The Sleep Doctor, Dr. Michael Breus will teach you how to get the best night of your life. And the one habit that beats 8-hour rule every time.

Dr. Michael Breus has spent 26 years studying why we can't sleep — and has helped everyone from Fortune 500 CEOs to Olympic athletes fix it. In this episode of Change Wired, "The Sleep Doctor" breaks down the one habit that matters more than eight hours, why every human on Earth wakes up between 1 and 3am, and what to do about it to sleep well tonight. Even Michael isn't immune — he only discovered his own sleep apnea 6 months ago, and he's using the exact tools he tells his patients to use. ...

• 0:09Speaker 00

  It is. So number one, if I had to give one sleep tip, one sleep fact throughout my entire career, and it was the most effective thing that I could possibly say, here's what it would be. It would be wake up at the same time, seven days a week. It would not be get eight hours of sleep. It would not be force your body into doing something. It would be, this is the only recommendation is, I'm not even telling you what time to go to bed. Wake up at the same time, seven days a week. Let me explain exactly why I give this recommendation. There's biology behind it. So.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Hey guys, and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina. I'm your host, I'm your partner in change, personal collective transformation, and your executive, sleep, stress management, recovery, master health, nutrition, fitness coach. And today, I'm super excited you are joining me for this beautiful conversation, insights full, and sleep transforming with Dr. Michael Bruce. Dr. Michael Bruce, you might know him as the sleep doctor.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  He is a clinical psychologist, clinical sleep specialist with more than 26 years of experience, one of only 168 people in the world to pass the sleep medicine boards without going to medical school. He's been on Oprah, Dr. Oz, CNN, and does more than 400 interviews a year. He wrote The Power of When. And if you've ever wondered why you feel brilliant one day and completely useless the next, sleep chronotypes might be the answer, and Michael Bruce basically built the whole framework around it.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  But here's why you definitely don't want to skip this episode. We talk about this single thing, Michael says matters more than anything else for your sleep, not eight hours, not a fancy mattress, something you can start doing tomorrow morning. We go deep into why every human wakes up somewhere between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. and exactly what to do when it happens to you. Michael walks us through his full protocol, including the one thing your instincts tell you to do that you should absolutely not do, and a breathing technique used by the military to quiet a racing mind. If you're a founder,

• 2:54Speaker 01

  an executive, or just someone whose brain won't switch off at night, stay for the part where Michael Bruce explains how he coaches CEOs through their biggest, most sleepless decisions, and why nobody makes a good decision on poor sleep. We also cover jet lag, the food and drink habits quietly destroying your deep sleep, and where sleep medicine is headed next, including a pill for sleep apnea that could be six months away. Grab a notebook, your favorite sleep-friendly drink, and here is my conversation with Dr. Michael Bruce.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Dr. Michael Bruce, so good to have you on Change Wired Podcast. I was so excited to invite you to the show to talk about what I believe one of the most fundamental things to good life, good health, good work, our sleep, rest, recovery. So thank you so much.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Michael, you are a clinical psychologist, clinical sleep specialist, and I probably, like most of our listeners, don't really know how your work looks day to day. Like, what do you do when you come to work? What kind of people you get to work with? Why do they come to you?

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so to be fair, I used to practice a lot. I don't practice that much anymore. I was in full clinical practice. So when I was in full clinical practice, I worked at a hospital, and we had four sleep laboratories at four different hospitals, and I ran the sleep labs that were there. We treated patients for sleep apnea. We treated patients for narcolepsy. We treated patients for insomnia. So it was all hardcore sleep medicine. I was there with five other doctors. They were MD doctors, pulmonary doctors to be specific, and they were most interested in snoring and sleep apnea. I learned a lot about snoring and sleep apnea, but I, my specialty is probably closer to insomnia

• 5:04Speaker 00

  than anything else, or people having difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep, because there's such a large psychological component to that. I think that's kind of where I've spent a large part of my career. I mean, I treat all 88 sleep disorders, but I'd say that's probably where I've spent a lot of my career. So people have a tendency to show up who aren't sleeping. And so people who have a hard time maybe falling asleep, people who wake up at 2:00 in the morning and can't stay asleep, or people who wake up at, let's say, 4:00 in the morning and they can't return to sleep. That would probably be the wheelhouse in which I play a lot. But I help people with jet lag. I help people with

• 5:44Speaker 00

  circadian rhythm problems, things like that. But I'm getting old, and I'm 58, and I'm getting tired. And so I'm not practicing nearly as much as I once did. I'm more doing podcasts, educating people through my books, and doing television appearances and things like that, which I enjoy. It's a lot of fun.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yes. Thank you for sharing. You already described this switch experience with sleep disorders and with your practice and where you are now doing a lot of educational work. But how did it all start though for you? Where did that maybe fascination with sleep and?

• 6:26Speaker 00

  So it's kind of weird. A lot of people wonder, like, did I have a sleep disorder? Did somebody in my family have a sleep disorder that I wanted to fix? No, not at all. I wasn't even interested in sleep, if I'm honest with you. I went to graduate school for clinical psychology, and I was specifically interested in sports psychology. And the internship that I wanted to go to in sports psychology, quite honestly, I couldn't get in. Only the people who went to Harvard and Princeton and Yale went in, big universities here in the US. I went to the University of Georgia. It was a top 20 program. But it wasn't Harvard. They had a sleep position open that was fully funded. And I

• 7:07Speaker 00

  had worked my way through graduate school in the Department of Electrophysiology. So I can take apart an EKG machine and put it back together again and make it work and things like that. And they ended up using the exact same machine that I knew how to run in the sleep lab. So I said, aha, I will sell myself to them as a sleep guy, but I'm not really a sleep guy. And as soon as I get there, I figured I would just transfer as soon as I got into the program. So I sold myself as a sleep guy. I got that position because of my experience in the past. And I started the first day. I raised my hand. I said, hey, I want to transfer. They said, we had a feeling that you might want to transfer, Michael. They said, you have to stay there for six months, but after that, you can go to any part

• 7:49Speaker 00

  of the program. I said, okay, how hard could it be at sleep? And then by the third day, I really fell in love with clinical sleep medicine, and I knew I wasn't going to change my path. And I'll tell you why. It's because it's so effective. Like, I change people's lives that fast. It's unbelievable. When you change someone's sleep, you change their life. It is really fundamental to who they are as a human. And it's a lot of fun. And you really see differences. Traditional clinical psychology, what I was trained in, you have some patients that never get better. You have some patients that take

• 8:27Speaker 00

  years to get better. It's very, very rare to have somebody come in and in six weeks, all of a sudden, their entire life has changed because they've been able to, you know, overcome this process. But with sleep, it happens all the time. So for me, I think it's a, I think it's a really fun, interesting area that has continued to be interesting to me. I mean, I've been in it for 26 years, and it's not boring yet.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  And it's it's a lot of fun. I I learn new things. There's new research all the time. So it keeps my brain going. I do actively still see patients, but not many. I think I have two on my roster right now that I'm helping. But generally speaking, that would be most of the reasons that people kind of come to me and sort of how I got into the field. It was really very serendipitous. It wasn't. It wasn't a plan, but I've been here for 26 years and I like it. I like the opportunities that I get from sleep. I get to be on podcasts. I get to do TV. I get to write books. I get to educate people in an area that is profoundly important. And, you know, there's a lot of people out there who are spouting education about things that may or may not make a big dent in your life.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  I feel fortunate that I I get the opportunity to have a big dent.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yes. You know, speaking about big dent, I I can so personally relate to the experience of a huge difference between days or nights when I don't get good sleep for one reason or the other. And the days when I get, I don't know, nine hours of really good sleep. It's like I the difference is just indescribable.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's it's a major, major difference for people. And it's it's weird because a lot of people will wake up one day out of nowhere and have a fantastic night of sleep. And then they're like, how do I do that again? And it's like, well, you need to like, need to think about it.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, actually, maybe let's jump into that. In terms of consistent, good quality sleep, what did you find make maybe the biggest difference? Like, where do you usually start with people, maybe asking certain questions to help them get the benefit as soon as possible?

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the first is, so I have kind of a an assessment that I interview that I do with people. And I have a symptom checklist. So I go. So the very first thing I want to do is I want to see if they have a sleep disorder. Right? So could they have undiagnosed sleep apnea? Could they have narcolepsy? Could they have restless legs, sleepwalking, sleep talking? I kind of go through that whole litany just to understand. Okay, am I moving them towards a medical treatment? Or am I moving them towards a behavioral treatment? Right? Because if you've got narcolepsy, there are a couple of things that you can do from a behavior standpoint. But you need a prescription to be able to sleep at night and be awake during the day. With apnea, there are some behavioral things you can do. You can lose a little bit of weight. You can get used to a CPAP machine.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  But generally speaking, that those are medical treatments. So step number one is always, hey, do they have a sleep disorder? Step number two is usually blood work. So usually I ask them to go to their physician and ask to get a blood draw done. And I'm looking for several specific things. Vitamin D is a circadian pacemaker, so it's always an important one. Magnesium appears to be one that has several different functions in the body. And the body seems to sleep better when it has better magnesium on board. And iron, iron seems to be another biggie. If I was going into the other vitamins, I'd say the next important vitamin would probably be the B vitamins. Because they have a tendency to affect a lot of things that go on during REM sleep. And then I fix deficiencies.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  So if you're deficient in vitamin D, or you're deficient in melatonin, or iron, or something like that, we fix that. Then we see what we've got. So we we pull sleep disorders off the table. Make sure you don't have a sleep disorder. If you do, we treat it. Ninety nine percent of the time, that fixes the problem. If you don't have a sleep disorder, we do a home sleep test to do that, by the way. Then we do blood work. If blood work all comes back normal and you still have a problem, we're not fixing a deficiency. That's when I'm going to kind of drill down and start to understand more of what's going on. Generally speaking, the next thing I do is I try to figure out what their chronotype is. So you know, I'm famous for chronotypes, which is this genetic propensity to want to sleep at a particular schedule.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  And so I'm very big on looking at that and finding out which one that is. Because I want to align the person with their chronotype. So if they're they're an early bird, but they have to stay up until midnight, this isn't going to go well for them. Right? So I want to figure out if they're off on the chronotype. So we start with sleep disorders. We go to blood work. Then we do chronotypes. Once I've got all that information, ninety five percent of the time, I figured out what what the next step is. They don't have a formal sleep disorder, no deficiency, and we know what their chronotype is. Then I create a sleep schedule for them. What time do they wake up? What time do they go to bed? Seven days a week. I create an exercise schedule for them. When do they exercise?

• 13:36Speaker 00

  This is going to be based on their chronotype and when it's going to give them the most energy. We give them a meal schedule. So kind of like, hey, here's when I want to eat. Because remember, the timing of your meals is a biological signal to your body of when to do different things. And then we give them a light schedule. So evening, morning, how much light do you get? When do you get it? And that's usually the starting point for most people. I usually give them what's called a sleep diary. A sleep diary is a paper pencil thing where they write down when they wake up in the morning. What time did I go to bed? How long do I think it took me to fall asleep? Did I wake up in the middle of the night for how long? How many times? How do I feel the next day?

• 14:19Speaker 00

  And they they collect this information for me over the course of the next two weeks after I've given them a specific schedule. Right? So if you're an early bird, what I call a lion, then I'm going to have you waking up by six o'clock in the morning. And I'm going to have you going to bed by nine thirty at night. Right? I'm going to know what I'm going to tell you when to use your meals. I'm also going to give you some guidance on when to use caffeine, if at all. And if you want to use alcohol, when to use it so that it doesn't mess up your sleep. When they've returned after two weeks, we look at the data that they've collected through their sleep diary. And we see how they did. We see how they feel. And usually, I've been able to reduce the number of awakenings that have occurred in the middle of the night.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  I would argue probably the biggest problem that I solve on the regular is people telling me that they wake up somewhere between one and three o'clock in the morning and they can't return to sleep. And they can't figure out what what the next protocol is to do during that period of time. Funny enough, my most popular video on YouTube is my video where I literally describe step one, step two, all the way down of exactly what to do. It's got about six million views on it now. And people are are pretty interested and excited about that. And that's kind of how I I kind of operate. On occasion, I do get a case from somebody in the community

• 15:44Speaker 00

  that maybe didn't have it as as advanced knowledge in my area, which would be insomnia and circadian rhythms. Sometimes I get clients where they didn't like their other sleep doctor. Their sleep doctor said, hey, you've got sleep apnea. Here's a CPAP machine. Leave me alone. I don't want to talk to you again. That's not how I do it. I spend a lot of time with patients and help them adapt. And one of the things I think that's kind of unique about me in terms of my perspective is I have a sleep disorder. I didn't know I had a sleep disorder until about four or five months, actually, six months ago. But it turns out I have pretty significant sleep apnea. So I stopped breathing in my sleep twenty six times an hour. So almost once every two minutes, which is pretty, which is a lot.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  And so I had to get on a CPAP machine. I also have oral appliance therapy that I'm using. So I also have, sometimes people will come to me and they'll say, hey, I don't want to talk to you as a sleep doctor. I want to talk to you as a sleep apnea patient and learn some of the tricks of how to wear the mask all night long, or which masks you like. Or is there pressure settings that can be more, you know, important to me? And so I I feel like that kind of maybe describes how people end up in my in my in my stable and how I end up treating them.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you for all this information in describing the process in in so much detail. I think it will yield a lot of, I don't know, solutions or ways how to go about solving people's problems already. You talked a lot about regularity and timing of things.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a big deal.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Yes. And can you maybe talk a little bit more about that? Is it really that important? Because I hear from so many people, it's like, yes, I try to get that many hours. But you know, to the one day I go to bed at this time, and then the next two hours later, and then like, and then they can't really get good quality sleep. Like, why timing is important? And is it important?

• 17:38Speaker 00

  So it is. So number one, if I had to give one sleep tip, one sleep fact.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Throughout my entire career, and it was the most effective thing that I could possibly say, here's what it would be. It would be wake up at the same time, seven days a week. It would not be get eight hours of sleep. It would not be force your body into doing something. It would be, this is the only recommendation is what, I'm not even telling you what time to go to bed. Wake up at the same time, seven days a week. Let me explain exactly why I give this recommendation. There's biology behind it. So when you wake up in the morning, sunlight hits your eye. Hopefully you're not waking up in the dark, right? We don't like people waking up in the dark. We like people to wake as the sun rises or after the sun has risen.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Light hits a very special cell in your eye called a melanopsin cell, sends a signal to the back of your brain to turn off the melatonin faucet in your head. Okay. But it sets a timer for almost exactly 14 hours later to turn melatonin back on. So what I just described to everybody that's listening is the time that you open your eyes and get out of bed directly determines when your body turns back on melatonin. You cannot sleep without melatonin. It's impossible. It doesn't work. So by merely setting your alarm to the same time, seven days a week, you will accomplish the most important goal in all of sleep,

• 19:15Speaker 00

  which is to wake up at the same time, seven days a week. Assuming you don't have a sleep disorder, right? Assuming you don't have a major medical problem that would be preventing you from being able to do that, like you have to take a certain kind of medication or things like that. Like I want to be clear, this is for reasonably normal, healthy people. This is the the did big tip. Now, the question that you asked, which is interesting is why? Why does timing matter? So our body functions on a 24 hour cycle and different things happen at different times throughout that cycle. Why timing turns out to be important, which is a great question for me because I'm the chronotype guy, is because we all have an internal biological schedule.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  And sometimes the real world schedule doesn't match our biological schedule. I'll give you an example of myself, right? So historically I have always been a night owl, what I call a wolf. I'd stay up until 12:30, 1 o'clock at night. I hate mornings. I hate, I, I hate morning people. I hate mornings. They're also chipper, right? Like it's not the place that I ever want to be, right? And so historically throughout my life, people would say, he's lazy. Right? Cause he can't handle a morning class. He's not going to get his work product. All it was, was I was, I was waking up at the wrong time, right? Because when I woke up at seven o'clock, six o'clock in the morning, my melatonin was still going.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Right? And so that makes it all the more difficult. The opposite could be true for a long time. Right? A person who, who's a real early bird, they could be trying to go to sleep when it doesn't make sense. But you know what I'm saying? So there's, so timing turns out to be very, very important based on your genetics. Timing isn't necessarily important if you don't include your genetics. But the good news is, is it's pretty easy to figure it out. If you go to chronoquiz.com, which is my website, you can figure out what your sleep animal is, and then you can start to follow those recommendations. So all of this, by the way, is laid out in my probably most popular book called The Power of When, W H E N.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Phenomenal.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It's, it's a great book. If you go to chrono quiz and you take the quiz, we'll send you information. So we teach people what time to go to bed, when should have coffee, when do you have alcohol, things like that? Just so that you can kind of get a better idea of a new schedule. Now here's where it gets interesting is I've even had some people where they, they will go and chronotype their company. So they'll take a hundred people in their company and they'll say, well, everybody take the chrono quiz. And then we want all the early birds or what we call lions, they're going to have meetings early. But all the late night people that we call wolves, we're not going to make them have an 8:00 AM meeting in the morning. We're going to let them have a meeting at four o'clock in the afternoon. Right? And magically, guess what happens? Everybody's awake.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  The biggest problem in today, I think in the workforce today, from a sleep perspective is something called presenteeism, which is where the, the person is there, but their brain isn't there. They're half asleep. Then they're doing poor quality work. They're not getting into the details, all because they're too tired. Right? And so if we can avoid presenteeism by allowing people to really be fully there and functional by getting a good night's sleep, it works wonders for their overall levels of productivity.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, I can totally relate to that. Like I'm a lion and

• 22:41Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm a completely different person in the morning and in the evening. If you ask me to, I don't know, do some creative work in the evening, like forget about that. It will take me like three hours and I still won't get it done, right? But morning I can get it in 30 minutes. And I think people very often don't realize how much of their potential they are losing just because they don't schedule the right activities at the right time of the day.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  It's, it's unbelievable. I've been able to figure out based on my timing clock of everything from when am I interested in intimacy to when do I want to work out? To when do I want to talk with my children? Right? Like you'd be surprised because once you learn somebody else's chronotype and you know your own chronotype, you kind of know where you sit at that particular moment of the day. And then you can kind of guesstimate where they sit. And then you can have that connection. Perfect examples with my daughter. I used to be the person who had to wake up my daughter in the mornings when she was in high school and it was a disaster. Right? I'd walk in and you know, she'd be like, leave me alone, you know? And, but if I walked into a room at two o'clock in the afternoon,

• 23:48Speaker 00

  I could have a 45 minute conversation with my daughter. And I'm, I'm pretty sure there's nothing more important than a 45 minute conversation with my daughter. Right? So, and as a parent, you know, it's like, you don't, you don't know when you're going to get those opportunities. But if you understood this idea of prototypes, they'd show up a lot more often than you think.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yes. I, well, I can talk about that for hours when it comes to social relationships and how the, you know, this kind of things affects the quality of them. You mentioned a couple of things here, waking up when the sun is out. For example, I'm in Cape Town, right? And I grew up in Siberia and there were a lot of mornings.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  A lot of mornings, there ain't no sun.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  What do you do then? What do you recommend people doing?

• 24:33Speaker 00

  Great question and an important question too. I would say you can use artificial light. And so you can buy, you can purchase blue light and you can have that on. They make blue light boxes that you can have. If people don't want to spend a lot of money, just walk around and turn on every light in the house. You know, just have as much, and it, it needs to be bright, bright, bright in the morning and dim in the evenings. Right? So what's interesting is there's some data to suggest that if you get specifically sunlight early in the morning. So let's say you're in an area where you can eventually get sunlight. You can get sunlight within about 30 or 40 minutes of your waking up. It actually can help boost your cortisol naturally. Cause a lot of people, you know, the first thing they do is drink a cup of coffee.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Right? They're like, oh, I need my coffee. Oh, I gotta wake up. Nah, you really don't. You need sunshine. Uh, you need light and you need a good quality sleep. And I got news for you. You'll probably wake up with a decent amount of energy and you'll, you know, you'll probably do pretty well with it.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, what's your take on movement and exercise? What I found works for me really well is when I get up as soon as possible, I actually do a few jumping jacks or something like that. It wakes me up really fast.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  So what I do, so I have something that I call the three fifteens that I do every morning. It's not, but I would add jumping jacks. I like that idea of jumping jacks. That's a good one. Is I bring a hard back chair outside so I can sit comfortably, but I want my back straight. I don't want to be slumping. Right? I want to take in 15 deep breaths over the course of time, just to wake up my respiratory system. I do this in the presence of 15 minutes of sunlight. This helps manage my vitamin D. It's good for me to get that sunshine into my eyeballs. And then I drink 15 ounces of water while I do it. Right? And so I call that the three fifteens. You can add movement into that. Right? And it would be the perfect time to add movement.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  For some people, it depends upon the reason why you're moving. Right? So for some people, they want to move because they want to lose weight. Well, if you want to move and lose weight, then you need to move on a fasting stomach. Right? Because then you're, you'll, you'll lose the fat that, that your body has. So sometimes it makes a lot of sense to do your cardio workout in the morning, especially if you're a lion. But if you're a wolf like me, you hate mornings. You don't want to work out in the morning and it's impossible to work out in the morning. So you save your morning time and around lunchtime is when you go and, and have a workout. However, I will tell you, I think that for most people, unless you're highly motivated or you have a workout partner, if you don't work out before noon,

• 27:11Speaker 00

  it's really hard to get a workout in for most people. It's really difficult. But I want to be very, very clear, the single best way to improve sleep quality is with daily exercise. You don't have to run a marathon. You don't have to, you know, but 20, 25 minutes of a brisk walk will absolutely positively help your sleep. One thing I've been trying to do myself, and I don't think it's a bad idea, as long as your doctor says it's cool, is trying to get in 10,000 steps a day. Right? That's about four and a half, five miles for most people, right? Of just general walking. And look, if it's hot out, go to the mall, walk around inside, go to a gym, walk on a treadmill. Secretly is good. Throw in a podcast so you can learn something.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Hopefully it's this one and people will learn about sleep. But yeah, movement turns out to be incredibly important. And, and I want to be clear, it's not just movement for health. It's movement for sleep. Right? And so people need to understand that this unit that we're walking around in, it's meant it was built to move. It was not built to sit on the couch and eat Cheetos, you know, and drink beer and, and, and have some odd existence. This thing needs to be worked.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  I, yeah, I heard somewhere that they, they did some research and compared people, days of people when they walked a lot and their quality of sleep and they did not walk a lot. And so what they learned is the more people walked, the better their sleep was.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's true. It doesn't surprise me at all, but if we can get people doing that, it generally speaking will work significantly better.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Another thing, Michael, is a lot of people, obviously, you know, have different social gatherings and wanna do things at night. So if I understand you correctly, what you recommend is go and attend those, you know, meetings and gatherings and then still wake up at the same time.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So but there's a lower level limit, right? If you get less than about five and a half hours, you might need to extend your sleep. But if you're smart about it, you'll never need to do that. Okay? Because you kind of know and understand what's going on, right? So let's say you're a lion and you wake up at five thirty and and your body functions best on. Or let's make the math simple. You wake up at five and your mu- your body functions best on seven hours of sleep. Go to bed at ten. At the end of the day, you'll do it one time or you'll stay up until midnight. And then you have to wake up at five AM and then you're gonna feel like crap and you're never gonna do it again. I promise you, it it becomes a habit and you self metric yourself into being able to do it.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  I do have some patients, though, that, you know, they say, oh, I wanna go to a concert tonight or I wanna go to the movies. That's fine. Like, I don't, it it's not a big deal to get one or two nights of less sleep. As long as you're consistent, your body can absorb that. It's when you have acute sleep deprivation where you don't sleep for forty eight hours, then you're a mess.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Yes. I don't even know how people do it, but I can't.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  All the time, even at even athletes do it.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, you work with so with so many groups of people and I'm gonna ask you a question about, you know, maybe differences between those people. But before we do that, you know, you mentioned this problem of me wake ups in the middle of the night and people not being able to go to sleep. It's quite a common problem that are here and from my clients and also just people around me. So what's your to go, you know, you already explained that you would check for different conditions and make sure that they have deficiencies. But in terms of, okay, people are okay on all these fronts and they still wake up in the middle of the night. So what's usually the cause and how do you address it?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Hmm. So so everybody wakes up in the middle of the night. Every single person that is listening to this will wake up tonight. I can assure you. Most of you aren't gonna remember it, okay? In order for your brain to recognize that you're even awake, it has to be up for like forty five minutes. I'm sorry, forty five seconds. So it's not easy to know. Most people wake up in the middle of the night, they move positions, they pass gas and they fall back asleep. Okay, that's just how it works. The problem is, is when you wake up and then you stay up. Right? And that has everything to do with your mind. It has almost nothing to do with biology. But the reason that you wake up is biological.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  So your core body temperature rises, rises, rises till about ten thirty at night and it hits a peak. Then people, that peak drops. That drop is a signal to the brain to release melatonin, which is that key that starts the engine for sleep. Unfortunately, your core body temperature continues to drop, drop, drop, drop, drop. This is, by the way, the reason why we like the bedroom to be so cool. Because if your core body temperature is dropping and you have in a hot environment, you're going to wake up. But if you're in a cool environment, you're going to stay asleep. But there's a problem. The problem is, is that when you get to a certain point, you better, your body better warm up or you go hypothermic and you die. Okay, guess what time that is?

• 32:26Speaker 00

  Between one and three o'clock in the morning, when every single human on earth wakes up because their body is warming up. Okay, so it's not your fault. You didn't do something wrong. I mean, you might have, but it's probably not your fault, right? So you're up. It's one thirty in the morning. What do you do? Okay, so step number one, don't go pee. Now, this is a controversial step. Most people are like, what is he talking about? I gotta go to the bathroom. I wanna go pee. You actually don't have to go to the bathroom ninety percent of the time. Most people are side sleepers and so they sleep in a more of a fetal position where they put a lot of pressure on their bladder. And when they wake up, it's one of the first things that they notice. Do yourself a favor, roll onto your back, count to twenty.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  If you still have to pee, go pee. If you don't have to pee, don't go pee. Let me explain why. There are three different bodily functions that need to go lower to fall back to sleep. Anxiety needs to go down, heart rate needs to go down, temperature needs to go down. All three must happen in order for you to fall back asleep. If you go from a lying position to a seated position to a standing position and you walk across the room to go pee, guess what? Your heart rate went up, your temperature went up. I don't know if your anxiety went up, but it probably went up at least a little because you're on your way back. So do me a favor, don't go pee. To be clear, if you have to pee, please go to the bathroom, okay?

• 33:55Speaker 00

  Like, we don't want you pissing in your bed or, you know, buying some diapers or something silly like that, okay? Number two, don't look at the clock. Now, this this has a lot to do with the anxiety aspect. The second you grab your phone, you see the clock. You instantly do the mental nap and now you're pissed off. You're saying, crap, here I am again. I've got three hours left. Sleep, sleep, sleep, and you try to force yourself to sleep. Angela, in the history of time, nobody has ever been able to force themselves to sleep without anesthesia, okay? It doesn't work that way. Because think about it, your heart rate's going in the wrong direction.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Right? When you're forcing yourself to sleep, what are you doing? Your heart rate is raising. What are you doing? You're elevating your anxiety. When your heart rate raises, your anxiety raises. Guess what happens to your temperature? It ratchets up to, nothing could be worse. So don't look at the clock. Now, all right, Michael, I didn't look at the clock and I didn't pee, but I'm lying here and I'm wide awake. What do I do? My favorite technique is called four, seven, eight breathing. Developed by Dr. Andrew Weil, Harvard-trained natural doctor, super smart dude, uses it in the military, very interesting technique. You slowly breathe in for a count of four, you hold for a count of seven and you push gently out through your mouth for a count of eight. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  Now, you have to get to twenty cycles of this, two zero cycles of this. So what I do is while I'm doing this technique in the dark, because I do it too, is I take my hands and I make gentle light fists. And when I do one, breathe in for four, hold for seven, push for eight, I stick out a finger. Then when I do another one, I stick out a finger and before I know it, I've got ten fingers and then I wrap them back and then I'm done. Right? Usually I never make it to twenty. Usually I've kind of, but there's a trick. And the trick is you need to see the number in your head. So when I see, when I close my eyes and I'm breathing in, I see a four, then I see a three, then I see a two, then I see a one. I want you to actually count.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  Because you cannot count and have something called monkey mind at the same time. Because that's what keeps ninety nine percent of people up, is their brain starts going and they think about the dumbest things that have no relevance in the middle of the night. Or they think about incredibly important things in the middle of the night. And all it does is cause anxiety and causes increased heart rate. By counting, breathing and using your hands, you can't think of anything else. And you are so distracted that the natural sleep rhythm will come in and help you to fall asleep. Now, let's say you do four, seven, eight breathing. You get to your twenty, you pictured it, right?

• 36:47Speaker 00

  You did great. You're very relaxed. Unfortunately, you haven't fallen asleep. That's okay. Lying there, doing something called yoga nidra, is actually rejuvenative. It's not the same as sleep, but if you lie there and do yoga nidra for an hour, it's worth about twenty minutes of sleep. So let's say you woke up at four o'clock in the morning and you can't fall back to sleep. You did your four, seven, eight breathing, you're lying there. Just relax. You're still giving your body part of what it needs. Just gently relax and allow yourself to be. A lot of times people will end up falling asleep. If you don't, that's okay. Your body is still rejuvenating.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  So don't worry so much about it. The thing I try to explain to people is sleep is flexible, right? One night you got great eight hours of unbelievable quality sleep. The next, maybe you only got six and a half of great quality sleep. You still woke up at roughly the same time because you went to bed at different times. That's okay, right? The good news here is nobody sleeps perfectly. You get to try it again every single night, right? So it's like this race that you get to run every night, right? And so who cares? Try something different. Maybe this time use an eye mask, maybe next time use earplugs. You might surprise yourself in finding there are certain things that really work well for you and kind of get you there.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  But you don't want to overindex on, I'm gonna try every gadget, every gizmo, everything. Because what ends up happening is you just end up with an anxious patient who is, it becomes even more anxious. And and then they create something called sleep anxiety. Now, this is an interesting phenomenon that goes almost too far, where people are so rigid in their thinking. They're like, okay, Dr. Bruce told me that I can only lie in bed for twenty five minutes and it's been twenty three minutes and I can't get up. But now, I'll wait, now it's twenty four minutes. Do I, should I get out early? Like, this is really the conversation that they have with themselves. So for those people, we try to give them more flexibility in their thinking.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Because that rigidness in that thinking ends up being problematic for them. Whereas sometimes giving people those criteria and rules, it's a great way for them to follow the directions and feel less stressed. So we really have to adapt to the type of person that we're working with in order to really understand what's going on with their sleep. It does make it a bit of a challenge at times on the clinical side. Because rarely do I see the same patient over and over and over, at least on the insomnia side of things. I'll be honest with you, on the apnea side of things, especially as somebody who has sleep apnea. I pretty much know that one inside and out and I can pretty much talk to somebody and within five minutes I can figure out.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Here's what's going on with you. Here's where a good solution set lies. There's three other solutions behind it. Let's set you up and let's get you going versus insomnia.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  That takes more time. There's a lot of nuance going on in there. There's a lot of reasons why things can happen. Like, I could be dealing with the CEO who has unique pressures because his business is about to go bankrupt, right? Or I could be dealing with the CEO who's about to sell his company and make millions of dollars but has no idea what to do next and is stressed out. And they can have exactly the same kind of insomnia with very different types of stressors involved. And so the stressor usually helps us understand what the treatment modality probably needs to be.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, you mentioned a very interesting case of CEO, business owners, which I predominantly work with, and they often say, you know, I have these important decisions, or we are going through this very important phase and I can't really, you know, sleep. My mind is always busy. What do you recommend those people? Because they're also very often convinced that, you know, this is just what it is, and this is the phase, and they can't get more sleep than they're getting at the moment.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the first thing is not to give them parameters and control, because they're gonna break them and they're gonna feel like crap about it. So there's no reason to do that. You look for what is the biggest stressor, and then you solve that stressor problem, because they're never gonna go to sleep without having some plan for that stressor. So I'll give you an example. One of my favorite tools, now, this is a, it would need to be a little bit more complex if I was dealing with the CEO, but follow the logic. I use something called a worry journal. Okay, very simple. It's a piece of paper. You draw a line down the middle. You write, what are your worries on one side? And then the beginnings of a plan on the other side. It's not the entire

• 41:32Speaker 00

  plan. If your child is not doing well in school, then the thing on the other side of the page might be email the teacher to set up an appointment. You didn't solve the problem, but you took one step in order to solve the problem, or in order to get that next piece of information. Now your brain doesn't have to worry about that. Your brain says to itself, hey, I just sent an email to the teacher. I'm gonna get a response back. We're gonna get into the room and then we'll be able to talk. There's no reason for me to get upset about it. All I did was, you know, do an appointment. I need to figure out what's happening with my kid. Now I can put that away, and now I can focus better on being able to relax and go to sleep, right? And so I have CEOs do this, but in a much more extended version. So if they're making a big decision, like, do I sell my company?

• 42:14Speaker 00

  Right? That's a very large decision to make. Then we work, then we sit down and we work with either their coaches, because a lot of them have mentors, or decision coaches, or life coaches, or things like that. We work together with that. What I can tell you is nobody makes a good decision when they're sleepy. Nobody.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Yes. And actually, you know, maybe that's also another good question to that is, a lot of business owners, a lot of CEOs, founders, they would say things like, oh, you know, I can't afford my sleep. You know, I have too many things on my plate, and I, yeah, I just don't have time for, I don't know, seven to nine hours of sleep. What do you usually tell those people?

• 42:54Speaker 00

  Then what I tell them is, sure, great, then let's get six of the highest quality hours you can possibly get. That's all. Here's what ends up happening, is it's not worth arguing with them. You need seven to nine hours. They're gonna walk away and not listen to you, or they're gonna go find somebody else that's gonna tell them something different. So you say, okay, how much do you need? Oh, well, I can get by on five and a half hours, Michael. All right, well, let's ask me, I wanna ask you a different question. What kind of decisions do you make when you're just getting by on your sleep? They say, well, sometimes they're good. Sometimes I might miss a few details. Okay, well, this is a big decision. You probably don't wanna miss any

• 43:37Speaker 00

  details. How much sleep do you think you need so that you wouldn't miss any details, right? And I'll say, well, probably more than that six and a half. I bet seven hours would probably do me right. Okay. Do you have any experience having gotten seven hours and made good decisions or bad decisions? Yeah, I do. Okay. Which ones did you make more of? I think I made more good decisions. Okay, so why don't we schedule for you getting seven? You notice we went from six to seven, right? I didn't go to eight. I didn't get them to nine, but you start to just get them to see where the performance lies. Because it's really about, what they're trying to do is they're just trying to accomplish more, accomplish more, accomplish more. And at the end of the day, what they don't realize is, the decisions that they make to accomplish those things are gonna be

• 44:22Speaker 00

  incorrect decisions, which is gonna make you have to go back and redo the work. And so it just makes more sense to do it right the first time by being well-slept. And you get them there over time. Some people are more stubborn than others, and some people, you have to let them run the experiment and make the bad decision. So there's many cases where I'll turn to a CEO, and they'll say, no, Michael, I can do it on five. And I say, okay, great. We're gonna try to get you the best five that we can, but we're gonna talk about this in about thirty days, and we're gonna see if you really made the best decision that you could. Michael, you know what you're talking about. I'm gonna be fine. Thirty days later, we have that discussion, and invariably, they say to me, you know, if I had just spent a little more time asleep, I probably would have

• 45:05Speaker 00

  noticed X, Y, and Z better, or I probably wouldn't have been as stressed, or I probably wouldn't have yelled at that employee, or what have you. And they start to really coordinate and associate lack of sleep with their performance. Once they've made that tie, it's easy to convince them to increase their sleep because it increases their performance.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that, and you know, another one that I often notice, they would complain about getting sick via some essential or important moments, right? And when they start realizing with experimenting with sleep, et cetera, that they all of a sudden get sick less, and because of that, they actually can do more things for, you know, a longer periods of time. And that's what I notice also is huge motivator, that just getting sick less. And obviously, like, sleep helps with immunity.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  And I mean, depending upon where you're, like, if you travel for work, like, you're on an airplane with three hundred people who are all coughing and sneezing and sending germs into the air. You want your immune system to work well. I got a news flash for everybody that's listening. Your immune system requires sleep. It's not an option. It's a requirement. Like, this is a biological function. It's so funny how people can kind of say, oh, I don't need this, or I do need this, or I can get by on five, and things like that. It's always so strange to me, because it's like, you wanna just turn to them and say, okay, so you're only gonna give me fifty percent, right, of your effort today? Oh, no, no, no, my doctor, I'm gonna get, well,

• 46:37Speaker 00

  clearly you're not, because you didn't sleep. So I mean, at best, I might get fifty percent. I've sent, I've sent employees home. Like, if you work for me, you damn well better get your night out, your night's sleep, because I'm not gonna let you work for me if you're not sleeping well, because you're gonna make mistakes. It's not gonna be worth it.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, do you know many, maybe tests that people do at workplaces to figure out whether people well-slept or not?

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah, it's not hard to do. You do reaction time tasks, right? So there are many reaction time tasks. You can get them on your phone. It depends upon the work that you're doing. As an example, let's say you're a colonel in the military, okay? You've got all these soldiers, right? You can have them, you can have them take these tests. You'll know exactly who's well-slept and who's not well-slept. And then you decide who goes on the gun range, or who goes back to the barracks, or, you know, what have you. That's a more extreme case, but let's be fair, you know the employees that you have that aren't sleeping. Just look at them, right? Seriously, just look at them. They look like crap. They look, they got bags under their eyes,

• 47:44Speaker 00

  right? They're more wrinkly. They're certainly in a worse mood. And the other easy way is, is get to work before everybody else and sit by the coffee pot, and see who comes first, and see how much they drink. I can assure you, those people did not sleep well. Like, there's a lot of signs and symptoms, if you're observant, that you can figure out very quickly, if you've got employees that aren't, that aren't well-slept. And many of your employees, by the way, they have no idea they have a sleep disorder. It's not like they're saying, oh, I'm just not gonna get my sleep disorder treated. They think this is how life is, right? As leaders of companies,

• 48:29Speaker 00

  it is our responsibility to take care of the people that are helping us produce the product or service that we're all, you know, making money from here, right? And so I believe that the leaders have an obligation, especially if you know and understand something about health, to check out the health of your employees. Look, let's be fair, every major company that I've ever been has got a smoking cessation program, right? Where they teach people how to stop smoking. Well, that sounds like a great idea. Let's just expand it. Let's teach people how to sleep. Let's teach people how to exercise. Let's teach people how to eat. All of what, what I have

• 49:09Speaker 00

  consistently found with every single CEO that I've ever done this with, is productivity goes through the roof. Every single employee wants to work harder, work product is better, when they think that their boss gives a crap about their health. It's very straightforward, and it's easy, right? Like, it's not hard to teach people how to sleep better. I work with corporations all the time. We have a twenty-eight-night sleep challenge that people can do, sent via email. We have eBooks that we can give people. I can come in and do lectures. There's all kinds of fun things that you can do to teach people how to sleep better. And it doesn't have to be on a huge budget. Like, look, am I expensive? Of course I'm expensive. But there are lots of

• 49:51Speaker 00

  ways to do this, where maybe it's virtual, or, you know, maybe it's, maybe it's you create a series of videos, you know, with the company that teaches everybody, one's on nutrition, one's on hydration, one's on sleep. Like, this isn't hard, right? Especially with the age of AI, we've got so much available to us. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in having AI teach everybody everything, but it can help with increasing slide presentations, and helping people have information and things like that. So I think there's a lot to it. And I, and I think employers, as they start to see the benefits, will realize that this is probably the biggest secret weapon that they have, is teaching their employees how to sleep better.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Yes. Another question I had for you is around sleep aids, or not so much aids, but maybe supplements, or things like sleeping mask, or certain technology. Like, is there anything that you would recommend to almost everyone to get to improve their sleep experience faster? Like, I'm a huge proponent, to give you an idea of sleeping masks and earplugs. I'm like, you know, in our noisy, bright world, I think like, everyone should get one. What's your take on those?

• 51:02Speaker 00

  I agree. I think there are some things that work really, really well for people. But if I'm honest with you, in many cases, it's very person-specific. So as an example, I have, I have a sleep mask that I love. But the reason that I use a sleep mask is because my wife falls asleep on the tele- with the television on all the time. And so the brightness, and so I'll have earplugs and eye shades on, and that works for me. But that's because of my situation. If I'm in a hotel, I'm probably not wearing my eye shades and my earplugs, right? So I think some things are specific. There's a few things I think that people should follow. I'm gonna give you a five-step plan, okay? Step number one, wake up at the same time seven days a week, okay?

• 51:48Speaker 00

  Step number two, stop caffeine by 2:00 P.M., right? Caffeine has a half-life of about eight hours. Stop at 2:00, it's 10 o'clock, most people going to bed, hopefully it doesn't affect your sleep, right? Step number three, stop alcohol three hours before bed. Limit yourself to one and a half to two drinks, okay? You don't wanna put in a lot of alcohol. Alcohol's the number one sleep aid in the world that's terrible. It destroys stage three, four sleep. Not a good idea. Step number four, you'll like this one, exercise daily, but don't exercise too close to bedtime. So stop exercise roughly four hours before bed, because you don't wanna increase the heart rate. And then the final one is my three fifteens. When you wake up in the morning, get 15 ounces of water, 15 minutes of sunshine, and 15 deep breaths.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  If we just, if all people did, and by the way, all of those are free, okay? So if everybody just did those five, you will see a 20 to 30% improvement in your overall sleep. So if I was gonna look for something, I would rather, instead of telling people, go buy an eye mask or have ear, earplugs, I'd rather them follow these five rules and tell me what they think. After you start following these five rules, then it's time to get one of, to get an eye shade, earplug, a cooling apparatus for your bed, whatever you wanna get. There's some cool stuff out there and it works, but there's also a lot of snake oil, so be careful.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so thank you so much for this five-step, well, process or routine. I follow all of these steps and...

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Well, actually, i- in the morning, what else don't I do? I don't always get the sun because of winter or...

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, just darker mornings and I wake up usually between 4:00 and 5:00. But another thing I wanted to ask, which is quite common for people I work with, is traveling, right? And so sometimes you travel through many time zones, or sometimes you're just in a bright environment for, I don't know, the, the wrong times of the day. Like, what do you recommend to, to people to do to a, not have maybe so many negative effects of that, you know, this shift of timing of sleep and wake? A, and then the second, maybe get to good quality sleep as soon as possible in their new destination? Like, what are some of the most effective strategies there?

• 54:04Speaker 00

  So give me the first question again, because I got lost with the second question.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Yes, the first question is, what are some of the most effective strategies to deal with shift of time zones when people travel?

• 54:15Speaker 00

  So jet lag sucks. It's very difficult. The only thing that I have personally found is there's an app that I use. It's called Time Shifter. T.I.M.E.S.H.I.F.T.E.R. timeshifter.com. Full disclosure, I'm an investor, because I liked it so much, I contacted them and I bought into the company. This is a, it uses napping, caffeine, light, and melatonin in a particular order, and you will land on time. So as an example, if you're coming from Cape Town and you wanted to come to

• 54:54Speaker 00

  Paris, which would be about an eight-and-a-half-hour time difference, a long flight, the eight-and-a-half-hour time difference, you could use this two days before you left and you would land on Parisian time. It's wonderful. I, so melatonin is something that I use, light is what I use, caffeine, and then napping. And again, it all happens in a very particular order. I have looked into some of these other flight kit or of these other products that are out there, and I've found no science in them that I've been able to discover for, for working with them. So if I have time zones, I'm usually using melatonin and caffeine again, and, and by following this time shifter. And then what was the second question?

• 55:37Speaker 01

  And the second question was, yeah, what are some tool strategies to feel, I don't know, as close to your best as possible in the new time zone? If you have, I don't know, three, four, or five hours, some more difference, time difference.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  So what I like to do is I like to land in the morning of my destination, and then I go outside immediately and I get a walking tour of whatever the area is for 25 or 30 minutes. So even if I'm landing in, you know, Paris to give a lecture, I, I put it into my contract that after I land, I go to the hotel, I have one hour to get outside and get that direct sunlight in me. I've already been, you know, moving my schedule, so usually I'm in good shape. But that's probably the biggest thing, is I like to land in the morning and then get sunlight, then I stay awake all day, and then I go to bed at like 8:30, 9 o'clock, using melatonin, and it helps quite a bit. Like, that's kind of, I would say, what I, what I would do.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  But I definitely wanted to, would recommend that you do something physical, but not competitively physical on the first day. So the physical is go for a walk after dinner, or, you know, check out the town or whatever. But what you don't wanna do is show up and then have to run a race the next day. Like, you need to give your body several days to adapt and get the time cues and the food cues going.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Yes. You know, so, well, speaking of food cues and maybe nutrition for sleep in general, what do you usually recommend people to improve the quality of their sleep when it comes to nutrition? Maybe around timing, specific meal composition, do, don't do, like, what do you know about that, like, that works well?

• 57:17Speaker 00

  So here's what I'll tell you, because I'm not a nutritionist, so it's, it's kinda outside my scope. But here's what I can tell you is

• 57:26Speaker 00

  there are some people that really respond well to intermittent fasting if they're interested in weight loss. One of the things I tell everybody is if you have any history of an eating disorder, intermittent fasting is out. It is not something that would be appropriate for you, but that is one way to look at nutrition in a closed window. The closer you have food to the act of sleep, the greater effect that food will have on sleep. So a lot of times I tell, I give people what I call my three, two, one rule, which is stop all food and alcohol and, and water three hours before bed.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  Stop all work two hours before bed, and then if you can, stop screens one hour before bed. That's kinda my three, two, one rule. Now, to be clear, if your doctor needs you to take medication and you, you, let's say you're diabetic, yes, you can drink water, that's fine. But the general guideline is to stop around three hours before, and then take a look at what you're eating, all right? So like, as an example, if you're gonna try a new type of cuisine that's super-duper spicy, I wouldn't have it at 9 o'clock at night and then try to go to bed at 10:30. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's just stupid. So like, I try to tell people, like, think through the ideas of what you're, what you're accomplishing. I'm not saying don't try new food. I'm not saying don't try something cool, but

• 58:48Speaker 00

  understand what the consequences are going to be, or just don't have it at 10 o'clock at night, you know? Have it at 6 o'clock at night. Looking at foods in particular that help with sleep, I would say any foods that are high in omegas are gonna be a good place to go. So the, the fatty fishes are always going to be very pro-sleep. I would say the biggest thing that people need to watch out for, and you, people are doing this anyway, is the ultra-processed foods. It, and the, the processed sugar. In particular, sugar has now been found in at least two studies to down-regulate the production of melatonin. So remember, melatonin's that key that starts the engine for sleep.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  If you eat a big piece of, you know, if you eat a half a chocolate cake, you ain't gonna have no melatonin. And that's gonna be problematic. Even though your body is gonna feel sleepy and you may close your eyes, the depth of the sleep that you get is not going to be great. And so you really wanna think about,

• 59:46Speaker 00

  I guess the best way I like to think about it is, why are you filling up the gas tank of your car when you're putting it in park for the night?

• 59:57Speaker 00

  Right?

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  Right? What is that fuel going to do? It's not just gonna sit in the tank, right? It gets absorbed and it turns into fat and carbs and then you have to work it off. But, but you don't even have the opportunity, right? Because it's, it's ten o'clock at night and you're still snacking and that kind of thing. And so, and that's hard. I'm gonna be very frank with you. It's, it's not easy to slow down your snacking, especially if you are a snacker. Night people like me, we're notorious snackers. We don't like to eat a lot during the day, but man, as soon as the sun goes down, it's time to have a piece of pizza, it's time to have a beer, you know, all the things that you shouldn't have. So you just wanna be thoughtful about that. And, and, but if you do have to have a snack before bed, you wanna keep it to about two hundred and fifty calories.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  You wanna keep it into some nice, complex carbohydrates, like maybe an apple and some nut butter would be a perfect snack, right? Or a rice cake with some avocado. That would be another great snack, you know, with a little sea salt on it or pepper or whatever, right? And so, like, you can find satiating snacks that aren't ice cream, cookies, candy. Don't get me wrong, I love ice cream, but if you have it at night, it's really gonna mess you up and the dairy is gonna, oh, terrible.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, thank you for this advice. And I also learned this to be true on all these tips. And whenever I actually have a craving for eating, I don't know, some snacks that I know are not that great for sleep. I just remember the next morning waking up and feeling really not great. And that keeps me from snacking.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  Every time.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Yes. So thank you so much for this advice. And as we are wrapping up, Michael, I also wanted to ask you about, you know, you've been in this for twenty-six years of working in sleep. What maybe, what maybe changed? A, and what you are excited about moving into the future? Maybe latest research or something that's.

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think sleep is advancing very quickly, sleep medicine in particular. I would argue within six months, we'll have a pill that treats sleep apnea. Yep, it's already in the works. There's already a company that's IPO'd and is on the stock exchange here called ApneMed. They're the first, there are at least two others that have got different types that are working. So we're, we're, we are six months away to, from probably the first and probably eighteen months away from having multiple options for sleep apnea. So that's a huge advance. Really interesting. I think with the, with, and here in the United States, we have a lot of people using what are called GLP-1s.

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  So these are the weight loss, Ozempics and Wegovy and Zepbound of the world. That's definitely helping people sleep. There's even one of those GLP-1s. The criteria for getting it is sleep apnea. So Zepbound, if you have sleep apnea, you can get this to help you with weight loss. Now, the question becomes, does weight loss alone get rid of sleep apnea? Probably not, but it definitely makes it worse. So if I've got somebody who's four hundred and fifty pounds, and by the way, I have plenty of patients that are that size, if we can get them on GLP-1s and we can really spend some time and get them reduced, their entire health is gonna get significantly better. However, remember, if you're not four hundred and fifty pounds,

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  you're two hundred and fifty pounds and you only need to lose thirty pounds, right? And your doctor puts you on a GLP-1, you need to be thoughtful because it doesn't just help you lose fat, you lose muscle too.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  And there's a lot of muscle in your throat that helps you breathe. So what we don't know is could GLP-1 use extended over time cause a loss of musculature and maybe make apnea worse? I don't know the answer to that question. I'm not sure anybody does. And so because of that, I think we need to be thoughtful about how we utilize GLP-1s. I don't think anybody's thinking about it right now. I think everybody's like, yeah, let's lose weight and, you know, and it's like, okay, well, number one, you shouldn't have gotten that big to begin with. I get it, okay, but we're not, there's not fat shaming here, but at the end of the day, like, you need discipline, you need to be responsible, you need to understand these things. I think we'll learn from that.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  And then we're also, the, the other big thing that's happening in sleep medicine is we're redefining the criteria of how to diagnose women with sleep apnea. Historically, we've used white male criteria. So we, we tested a bunch of white men and that's the numbers that we use and that's pretty inappropriate. So now we're really starting to understand more. Women seem to present with a different kind of sleep apnea than men do. And I think that's an important thing for people to think about and realize and talk with their doctor about. So there's a, there's quite a bit of cool stuff that's happening in the sleep world. There's also some amazing technology that's coming about.

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  We've got new rings that measure people. We've got toppers that can make your bed hotter cold. There's, there's some, and there's real science behind a lot of that. So I think there's some real interesting things going on.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, do you think we'll ever get to the point where we'll just somehow need less sleep and can leave more? Some of us dream like, if I could just sleep less.

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  I'll tell you what I think is gonna happen.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  Is I think if we ever do reach the artificial general intelligence and AI is taking over the world, I think the same thing is gonna happen that what happened during COVID is you're gonna have two, two camps. You're gonna have people that are gonna get super healthy, right? Cause now they've got all this extra time and they can go hike and they can go bike and they can get, take advantage of sport and all that. And then you're gonna have people that are gonna go pure hedonism and gonna drink more, smoke more weed, smoke, you know? Like, I, I see it as two very different pathways. Because when you're not gonna have to work or you have all this extra spare time, people get bored.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  And when you don't have a purpose and you get bored, you move towards passions or you move towards things that make you feel good because you don't have a purpose. So you're looking for this purpose in this thing that makes you feel good. So I think that happens to people a lot as well. So if I had to guess, I think that might be what's going on. For me personally, I'm excited about the future. I think it's gonna be super cool and super interesting. I'm really excited about medication exploration with digital twins and being able to figure out how we can get people better, sleeping better. Do we need medications? Can we find ways to use medications less often in the future? I think that's a, a great area of study.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  So I'm, I'm pretty excited, I'm pretty optimistic about health and what we're gonna learn. The healthcare system here is awful and that's a whole nother problem. But I think generally speaking, I'm excited about what we're gonna see in the future. And I'm not sure if people are gonna need less sleep over time. I think, I don't know. I really don't know. I think there will be groups of people that maybe need less, but there will also be groups of people that maybe need more.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. What I was thinking about, if we can improve efficiency of the sleep, maybe at some point we can then shorten it. But, you know, you know, I know.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just don't know, like, no, like, I wish, like, our bodies came with, like, a user's manual. So we knew like what the, what the parameters were, like, can we really whittle it down to six and then what would happen to this or that? You know, that kind of thing? So I, I don't know. Whoever invented the human, they did a pretty good job. It's pretty much the most sophisticated invention that's ever come across in, in our lifetimes. And it seems to be working well. So I think we should, I think we should sleep a little bit more. I think generally speaking, that would probably be good for all of us.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, I, I tend to agree. I wake up the happiest when I sleep more. Yes. Well, Michael, thank you so much for this amazing interview, just so packed with practical wisdom and all kinds of science that I'm sure people will just love absorbing. The, the last question, well, the last couple of questions, is there a question that you wish I asked, but I never did, that you'd like to answer?

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  No, you did a great job of, of interviewing me. I, I think your interviewing skills were wonderful. And now I think we covered a lot of it. I, I would like to tell people, if you, if you're interested in learning more about me or more about some of the things that I do, swing on over to my website. It's called sleepdoctor.com. And then it's on YouTube, I am the Sleep Doctor. And we have a great YouTube channel. We're always looking for people to come check it out. Also, I have a podcast that I'm just, I'm launching soon, actually in the next couple of days. So if anybody out there, yep, it's called Better in Bed, wherever podcasts are available, or if you can get on YouTube, check it out on my YouTube channel. But we're super excited about it.

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  I think we're gonna have a lot of fun with it and I hope everybody gets a chance to listen.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, congratulations. And we're gonna link all this in the show notes. And by the time this podcast comes out, your podcast is already gonna be out. So please guys, check it out and yeah, connect with Dr. Michael Bruce everywhere. We're gonna link in the show notes, the YouTube and all the other links you mentioned. And yeah, thank you so much for coming to Change Your Podcast. I learned a lot and I'm sure our listeners did as well.

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  Well, it was my pleasure. Thanks for having me and I just wanna wish everybody out there sweet dreams.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you so much, Michael. That was a pleasure.