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

You already know sleep matters. What you don't know is why you keep waking up at 2 AM, why your tracker is probably lying to you, and why the rules you've been following may not be meant for you. Dr. Michael Breus is one of the world's leading sleep doctors - not just a sleep expert, but a clinical psychologist who actually treats patients and pressure-tests every theory in real life. The difference matters. The rule saying you need a pitch-black, 65-degree room with no TV and no partner? He sleeps with two French bulldogs and a big screen on. His point isn't that sleep hygiene doesn't matter. It's that it has to work for your actual life. One thing that might reshape how you think about your body: every human on earth wakes up between 1 and 3 AM. It's biology. Your core body temperature drops to prevent hypothermia, and your body briefly surfaces. Most people roll over and go back to sleep. If you don't, the fix isn't pills - it's understanding what's happening and using tools like 4-7-8 breathing to lower your heart rate below 60 and let sleep return naturally. Your chronotype - lion, bear, wolf, or dolphin - is genetic. It shifts across your lifetime. Forcing a wolf to be a lion doesn't make them a better performer; it makes them worse. The biggest unlock, according to Dr. Breus, isn't more sleep. It's doing the right things at the right time for your specific biology. Dr. Breus has a five-step daily framework he gives every patient. It's specific, it's sequenced, and most people are violating at least three of the steps without knowing it. Dr. Breus’s books: Sleep Drink Breathe: Simple Daily Habits for Profound Long-Term Health Energize!: Go from Dragging Ass to Kicking It in 30 Days The Power of When: Discover Your Chronotype and the Best Time to Eat Lunch, Ask for a Raise, Have Sex, Write a Novel, Take Your Meds, and More The Sleep Doctor's Diet Plan: Lose Weight Through Better Sleep Beauty Sleep: Look Younger, Lose Weight, and Feel Great Through Better Sleep Take The Chronotype Quiz! Dr. Breus on Instagram Dr. Breus on LinkedIn In this episode you will: Learn the five-step framework Dr. Breus uses with CEOs, elite athletes, and patients to dramatically improve sleep quality without medication Discover the 4-7-8 breathing technique developed by Dr. Andrew Weil and how it lowers your heart rate to unlock sleep when your mind won't stop Understand chronotype science - whether you're a lion, bear, wolf, or dolphin - and how aligning your schedule to your biology changes everything from performance to sex drive Uncover the truth about sleep trackers, melatonin supplements, and why eight hours is not the universal target you've been sold Master the Napa Latte protocol and non-sleep deep rest (Yoga Nidra) as emergency recovery tools when life disrupts your sleep For more information go to https://lewishowes.com/1930 For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960 Follow The Daily Motivation for essential highlights from The School of Greatness More SOG episodes we think you’ll love: Andrew Huberman Dr. Baland Jalal Shawn Stevenson TOPICS chronotype, circadian rhythm, sleep drive, adenosine, 4-7-8 breathing, Yoga Nidra, non-sleep deep rest, Napa Latte protocol, melatonin, chrono longevity, sleep anxiety, Dr. Michael Breus Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is the most powerful drug in the world. And if you can figure out how to use that to your advantage, now we're talking. If you were a patient of mine and you walked in and let's say you were taking 10mg of Ambien, I could utter one sentence looking at your medical chart and I could make that Ambien not work. I could just turn to you and say, "You have cancer." Boom. You ain't sleeping that night.

• 0:21Lewis Howes?

  His research has changed the way top CEOs, elite athletes, and millions of people think about sleep, energy, and performance. A bestselling author and one of the most trusted sleep experts in the world, Dr. Michael Bruce. Thanks for being here.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  I think sleep is kind of like the volume knob for greatness. 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.

• 0:53Lewis Howes?

  What ruminates in the mind that causes us not to sleep?

• 0:56Speaker 00

  That is literally the number one question that I'm asked is, "What do I do if I wake up in the middle of the night somewhere between 1 and 3 and I can't get back to sleep?"

• 1:04Lewis Howes?

  What do you do?

• 1:04Speaker 00

  So I've got a whole routine and I tell people all the time about it. So first of all...

• 1:13Lewis Howes?

  You said there's a difference between sleep experts and sleep doctors. What is that difference?

• 1:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's not just a nuance. It's a whole different kind of area. So a sleep expert, and by the way, I love sleep experts. They really help me do my job really well. Sleep experts are folks who are a lot of times academicians, right? So they're running research, they're looking at things. But when you do a research study, it's in a very controlled environment, right? And you get these interesting results and you can talk about them and tell people all these interesting things. That's what a sleep expert does. They kind of create an overwhelming theory based on all their research and try to explain a problem. I'm a sleep doctor. I take care of people's sleep. I take care of people's apnea, narcolepsy, insomnia. I look at these things called chronotypes, which I know we're going to get into. But I pressure test all of their ideas in the real world

• 2:02Speaker 00

  and then I manipulate them so that they work. So a lot of times it works in the research lab, but it might just not work in your bedroom.

• 2:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, it's interesting because before we started, you were talking about how you have two French Bulldogs that sleep in bed with you.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:16Lewis Howes?

  You have a, you have a, you know, a sixty inch.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  Big screen TV.

• 2:18Lewis Howes?

  Flat screen TV, lots of bright lights on the whole time. And right away, I was like, that's everything that sleep experts say not to do.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:26Lewis Howes?

  They say to have it, you know, fifty degrees or something, you know, sixty something degrees is the perfect temperature. Blackout shades, snake plants, like to have all these like cooling temperature sheets, like to have the perfect environment, which I actually love the idea of having the perfect environment to allow yourself to sleep. But it sounds like as one of the top sleep doctors, you don't do that.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 2:49Lewis Howes?

  And I've also heard sleep experts say like, don't sleep with your partner. Because like any movement is going to disrupt your sleep. Like if you could have optimal, optimal sleep, they're saying this, but I'm also like, okay.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  But who has that?

• 3:02Lewis Howes?

  Right, exactly.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 3:04Lewis Howes?

  Who has that?

• 3:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:05Lewis Howes?

  So as a sleep doctor, you go against the rules of a lot of sleep experts.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  What I try to do is I try to adapt them, right? And try to figure out what is the mechanism inside of their research that they're finding can help people with better sleep? And then how do I adopt that to people's real living and real lifestyles, right? Yeah, I know you're an entrepreneur, right? Entrepreneurs sleep differently than other people sleep. Let me give you an example, right? So I work with entrepreneurs all the time. And one of the classic things that I hear people on the, on the doctor's side is, hey, I fall asleep just fine, but I wake up somewhere between one and three o'clock in the morning and I, it either takes me an hour or I don't fall back to sleep. You know, what is that and how do I fix that? By the way, that's the number one question that I get asked, but it's different for an entrepreneur.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  When an entrepreneur wakes up in the middle of the night, they're not stressed, they're excited.

• 3:57Lewis Howes?

  They're thinking.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  They're like, I've got the idea, I figured out what my business problem is. And so we have to be able to change some of the thinking that we used to have for insomnia and adapt it to the entrepreneur mindset.

• 4:08Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, yeah, when I was growing up, it would take me hours to fall asleep.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Really?

• 4:12Lewis Howes?

  And it would take me hours. And I think it was just like a stressful home environment and I didn't feel maybe psychologically or emotionally safe. And, you know, I knew my parents loved me, but they didn't have a healthy relationship with each other.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:26Lewis Howes?

  So there was a lot of uncertainty and screaming and fighting. Silent treatments and then just this, what's gonna happen? You know, the uncertainty of life as a seven, eight, 10 year old.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. I would argue a lot of sleep related issues are fear based, right? So you want, you might've been safe physically.

• 4:44Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  But emotionally, things weren't necessarily where you thought they should be or, or understood they should be.

• 4:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  And that fear can really play a role. Most of sleep issues that I deal with have an anxiety component to them. And when I think about anxiety, it's not like, oh, I'm afraid of this or, you know, I've got a phobia about that. It's, there's a level, my heart rate is up, there's stuff going on. It's not, it's not working here and I, and I'm, I'm concerned, I'm scared. That will override just about anything.

• 5:13Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I give you an example. If you were a patient of mine and you walked in and let's say you were taking 10 milligrams of Ambien. I could utter one sentence, looking at your medical chart, and I could make that Ambien not work. I could just turn to you and say, you have cancer. Boom, you ain't sleeping that night, right? It overrides the pharmacy, right? This is the most powerful drug in the world is your brain. And if you can figure out how to use that to your advantage, now we're talking, right? So I'm not saying anything against pills. There are plenty of people out there who use medications and, and by the way, there's nothing wrong with that. There are certain situations where pharmaceutical intervention makes a ton of sense, right?

• 5:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  If you're a paranoid schizophrenic, you get your Ambien, okay? You know, you've been in a motor vehicle accident and got terrible pain? Hey, you might need a sleeping pill. My goal is to try to get people off of those medications when they're not necessary.

• 6:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Almost everybody was able to sleep without pills when they were younger. So let's see if we can figure out how to get back to some of that.

• 6:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and as a psychologist, then what shifts in the mind that causes people not to be able to relax? And slow down their thinking?

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:23Lewis Howes?

  What, is it a traumatic event? Is it a, is it a, a recurrence of an uncertainty around events? Is it a constantly thinking about the past, worrying about the future? What ruminates in the mind that causes us not to sleep?

• 6:37Speaker 00

  All of the above. Right? You you literally hit almost all of them. So it's traumatic events, but it can be as as simple as daily worries, right? I mean, here's the thing, you know, I've heard this many times. It's a lot of people, they wake up in the middle of the night and they get monkey mind, right? Now, I'm not sure I have to give a formal definition of monkey mind, but I think we all know a little bit of what that is. It's, are you worried about your kids? Are you worried about your job? Did you get the right groceries? Um, you know, is the, what's that noise? Any worry. Letter in the house, right? Like, there's a whole host of things that can be out there. This causes a level of what we call physiological arousal. What it does is it turns on what's called the sympathetic nervous system. So you've got an autonomic nervous system breaks out into two pieces, sympathetic and parasympathetic.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  This is the fight or flight was just sympathetic and then the rest and digest is the parasympathetic. We want, at least before bed and during sleep, we'd love you to be in the parasympathetic. But when you wake up in the middle of the night, here's the thing that's kind of crazy. Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night for a good reason? Has anybody run into your room and said, happy birthday in the middle of the night? I don't know. Hey, it's joyful. But not many times. Not many times. Believe it or not, our brain is built, when we wake up in the middle of the night, we immediately go to the negative. And that can be problematic. And so you start to think about different things. Sometimes people will flip on the TV. I I gotta be honest with you. You flip on the TV nowadays, it's tragedy all over the place. It's geopolitical stuff, it's financial stuff, it's emotional stuff.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  I mean, there's a lot of things that are influencing us on the regular. What I try to explain to people is you need runway to land the plane, right? So you need time before bed that we don't have all of those things going on so that I can lower your heart rate. So here's the crazy part, is if everybody gets just one piece of evidence from from this podcast, you want a heart rate of about 60 or below to enter into a state of unconsciousness, right? If your heart rate's above that, it's gonna be tough for us to get you there. Now, don't get me wrong, there are people out there with high blood pressure who may never get a heart rate below 60, but I'm just talking about a lowering of the heart rate pretty significantly to allow your body to begin to relax and then allow the sleep process to take over.

• 8:52Lewis Howes?

  And if your mind is constantly ruminating on stressful things, or it's watching stressful things, it's gonna be hard to bring it back down.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Exactly. So I use all kinds of different techniques for people, even when they wake up in the middle of the night. Cause like I said, that is literally the number one question that I'm asked is, what do I do if I wake up in the middle of the night somewhere between one and three, and I can't get back to sleep?

• 9:13Lewis Howes?

  What do you do?

• 9:14Speaker 00

  You want me to go through it?

• 9:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  All right, perfect. So I've got a whole routine and I tell people all the time about it. So first of all, don't go pee. Yeah, you heard it here. Don't go pee.

• 9:24Lewis Howes?

  What if you have to pee?

• 9:25Speaker 00

  If you've gotta really pee, please go pee. Okay? But here's the thing, people wake up and they say to themselves, I'm up, I might as well go pee, right? What happens when you go from a lying position to a seated position to standing?

• 9:37Lewis Howes?

  Your heart rate starts up.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Your heart rate goes up, exactly. And so then you have two problems on your hands. So what I tell people to do, roll over to your back, count to 10 or 15, see if you really have to pee. If you have to pee, please do me the favor, go pee.

• 9:49Lewis Howes?

  Don't let the bed.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Right. Now, don't put on some Depends, okay? Like, that's not what we're talking about here. But if you're gonna do that, have some strategically placed nightlights along the way. Cause if you flip on lights, you just told your brain it's morning, and it doesn't actually work out so well. Step number two, don't look at the clock, right? Here's what people do.

• 10:07Lewis Howes?

  Then you start ruminating more.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Well, you instantly do the mental math.

• 10:11Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man, I lost the sleep. I need this much more sleep.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  Now you're done, bro. Right? You're like, you spin up and now you're pissed off.

• 10:18Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  Right? You're like, oh my gosh, it's 3:30. I gotta get up at 6:00. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Like, that doesn't, in the history of time, no one has ever forced themselves to sleep without anesthesia. Okay, so it just doesn't work that way. So if you can avoid the clock, now what I tell people, plug your phone in across the room. You can still hear it if there's an emergency, cause everybody always tells me, oh, what if my kids call or use it for my, you know, alarm clock? Great, stick it across the room. But what happens, most people when they wake up, they grab their phone and they head to the can.

• 10:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Right? And you know what they do? They're checking social media, they're looking at their te- Who needs that at 3 o'clock in the morning? Nobody. So if you can avoid it, don't go pee. If you gotta pee, remember, please go pee. Avoid the clock. Now you're lying there and you're wondering, what am I supposed to do? I want to back up for a second and describe to everybody why this has occurred. Because by the way, it's biology. Okay, so here's where it gets really, really interesting. Your core body temperature rises, rises, rises till about 10:30 at night. And sleep follows your core body temperature. It hits a peak and then it drops. That drop is a signal for your brain to release melatonin. Melatonin is kind of the key that starts the engine for sleep. It's not the only thing that you need, but you ain't got no melatonin.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  You're not going to be able to fall asleep. Your core body temperature continues to drop, drop, drop, drop, drop. At some point in time, if your body doesn't heat up, you go hypothermic and you die. Guess what time that is? Between 1 and 3 o'clock in the morning. Every human on earth wakes up between 1 and 3 o'clock in the morning. But here's what happens. They burp, they fart, they roll over and they go back to bed. I'm talking about what happens if that doesn't occur? What happens if you don't fall back asleep immediately? Here's a technique that I have all my patients do and they love it. It's called four, seven, eight breathing. So this is a technique that was developed by Dr. Andrew Weil, Harvard-trained naturalist, believe it or not, used in the military to help our snipers be able to shoot in between

• 12:19Speaker 00

  heartbeats. Because you know, if your heartbeat's beating too fast, you can actually change the trajectory of the bullet. One little, one little flinch. Exactly, right? And so here's what it is. And by the way, it's exactly what it sounds like. You slowly breathe in through the nose for a count of four. You hold for a count of seven and you slowly push for a count of eight. Now you need to do this about 20 times and those cycles will dump your heart rate below 60, which is kind of our magic number. Now I'm going to be honest with you. When I tried this myself, and by the way, I've had this happen to me. I'm not immune to having sleep problems every once in a while. I mean, I'm a human being, right? I lose count. And then I get anxious and then my heart rate goes up and now I've completely screwed the whole thing up. So here's what I do is I have people take their hands and make

• 13:04Speaker 00

  light fists. And when you do one, eleven, four, seven, eight, you stick out a finger, two, three, four, five, you get to 10, you wrap them back. Most people don't even make it back.

• 13:13Lewis Howes?

  Cause you're, you're also like heavier, right?

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Exactly. And you do it down by your sides, right? And so now you're doing something distally and then you're breathing. And here's the kicker is you want to picture the number in your head. Cause you can't count and think of anything else at the same time. It's impossible. So you picture that four, then the three, then the two, then the one, then the seven, all the way down, and then the eight for the push. And now it's not a hard push. To be clear, it's very gentle, very light. It's a breathing in and breathing out. Also, I couldn't hold my breath for seven seconds and push when I first started doing it. So I modified it a little bit. So I did a four, five, six for about two weeks, then a four, six, seven, and then a four, seven, eight.

• 13:54Lewis Howes?

  Yes. A breathing strategy, I think is really important.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  Now here's also, what happens if this doesn't work? What happens if you get through 20 cycles and you haven't fallen asleep? Couple of different things you want to think about. One is there's actually data now to show something called non-sleep deep rest. Otherwise known as yoga nidra, right? Lie there, relax. It's actually rejuvenative. So even if you don't fall asleep, but you're chilling out, you're actually doing your body some good. And as we were talking earlier, you're gonna stay positive. So so many people go into this negative mindset. If you find that you're lying there and you're like, this sucks, and you can feel your heart rate going up, that's the time to go ahead and get out of bed. Have a specific area in the house, right? Where there's a book, there's a light,

• 14:38Speaker 00

  and you can just relax, chill. And when you start to feel sleepy again, then return to bed.

• 14:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Now, is it, most people think they have a sleep problem because they're not getting eight hours of sleep.

• 14:50Lewis Howes?

  Is eight hours still the optimal for average human beings?

• 14:54Speaker 00

  Absolutely not.

• 14:55Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  No, absolutely not.

• 14:57Lewis Howes?

  Should some people be getting less or more depending on their personality, depending on their job, the person, if they're athletes or?

• 15:04Speaker 00

  It has a lot to do with genetics and where they are in their physical stage of life, right? So when you're younger, you can get six and a half, seven hours. When I talk about younger now, I'm talking like early twenties, things like that. When you're much younger, you want to get as much sleep as you can because you've got a developing body. I mean, you're an athlete, you understood this when you were out playing.

• 15:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  You got your rest.

• 15:23Lewis Howes?

  You need a lot of sleep, you need naps, you need sleep, you need.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 15:27Lewis Howes?

  Ten hours maybe.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Right, and so in those cases, you might need more sleep. But once you kind of hit adulthood, what we're learning is somewhere between seven and nine hours seems to be kind of the general average. I'll be honest with you though, I get about six and a half. I'm fifty eight years old, I get six and a half, I've had no coffee today. This is my energy level every day, right? So, sleep is flexible. That's the thing I want people to really understand. I've got so many people out there like, the only way I'm going to optimize is if I get eight hours. Remember, sleep isn't about quantity, it's also about quality of sleep. And so, depth of sleep matters, are you getting the right stages? How is that going for you? And a lot of people say, okay, well, I've got a tracker, you know, I've got a ring, I've got a wristband, I've got a watch, I've got something that's tracking.

• 16:11Lewis Howes?

  What do you think about those, those wearables that track your sleep?

• 16:14Speaker 00

  Here's what I'll tell you, is none of them are fantastic, okay? They're not accurate, because here's the problem, we measure depth of sleep from brainwaves. It's hard to get brainwaves from your finger, right? So you have to use a proxy, so you have to use heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, and then an algorithm is kind of, kind of guess. Okay, Louis is at this heart rate at this time of night, we're pretty sure he's in this depth of sleep. The biggest problem, I think, with the trackers out there is people just. Zone in and they like it'll hijack your day. I can't count the number of people who walk up to me and they're like, Dr. Bruce, I only got 14 minutes of deep sleep last night. Am I gonna die? You're probably gonna die, but it's not gonna be from deep sleep loss, right?

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Because how much did you get the night before? And they'll say, oh, 16 minutes. I go, how about the night before? 18 minutes. I said, well, then the tracker is being consistently inaccurate. I can work with that, right? What we're looking for is the delta or the deflection. So if you get 14 minutes every single night, there's no universe. You're only getting 14 minutes of sleep. It doesn't work that way, right? It's being consistently inaccurate. But if you get 14 and then you get 407 one night, I want to know what happened that night, right? Look at the trend at the end of the week. Don't double down on the number because sometimes it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. They wake up, they get a crappy sleep score and then they think, oh, my day is shot.

• 17:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Right. I'm gonna be done for the day. It's not gonna work. It's not gonna go well and all this stuff. And then it ends up not going well because they've kind of made it up themselves, right? So use the tracker as something to guide you in different directions, but you really don't want to look and say, this is the number. Because unfortunately, we're not there yet. Now, I will tell you, probably 18 to 24 months from now, we might be. Some of the AI and the algorithms that I'm seeing out there, I would not be surprised if a lot of these companies are starting to work and getting better and better and better at the at the variability and the guessing game. And I think we'll get there over time. But that is very different than, for example, what we do in clinic with a sleep study, right? So a sleep study is where you actually are looking at all of those things.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  You have FDA approved medical devices that really are measuring brain waves, measuring the whole thing and getting you a much better understanding. So if you've got a tracker, use it as a guide, but not the Bible.

• 18:33Lewis Howes?

  Now, as a sleep doctor, you've got, you get around six and a half hours of sleep.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  I do.

• 18:38Lewis Howes?

  You have two French Bulldogs in bed with you.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  I do.

• 18:40Lewis Howes?

  Snoring and making their noises.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:43Lewis Howes?

  Moving around and licking your face throughout the night or whatever they're doing. You've got a, you know, 80 inch flat screen TV blaring signals, frequencies.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:54Lewis Howes?

  And you you told me before that you also have a sleep apnea?

• 18:57Speaker 00

  Yep. So I was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea.

• 19:00Lewis Howes?

  So what does that mean? And do you use a machine for this?

• 19:03Speaker 00

  I sure do. So sleep apnea, I'm glad we're talking about this because this is important, right? So 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 wasn't feeling up to snuff. I my workouts weren't as good, my times weren't as good and my 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. Some 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.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  But 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.

• 19:56Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 19:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Let me tell you, that was not the side effect I was looking for, brother.

• 20:01Lewis Howes?

  You're like, I wanted to get jacked, I wanted to get strong.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  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 I when I used to be practicing on the regular, I would test out all the new equipment on myself. So 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 if you're looking at sleep apnea in particular. So I got a machine, 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, the whole, that's the whole thing.

• 20:38Lewis Howes?

  You sleep with that?

• 20:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:49Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  Right. That's a lot. That's moderate sleep apnea.

• 20:52Lewis Howes?

  How long do you stop sleeping, uh, stop breathing for?

• 20:55Speaker 00

  So the definition is anywhere from 30 to 90 seconds.

• 20:57Lewis Howes?

  Come on.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  For real.

• 20:59Lewis Howes?

  You stopped breathing for 30 to 90 seconds, 24 times an hour?

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Correct. That is sleep apnea. And I want to be clear.

• 21:05Lewis Howes?

  And you can't hold your breath for seven seconds?

• 21:08Speaker 00

  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 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, 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. So 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 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.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  I don't want to sleep with the 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 is not the only solution, Lewis. Like there are mouth guards that you can wear with no hose, no mask. There 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. And cognitive decline for sure. Right? Like this is a significant medical issue.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  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. They said, Michael, are GLP-1s the new CPAP? Right? Because you know, people are losing weight with GLP-1s. Can that, 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 apnea. So people need to get tested.

• 23:13Lewis Howes?

  Is it true that one of the greatest things that an individual can do to reach their greatness is to have better sleep?

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. 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.

• 23:48Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 23:49Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:58Lewis Howes?

  Come on, dude, the research is out there.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Wow. Absolutely.

• 24:02Lewis Howes?

  So wait a minute. So you can, if you have cancer and you get treatment, if you get chemo at a certain time.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  In your circadian rhythm.

• 24:13Lewis Howes?

  It could potentially, the research is showing that it helps you recover faster.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  And you need less chemo. Less poison is going into your body.

• 24:20Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. The research has been around for a little while.

• 24:23Lewis Howes?

  I mean, okay, so tell me about circadian rhythm then. Why is this important for us to understand? And what should we know about our own circadian rhythms?

• 24:30Speaker 00

  So sleep is basically two separate systems in the brain. One is called your sleep drive. The other is called your sleep rhythm. Sleep 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.

• 25:06Lewis Howes?

  What does that mean?

• 25:07Speaker 00

  So I'm gonna tell you what it means. I figured out this thing. I call it the napa latte. So here's what we do.

• 25:13Lewis Howes?

  The napa latte.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're gonna like this.

• 25:15Lewis Howes?

  All right.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  So if you're a dragon ass, you've only got four hours, you know, the night before, you got a big presentation, gonna be on a podcast, you're gonna 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? And since caffeine and adenosine are off by one molecule, caffeine fits into that place, blocks future adenosine for up to four hours.

• 25:48Lewis Howes?

  So what does that mean?

• 25:49Speaker 00

  That means you're wide awake and not dragging it for four hours.

• 25:53Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I do it with athletes. I do it with CEOs 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.

• 26:02Lewis Howes?

  Once a month, if you have, if you didn't get a good night's sleep or something.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. But you can definitely use something like this to your advantage.

• 26:09Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 26:15Lewis Howes?

  And you got a game, you got an event, you got a speech, you got something the next day.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Right. I would say somewhere around 60 minutes before you're gonna go on, right? Do this 25, take the coffee with, cool it down, take the coffee, drink it.

• 26:28Lewis Howes?

  Why not hot coffee?

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Cause, cause you have to drink the whole thing fast.

• 26:31Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  It's merely to cool it down.

• 26:33Lewis Howes?

  For an hour, you have to drink it.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Not the goal. The goal is to put it in and close your eyes.

• 26:38Lewis Howes?

  And what if you can't sleep right away?

• 26:40Speaker 00

  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?

• 26:49Lewis Howes?

  And sleep for 25 minutes?

• 26:50Speaker 00

  25 minutes. You don't want to go over that. You ever taken a nap and felt worse, not better?

• 26:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  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. That'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, 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. 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 10:30. You go to Latin America where they take a siesta during the day. Eat at 10:30.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  I mean, these people are up, up, up. That's a whole different, you know, ballgame 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. We tried everything.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  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? She 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?

• 29:04Speaker 00

  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 he said, you want to do what? I said, I want her to come in two hours later. So in this particular job, she had to be there 8:00 AM. 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. 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.

• 29:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  I'm like, no pressure. Great.

• 29:39Lewis Howes?

  Wow, wow, wow.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  So we, we run the.

• 29:41Lewis Howes?

  Did you tell the client, your client, the patient this? Like, hey?

• 29:44Speaker 00

  No, no, no. Cause 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.

• 29:54Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  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?

• 30:12Lewis Howes?

  Okay. Tell me why.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  Because 85% of the world can't wake up at 5 a.m. Louis. 85%. They're gonna fail no matter what genetically speaking. I can actually look, if you had your genome sequenced, I could look at your 23andme or your ancestry.com. I can show you where it's an area called the P E R three area. I want to be clear, there's about 30 areas that control this, but P E R three is kind of the big, 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.

• 30:47Lewis Howes?

  Of course.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  A lot of people out here have never heard of chronotypes, but they've definitely heard of early birds. If 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, I was in school. I heard about it like it's, it's kind of a well-known system. I said, but it doesn't encompass this woman I, 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.

• 31:18Lewis Howes?

  So this is not just some social construct of just saying, ah, I'm a night owl. I'm an early bird or. So this is like, if someone's saying that they're actually, it's their body saying it.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 31:29Lewis Howes?

  It's not, they're just like, ah, well, I just don't want to wake up early.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  That's right. It is actually their body. Okay? Now I have always.

• 31:35Lewis Howes?

  And you can test this.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:37Lewis Howes?

  Is this through blood work you're saying or is this through?

• 31:39Speaker 00

  I've got a quiz online.

• 31:40Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  That people can take and, and look. Thirty 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? Um, and lions are very interesting people. They make up about 15% 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, too into the morning scene parade, right?

• 32:23Speaker 00

  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. So they're great for the 5am club. But 85% of the rest of the fricking 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. Um, and by the way, 50%, five, zero percent of the population is a bear. And I gotta 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?

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Absolutely perfect. Um, and, and these people are a lot of fun. They're really good to work with. Um, and, and you know, a lot, a lot of times it makes a lot of sense. We'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 8am. It's the worst. It's the worst, right? 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.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Right? I was told that I wasn't intelligent. I was so, all of these different things. And, and if all I had done is just taken some of those classes later in the day, dude, I would have crushed it.

• 33:57Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  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. Cause who gets an idea at two o'clock in the afternoon? Nobody. I get it at 2am, right?

• 34:11Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Well.

• 34:12Lewis Howes?

  Is there something around brain chemistry?

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 34:15Lewis Howes?

  Or like the ability to dream or to let go?

• 34:18Speaker 00

  We can 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.

• 34:27Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  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, why do you call them dolphins? So it turns out that dolphins sleep unihemispherically. So half of their brain is asleep while the other half is awake and looking for predators.

• 34:51Lewis Howes?

  And I thought. They don't sleep, right? I mean, they're just swimming in a circle.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 34:55Lewis Howes?

  If you see at the zoo or whatever, just like.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 34:58Lewis Howes?

  They're swimming 24/7.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  Exactly. So half of their brain has to sleep while they're swimming and then it rotates to the other half.

• 35:03Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Right. That is my insomnia groups. That's what this woman was. She was a dolphin. And you know, we did.

• 35:10Lewis Howes?

  What percent is that?

• 35:11Speaker 00

  It's about 10 to 15%. closer to 10.

• 35:13Lewis Howes?

  And what are the wolves?

• 35:15Speaker 00

  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. The 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.

• 35:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  Cause 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 4:30 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 really cool. So 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.

• 36:18Lewis Howes?

  So how do you know, once you go through your quiz and you find out your chronotype?

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 36:24Lewis Howes?

  Then you should know when to have sex.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 36:27Lewis Howes?

  So you can learn when to have sex based on your chronotype to have the best night's sleep?

• 36:32Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 36:34Lewis Howes?

  So when is that?

• 36:35Speaker 00

  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 give 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. And melatonin, the sleep hormone, needs to be low. So when we surveyed people, seventy-five percent of people have sex between ten thirty and eleven thirty at night. What do you think their hormone profile looks like? It's the opposite.

• 37:02Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Melatonin is high and all five of those things is low. So that's hint.

• 37:07Lewis Howes?

  You need that to switch.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 37:10Lewis Howes?

  So you should be having morning sex, not night sex.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  So you've 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.

• 37:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, if you're exhausted at night and you can't get an erection, why force it?

• 37:31Speaker 00

  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. So 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 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? So in the book, I created a matrix.

• 38:12Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  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 chronotype. This is the biggest unlock that anybody could do.

• 38:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 38:40Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so I, so here's the thing. I feel like when I was growing up, I was more of a wolf.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  This is such a great question. I know where you're going.

• 38:47Lewis Howes?

  Right?

• 38:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:48Lewis Howes?

  But then, but then through social conditioning, through sports where we had to wake up at 5:00 AM for lifting.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Yes, yep.

• 38:55Lewis Howes?

  I had to condition myself, essentially go against my nature or the way my brain was working at that season of life.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  So.

• 39:03Lewis Howes?

  To try to fit in with, you know, high school, college, then pro sports, then.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:08Lewis Howes?

  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 and there's, everyone's asleep, so I can actually get some work done.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:20Lewis Howes?

  But then I was like, okay, well, 2:00 AM every night doesn't work also because now I'm gaining weight and I'm not, it's like my healthiest.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 39:27Lewis Howes?

  So I feel like I've become more of a bear and probably more of an early bear now.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 39:33Lewis Howes?

  Just so I can get up and get my workouts in first. And now with twin daughters, I gotta spend time with them in the morning. So it's like fitting things in the morning.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  So it's called chrono longevity.

• 39:43Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  So you go through all of the phases in your lifetime.

• 39:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I'm sure I've been a dolphin in this season also, you know?

• 39:49Speaker 00

  Your daughters right now are lions. They go to bed early, they wake up early, right? Once they hit middle school, they're gonna be bears. They're gonna go to bed around 7:30, they're gonna wake up around 7:30. Then adolescence hits. I don't know an adolescent who doesn't want to stay up until two and sleep until 12.

• 40:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that was me. That was me.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Me too, right? Then when you hit about 20 years old, it sets for about 30, 40 years.

• 40:11Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 40:12Speaker 00

  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.

• 40:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Right?

• 40:23Lewis Howes?

  My mom's taking a nap throughout the day multiple times.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  Right, because, well, we should talk about that.

• 40:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 40:40Lewis Howes?

  Maybe how much daylight you get during the day, all these stuff.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 40:56Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, we call it the darkness hormone or the vampire hormone because it only comes out at night.

• 41:00Lewis Howes?

  So you, your body won't create melatonin if the sun is out.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  That's correct.

• 41:05Lewis Howes?

  Or if you see the sun.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  Correct. Now, what happens with jet lag? People always ask me this, like, I'm on 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.

• 41:20Lewis Howes?

  So how do you never get jet lag?

• 41:22Speaker 00

  Believe it or not, there's an app for that.

• 41:24Lewis Howes?

  I've seen that.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Uh, it's called Time Shifter.

• 41:26Lewis Howes?

  I've seen that.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Yep. So.

• 41:27Lewis Howes?

  Does it work?

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Full disclosure, I'm both an investor and developer of Time Shifter.

• 41:31Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Right. But I'm going to tell you something, the shit works.

• 41:33Lewis Howes?

  It works.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  So what we do is we give you a schedule. We know where, so about 15, 20 years ago, they discovered that if they put a specific frequency of light, blue light, in fact, um, 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's squelches your melatonin, and then we give you a little bit of melatonin when you're supposed to be sleeping on Paris time. And if you can't quite wake up because your melatonin is still trying to come through, we give you a little caffeine,

• 42:16Speaker 00

  maybe even take a nap, and by the time you get to Paris, I have you on Paris time.

• 42:20Lewis Howes?

  Come on, swear to God. So is the app give you a blue light through the phone? Is that what it is?

• 42:26Speaker 00

  Um, 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 anyone to like, any light that you want.

• 42:33Lewis Howes?

  Really? A blue light, though?

• 42:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Not, not blue the color. These lights have blue in the frequency.

• 42:38Lewis Howes?

  I see what you're saying. Got you.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  So blue light is a frequency between 460 and 480 nanometers.

• 42:43Lewis Howes?

  And you just look at it?

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. 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.

• 42:53Lewis Howes?

  Dark.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  Right? Also, by the way, we just kind of flipped over to daylight saving time.

• 42:57Lewis Howes?

  That messes you up, too.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  It's a terrible idea.

• 42:59Lewis Howes?

  Why? I mean.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  It's a terrible idea.

• 43:01Lewis Howes?

  My whole last week was a mess because of this.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And by the way, your daughters will actually be lagged behind.

• 43:06Lewis Howes?

  Oh, they were, I know. It was rough.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  It's awful, dude.

• 43:09Lewis Howes?

  It's rough because it was lighter later, they were going to bed, and I was like, and they were fussier for hours.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:14Lewis Howes?

  Why do they keep allowing daylight savings to happen?

• 43:16Speaker 00

  They shouldn't. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has 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 them on Amazon for like a hundred bucks. I've traveled with one all the time.

• 43:34Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I put it in my sleep kit. I create my own sleep kits when I travel.

• 43:37Lewis Howes?

  So we shouldn't wake up during the dark?

• 43:39Speaker 00

  Absolutely not. It's just your body wasn't designed to do that.

• 43:42Lewis Howes?

  But there are lions that wake up in the dark, right?

• 43:45Speaker 00

  They do. They do because their melatonin turns off naturally.

• 43:48Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's pretty cool. I'm telling you something. This chronotype is incredible on lock. I had one entrepreneur chronotype his entire company and then schedule meetings based on people's chronotypes.

• 44:00Lewis Howes?

  Come on.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  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. Like there's data to now show that an average employer loses approximately thirty two hundred dollars 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 gonna get anything done.

• 44:34Lewis Howes?

  What's the best time for a wolf to be creative?

• 44:40Speaker 00

  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 eight AM Monday morning meeting. Have it Thursday at four o'clock, bring some guacamole 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.

• 45:03Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  It's being present.

• 45:05Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  Right?

• 45:07Lewis Howes?

  Man, that's fascinating. So as a new parent to twin girls, they're gonna be

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Rough, bro.

• 45:14Lewis Howes?

  They're gonna be five months this week.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Hmm, congratulations.

• 45:17Lewis Howes?

  Thank you very much. It's a beautiful journey.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Pretty cool.

• 45:21Lewis Howes?

  What advice as a sleep doctor would you have for me to ensure that I get the best sleep possible? My wife gets the best sleep possible?

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 45:28Lewis Howes?

  Knowing that things are to keep evolving as they grow.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 45:41Lewis Howes?

  Coming soon, huh?

• 45:42Speaker 00

  It's gonna be.

• 45:42Lewis Howes?

  They're starting to put everything in their mouth now, yeah.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  And they're sucking on things and, 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 gonna be fussy. They're not gonna be sleeping well and things like that. So what I always recommend is, for example, you take Monday night, Wednesday night, Friday night. What's your wife's name?

• 46:02Lewis Howes?

  Martha.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  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.

• 46:11Lewis Howes?

  Not both.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  Not both.

• 46:12Lewis Howes?

  Why should both suffer?

• 46:13Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 46:13Lewis Howes?

  You know?

• 46:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 46:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  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.

• 46:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  Take advantage of the.

• 46:29Lewis Howes?

  Take the morning, exactly. That's smart.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 46:31Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. Now, we mentioned briefly about how different cultures sleep in different ways. You know, I'm, 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 eight PM, maybe for dinner, whatever. But my wife's from Mexico and they eat at 10 PM.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 46:52Lewis Howes?

  And on New Year's, they eat at 1 AM.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 46:54Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  Later evenings.

• 47:03Lewis Howes?

  10 o'clock start.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:05Lewis Howes?

  Which to me seems crazy.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:07Lewis Howes?

  Cause you're like, don't you want to try to go to bed by 11:30, 12 and actually let yourself rest?

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Yep. So a lot of those people end up being prototypes, but it's all shifted. Because this comes through culturally from hundreds of years of people evolving there, right? Also, they're closer to the equator, which means they get more light later.

• 47:25Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  And remember.

• 47:26Lewis Howes?

  It's still light at 10 PM.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:38Lewis Howes?

  And what happens when you take a 30 to 60 minute nap during the day, a siesta?

• 47:43Speaker 00

  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 to 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. So 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. Absolutely. I love it now. And 20 minute, 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. Wow. What is the one or two questions that most people are asking about sleep today?

• 48:27Speaker 00

  Well, we went through the whole idea of what do I do to wake up, like waking up in the middle of the night? Um, 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. They don't really 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, I'm pretty prescriptive. I'm good about telling people exactly what to do. Yeah.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  So I'd like to, if I can, give people a five-step plan. Let's do it. 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. Let 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 um, 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.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Takes 90 minutes for it to get up and in. You start to get tired around nine 30, you go to bed at 10, 10 30, right? But 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. Really? Do that one. Not, 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. Okay. If you stop at two, eight hours later is 10, which is roughly when most people are thinking about going to bed.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  And at least half of the caffeine is out of your system. A lot of people don't realize that, oh, I can fall asleep. I can drink a cup of coffee for, you know, at 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.

• 50:58Lewis Howes?

  I mean, a lot of cultures will have a cappuccino or an espresso after dessert.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  I get it.

• 51:03Lewis Howes?

  At dinnertime.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  I get it.

• 51:05Lewis Howes?

  And they're falling asleep.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  It's problematic.

• 51:07Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 51:07Speaker 00

  It is. Go decaf. It's not gonna kill you. Still taste it and you'll be fine. Trust me on this one.

• 51:13Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  Number three has to do with alcohol. There's a really big difference between going to sleep and passing out.

• 51:19Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 51:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  Like, we've all been there.

• 51:22Lewis Howes?

  Being unconscious and being unconscious.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  Right, exactly, right. There's, because alcohol basically anesthetizes you.

• 51:28Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  Right, and so, by the way, I like bourbon. Okay, I like, 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 wanna always go one for one because you wanna be flushing the system out, you know, pretty quickly. Takes the average human approximately one hour to digest one alcoholic beverage.

• 51:54Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 51:55Speaker 00

  Now you order your second glass of wine. Maybe you finish it, maybe you don't. Then you have your second glass of water, stop, and then three hours later, if that's your chronotypical bedtime, you are on the go. It's perfect, right? So, to limit yourself to two drinks, but step number three is to stop alcohol three hours before bed.

• 52:13Lewis Howes?

  Wow, but there is, there's no nutritional value to having alcohol.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  Absolutely none. Here's the crazy thing.

• 52:17Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't help your brain, it doesn't help your sleep, it doesn't help your gut, nothing.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  It does nothing, 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 shit. Stop drinking alcohol.

• 52:29Lewis Howes?

  Right, exactly.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  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? And that makes it hard to sleep. So stop exercise four hours before bed.

• 52:47Lewis Howes?

  Stop before, not what about like a brisk walk or even just a slow walk?

• 52:50Speaker 00

  Walking after dinner spine. Zone two is bonkers, okay? But you don't want, 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.

• 53:05Lewis Howes?

  What about like, um, a hot bath, a sauna?

• 53:10Speaker 00

  Let's talk about it.

• 53:10Lewis Howes?

  A hot tub, like things that activate that way.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  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. 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. By raising it. You can do the same with the sauna, right? Sauna, hot bath, 90 minutes to 120 minutes before bed.

• 53:48Lewis Howes?

  Is okay.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  Absolutely a good idea.

• 53:50Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Absolutely a good idea.

• 53:52Lewis Howes?

  This is gonna help you drop your temperature.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  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 just, I'm gonna, you know, 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.

• 54:16Lewis Howes?

  It's a heater.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  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. So 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.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  It always has. I 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 hard back 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, and activate your, 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 sleeping in of itself is a dehydrative event. You 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.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  That's really, really important. And then the other thing you want to do is get 15 minutes of sunshine. Now, people are gonna 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. Vitamin D is a circadian pacemaker, right? So that's kind of where we want people to be. Now, speaking of vitamin D, people also always ask me all the time. I think another thing that we didn't get to hit on, supplements. Tell me. Right? So people are always like, Michael, Michael, should I take melatonin? Absolutely not. Really?

• 56:24Speaker 00

  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. Hormones 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

• 56:48Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 56:49Speaker 00

  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. But 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?

• 57:32Speaker 00

  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. Dude, I would say 10% of the patients that I see, when I just get them to do that, their problem is solved.

• 57:50Lewis Howes?

  They feel better.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:53Lewis Howes?

  I keep coming back to this idea of ruminating. Thinking about stress, worry, whether it's big T, little T traumas,

• 58:02Lewis Howes?

  uncertainties on what keeps us waking up or staying up and not able to sleep.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  And you know, one of the things we didn't really touch on, but I think it falls into this category? Nightmares.

• 58:12Lewis Howes?

  Oh yeah, for sure.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Right?

• 58:14Lewis Howes?

  Nightmares.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  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. And 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, you've had a terrible sexual trauma, 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. I 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. Cause they don't want to watch the movies that are playing in their head. No.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  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. And so you dream for whatever was going on in your day. Right. So if you had a joyous day, your daughter's turned 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.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  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. I gotta 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, but if you can't get it there because you're waking up because you're scared due to a nightmare.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:00:36Lewis Howes?

  What about sleep hypnosis?

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  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. I 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 before seven, eight that we were talking about earlier. I think that has a real, you know, use case right there.

• 1:01:05Lewis Howes?

  Where is the research lie within spirituality and sleep?

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  That's a great question.

• 1:01:09Lewis Howes?

  Having, you know, faith in God or a bigger purpose or something else. If you've dealt with stress, rumination, anxiety, sleep tremors, nightmares.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:21Lewis Howes?

  Is there research around faith in God to allow people to sleep better?

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  There's research around faith in general. I don't know everybody, there's a lot of people 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. It 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.

• 1:01:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, but what I'm hearing you say is, is there research that if someone has faith in a higher purpose, they sleep better?

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  I would agree, yes.

• 1:02:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Is there any like documentation of this out there or is this more from your experience?

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:02:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I'd be curious about that. If people sleep better if they believe in God or a higher purpose? Or if they don't believe in God, do they sleep worse?

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  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. It's rough.

• 1:02:34Lewis Howes?

  Life is harder.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  It is. Everything is harder, right? Purpose, I mean, isn't that kind of what defines greatness, right? Is purpose?

• 1:02:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  Right? And so when you're, when you're, and, 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.

• 1:02:54Lewis Howes?

  When you work with those patients that have sleep insomnia or that are dolphins for seasons, right?

• 1:03:02Lewis Howes?

  How many of those have a belief in God or a higher purpose versus don't?

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:03:21Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. That's interesting to know.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:25Lewis Howes?

  The ones that sleep the best, the ones that have followed your routines and the practices and the principles we've talked about.

• 1:03:35Lewis Howes?

  And they've gone from either bad sleep to now consistently good sleep over years.

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:03:40Lewis Howes?

  What are the things they are thinking and doing differently? And do you feel like they've healed a certain past trauma?

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  Oh, it's an interesting question. 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's not on or the bulldogs aren't in the bed, all the thoughts come in.

• 1:04:03Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:04:32Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Lewis Howes?

  How much does I, how much does self-identity impact the way we sleep?

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  What do you mean by self-identity?

• 1:04:41Lewis Howes?

  Like if I identify myself as a bad person, as stupid, as ugly, as not good, as I'm, I'm never going to be amount to anything in my life versus I'm confident, I'm courageous, I create boundaries.

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  The more sleep deprived you are, the more likely you are to have a negative self-image.

• 1:04:58Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  There's a lot of data on that.

• 1:05:00Lewis Howes?

  That is interesting.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  The more sleep deprived you are, the more likely you are that the tapes in your head are negative.

• 1:05:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  The better sleep you get, the more likely it is that the tapes in your head are positive.

• 1:05:11Lewis 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.

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:05:19Lewis Howes?

  And use tools, helpful tools that supports you in calming your mind, creating a more empowering self-identity versus a negative self-identity.

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  With discipline and following a couple of those rules we talked about.

• 1:05:32Lewis Howes?

  Like what?

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  Well, I mean.

• 1:05:33Lewis Howes?

  You cannot have caffeine in the middle of the night or something.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. Like you can't do that. And you can't, like, 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.

• 1:05:43Lewis 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 2:00 P. M. You can.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, but if you think you're a pile of you know what, you're not gonna sleep well.

• 1:05:57Lewis Howes?

  None of those. 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.

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:06:05Lewis Howes?

  You won't sleep.

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:06:18Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  It's pretty interesting. So we, it seems to bifurcate and we seem to be two different camps on this. Is 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, I ask about narcolepsy and I ask about depression or undiagnosed sleep disorder like that. And 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 that hard.

• 1:07:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. What about 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.

• 1:07:15Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:07:17Lewis Howes?

  Do narcissists sleep better than those who don't have narcissistic tendencies?

• 1:07:22Speaker 00

  I'm not familiar with the data in that area, but if I was gonna like put on my clinical hat and, 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. But if you really are ident, 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 problems for sure.

• 1:07:50Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Now, there's a lot of kind of sleep hack trends out there right now.

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:07:56Lewis Howes?

  Mouth tape being one of them.

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  So stupid.

• 1:07:59Lewis Howes?

  Why?

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  So stupid.

• 1:08:00Lewis Howes?

  As a sleep doctor, does mouth tape work or why do you think it's stupid?

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:08:13Lewis Howes?

  Come on.

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  Dude, I mean, it's the data, I, I'll send you the study.

• 1:08:17Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  Right? And here's the thing, because people are not seeing if they have undiagnosed sleep apnea. If you've got undiagnosed sleep apnea and you tape your mouth shut, it's not a good idea.

• 1:08:27Lewis Howes?

  You got a stuck in nose and you can't breathe.

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  And by the way, that's the reason why people use mouth tape or their 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.

• 1:08:54Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Okay, so when, before the data came out about this, you know, 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, you know, I guess if you have your mouth open the whole time and you're not like

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  I never thought it was a good idea.

• 1:09:11Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:09:12Speaker 00

  Biologically, it doesn't make sense. I 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.

• 1:09:25Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  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 that device, I think it's called the Navage or something like that, that rolls, you know, you know, hot water through there.

• 1:09:36Lewis Howes?

  Places it out, yeah.

• 1:09:37Speaker 00

  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. Right, there'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 out and let's figure out what's going on.

• 1:10:06Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. Why is it important for us to sleep? Why is it important for us to breathe through the nose when we sleep and not through the mouth?

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  Again, you're not getting good air. Right? The air that you're getting

• 1:10:18Lewis Howes?

  When you sleep, when you breathe through the mouth.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  When you breathe through the mouth. Because it's, there's no, all the particulates are going straight into your lungs, right? The, the purpose of the nose, like, you've got two nostrils, you've got one mouth. Noses are for breathing, mouths are for eating. Like, that's really how it was, you know, however, the big guy upstairs, you know, planned it all out, that's pretty much biologically speaking.

• 1:10:37Lewis Howes?

  How much should we be breathing through our nose throughout the day and night versus through the mouth? Because when you're, when you're speaking, you're going to breathe through the mouth.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  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? Most people are shallow breathers.

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  Right, they're not.

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  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 breathing in through your nose is one of the best ways to do that.

• 1:11:50Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. So how often or how much of the time should we be breathing through our nose?

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  While we're sleeping?

• 1:11:56Lewis Howes?

  Throughout the day and night, the night, the whole night?

• 1:11:59Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, generally speaking.

• 1:12:01Lewis Howes?

  Ninety percent.

• 1:12:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, something like that would make sense to me. Sure.

• 1:12:05Lewis Howes?

  I guess if you're speaking part time and you're breathing throughout your mouth, it's different.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, look, I'm a, 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, like, you know, 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 gotta chill yourself out. 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.

• 1:12:51Lewis Howes?

  See, I've heard you say mouth taping is stupid.

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

  It is.

• 1:12:54Lewis Howes?

  And what about kind of the nose strips, the opening, the airways?

• 1:12:57Speaker 00

  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 also 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. I 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 internal nasal dilators, I think, well, don't get me wrong.

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  There's nothing wrong with the strips. I just personally, they just don't work greatly. Sure. So what I'm hearing 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. Before shutting your mouth. With, with a piece of tape. With a piece of tape. 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, you know, one of the things we haven't touched on is noise at night. Snoring, right? It's a big one. So a lot of people are thinking about like noise at night and, and what's going on here? Like, we want people to snore. By the way, if you sleep next to a snoring bed partner, you lose approximately one hour of sleep a night. Do you say we want people to snore?

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  No. Snoring is bad, right? Snoring means that there's some kind of disruption in your airway. Snoring is like on the way to apnea. Now. 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? Yes. 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 we, anything we can do to open up the pipe, works better. So that's why that mute thing works really, really well.

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  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. Yeah. But noise in general is kind of interesting. 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 NextSense, which is really cool. And what they do is they measure your EEG, they measure your brainwaves 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 sleep. That's crazy. Dude, the tech is cool. So how important is it to keep things quiet when you sleep then?

• 1:15:52Speaker 00

  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. So as a sleep doctor. Those next sense things is. You put them in. Yeah, I got my sleep app on. I got my next sense 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 us. So is she losing an hour of sleep because of the noise and the dogs? Great. Such a good question. Of the machine, right? 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, I, she told me, Michael, if we ever have a sleepover, right, I need to let you know that I sleep with the TV on and I. She said this.

• 1:16:36Speaker 00

  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 with 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. It'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 and 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.

• 1:17:19Speaker 00

  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? So it changed the emotional valence of the sound to me.

• 1:17:43Lewis Howes?

  So it created a sense when she heard snoring, she felt emotionally safe and allowed her to sleep better.

• 1:17:49Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:17:50Lewis Howes?

  Even though snoring based on the data

• 1:17:52Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:17:52Lewis Howes?

  makes you lose an hour of sleep a night in the partner.

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  This is the difference between a sleep expert and a sleep doctor.

• 1:17:58Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:17:59Speaker 00

  Right? There's data and then there's practicality.

• 1:18:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  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 with it.

• 1:18:12Lewis Howes?

  It's the, it's the way we interpret the emotions of everything in our life.

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:18:18Lewis Howes?

  Which allows you to either sleep better in horrible conditions.

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:18:23Lewis Howes?

  Or bad in perfect conditions.

• 1:18:25Speaker 00

  Right. Talk to somebody in the military, right? They can rack out anywhere on the middle of a B-52 in a tank and 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.

• 1:18:40Lewis Howes?

  Well, somewhat safe. I mean, it's like, yeah, and you have to sleep also at some point. You can't just be up five nights.

• 1:18:45Speaker 00

  Correct. Your body will

• 1:18:46Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 1:18:47Speaker 00

  crash out.

• 1:18:50Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 1:19:04Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:19:05Lewis Howes?

  As a sleep doctor, not a sleep expert, right? What would you recommend? Should parents or what are the benefits? The pros and cons of sleeping with kids

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:19:15Lewis Howes?

  in the same bed versus not sleeping with your kids?

• 1:19:17Speaker 00

  It depends on the child and it depends upon the age of the child, right? If 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. problematic, especially if there's alcohol involved or if you have big fluffy pillows and covers, right? When 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

• 1:20:01Speaker 00

  haven't had a chance to grow yet. So if they go over on their face, whoosh, they can suffocate, right? What you want, for the first three to four months, we had what's called a Moses basket. So it was in between my wife and I, we'd 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, in the basket and everything was fine. Over the course of time, maybe four to six months, we started rotating him, the bassinet in there, rotating him out, finally got him into his own room. I would argue that you really want to get your kids figuring out how to fall asleep on their own. Why? Because they, it's a skill that they need to learn. Okay. If, if you put a child down every single time and they're out cold, here's what happens is there's, there's this idea called

• 1:20:46Speaker 00

  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, whatever your thing is, you know, say your prayers, whatever, that actually has a tendency to work a lot better. Now, 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

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  and it's so cuddly and I, I, I'm gonna 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. Now, 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.

• 1:22:00Lewis Howes?

  Now, what about, and what happened, I don't know, thousands of years ago?

• 1:22:04Speaker 00

  It was pretty different thousands of years ago, but generally speaking, everybody lived in the cave, you know, and, 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. I think that screwed up everybody's sleep pretty bad. Because it used to be, when we were in 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.

• 1:22:37Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:22:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is well documented.

• 1:22:39Lewis Howes?

  We used to wake up in the middle of the night and have meals? Why?

• 1:22:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, you were hungry. Right? And then you'd wake up at dawn and then plow the fields and do that. When old, you know, 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.

• 1:22:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I'm sure people went to bed.

• 1:22:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:00Lewis Howes?

  Like maybe within an hour or two after it got dark, start to wind things down?

• 1:23:04Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:23:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, got a little lamp on maybe?

• 1:23:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, right, Abraham Lincoln supposedly, you know, wrote with, 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? Like, trust me on this one.

• 1:23:33Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man. So, yeah, do you think, I mean, people probably had a lot less depression or insomnia, you know, hundreds of years ago.

• 1:23:40Speaker 00

  I would guess so, yeah. Or at least it wasn't recognized.

• 1:23:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Now, let's talk about phones.

• 1:23:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:46Lewis Howes?

  Since you brought it up.

• 1:23:47Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:23:48Lewis Howes?

  That's also something we didn't have 20 years ago.

• 1:23:50Speaker 00

  Thankfully.

• 1:23:51Lewis Howes?

  You know, I just saw this video online yesterday. Who's the guy who wrote the anxious generation? Jonathan?

• 1:23:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:58Lewis Howes?

  Jonathan something.

• 1:23:59Speaker 00

  Something, yeah, I, exactly. Great book, by the way.

• 1:24:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:02Speaker 00

  He really talks a lot about anxiety and what's going on.

• 1:24:05Lewis Howes?

  He had a video, it's kind of funny because it was on the phone, but impressed 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 were eight, nine, 10 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?

• 1:24:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:28Lewis Howes?

  Wait, you you didn't stay out till like the lights went on? You know, and then come back home?

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:24:34Lewis Howes?

  Wait, you're just on a phone all day like?

• 1:24:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:24:47Lewis Howes?

  Dinner. Dinner time.

• 1:24:49Speaker 00

  Dinner time. And if and if your mom, if you didn't hear your mom, you know what you did? You just went 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, Louis is over here, right? We we got him for dinner tonight. You you take him, you know, my son tomorrow night. Now, that's just kind of how it worked.

• 1:25:08Lewis Howes?

  It was it.

• 1:25:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, very different.

• 1:25:11Lewis 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.

• 1:25:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's just so much stimulation. Like, here's the thing is you can 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 autono of brain arousal, you it's really hard to overcome that, right? So if you're watching videos and all of a sudden, you know, something comes on about the con a conflict or something comes on about, you know, a a award show or something, you know, whatever it is and it piques your interest, it dials up your cortisol, it dials up your heart rate. And now you're you really haven't done yourself any favors. Read a book, okay? Read one of your books, okay? Like, this isn't tough, right? Keep, you know, greatness right by the bedside and read it. You'll be surprised at how you'll, number one, you'll retain the information.

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  But number two, it really helps ease you in. You need runway to land the plane.

• 1:26:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. 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.

• 1:26:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:26:32Lewis Howes?

  They can check out your website, thesleeptdoctor.com, thesleeptdoctor on social media as well.

• 1:26:37Speaker 00

  Oh, and we actually created a special landing page for all of your viewers.

• 1:26:41Lewis Howes?

  Okay, what is it?

• 1:26:41Speaker 00

  So if people go to sleepdoctor.com forward slash greatness.

• 1:26:46Lewis Howes?

  Perfect. They can check it out.

• 1:26:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, they can check out the book. They can take the quiz. Quiz. They can hear some of the products we were talking about, whole thing.

• 1:26:52Lewis Howes?

  And there's a home sleep apnea test as well, right?

• 1:26:56Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:27:13Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. Michael, I got a couple of final questions for you.

• 1:27:16Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:27:17Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 1:27:29Speaker 00

  Well, 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. And 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,

• 1:28:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:28:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Or get it from Michael's book, The Power of When, or one of your other books as well.

• 1:28:26Lewis Howes?

  This question is called the three truths. You've shared a lot of advice today. You have tons of great books. You have a lot of great content.

• 1:28:33Speaker 00

  Thanks.

• 1:28:34Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 1:28:42Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:28:43Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 1:28:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:28:53Lewis Howes?

  Far in the future.

• 1:28:54Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:28:55Lewis Howes?

  And for whatever reason, we don't have access to any of your content anymore. So this episode is gone. Your books are gone. Nothing is around anymore, hypothetical.

• 1:29:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:29:03Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 1:29:15Speaker 00

  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. And, and if you're not thinking about it, that's okay, but do yourself the favor. Take a few minutes and, 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.

• 1:29:58Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:58Speaker 00

  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. They, everybody'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.

• 1:30:21Lewis Howes?

  That's beautiful. I want to acknowledge you, Dr. Michael Bruce, for being a leader in this space. Because I think, I think for me, sleep definitely has.

• 1:30:31Lewis Howes?

  Giving me a better life when I'm consistently sleeping well.

• 1:30:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:30:35Lewis Howes?

  And you feel it specifically having, you know, twins now. I can feel, 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 in 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? And I think also reminding people that you don't need medication.

• 1:31:06Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 1:31:06Lewis Howes?

  To sleep better. I think I get really worried when doctors come on and they prescribe medication first rather than

• 1:31:13Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:31:13Lewis Howes?

  That should be the last result.

• 1:31:14Speaker 00

  Last result.

• 1:31:15Lewis Howes?

  Do all these other things. Heal, create peace, learn breathing, meditate, you know, find purpose. All these other things, you know, mend your relationships, all these things that cause stress, anxiety and worry first.

• 1:31:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:28Lewis Howes?

  And then, okay, last resort, have some pill that maybe can help you next.

• 1:31:32Speaker 00

  And maybe it's just temporary.

• 1:31:33Lewis Howes?

  Temporary, yes.

• 1:31:34Speaker 00

  Right? Pills are really good on the temporary when we're talking about sleep.

• 1:31:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:38Speaker 00

  Not on the regular.

• 1:31:38Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. So I want to acknowledge you for all the work you're doing.

• 1:31:41Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:31:41Lewis Howes?

  And the final question I have is what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:31:47Speaker 00

  My definition of greatness, I think, 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. You know, 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.

• 1:32:15Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely. Thanks for coming.

• 1:32:17Speaker 00

  Thanks, brother.

• 1:32:18Lewis Howes?

  Thank you very much.

• 1:32:19Speaker 00

  Appreciate it.

• 1:32:19Lewis 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. 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. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.

• 1:33:04Lewis Howes?

  And now it's time to go out there and do something great.