and most of your creatives are wolves because that's the people who are the creatives dude you're never

50:14Lewis Howes:going to get anything done what's the best time for a wolf to be creative in the evening time so as an example when i work with creative agencies like marketing agencies or some of the big brands what i'll tell them to do is like don't have your 8 a.m monday morning meeting have it thursday at four o 'clock bring some guacamole a little and a little bit of beer and you're going to get more out of your group than you could possibly imagine because they're there they're present that's what greatness is wow it's being present yes right man that's fascinating so as a new parent to twin girls they're gonna be rough bro they're gonna be five months this week congratulations thank you very much it's a beautiful journey um it's pretty cool what advice as a sleep doctor would you have for me to ensure that I get the best sleep possible.

51:07Lewis Howes:My wife gets the best sleep possible. Yep. Yep. Yep. Knowing that things are to keep evolving as they grow. Yep. So there's a whole host of different things, but my favorite is what I call the on-call system. So here's what's going to happen. So they haven't told you this yet, but teething is right around the corner. It's coming soon. It's going to be, they're starting to put everything in their mouth now. Yeah. And they're sucking on things and it's really painful. Like the teeth erupt through the gums. Like it is not fun for the baby, right? And so they're going to be fussy. They're not going to be sleeping well and things like that.

51:37So what I always recommend is, for example, you take Monday night, Wednesday night, Friday night. What's your wife's name? Martha. Martha takes Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. You flip a coin for Sundays. And here's the deal is if the twins get up, it's one person who has to get up with them. Not both. Why should both suffer? Exactly. And if you alternate like that, you can get one good night's sleep and then one crappy and then one good and one crappy, and then you make it through your day. And then it's just a matter of time to get through it. Now, here's what's also cool is if you're a lion and your wife is a wolf, you could actually do it like that.

52:09You can take advantage of the prototype.

52:11Lewis Howes:Exactly, that's smart. Exactly, interesting. Now, we mentioned briefly about how different cultures sleep in different ways. You know, I'm an American, I was raised here and there's a certain standard of living and when people eat around six to 8 p.m. maybe for dinner or whatever. but my wife's from mexico and they eat at 10 p.m yes and on new year's they eat at 1 a.m yes dinner and it's like come on guys i'm going to bed um but this you know not all latin cultures but predominantly latin cultures have this later evening later evenings 10 o 'clock start which to me seems crazy because you're like don't you want to try to go to bed by 11 30 12 and actually let yourself rest that's so a lot of those people end up being chronotypes but it's all shifted because this comes through culturally from hundreds of years of people evolving there, right?

53:03Also, they're closer to the equator, which means they get more light later. Right. So it's still light at 10 p.m. Right. And remember, light is the real meter or metric against sleep. You can't make melatonin with light going on. So they've had to adapt from a cultural perspective.

53:19Lewis Howes:And what happens when you take a 30 to 60 minute nap during the day, a siesta? Does that mess up your nighttime sleep? So I'm a big fan of the nap, especially while watching golf, right? Oh, yeah. You can sleep during that. Rory gets into the tee box. You know, it's like it's all really quiet. And if you fall asleep, you can just catch up on ESPN like that. It's pretty easy. You didn't miss anything. Right. But insomniacs should never nap. Because what happens is when you nap, you lower that sleep drive, that adenosine we were talking about, makes it much more difficult to sleep. But naps can be a good thing.

53:51Absolutely. I love it now. And 20 minutes. What's the ideal time? 20, 25 minutes is really where I like to see people because if you nap too long, what ends up happening is you pop over into a deep sleep and man, it's tough to get yourself out of deep sleep.

54:03Lewis Howes:Wow. What is the one or two questions that most people are asking about sleep today? Well, we went through the whole idea of what do I do to wake up, like waking up in the middle of the night. I think that's really a big one. We talked a little bit about, you know, what are the sleep disorders and undiagnosed sleep apnea. So I think that those are kind of some of the big, big, big ones. And I think we were able to cover that. But, you know, a lot of people, it's unfortunate because a lot of people don't see a sleep doctor unless they're in their office, right? And they've already been diagnosed with something.

54:32They don't really are able to get their questions answered. And so what I like to do is I like to give out as much, you know, evidence-based information about what's going on in sleep and how you can use this to your advantage. I'm a very practical guy. Like I'm not a big theory person. I'm pretty prescriptive. I'm good about telling people exactly what to do. So I'd like to, if I can give people a five-step plan, right? That they can roll through every single day, which can help them with sleep. So step number one is to have one wake up time, seven days a week. Same wake up time. Same wake up time.

55:07Let me explain why. When you wake up in the morning, sunlight hits your eye and you have a special cell in your eye called a melanopsin cell, right? This cell turns off the melatonin faucet in your head. Okay. And, And by the way, it sets a timer for approximately 14 hours later, okay, when your melatonin turns back on. So what I just said was the time that you wake up directly determines when melatonin turns on at night. So if you're waking up at six, melatonin is going to turn on about eight, takes 90 minutes for it to get up and in. You start to get tired around 930. You go to bed at 10, 1030, right?

55:41But if you wake up at eight, melatonin doesn't start until 10. And now you've got a different problem on your hands. One wake up time. If people only get one thing from what I'm talking about today, do that one. Not the same sleep time? You will automatically metric yourself, right? If you know you're getting up at six on Saturday, you ain't staying up until one. I can assure you. You'll do it once, maybe twice, and then you'll be done with that one. All right. Step number two is to stop caffeine by 2 p.m. We really haven't had a chance to talk about caffeine. Caffeine is a half-life of between six and eight hours.

56:13Okay. If you stop at two, eight hours later is 10, which is roughly when most people are thinking about going to bed. And at least half of the caffeine is out of your system. A lot of people don't realize that they, oh, I can fall asleep. I can drink a cup of coffee for dinner and fall right asleep. It's because you're so damn sleep deprived that you're falling asleep. Okay. But if I put electrodes on your head and I look at the quality of the sleep you're getting, you're not getting deep sleep if you've got caffeine on board.

56:39Lewis Howes:I mean, a lot of cultures will have a cappuccino or an espresso after dessert. I get it. At dinnertime. I get it. And they're falling asleep. It's problematic. Really? It is. Go decaf. It's not going to kill you. You still taste it and you'll be fine. Trust me on this one. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Number three has to do with alcohol. There's a really big difference between going to sleep and passing out. Right. Okay? Yeah, yeah. Right? Like we've all been there. Being unconscious and being unconscious. Right. Exactly. Right. Because alcohol basically anesthetizes you. Wow. Right? And so, by the way, I like bourbon.

57:13Okay? I have a beer every once in a while. I'm not saying you can't drink. Right? But what I am saying is you need to be thoughtful about when you drink. So here's the schedule. Let's say you're sitting down for dinner at 6.30. Right? Have your first glass of wine. Then have a glass of water. You want to always go one for one because you want to be flushing the system out, you know, pretty quickly. It takes the average human approximately one hour to digest one alcoholic beverage. Now you order your second glass of wine. Maybe you finish it. Maybe you don't. Then you have your second glass of water.

57:42Stop. And then three hours later, if that's your chronotypical bedtime, you are on the go. It's perfect. Right? So limit yourself to two drinks. But step number three is to stop alcohol three hours before bed. Wow.

57:55Lewis Howes:But there is no nutritional value to having alcohol. Absolutely not. Here's the crazy thing. It doesn't help your brain. It doesn't help your sleep. It doesn't help your gut. Nothing. It does nothing. Okay? Okay, during dry January, all of my patients call me up and they're like, Michael, my sleep is so much better. I'm like, no, stop drinking alcohol. You stop drinking alcohol. Step number four has to do with exercise. I know you're a fan of exercise as am I. I work out every single day. I was in the gym this morning. But if you exercise too close to bedtime, it increases your core body temperature, right?

58:24And that makes it hard to sleep. So stop exercise four hours before bed. Stop before. What about like a brisk walk or even just a slow walk? Walking after dinner, spine. Zone two is fine. But you just don't want to break a sweat because that increases your core body temperature. And in fact, walking after dinner has actually been shown in studies to help with digestion. So it's probably a really good idea to do that. What about like a hot bath, a sauna?

58:51Lewis Howes:Let's talk about it. A hot tub, like things that activate that way. So thermoregulation is what you're talking about, or the body's ability to change temperatures and how does that affect sleep? It turns out it's very, very important. And here's the one thing that you can control as a consumer. You don't need a drug. You don't need a therapy. You can actually control the temperature. A couple of different ways to do it. With our insomniacs, sometimes 90 minutes before bed, we do have them take a hot bath. Because what we do is we mimic that core body temperature drop that I was talking about earlier by raising it.

59:23By raising it. You can do the same with the sauna, right? Sauna, hot bath, 90 minutes to 120 minutes before bed. Is okay. Absolutely a good idea. It works, really. Absolutely a good idea.

59:33Lewis Howes:This is going to help you drop your temperature. Correct. Now, let's talk for half a second about what happens under the covers, right? So here's what's interesting is people always say, well, Michael, I'm going to crank the AC on and go to 65 degrees or 68 degrees. The data would say somewhere between 65 and 72 turns out to be about where you want to be. But here's the thing. This unit that we're walking around in for a while runs at 98.6 degrees. It's a heater. It is. And when you're under the covers, guess what happens? You create your own little mini sauna, right? You really do because the heat just bounces off the sheets and comes back and the mattress and what have you.

1:00:09So they now have out there these things called thermoregulatory pads. So it's a topper that you put underneath the sheet that you're lying on top of, has a thin tube that runs through it and you can run hot water or cold water through it. And you can actually cool yourself from beneath. I work with a company called Orion Sleep and they've developed this technology. And here's the thing. It's great for menopausal women. It's great if you are, if you happen to work out in the evening time, you know, and your core body temperature is, is high. Or if you're like me, my body just runs hot. Me too. It always has.

1:00:41I don't know why it does, but that's just the genetically who I am. So these, these devices like this, Orion work really, really well. Really? Step number five is for the morning time. And so when you wake up in the morning, there's three things I ask people to do. Take a hardback chair, sit outside if it's not too cold out, right? And what I want you to do is I want you to take 15 deep breaths. This is merely to bring yourself present and activate your lungs and your respiratory system. In between each breath, I want you to drink one ounce of water. Most people don't know it, but sleep in and of itself is a dehydrative event.

1:01:15You lose almost a full liter of water every single night, right? And so we want to replenish that. You want to hydrate before you caffeinate. That's really, really important. And then the other thing you want to do is get 15 minutes of sunshine. Now, people are going to be like, oh, California doctor. He's getting all woo-woo on the sunshine on us. The data is incredibly consistent. Number one, the sunshine activates that melanopsin cell I was talking about, turns off the melatonin so your morning brain fog goes away. 15 minutes is the exact amount of time that it takes your body, generally speaking, to produce vitamin D.

1:01:48Vitamin D is a circadian pacemaker, right? So that's kind of where we want people to be. Now, speaking of vitamin D, people always ask me all the time, I think another thing that we didn't get to hit on, supplements, right? So people are always like, Michael, Michael, should I take melatonin? Absolutely not. Really? There's only three instances where I think melatonin is appropriate. Jet lag, shift work, and if you have a melatonin deficiency, okay? Melatonin, first of all, is a hormone, okay? You can't just walk down to the local CVS and buy testosterone, right, and estrogen. And there's a good reason.

1:02:21Hormones affect every system in the body, right? Here's the problem with melatonin that a lot of people don't know. Did you know that melatonin affects birth control? Really? Did you know it affects all antidepressant medication, all diabetes medication, and all heart rate medication? It's a circadian pacemaker. It affects your circadian rhythm. This is not something to play around with. And by the way, never use melatonin with kids. Never, ever, ever. There's one group of kids, kids on the autism spectrum, where we have discovered that about five or six milligrams turns out to be good for them.

1:02:53But by the way, that's kind of a whopping dose. Average dose should be between a half and one and a half milligrams. Wow. Now, here's what I think about supplementation. Generally speaking, go do blood work. Okay. If you're supplementing, it's because you're not getting something in your diet and it's a vitamin or a mineral. Like to be clear, nobody has a deficiency in ashwagandha. Okay. But you might have one in vitamin D or magnesium or iron. Or melatonin. And those are the four that I always have people do blood work on. And let's fix that first. Bring those up to par levels in your body. And let's see how your body functions.

1:03:26Dude, I would say 10 % of the patients that I see, when I just get them to do that, their problem is solved. We feel better. Yeah.

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1:05:22Oh yeah, for sure. Right. Nightmares. Yeah. So one of the things I've been spending the last year and a half working on becoming what's called a dream therapist. I want to be clear. This is not dream interpretation. Okay. This is actually using the dream in the therapeutic context. So what I'm talking about are people with PTSD, right? And one of the hallmark signs of PTSD from any kind of trauma, whether you're a first responder, uh, you've had a terrible, uh, sexual trauma, um, you know, military, right? I mean, how many people are committing suicide that are coming back from our, like, I don't take it for granted when somebody puts their self in harm's way for my freedom, right?

1:05:57I want to be able to figure out how we can help these people. And they're all coming back with these terrible, terrible nightmares. And they don't want to go to sleep because they don't want to watch the movies that are playing in their head. No. Right. This is where PTSD becomes a really big issue. And dreams are an area of study for me. I haven't quite cracked the code on it yet. I'm going to be honest with you. But what I have discovered is that there's a couple of different techniques that can be used to help people move the dream forward. What dreaming turns out to be is what I call emotional metabolism, right?

1:06:26And so you dream for whatever was going on in your day, right? So if you had a joyous day, your daughter's turn five months, you're having a party, having a good time, you might have a little bit more REM sleep and you might dream a little bit more. Or the same could hold true if God forbid something bad happened in your life. So dreams are a great way to understand emotionally where you are. People also oftentimes have these things called repetitive dreams or stress dreams. I have my own. It's kind of funny. I'm in high school and the bell has rung and I'm running to my locker and it's one of those spin combination lockers.

1:06:57I got to get my books out for the next class and I can't remember the combination. Really? Yeah. You have that dream on repeat? I do. And if I have that, that's a signal to me that there's something else going on in my life, right? I don't know exactly what it is yet. It's still maybe filtering around in my unconscious, but it's something to be thoughtful of. A lot of people don't know the purpose of REM sleep. REM sleep is where you move information from your short-term memory to your long-term memory, right? And you create this kind of organizational substructure like a filing cabinet in your head, but you can retrieve things.

1:07:27But if you can't get it there because you're waking up because you're scared due to a nightmare, it never hits the filing cabinet and you're just kind of stuck on this repeat and repeat and repeat. So the goal here is to try to get people through that and there's some different therapeutic techniques that can be done for that. Really? Oh yeah, it's pretty cool. What about sleep hypnosis? So sleep hypnosis, generally speaking, is to help people fall asleep if they're having some level of anxiety prior to sleep. And so there's a lot of different things you can do. Me personally, I like breathing techniques there, I think, because it's very hard to self-hypnotize.

1:08:02I mean, there are different platforms and there are things that you can look at or listen to that can be helpful. But generally speaking, I think the breathing techniques, the 478 that we were talking about earlier, I think that has a real use case right there.

1:08:14Lewis Howes:Where does the research lie within spirituality and sleep? Oh, that's a great question. Having faith in God or a bigger purpose or something else, if you've dealt with stress, rumination, anxiety, sleep tremors, nightmares, is there research around faith in God to allow people to sleep better? There's research around faith in general. I don't know. There's a lot of people who have a lot of different forms of what they call a higher power. But here's what I'll tell you is people who are thoughtful in that area have oftentimes sleep better and you can't be spiritual with a bad night's sleep, bro.

1:08:50It doesn't work when you're so exhausted that you can't either read the Bible or look at the Torah or the Quran or whatever it is, whatever your thing is, if you're too tired to be able to get those messages and to be able to have that purpose, it's problematic.

1:09:05Lewis Howes:Yeah. What I'm hearing you say is, is there research that if someone has faith in a higher purpose, they sleep better? I would agree. Yes. Yeah. Is there any like documentation of this out there? Or is this more from your experience? I would say that's more from my experience, but if I'm fair, I'll look it up and I'll let you know. Yeah. I'd be curious about that. People sleep better if they believe in God or a higher purpose, or if they don't believe in God, do they sleep worse? I think for the people, this is a guess. I don't have any data on this, but if I had to use my years of experience to kind of figure it out, I think when you don't have a higher purpose, whatever that means for you, it's hard.

1:09:43It's rough. Life is harder. It is. Everything is harder, right? Purpose. I mean, isn't that kind of what defines greatness, right? Is purpose. Yeah. Right. And so when you're, when you're, and don't get me wrong, people struggle with purpose all the time. And sometimes you don't always know your purpose or your purpose can change over time. I think as long as you're in the pursuit of purpose, I think that's really where sleep plays a good role.

1:10:04Lewis Howes:When you work with those patients that have sleep insomnia or that are dolphins for seasons, right? How many of those have a belief in God or a higher purpose versus don't? You know, if I'm honest with you, it's not a question that I usually kind of run through with them. But if I was going to guesstimate, I would say that the people that are having the more difficult time might be the ones that don't have a well-defined purpose. Interesting. That's interesting to know. Yeah. The ones that sleep the best, the ones that have followed your routines and the practices and the principles we've talked about and they've gone from either bad sleep to now consistently good sleep over years right what are the things they're thinking and doing differently and do you feel like they've healed a certain past trauma oh it's interesting question i i think that happens a lot so you know here's the thing is when you've got a past trauma, when you get home and you get in bed and nobody's talking to you and maybe the TV is not on or the bulldogs aren't in the bed, all the thoughts come in.

1:11:12Yes. Right. And that's hard because there's fear, there's elevation of heart rate, there's anxiety. So if I had to guess, I would say that if you've got all that stuff tucked in and dealt with, whether that's through therapy, whether that's through journaling, whether that's through you know, working with your pastor who, whatever method that you use that's positive for you. I think that would actually promote good sleep. And I would say I could, I can easily say that looking at my patient population, I've seen that over time. Really? Yeah.

1:11:42Lewis Howes:How much does I, how much does self-identity impact the way we sleep? What do you mean by self-identity? Like if I identify myself as a bad person, as stupid, as ugly, as not good, I'm never going to be amount to anything in my life versus I'm confident. I'm courageous. I hear what I'll tell you is the more sleep deprived you are, the more likely you are to have a negative self-image. Interesting. There's a lot of data on that. That is interesting. The more sleep deprived you are, the more likely you are that the tapes in your head are negative. Yeah. The better sleep you get, the more likely it is tapes in your head are positive.

1:12:20Lewis Howes:So what I'm hearing you say so far in this conversation is that when you learn to manage or navigate your mind in an empowering way and use tools, helpful tools that support you in calming your mind, creating a more empowering self-identity versus a negative self-identity. With discipline and following a couple of those rules we talked about. Like what? Well, I mean, you can not have a caffeine in the middle of the night or something. Right, exactly. Like you can't do that. And you can't, I got bedtimes all over the place. But if you've got the things that you're talking about with the discipline, dude, that's a winning combination.

1:12:52Lewis Howes:Interesting. so and it also sounds like you can do all the things right you can do these five steps you can wake up at the same time every day you can stop caffeine at 2 p.m you can yeah but if you think you're a pilot you know what you're not gonna sleep well none of those that you could have the darkest room at 62 degrees and the perfect conditions but if you're thinking ruminating that i'm a piece of crap yep you won't sleep more than likely not what we're talking about here is a little bit into the data on depression and sleep, right? So if you get to that point where those negative tapes have really started to affect you and you become depressed, what happens to your sleep?

1:13:27It's pretty interesting. So it seems to bifurcate and we seem to be two different camps on this. One is people have a tendency to not sleep. And then the other is people have a tendency to oversleep, right? So people who they're so depressed, they don't want to be in the world, right? They want to stay in bed for nine, 10 hours. When somebody comes to me and says, oh, Dr. Bruce, I need 10 hours of sleep a night. Big red flag pops for me, right? Unless they're an athlete and they're doing something crazy like that. I ask about narcolepsy and I ask about depression or undiagnosed sleep disorder like apnea.

1:13:56And by the way, undiagnosed sleep disorder can lead to those negative thoughts, which then compounds it. Like it's such a compelling reason. Like if you want to have a positive attitude and a positive life, get a sleep study. Like it's not

1:14:10Lewis Howes:that hard yeah what about um narcissism you know there's a lot of people there's a lot of information going around that more and more people are becoming narcissistic or having narcissistic tendencies or narcissism yep um do narcissists sleep better than those who don't have narcissistic tendencies i'm not familiar with the data in that area but if i was of like put on my clinical hat and talk about it. If you're a true narcissist, you think you're fantastic, right? And so you're probably, you probably think you're full of purpose. The rest of the world might hate you, but you probably think you're full of purpose.

1:14:49But if you really are like, you start to identify and you say, wow, I'm kind of a narcissistic ass. Like I'm kind of not like the nicest person. I think you trail down into sleep related for sure. Wow.

1:15:01Lewis Howes:Now there's a lot of kind of sleep hack trends out there right now yep mouth tape being one of them so stupid why as a sleep doctor yes does mouth tape work or why do you think it's stupid so here's the thing there's actually data on this there was a meta-analysis that was released last year looking at 20 different studies people have died using mouth tape come on dude i mean it's the data i'll send you the study wow right and here's the thing because people are not seeing if they have undiagnosed sleep apnea. If you've got undiased no sleep apnea and you tape your mouth shut, it's not a good idea.

1:15:36You got a stuck in nose and you can't breathe. And by the way, that's the reason why people use mouth tape. They're mouth breathers because they've got nasal congestion. Fix your nose. Fix your nose. It's very simple. I think mouth tape kind of falls under the mom test, which is call your mom up and say, hey mom, I'm thinking about taping my mouth shut while I sleep. And see what her reaction is. She might say, I'd love it if you did it during the day, but It really sounds like a stupid idea at night. It is a stupid idea. Wow.

1:16:04Lewis Howes:Okay. So before the data came out about this, and it started being big maybe four or five years ago, the mouth taping, as a sleep doctor, do you think, oh, maybe this is a, I guess if you have your mouth open the whole time and you're not - I never thought it was a good idea. Really? Biologically, it doesn't make sense. 90-something percent of people, their mouth will naturally close while they sleep. the question becomes why is there a group of people out there that this isn't occurring it's the nose look it's all about nasal congestion by the way it's not that hard to fix your nasal congestion you can use a saline spray there's that device i think it's called the navage or something like that that rolls you know you know hot water through there right you can use flonase you know which is a over-the-counter now they can squirt up your nose and be able to reduce that tissue like here's the thing when you're taking in air through the mouth right It's like leaded gas going into the tank.

1:16:59There's no cilia. There's no filter. There's nothing that's pulling those particulates out. So I get it why we want our mouth closed. And I understand that there are people out there who are like, look, it's the only way it's going to work for me. I don't think so. Go call an ENT. Have your nose looked at and let's figure out what's going on. Interesting. Why is it important for us to sleep?

1:17:17Lewis Howes:Why is it important for us to breathe through the nose when we sleep and not through the mouth? Again, you're not getting good air. right? The air that you're getting - When you breathe through the mouth. When you breathe through the mouth, because all the particulates are going straight into your lungs, right? The purpose of the nose, like you've got two nostrils, you've got one mouth. Noses are for breathing, mouths are for eating. That's really how it was, however the big guy upstairs planned it all out. That's pretty much biologically speaking. How much should we be breathing through our nose throughout the day and night versus through the mouth?

1:17:51Lewis Howes:Because when you're speaking, you're going to breathe through the mouth. Yeah, absolutely. So in my fifth book, it was called Sleep, Drink, Breathe. Wellness is too complicated. These are some of the most important habits. We've talked a lot about sleep, but let's talk about breathing. And then of course, hydration is the other one. People always say like, why did you write a book about things your body naturally does? It's like, well, because our body is, we're kind of putting hurdles in front of ourselves to do some of this stuff. And so what we need to think about here is getting clean air in, humidified clean air in actually is better for oxygen exchange, right?

1:18:23Most people are shallow breathers, right? They're not, right? And so what ends up happening is when you're a shallow breather, your heart has to beat twice as fast in order to distribute oxygen in an effective manner, right? So this four, seven, eight breathing, right? It's perfect because you slowly breathe in, you hold and use all your oxygen, create your carbon dioxide, and then you push it all out. Your heart is more efficient, which lowers the load on your heart, right we don't need our hearts beating any faster than they need to be beating we need efficient hearts and i'm breathing in through your nose is one of the best ways to do that gotcha so how

1:19:01Lewis Howes:often or how much of the time should we be breathing through our nose while we're sleeping throughout the day and night tonight the whole night well i mean generally speaking 90 yeah something like that would make sense to me sure i guess if you're speaking part-time and you're breathing throughout your mouth it's different yeah i mean look i'm i'm a public speaker you're a public speaker, like when I'm on stage, what's happening, I'm, I actually pace myself. Like I actually know when my breathing is off when I'm on stage because I'm, I'm, I'm out of air at the end of the sentence. Right. You know, and when you're on, I mean, like, I mean, I speak in front of you do too, like big crowds.

1:19:36Like, you know, I, one time I was on stage for Tony Robbins, 12 ,000 people in the audience. Right. And you know, your heart starts beating fast because it's exciting and it's a lot of fun. You got to chill yourself. I do four, seven, eight breathing before I go on stage, chills me right out. Not 20 cycles, because I don't want to fall asleep, right? I do about five, six cycles, chills me out. And now my body is being efficient. Then I don't have to worry about my body. My brain can do what it needs to do to educate.

1:20:01Lewis Howes:I've heard you say mouth taping is stupid. It is. And what about kind of the nose strips, the opening, the airways? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's talk about those. And so I like those, right? So anything you can do to open up the pipe is going to be a good idea. I will be honest with you. for me personally, whenever I've tried those nose strips, I have slightly oily skin. They have a tendency to migrate. And all of a sudden it's like across my eye and I'm like waking up like, you know, what's going on. They now make internal nasal dilators, right? These, these little, like almost like a little stent that you put right here inside your nose.

1:20:31I use one called a mute. And it's like, turn the mute button on. My wife always says like, if you had any whiskey tonight, put in that nose thingy, because here's what happens. Alcohol causes inflammation inside your nose congestion yeah why do you think people snore when they when they drink alcohol this is the reason right so internalized nasal dilators i think well don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with the strips i just personally they just don't work right sure so that's what i'm hearing

1:20:56Lewis Howes:you say is don't fix your mouth fix your nose if you can't breathe absolutely try to expand the nose try to find ways to enhance it reduce inflammation yeah uh before shutting your mouth with a piece of tape. With a piece of tape. Exactly. Your mouth should close. It should naturally get there for you. Keep your mouth shut, but not like trap your mouth. Exactly, exactly. Now we've talked about, one of the things we haven't touched on is noise at night. Snoring, right? It's a big one. Yeah. So a lot of people are thinking about like noise at night and what's going on here. We're like, we want people to snore.

1:21:28By the way, if you sleep next to a snoring bed partner, you lose approximately one hour of sleep at night. Do you say we want people to snore? No. Snoring is bad. Yeah. Right? Snoring means that there's some kind of disruption in your airway. Snoring is like on the way to apnea. Now, to be clear - Is snoring related to the nose or the throat? Great question. So you can have snoring in three different places. There's a nasopharynx, an oropharynx, or a hypopharynx. And so anywhere - So let me back up. You ever been in the garden and you stick your thumb over the end of the hose and the water squirts out faster?

1:21:59Yes. Right? Your nose is the hose in this analogy. So air is coming in. anywhere that you close the aperture, like putting your thumb on here, makes the air move faster, causes a vibration, causes a cadence, causes a snore. So anything we can do to open up the pipe works better. So that's why that mute thing works really, really well. Sometimes there are oral appliances where you can slowly move the jaw forward, open up the oropharynx, or there are surgical interventions for the hypopharynx. Yeah. Surgery is probably the last thing you want to do. Absolutely. Last, last, last case scenario. Yes.

1:22:30Yeah. But noise in general is kind of interesting. think they're now making earbuds that made to sleep in like so they don't hurt the auricular canal. And there's one on the market. It's called NexSense, which is really cool. And what they do is they measure your EEG. They measure your brain waves because it's so close to the brain. They figured out a way to do it. Don't ask me how because I haven't figured it out, but it's pretty cool. And then they know when you're moving into a lighter stage of sleep, they can send in a frequency to help you move back to a deeper. That's crazy. Dude, the tech is cool.

1:22:57So how How important is it to keep things quiet when you sleep then? I mean, dude, I sleep with the television on all night long. You can adapt to almost anything. But does it disrupt your sleep? It does. Absolutely does. So as a sleep doctor. That's what I have those NexSense things is. You put them in.

1:23:11Lewis Howes:Yeah, I got my CPAP on. I got my NexSense in. I'm golden. Do you sleep alone or do you sleep? No, my wife's there and the two French Bulldogs are right next to me. So is she losing an hour of sleep because of the noise and the dogs? That's such a good question. Of the machine? I have tried to convince her that she is. But here's what's interesting. There's actually data to show that people feel safer with animals in the room. And she grew up with animals in her bed in the room. Now, you know, when we first met, she told me, Michael, if we ever have a sleepover, right, I don't need to let you know that I sleep with the TV on.

1:23:44She said this. She said this to me. And I said, you know, hey, honey, I'm becoming a sleep doctor. I'm going to fix that. Right. What was this, like 30 years ago or something? Yeah, we've been married for 26 years. So you ever try to fix something in your bed, partner? doesn't go particularly well, right? Ever. So you've always slept the TV on since you've been with her. Absolutely. So I studied her to understand why. Because if you live in my house, the sleep doctor is going to take a look at you, right? And here's what I discovered is she's not watching TV. She's listening to it, kind of out of what I call the corner of her ear.

1:24:14It's a distraction technique for her for monkey mind. So you know what I do? I set the timer, right? So the timer goes off 90 minutes later. She falls asleep. Half the time she never wakes up again and the TV is off all night long. The only thing I hear is the bulldogs. Now the bulldogs are an interesting story. So we used to have an older bulldog and my wife went to back East to visit her family and I was taking charge of the dogs. We had a younger one and an older one. And with the older one, she turned to me and she said, his name was Hugo. She said, he passed away now. She said, if Hugo is not snoring, it's a problem, right?

1:24:49So it changed the emotional valence of the sound to me.

1:24:52Lewis Howes:so it created a sense when she heard snoring she felt emotionally safe and allowed her to sleep better exactly even though snoring based on the data correct makes you lose an hour of sleep a night in the partner this is the difference between a sleep expert and a sleep doctor interesting right there's data and then there's practicality yeah right people can sleep through almost anything depending upon what's going on if you if you understand the emotion that's attached to whatever the sound is it makes a lot more sense and you can really do pretty well it's the it's the way we interpret the emotions of everything in our life exactly which allows you to either sleep better in horrible conditions correct or bad in perfect conditions right talk to somebody in the military right they can rack out anywhere on the middle of a b-52 in a tank in a submarine it doesn't matter how loud it is down there or any of those places for those guys why because they know they're safe well somewhat safe i mean it's like yeah let's be fair and you have to sleep also at some point.

1:25:52Lewis Howes:You can't just be up five nights. Correct. Your body will exactly crash out.

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1:27:14Lewis Howes:These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Now, what about kids? Because there's a lot of different parents online that say, that swear by sleeping with your kids and other ones are like, this is the worst thing you could ever do. Put them in the crib in a separate room and you never see them. Let them like sleep on their own. Yep. As a sleep doctor, not a sleep expert, what would you recommend? man, should parents or what are the benefits, the pros and cons of sleeping with kids in the same bed versus not sleeping with your kids? It depends on the child and it depends on the age of the child, right?

1:27:49If you have a special needs child that has got something else going on, you probably want them close by. Okay. Let's just be fair, right? If you've got a child who's got RSV, who's got major medical situations going on, who's got autism, you know, God forbid any of these things happen to a child, you're going to feel better. You're going to not worry nearly as much if the child is in the room with you. Now, there's a difference between being in the room with you and being in the bed with you, right? And so children in the bed can be highly problematic, especially if there's alcohol involved or if you have big fluffy pillows and covers, right?

1:28:23When babies are born, when you go home tonight and you look at your daughters, they do not have protruding noses. Their noses are actually pretty flat because their noses haven't had a chance to grow yet. So if they go over on their face, they can suffocate, right? What you want for the first three to four months, we had what's called the Moses basket. So it was in between my wife and I, we put my son in there. And if she was, if he woke up and was hungry, she'd scoop him up, she'd put him on, she'd take him off. She'd put him back, you know, in the basket and everything was fine. Over the course of time, maybe four to six months, we started rotating him, put the bassinet in there, rotating him out, finally got him into his own room.

1:29:00I would argue that you really want to get your kids figuring out how to fall asleep on their own. Why? Because it's a skill that they need to learn. Okay. If you put a child down every single time and they're out cold, here's what happens is there's this idea called object permanence, right? And so it doesn't really kick into gear until like year like one or two. And so here's what happens is when the baby goes to sleep and you go away, they think you're gone forever. But if you put the child down while they're awake and they see you and then you start moving out and they know that they're okay and safe, maybe you've got a monitor so you can talk to them, maybe sing them a song, read them a poem, Bible verse, whatever your thing is, you know, say your prayers, whatever, that actually has a tendency to work a lot better.

1:29:46Now, the age of the child also becomes a big determining factor. I mean, I had one patient who turned to me and she said, you know, she had her seven or eight year old son sleeping in bed with her. And I hate to say it this way, but the moms are like, it's so cute and it's so cuddly and I'm going to miss it. What happens when the young boy starts to have erections when he wakes up in the morning and he's sitting next to mom? That's pretty inappropriate, right? So you need to be thoughtful about the biology that's going on. But I would say generally speaking, it's probably a good idea to get him out.

1:30:15Now, to be fair, there's some cultures where the family bed is where everybody sleeps. I think that's a whole different ballgame. But here in the United States, I would say generally, you really want your child to have their own room, their own bed, and put them down awake. Now, what about, and what happened, I don't know, thousands of years ago? It was pretty different thousands of years ago. But generally speaking, everybody lived in the cave, you know, and they sat around the fire and that's how they did it. As we've gotten bigger and bigger, things change a whole lot. I would argue that sleep really changed when that idiot Thomas Edison invented that thing called the light bulb.

1:30:52I think that screwed up everybody's sleep pretty bad because it used to be when we were an agrarian society, right? We'd go to bed when the sun went down, right? Then we'd wake up halfway through the night, have a meal, have sex, have whatever, then go back for the second sleep. Really? Yeah. This is well-documented. We used to wake up in the middle of the night and have meals. Why? Yeah. You were hungry. Ah. And then you'd wake up at dawn and then plow the fields and do that. When old Tom came around and everybody could have light at night, everything started to change. I don't know this as a fact, but my guess is we probably didn't have insomnia before the light bulb.

1:31:27Yeah, I'm sure people went to bed. Yeah.

1:31:29Lewis Howes:Like maybe within an hour or two after it got dark, I start to wind things down. Exactly. Got a little lamp on maybe. Yeah, you know, right. Abraham Lincoln supposedly wrote by candlelight. so i think that society has evolved from back those days to where we are now but i'm going to be honest with you i think some of the evolution is not going in the right direction i mean the phones before bed you know and by the way it's not the blue light that's keeping you up it's this if you're trying to get your heart score on candy crush you ain't trying to go to bed okay trust me on this one oh man so yeah do you think i mean people probably had a lot less depression or insomnia you know hundreds of years ago i would guess so yeah or at least it wasn't recognized yeah now let's talk about phones yes since you brought it up sure that's also something we didn't have 20 years ago thankfully you know i just saw this video online yesterday who's the guy who wrote the anxious generation jonathan yeah yeah uh jonathan something something yeah exact great book by the way yeah he really talks a lot about anxiety and what's going on he had a video it's kind of funny because it was on the phone but in class about not having phones but he had a video go out on social media of like an ai video from back in the 90s of like kids when they're eight nine ten in in the 90s reenacting they're like wait so you you had a a box that would like call people you didn't just like go to your home phone and like pick it up and make a call yeah wait you you didn't stay out till like the lights went on you know and then come back home right well you're just on a phone all day like yeah i mean when i was growing up you know here's how it worked you were you got home from school you played out you went outside yes you played all day and then your mom yelled from the porch dinner dinner time dinner time and if and if your mom if you didn't hear your mom you know what you did you just went to with your friends to their house and had dinner at their house because everybody's mom was having dinner at a particular time and you know then you'd get in the house and the mom would call your mom and say hey You know, Lewis is over here, right?

1:33:33We got him for dinner tonight. You take him, you know, my son tomorrow night. Now, that's just kind of how it worked. That was it. Yeah, very different.

1:33:40Lewis Howes:And with phones, if someone is on their phone first thing in the morning and last thing at night, it's not good. It's not easy to sleep probably. Well, I mean, it's just so much stimulation. Like here's the thing is you can do all the things we've been talking about today. You can follow all the five steps. You can figure out your chronotype. But if you're causing a significant level of brain arousal, it's really hard to overcome that. So if you're watching videos and all of a sudden something comes on about a conflict or something comes on about an award show or something, whatever it is and it piques your interest, it dials up your cortisol, it dials up your heart rate.

1:34:21And now you really haven't done yourself any favors. Read a book. Read one of your books. This isn't tough. Keep greatness right by the bedside and read it. You'll be surprised at how, number one, you'll retain the information, but number two, it really helps ease you in. You need runway to land the plane.

1:34:41Lewis Howes:Oh, man. This has been powerful. I want people to get your book, The Power of When, discover your chronotype and learn the best time to eat lunch, ask for a raise, have sex, write a novel, take your meds, and more. This is really inspiring. So I want people to get this book. You have a lot of other books as well. Yep. They can check out your website, the sleep doctor.com, the sleep doctor on social media as well. Oh, and we actually created a special landing page for all of your viewers. Okay. What is it? So if people go to sleep, doctor.com forward slash, uh, greatness. Perfect. They can check it out.

1:35:17Yeah. They can check out the book. They can take the quiz. They can hear some of the products we were talking about whole thing.

1:35:21Lewis Howes:And there's a home sleep apnea test as well, right? Yeah. And so that's one of the things that our company does. And again, I was trying to tell people, don't be afraid of the test. Let's figure it out. It's less than 200 bucks. Okay. It comes to your door. You don't have to go see a doctor and then a doctor interprets it. It's all done online. It makes like much, much easier. That's cool. Michael, I got a couple of final questions for you. Sure. Before I ask them, is there anything else that you're seeing online that could be harmful for people to start believing is good around sleep or sleep practices that is actually potentially harmful.

1:35:58Well, I'm going to be honest with you, even though I do have my own TikTok channel where I'm trying to give people, don't get your information from social media about sleep. You know, like for a while, there was this thing going around called the sleepy girl mocktail, right? Where you would have two scoops of magnesium, fizzy water, tart cherry juice. And again, the practicality of this is like you shouldn't be drinking large volumes of water before bed because you're going to have to get up and pee. By the way, too much magnesium and it's going to give you gas and make you go to the bathroom.

1:36:30And then that fizzy water is also going to give you gas. So like really, if you're going to get your sleep information, get it from somebody who's well versed, who has an educational background that's going to be important for you to understand, like vet your sources. because nowadays anybody can seem to be talking about stuff and they really don't know what they're talking about. Yeah, or get it from Michael's book,

1:36:51Lewis Howes:The Power of When, or one of your other books as well. This question is called The Three Truths. You shared a lot of advice today. You have tons of great books. You have a lot of great content. Thanks. But let's create a scenario far in the future. You get to live as long as you want on this earth, but then it's eventually the last day on earth for you. Okay. And you get to create and accomplish everything you want and experience all of life's magic. And you see your kids grow up and all the great things happen. But it's your last day on earth. Okay. Far in the future. Okay. And for whatever reason, we don't have access to any of your content anymore.

1:37:27Lewis Howes:So this episode is gone. Your books are gone. Nothing is around anymore. Hypothetical. Okay. But you get to leave behind three truths. Three things that you know to be true from all of your experiences that you would share as lessons to the world. and we would get to keep those. What would those truths be for you? I think the first one that comes to mind is sleep matters. It's important. People take it for granted all the time. Oh, I'll sleep when I'm dead. I can't count the number of times people have said something like that to me. Okay, sleep matters. It's important. It's something you need to be thoughtful about.

1:38:02And if you're not thinking about it, that's okay. But do yourself the favor, take a few minutes and think about your sleep because I think sleep matters. Number two, be present, right? Be a present husband, be a present father, be a present employer, be there, be able to help people in whatever way, shape or form that you can. And by the way, you can't do that without good sleep, right? I think those two are the two that definitely hit me, hit me kind of hard. I think the final one is probably be open, right? Be open to other people, be resilient. You know, listen to what other people have to say.

1:38:43Everybody's got some good ideas, right? Be open to the new ideas and see if you can, you know, make them part of your life.

1:38:50Lewis Howes:That's beautiful. I want to acknowledge you, Dr. Michael Bruce, for being a leader in this space because I think for me, sleep definitely has given me a better life when I'm consistently sleeping well. Right. And you feel it specifically having, you know, twins now. I can feel it when I don't sleep well. My wife can feel it when she doesn't sleep well. And it impacts everything you do that day or for potentially days. Oh, you don't get a good night's sleep. And so I want to acknowledge you for being a leading voice and researching these things and constantly learning about what is going to support your quality of sleep, what's not going to support your quality of sleep.

1:39:32Lewis Howes:And I think also reminding people that you don't need medication to sleep better. I think I get really worried when doctors come on and they prescribe medication first rather than that should be the last result. Last result. Do all these other things. Heal. Create peace. Learn breathing. Meditate. Find purpose. All these other things. Mend your relationships. All these things that cause stress, anxiety, and worry first. And then, okay, last resort, have some pill that maybe can help you next. And maybe it's just temporary. Temporary. Yes. Right? Pills are really good on the temporary when we're talking about sleep, not on the regular.

1:40:08Exactly.

1:40:08Lewis Howes:So I want to acknowledge you for all the work you're doing. Thank you. And the final question I have is what's your definition of greatness? My definition of greatness, I think it's about being present. I really do. I'm going to go back to that one. It's about being able to be in the moment. I saw a great interview with Michael Jordan. And one of the things he said is he said the second his foot touched the court, he was present. He was there. Don't be someplace else. Be here because here is really the best place to be. Absolutely. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

1:40:48Lewis Howes:Powerful. 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. Share 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.

1:41:27Lewis Howes: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.

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