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I was 86% correct on accurately predicting when an NBA team will be at highest risk of losing strictly based on
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the sleep oh gosh yes and just 15 or 30 minutes can make a difference so let's
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dive into just some very practical strategies to get the best sleep possible Dr sharim ma is a renowned
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sleep doctor and performance expert whose sleep optimization research has enhanced the careers of CEOs as well as
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athletes in the NFL MLB and Formula 1 and has provided lifechanging expertise to companies like under aror and Google
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for my Elite athletes that I work with sufficient sleep it's a game Cher for example we saw 12% faster Reaction Time
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a 9% Improvement in free throws and a 4% increase in Faster Sprint time and when
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you experience what it feels like to be well rested you never want to go back getting insufficient sleep and it
00:00:50
doesn't have to be these big jumps I'd love to dig into that okay so i' have a shower then I get straight into bed
00:00:55
after is that good or bad tweak the timing of your shower and your hot bath to just an hour or two before bed it's
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hard to grasp how much of a difference this can make in your life what about sex does it have an impact on your sleep
00:01:09
okay so is there anything that I can eat before bed that won't disrupt my sleep but will get rid of The Hunger there's a pre-sleep meal for example cereal and
00:01:16
milk cereal and the reason why is because and then I read this fascinating word nappuccino yes this is a useful
00:01:23
tool if you're a working professional and you need a little boost and alertness and performance what you do is
00:01:31
the DI of AO raffle is about to close anyone that subscribes to the DI ofo
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below when we hit 7 million subscribers [Music]
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Dr M what is it you do and why is it so
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important in your mind that you do it great question so I am a sleep physician um but I spend a lot of my
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time and career trying to educate and and advocate for people to prioritize
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sleep right this fascinating process that each of us does every single night and arguably is about a third of our
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lives but many individuals don't do this very well or they you know sacrifice it
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and overlook this area I very much believe if you don't sleep your best you
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will not be your best or counter to that is if you your if your sleep is best
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you'll be at your best and what that means if I unpack that a little bit more is we often are sacrificing our sleep
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we're underslept we often don't have good quality sleep it we're very reactive to our sleep at night time and
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it's the last thing that we think of at the end of the day when we wrap everything up um and that's arguably not
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going to put ourselves up to be the best we can be in the following day right and
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for my Elite athletes that I work with when you actually get sufficient sleep
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you have practices that you plan into your day and you actually are more
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proactive with that it can be a game Cher and for them when it comes to performance on the field that can be the
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difference of a 9% Improvement in free throw shots it can mean reacting 12%
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faster and so until you experience that it sometimes is hard to grasp how much
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of a difference this can make in your life but it is one of the foundations that will impact everything about how
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you function your mood how you feel and ultimately perform the following day if
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I could offer you or yes you specifically see if I could offer you something that's free and healthy and
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safe that's going to help you think more clearly make better decisions be in a
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better mood be more productive and efficient would you want it of course
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how much exactly and so it's really a decision of whether you want to invest
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uh your time to be able to be more proactive with this particular area of your life to get the benefits that come
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down the road with it who do you work with give me a sort of broad spectrum of
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the individuals organizations that you've worked with on sleep and why have
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they come to you I've had an opportunity to work with a number of professional sports teams and athletes as well as
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organizations over the years to try and apply the science into practice to help them improve their sleep their
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scheduling and their travel so for example I've been with the San Francisco Giants in Major League Baseball I've
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worked with um NBA teams like the Golden State Warriors uh NFL teams like the
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Philadelphia Eagles I won a Super Bowl ring in 2017 with them to um other
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sports organizations like Nike and under arour and ESPN to try and show how you
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can predict when NBA teams will lose strictly based on the schedule and insufficient sleep opportunities um to
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individual athletes who recognize you know hey this is an area that I am not
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optimizing and I know this can be such a valuable asset to extend my career to
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prevent injuries down the road and to help me be at my best do you ever work with CEOs I do I do work with Executives
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and seite um um Executives to try and help them be their best because they too
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are high performers right their performance outcomes are maybe a little bit different than pro athletes where
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we're quantifying on field performance and looking at their swim times and what
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they're doing when it comes to the you know onc court or on field um performance outcomes but for these
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Executives they arguably are also making incredibly important decisions they have to still react when they're under
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pressure and they have to make good judgment calls and so many of the things that I coach and and try to recommend to
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my lead athletes are very much applicable to the SE Suite executive or even just the working professional
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that's really what what I found so fascinating about your research and your work is that although there's a focus on
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athletes as someone who is also traveling is also very very busy also um
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struggles with sleep sometimes because I'm I have to perform late at night whether that's on stage or with meetings or whatever it might be I resonated with
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so much of it and I also train in the gym pretty much every day if I can um
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and I've also noticed a correlation between things like injury in the gym based on how I'm sleeping in my quote
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unquote sleep de but I but I I want to confront two things the first thing I want to confront is the misconceptions
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around sleep that you encounter over and over again what are the like big overarching misconceptions that stand in
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the way of people believing in and implementing the advice that you give
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them I'll start with just this badge of honor that I really believe still persists in society where you should get
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only four or five hours of sleep and should be able to perform at your best and I think the tides are turning and I
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do think that that is changing over the last several years where there are more vocal Advocates of um you know Elite
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athletes like the Tom Brady who you know say everything is around performance enhancement I going need to go to to bed
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early so that I can wake up early and to be ready to go for the day to you know
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the Simone bios who says I need to get 8 hours of sleep and so I think that that is a badge of honor that is now shifting
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and now it's going to become well if you're not getting your 8 n 10 hours of sleep right then you're actually at a
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decrement to yourself and you're actually not going to set yourself up to be the best that you could possibly be
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whether you're on the field as a pro athlete or whether you're leading an organization or trying to go after
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whatever ever it is that matters to you right and and I think that's going to continue to shift but I'm excited about
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it because that's one thing until you experience that that difference and that
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life transformation of what it feels like to be well rested then it can be a
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game changer you never want to go back to it again when you're getting insufficient sleep are there any
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misconceptions around how to sleep in sleep hygiene and um I know the
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quantities of sleep weeny that also seem to stand in people's way of them getting a great night's sleep
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yeah so I think that there is a misconception that everyone needs a certain amount of sleep there's individual variability so the the
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recommendation from the American Academy of sleep medicine and the Sleep research Society so two of our national
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organizations here in the US recommend minimally 7 hours of sleep but that's the lower threshold you might actually
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need 8 hours or 9 hours or more to feel well rested right I I personally feel
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terrible on seven hours and I much more need the eight to nine hours and there's those in that individual differences so
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you need to find what you feel well rested you're able to function well at a
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high level during the day and that will then be your individual requirement so I
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think there's this misperception that everyone needs a certain amount but you need to find what works for you and it's
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all about small changes so if you're not at 7 hours I think you shared sometimes you're you're you're under that oh yeah
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sometimes yeah you know it's about F 15 or 30 minutes more can make a difference
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refence so if you're getting 6 hours then I'm going to recommend getting 15 minutes or 30 minutes more every day for
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this one week and then get 15 or 30 minutes more next week so that you're building from say 6 hours of sleep to 6
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and a half hours and you may not think that that's that much but we can all do 15 minutes more right we're less
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scrolling or doing what we're wrapping up our day but those 15 minutes add up where that's a difference of like an a
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student to a b student or 11 minutes more sleep is the difference of a b student to a c student in one of these
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studies really exactly and then over the course of a week 15 minutes will be almost 2 hours more sleep than if you
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didn't what was the study so this was a study done um in high school students but looking at the difference of how
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much they're sleeping versus their correlation to to grades and so that 15minute difference was shown to be that
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A to B student 11 minutes from that B to C student oh gosh yes so it doesn't have
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to be these big jumps but small changes over time will will add up the the study I have in front of
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me here which I've printed out um also highlights the importance of sleep for
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everybody but also specifically in this case for athletes can you walk me through this study and what you found in
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this particular study on the adult male basketball players yes and how you conducted the study so in the study we
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looked at the men's basketball team and we really tried to examine if we extended their sleep over 5 to 7 weeks
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encouraging them to get 9 or 10 hours of sleep every single night to B pay back
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what we call an accumulated sleep debt would we see any impact on performance outcome specifically would we see an
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impact on reaction time their fatigue levels and would we see an impact on
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their onc Court performance specifically free throw shots three-point shots Sprint time and these are measures that
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we would do after every regular practice and over the course of those 5 to 7 weeks we demonstrated that we saw a 9%
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Improvement in free throws a 9% Improvement in three-point shots we saw a 12% faster reaction time and a 4%
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increase in uh faster Sprint time and so these were the quantification which was
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novel at the time was what was quite fascinating because it wasn't that 1% that I think many Elite athletes are
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trying to find every small way to adjust their training to get that 1% better better because in Elite Sport that 1%
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can be the difference right of being at the top versus not but this was arguably 9% or even double digits for Reaction
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Time depending on the outcome and so we've expanded that looking at other sports as well but this was one of the first ones to show that it really
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potentially could have a significant impact on performance outcome for these athletes how much did they sleep more
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per night to get those results yeah so they did so we did quantify objectively through a uh what's called actigraphy it
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looks like a wearable nowadays um and then compar that also with what they thought they were getting and so we did
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extend their sleep um uh substantially over I believe an hour and a half uh
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compared to what they were getting prior to the study because getting 9% more
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free throws or three-point shots or 12% better reaction time is quite frankly
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for some teams the difference between like winning a championship and not yeah because I think about the Premier League often which is it's soccer I guess
00:13:01
football um often time there's been leagues within my lifetime there's been years in my lifetime where both teams
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have um tied with the same amount of points and one is one just on the amount of goals they've scored they've just scored a couple more goals so after 38
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games they both have the exact same points and the winner is just the person that scored like a couple more goals but
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even you think of reaction times you think of goalkeepers in in soccer their whole game is reaction time so if you
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can increase your reaction time by 12% it's really really staggering it can be a game changer and I think
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that's what has been so fascinating with some of the athletes or organizations and teams I've worked with who have made
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it to the most important games and those championships because the hope is that
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you've invested not just the night before that championship game but you've invested an entire season even starting
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in the off season on cultivating better habits to give yourself that foundation
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and be able to leverage these strategies that the other team is not because we know that it significantly can impact
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not just the individual level on performance outcome but organizations as a whole and I think one example of that
00:14:08
is um I partnered with ESPN to do what was called the NBA schedule alert project where they ask can you predict
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Dr ma when NBA teams are going to be at risk of losing games strictly based on
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the schedule so not factoring in strength of team but based simply on
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their schedule where they're traveling to how many times are crossing these various factors does it affect
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organizations as a whole and teams and their game outcomes as you mentioned and over three seasons I was 76 to 86%
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correct on accurately predicting when an NBA team will be at highest risk of losing strictly based on the schedule so
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in the spirit of the project we didn't factor in strength of team but to me that was staggering because there's many
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other factors that maybe are not always considered to be as clearly important
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about you know this travel schedule up front but hey maybe these factors really do play and influence um game outcomes
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in this way and that's not the only thing that has obviously shown that organizations and teams as a as a whole
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will have differences performance outcome there's other studies like the Monday Night Football study that showed
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if you simply bet on a West Coast team when they play an East Coast West Coast
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matchup during night games over 25 seasons you'd beat the Las Vegas point spread 68% of the time and so if you're
00:15:33
able to predict with with greater accuracy then obviously there is potentially some gambling outcomes that
00:15:39
could work in your favor here but really being able to show that you would be able to benefit and predict better than
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what the spread will be between the the two teams over is that because the West sorry the West Coast team has gone which
00:15:54
who's who's traveled it doesn't matter it simply matters that the West Coast team is playing the east Coast team
00:15:59
during night games so this can happen on the west coast it can happen on the East Coast the reason why is because
00:16:04
performance is enhanced in the late afternoon to evening around 4: to 8:00
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in both scenarios the body clock of the West Coast team because they typically
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go out just the day before the game it feels like they're on the west coast
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okay right so when you're a West Coast team and you stay there and the East Coast team comes out the East Coast is
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three hours later so what is a seven o'clock game on a West Coast feels like a 10 o'clock game for a East Coast team
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got you same thing applies when the West Coast team goes east coast even if it's a 7:00 game there yeah the West Coast
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feels like it's a 4:00 body clock yes and so that special window of around 4:
00:16:48
to 8:00 p.m. when world records are broken and performance in a 24-hour day is is optimal and that is leveraged then
00:16:56
over those 25 Seasons that the West Coast will have more favorable outcome
00:17:01
overall got you so in this study you did in 2011 that was published in 2011 one
00:17:06
of the things I read as well is that players who had slept more in your study sprinted
00:17:13
faster I mean quite quite dramatically faster as well I I think from 16.2
00:17:18
seconds at the start of the study versus 15.5 seconds at the end yes over what
00:17:23
distance was that yes so that was from the Baseline to half court to Baseline to full court and back so we chose a
00:17:29
very standardized sprinting uh sprinting drill that they are familiar with that we could
00:17:36
replicate after every regular practice as you imagine not everyone on the team was participating on in this study and
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so they did this after every regular practice and that ended up being a 4% difference in Sprint time that is pretty
00:17:48
crazy do do do professional teams know this do athletes know this are they aware of this or is this something
00:17:54
that's fairly new some are aware and I think the momentum is shifting towards
00:18:00
more athletes more teams recognizing that this is an untapped competitive
00:18:05
advantage that this is an area that they may or may not have implemented specific
00:18:11
strategies or education or or planning for when they travel but I think the
00:18:16
more Forward Thinking organizations teams and athletes are starting to pick
00:18:22
this up and starting to recognize that they can use this as a weapon right as a
00:18:27
performance-enhancing drug if you may because it is safe it's healthy it's effective and we know that it will be
00:18:34
one of the only things that can give you these performance benefits um and and
00:18:39
those are the ones that are trying to Leverage The Science into application for optimizing yeah their sleep at
00:18:45
nighttime have you seen athletes individual athletes change and save
00:18:50
their careers when I say change I mean change the trajectory of their career or save their careers because they focused
00:18:57
on their sleep and can you give me some examples of that yes Golden State Warriors Andre Iguodala he's someone who
00:19:03
I worked closely with he came to the Warriors back in around 2014 he was
00:19:09
already an Allstar he was 28 at the time knew that his career was going to
00:19:15
probably be sunsetting at some future time but wanted to extend it as long as possible but he knew he wasn't doing
00:19:20
sleep best as possible he was very open about sharing how he would stay up till
00:19:26
the we hours in the morning playing video games would sleep for a few hours go to practice play for a few hours come
00:19:32
home and take a 2 to three hour power nap and that was his routine for for 10 years um and he said you know how do I
00:19:39
improve how I approach my sleep I know that this is important as an athlete to
00:19:44
who wants to play in the league as long as possible so I had the opportunity to work with him over several months to
00:19:49
help him recraft how he approached to sleep including a wind down routine thought about some of his nutritional
00:19:55
choices tried to shorten his naps time them closer to game time to give him the Boost and alertness and performance be
00:20:03
able to manage a racing mind and be able to have just a more proactive approach to his sleep in a really neat way The
00:20:10
Following Season the Warriors went to the championship for the first time in many years they won he came back with
00:20:17
the finals MVP he subsequently has won three more championships with them so
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four in total and extended his career for 10 years when we made these changes
00:20:28
there was a quantification of the performance enhancement so a third party Quantified as he went from under seven
00:20:34
to seven and a half to more than eight hours he had a two-fold increase in his
00:20:39
threo percentage he had a 88.9% increase in his free throw shots
00:20:46
which very interestingly is the exact same 9% that I showed in my man's basketball study that had the same 9%
00:20:54
Improvement in free throws he had a 29% Improvement in his points per minute a
00:21:00
45% decrease in his fowls and so you know these numbers are pretty staggering
00:21:06
again for someone who's already at the highest level as an Allstar and it's not to take anything away from Andre but he
00:21:12
has been very vocal about the difference this made as he changed these habits it he says it changed everything for him
00:21:19
and I think that that's you know a very inspiring story of what it can mean to
00:21:25
extend your career and be able to almost tap into this additional performance capacity that I think even he was
00:21:31
surprised about that he for the first time was able to improve beyond what he
00:21:38
already thought was his best and I think that's what's so inspiring because this is something that's accessible to all of
00:21:43
us to be able to tap into that little bit more so not only did he win the most valuable player award but his
00:21:48
three-point conversion went up 218% yes so during the time that I had
00:21:55
worked with him his three-o percentage went up twofold during that time it begs the question what did you do to
00:22:03
him and you know you named a couple of things there but I'd love to dig into some of those key points sure um where
00:22:09
you started with him the specific sort of implement things that you implemented into his um sleep hygiene and so that if
00:22:17
I am him the day that you met him when he was taking those naps and staying up late which I often do to be fair um
00:22:24
where would you start with me and where did you start with him okay so let's dive into is just some very practical
00:22:30
strategies that I started to challenge him with which was we'll start with his sleep environment we want to make your
00:22:36
sleep environment like a cave really dark quiet cool and
00:22:42
comfortable dark cave so dark blackout curtains eye mask are some of the
00:22:48
easiest tools that you can grab but are incredibly helpful and great investment to be able to use that both at home and
00:22:54
then when you travel so that if you're in a non-ideal environment like a hotel room you have for example an IM mask
00:23:00
that can help dampen out the the light uh making it quiet so earplugs uh also a white noise machine
00:23:07
I'm a huge fan of even a small travel white noise so that you can actually mask over external noises that you may
00:23:13
or not be able to control I'm someone that tells myself that I sleep with something playing for I grew up with a
00:23:19
radio in my room so when I'm as an adult now I'm always looking to play something as I fall asleep is that going to hurt
00:23:25
my Sleep Quality I would say if you're accustomed to this would say that's fine to continue to do so I am not a fan of
00:23:31
having the TV on and having the bright light exposed um to you in that hour before bedtime because it also can just
00:23:38
be very psychologically stimulating but if like you said it's a radio or it's a podcast that you feel is helping you
00:23:44
relax then I'm a fan of it do you think Daria will help people relax it
00:23:49
might it might help you at least think about your sleep a bit more and challenge you to do maybe one one change
00:23:55
tonight we consider that to be a scientific endorsement of of the podcast um okay so I've got sound down you are a
00:24:03
fan of the white white noise machines I am because sometimes there's external noises like a garbage truck or
00:24:09
construction that you're not always able to control so if you can at least mask over it temporarily that can sometimes
00:24:15
be helpful to keep individuals more asleep during the night time and there's even some now that are adaptive so if
00:24:21
the door slams then the volume temporarily increases and then will decrease so there's almost these smart
00:24:27
white noise machine that are that are coming out on the market so that's from a noise standpoint and earplugs are
00:24:33
going to be helpful if you're traveling when you're at home you can obviously use those to dampen down any external
00:24:38
noise from a from a temperature standpoint you want it to be cool I think this is an area that a lot of
00:24:43
people can benefit from because they often sleep in much warmer temperatures than what we know is probably more
00:24:49
conducive to sleep which is cooler 60 to 67° has been shown to help individuals
00:24:55
stay asleep and fall asleep that may be frigidly cold for some but you have to
00:25:00
find the temperature that's right for you I would say decrease your temperature by say one degree or two
00:25:06
degrees every couple of days and then you can find the temperature that works well for you and there's even technology
00:25:11
now where there's mattress covers that can help you regulate temperature from
00:25:17
much cooler to warmer so if there's differences in bed Partners that's a way that you can actually accommodate both
00:25:22
of their preferences so that's about 16 to 20° cus
00:25:28
what about when I shower or I bath because often I go and have a shower then I get straight into bed after yes
00:25:35
is that good or bad I would encourage you to shift that timing a little bit earlier into the night so an hour and a
00:25:42
half before you are planning to go to bed I would shift your shower because
00:25:48
when you are taking a hot bath or hot shower it increases your core temperature but when you fall asleep
00:25:54
your core temperature drops so you don't want that competing signal to be right
00:26:00
before bedtime but if you back that shower up an hour and a half that should
00:26:05
be sufficient time that we think potentially there's an augmentation of helping that drop in temperature and
00:26:11
some smaller Studies have shown that that can help decrease the time to fall asleep and also enhance deep sleep which
00:26:17
has implications for Muscle Recovery regeneration and you get more of that in the earlier part of your night so it's
00:26:24
an easy fix uh just to tweak the timing of your shower in your hot bath to be
00:26:29
just an hour or two before bedtime not right before bed so it's a strategy too if you have difficulties winding down
00:26:36
and relaxing to implement that hot shower hot bath earlier in the evening one of the problems I also have when I
00:26:42
sleep sometimes is I I hear people say you got to you can't eat like 3 or 4 hours before bed however I sometimes you
00:26:51
know I sometimes get home at 10:00 p.m. and I get home hungry as hell at 10 p.m.
00:26:56
and then sometimes if I order food for for example it might come at like 11:00 okay which means I end up eating at
00:27:01
11:00 and then I really see it in my sleep schools um I think as well that I'm someone that
00:27:08
tends to fall asleep later again this might just be me telling BS to myself but that's what tends to happen and I
00:27:13
know I'm not supposed to eat before bed but I'm so hungry so is there anything that I can eat before bed that won't
00:27:19
disrupt my sleep but will get rid of The Hunger yes the preference is not to have a huge meal right before bed that's
00:27:26
fried fatty um you know really heavy sitting in your stomach that hour right
00:27:32
before bedtime um so if you're able to time that and be strategic then that's obviously the preference but I'm okay
00:27:37
with you having a pre-sleep snack a lot of times for my athletes that means we'll go for something like 50% of a
00:27:43
complex carb and like 50% of a lean protein so for example cereal and milk
00:27:48
is an easy one cereal yes cereal and milk of course we want something that's whole grain uh and not you know
00:27:55
necessarily A sugary you know cereal but Cal and milk is an easy one that's many
00:28:01
people have access to or cottage cheese and fruit or 100% ho whe crackers and
00:28:06
peanut butter and the reason why is because I don't want you waking up in the middle of the night being hungry or even trying to fall asleep and you feel
00:28:13
like you're hungry but we want something that's slow digesting through the night because ideally you're going to be sleeping S 8 n hours during the night uh
00:28:21
and we want it to be able to get you to the morning time and then you will fuel when you wake up so a pre-sleep snack
00:28:27
can can be a great strategy if you're coming home late and you want to obviously be able to fuel before bed or
00:28:33
if you have a really early dinner and you're hungry before bedtime yeah that happens sometimes as well sometimes I'll eat dinner at about 5:00 p.m. Y and then
00:28:41
I get to about 10 11:00 p.m. I'm still awake and I'm starving okay so what's a pre-sleep snack that you think you can
00:28:46
grab for some nuts okay yeah does that work yeah yeah nuts have protein in them
00:28:52
um yeah you can grab a good nut mix maybe you can partner that also with like some yogurt too raspberries
00:28:59
raspberries yeah fruit yeah and some yeah a a protein and carbon there and
00:29:05
those are good good pre-sleep snack what's the if I wanted to destroy my sleep what would you recommend I eat
00:29:12
right before bed what would you recommend I I yeah consume right before bed it can be if you just want to
00:29:17
destroy your entirely okay so we're going to have the the night cap of
00:29:23
having a couple of drinks right before bed okay so some alcohol yeah we'll have some alcohol on board we'll we'll throw
00:29:29
in some caffeine too to to really get you to stay awake in the next couple of
00:29:35
hours we add a really heavy meal that's Fried Tomato based um fatty sitting in
00:29:42
your stomach right before bed and you say tomato based yeah sometimes individuals will have acid reflux with
00:29:49
tomato based products and so if that's something that is is yeah is that something that you experience then you
00:29:55
generally want to avoid some of the Tomato based products that can aggravate some of the acid reflux so some fried
00:30:02
food with some ketchup yes okay so alcohol caffeine and
00:30:07
some fried food with some ketchup I think that would really work to your disadvantage during the nighttime any
00:30:14
sugar yes sugary carbs are tends to be some of the preferences when you're
00:30:20
particularly also sleep deprived so people will choose more carb heavy foods
00:30:25
and foods that have um less fiber and more more sugar why fats is it that if I
00:30:32
eat those Foods before bed it impacts my sleep what what what's going on I don't
00:30:37
think we have a great understanding of that I think the field of sleep and nutrition is definitely growing and I
00:30:43
think down the road in the next five or 10 years we hopefully we'll have more answers to that but it's a fast area
00:30:48
that we do start to understand what we eat can affect our sleep so for example the stages of our sleep or how we sleep
00:30:55
during the night time some of the smaller studies shown what you eat can then affect having more Awakenings
00:31:01
during the nighttime um and affecting the quality of your sleep but I think many of them are still at the infancy
00:31:08
because that's certainly something I can attest to I I talked about one time many months ago I think it was last year actually when I I was staying in a hotel
00:31:14
here in LA and I had a cookie before bed because it was cuz I'm bloody you know I blame the hotel I don't really blame the
00:31:20
hotel I take full responsibility it was in the mini bar and I hadn't eaten all day I'd came back I'd been working all
00:31:26
day and when I'm when when I'm when I've been working a lot I'm much more likely to reach for something bad and I had
00:31:32
this cookie and honestly I woke up the next morning 8 hours later feeling like I hadn't slept at all I just felt so
00:31:39
tired and I know it was that Bloody cookie cuz I looked at my um my whoop hashad investor and I could see that my
00:31:47
heart rate throughout the night was really high like atypically high my heart rate throughout the night will usually just be this nice flat I don't
00:31:53
know 50 55 beats per minute and when I'd had that cookie it it started and pretty
00:31:58
much stayed for the first 3 or 4 hours about 75 beats so it was like my body was was still on it was like I was
00:32:06
walking MH um and so I've always just had this idea that when I if you eat something like that right before bed
00:32:12
like puts your body under a lot of strain like metabolic strain then it's kind of like your body doesn't fall
00:32:19
asleep and my REM sleep's always attacked as well if I if I if I were to eat something like that yeah it's it's
00:32:25
very fascinating I think we're starting to understand the connection of what we eat how our gut is responding to that
00:32:32
and then how that potentially can affect your sleep and then ultimately your daytime functioning the next day but we
00:32:38
do recognize from sleep deprivation studies uh that individuals will make different nutritional choices and grab
00:32:44
for the cookies and the ice cream and some of those other snacks later at night than they would if they were well
00:32:51
rested that's a real horrible Paradox isn't it it is do you know what I mean like if you're tired then you're going
00:32:57
to eat bad things right before bed which is going to make you sleep worse and make you tired which is going to mean
00:33:03
you eat bad things before bed is vicious cycle it is and unfortunately that could potentially lead to potential weight
00:33:09
gain and other Downstream consequences so just one other reason why obviously
00:33:15
making sure you're having sufficient sleep but also having good practices and your approach to sleep is also um a
00:33:22
priority so you're asking what else did we do with Andre but in that ways of
00:33:28
preparing to sleep you know we addressed does he have a windown routine so we implemented one where he would read
00:33:35
before bed to actually relax and prepare his brain and body to sleep for the night managing a racing mind can be
00:33:42
incredibly common for not just the elate athlete but for for all of us and so even before he did that reading we'd
00:33:49
actually have him stretch and process his thoughts outside of bed and that set him up with a two-part system so that he
00:33:57
could actually be strategic about preparing to sleep for the night a lot of people can relate to this managing a
00:34:03
racing mind athletes um performers creatives um so if I've got a racing
00:34:11
mind I think as well I think I tend to feel like I have my best ideas just before I'm about to get in bed what
00:34:17
would you recommend someone do if they have a racing mind again incredibly common to have racing thoughts thinking
00:34:24
through the day needing to process your thoughts about how to prepare for tomorrow so what I'd recommend is
00:34:30
spending 10 minutes processing your thoughts outside of bed in dim light
00:34:36
every single night so that can mean I would recommend you could do stretching
00:34:42
H you could do deep breathing exercises to activate your parasympathetic system and dampen down your sympathetic system
00:34:48
that's what I recommend for a lot of my athletes if that's not your thing I recommend journaling getting your
00:34:54
thoughts down onto paper uh or writing a to-do list those are easy ones that all of us can
00:35:00
do for even if you start with 5 minutes today so I'm going to stretch um I've read I read something I think it was
00:35:06
whoops data they released at the end of the year where they because there's an activity log in whoop where you basically say what you're doing and I'm
00:35:13
going to butcher this but I think the stats said that reading before bed
00:35:18
improved your sleep by about 5% across everyone that was using ROP which makes
00:35:23
sense because you're going to be away from Light I guess and you're also going to be calming your you called it your
00:35:30
parasympathetic nervous system yes the parasympathetic nervous system what do I need to know about that in the context
00:35:35
of sleep that's just the system that helps you relax and wind down the it is
00:35:41
in balance with the sympathetic system which you may have heard is the fight or flight system that gets you going that's
00:35:46
where your heartbe heartbeat will be much more rapid your breathing can be much more rapid when you need to go
00:35:52
that's when I'm overthinking yes but you want to dampen that down and you want to get your parasympathetic atic system
00:35:58
activated so you can help actually relax physiologically your body and also your brain so that you're in a better state
00:36:05
to sleep at night right it's easier to slowly pump your brakes and then try to
00:36:12
sleep versus if you were going 60 M an hour on a freeway and then suddenly slamming on the brakes and just jumping
00:36:17
into bed so you actually have a process to slow yourself down your brain and
00:36:22
body it will help prepare you to actually get better sleep during the night time just want to close off on
00:36:28
Andrew then is there anything else you did with him to yes there's please give me there's more that we've done with
00:36:33
Andre but this is to give you some highlights so you know approaches to his sleep were having that way to process
00:36:40
his thoughts being able to wind down before bed and relax improving his sleep
00:36:46
environment so that it was as I mentioned dark and cool I believe his was around 67 degrees it was quiet um we
00:36:54
tried to we took out technology from his bedroom so he didn't have that exposure
00:36:59
prior to bed we looked at cutting down some of his power naps that were several
00:37:05
hours long to shorten them to 20 to 30 minutes and time it much closer to game time so we would get that boost as you
00:37:11
would go into evening games um and we looked at some of his nutritional choices but this is the
00:37:18
highlight of of some of the ways that we were strategic about his approach to sleep and while we're also extending his
00:37:24
sleep from that under 7 to 7 and 1 12 to 8 hours because we knew he had an
00:37:29
accumulated sleep debt that had been built from not getting sufficient sleep probably for many months to years prior
00:37:35
to this and so as we've shared some of the performance outcomes were astonishing and he's been very vocal
00:37:42
about sharing his sleep story and he's not the only one um if I could share another story about another athlete
00:37:48
where you've asked what has saved someone's career so with Andre I think he saw this performance enhancement that
00:37:55
he could tap into that was that was um previously he didn't know almost existed
00:38:01
right but then there's other athletes where I think having sleep as a foundation almost save their career one
00:38:08
example is Ryan Jensen so Ryan Jensen was cut from the Ravens and put on the practice squad and during this time as
00:38:15
the story goes his father said you know what's happening you're not yourself you like made your mom cry the other day you
00:38:22
know there there's something that's going on and he eventually was tested for sleep apnea which is a very very
00:38:30
common sleep disorder where your Airway has some partial or full collapse during the air during the night and so can have
00:38:36
very fragmented sleep through the night and he was eventually tested diagnosed
00:38:43
and then put on treatment through what's called a CPAP or continuous positive airway pressure so it's a it's a mask
00:38:50
that provides air to keep the airway open so then you actually can have Consolidated sleep during the nighttime
00:38:58
and in a very neat way four years later Ryan Jensen comes back signs a $42
00:39:05
million contract as one of the highest paid centers in the NFL and then 3 years
00:39:11
later in 2021 wins the Super Bowl with Tom Brady on the Bucks I see this as the success
00:39:18
story of Saving his career and he's been vocal about how much of a difference it made from literally almost the end of
00:39:25
his career happening to now being able to succeed at the highest level and also of course being healthier and being able
00:39:32
to have um more success on the field than he probably imagined for himself and better relationships presumably he's
00:39:39
not made his mother cry I'm quite curious about that why is it that when we haven't slept we're more likely to
00:39:44
make people cry because we are our emotions are not regulated well when
00:39:50
we're short on sleep we are more irritable we are more grouchy we respond
00:39:56
more with our emo being able to um why we respond with our emotions yeah what's going on in the
00:40:02
body is it like a different part of my brain is it my hormones is it something else it's probably a combination of both
00:40:08
right we know that um our emotional regulation is not the same if we're well rested versus if we're asleep deprived
00:40:15
and so we rely more on our innate response which may not necessarily be that which is strategic for what we
00:40:22
should be responding with if we were tempered and had a better rest under our belt um so we ask cognitively there's a
00:40:29
an implication of which part of your brain you're going to be using but then also you are just not in a state in
00:40:36
which you are going to be able to respond in the way that you would otherwise is it the amydala that's the
00:40:42
emotional center that is one that's where like fear is very much um and emotions and and um yeah the amydala is
00:40:50
where like fear and emotions are are often centered because I've started when I started learning more about sleep and the impact it has on my emotions I could
00:40:56
see a huge VAR in how um how I make my decisions but also how
00:41:03
like short I can be yeah if I haven't slept yeah and so on the days now where
00:41:09
I haven't slept I literally have a conversation with myself and tell myself that I'm going to be in my M mdala today
00:41:14
so to try not to make any decisions try not to talk to many people because there's a risk that I might just be I
00:41:20
might be too short in how I consider things and how I respond and I really want to stay away from that but I've
00:41:26
seen such a huge huge variant and I've also heard of other like famous CEOs and stuff like that talk about how they they
00:41:33
focus so much on their sleep I can't was reading something the other day and it was I think it was it was Jeff Bezos do
00:41:40
you know what I'm gonna say I don't but Jeff Bezos is someone who has been an advocate about sleep and vocal that he
00:41:46
needs eight hours every night yes the quote that I heard him say or someone
00:41:51
told me that he said was I think it might have been Ariana Huffington actually he said that his job as a CEO
00:41:59
is to make decisions and he says he doesn't have to make that many decisions a year he only makes a couple of big
00:42:04
decisions a year every day he's probably just making two or three big decisions so if his job is to make decisions then
00:42:11
his job is also to sleep because the variance I see in even my own decision- making when I'm slept and underslept is
00:42:17
just unbelievably staggering as someone that sits here for seven eight hours a day sometimes having
00:42:23
conversations you wouldn't believe the difference when my brain and my mouth are like connected because I've slept
00:42:29
it's like a different human being it's a different podcast host um have you got data to support this this impact on
00:42:35
cognitive performance yes so you definitely make better decisions when you're well rested you're less likely to
00:42:42
make cognitive errors you have better judgment when you're well rested and you're going to react faster so in the
00:42:49
situations where you need to make big decisions whether it's on the field and you need to react because you're running
00:42:56
a pass whe whether you are Jeff Bezos and you're running a company and you need to make critical decisions um under
00:43:03
under sometimes you know acute stressors or you are someone who just is trying to
00:43:09
be your best we know that the cognitive domain very much is influenced by
00:43:14
getting sufficient sleep and some of the I would say you know large um very very
00:43:21
public disasters have happened as a result of what we know is sleep loss um
00:43:27
where people have made poor decisions or decisions that have led to unfortunate
00:43:32
disaster so for example the Challenger disaster with a space shuttle that exploded um and as a result there's
00:43:39
investigations of why did this happen and the final report does suggest that insufficient sleep for some of those key
00:43:47
decision makers around being able to launch or not was attributed to fatigue
00:43:52
and insufficient sleep so being able to make good Dame time decisions had this disastrous effect ultimately on the
00:43:58
Challenger explosion or are you aware of any studies that have measured cognitive
00:44:04
performance on and sleep yes so my studies as well as many of my other
00:44:10
colleagues particularly look at reaction time because we know reaction time is um
00:44:15
very finely or is very sensitive to sleep loss and I'm starting to find it also is sensitive to extension of sleep
00:44:22
so the other half of the story when you pay back sleep sleep debt we see that
00:44:27
benefit on on uh reaction time but uh reaction time and looking at aspects of
00:44:34
you know how quickly you're able to respond or if you're having errors when you're responding and you're not
00:44:39
supposed to be responding cognitively those are um tests that are typically used in a lot of sleep studies because
00:44:45
we know is quite sensitive can you give me an example of a study that will convince me that um if I sleep more my
00:44:52
cognitive performance will improve one of the studies I mentioned before even 15 15 minutes more sleep was that
00:44:58
difference of that a student to the B student there's another study I often cite where if you look at the difference
00:45:04
of someone who gets 9 hours of sleep for a full week the reaction time stays very
00:45:09
consistent great you want to react appropriately you want to not make cognitive errors or lapses in judgment
00:45:15
and that will be consistent over the week if you're someone who's getting seven hours of sleep you see a slowing
00:45:20
of that reaction time and then a leveling off if you are getting 5 hours of sleep you see an even sharper decline
00:45:27
in being able to react fast and then you see a leveling off if you're getting three hours of sleep every night you're
00:45:33
just going to tank that reaction time and be slower at the same time you have more lapses in judgment and not able to
00:45:40
respond appropriately but the the thing about this study that I find so fascinating is when we know that there's
00:45:47
this deficit when you're going to react slower in the seven and the 5our group
00:45:53
there's this leveling off so people say oh can I get used to getting insufficiency sleep in some sense there
00:45:58
was this stabilizing of it but the reality is you're not at your best right we know what your reaction time could be
00:46:04
if you were getting that 9 hours and if we even gave you three nights of what we call recovery sleep so we said okay now
00:46:11
we get let's say 8 hours in bed for the next 3 days you're going to feel better and you'll probably feel more refreshed
00:46:17
but those reaction times for the 7 hours and the 5 hours and the 3H hour group
00:46:23
didn't go back to the Baseline so it takes more than one night night or one weekend of that recovery sleep to get
00:46:31
you back to your Baseline and so that's the bottom line that I tried to show my athletes is that you can pay back sleep
00:46:38
debt but it often can take more than just one day or one weekend of quality
00:46:44
sleep how long does it take so my Studies have suggested multiple weeks uh will really be beneficial to paying back
00:46:51
more of your sleep debt than just a night or two nights of sleep the biggest bankr tends to be in the first week or
00:46:58
two but obviously this depends on how much more you're actually getting how you're timing that in your night but the
00:47:04
bottom line is that if you can invest maybe a week or maybe if you have a vacation coming up and you do two weeks
00:47:10
that's going to be U the biggest impact on paying back your sleep debt and if you say hey that sounds like a long time
00:47:17
Dr ma well even potentially like 5 days is one of my preliminary studies had suggested in professional baseball
00:47:24
players even if it's 5 days of getting one additional hour of sleep that was shown to potential that was shown to
00:47:31
improve cognitive reaction time and also processing speed in the athletes that
00:47:37
actually got one additional hour so if you got six hours you went to seven if you got seven hours you went to eight hours versus the athletes that just
00:47:43
continue to get their normal sleep interesting I I guess I've got to understand what this concept or this
00:47:50
idea of sleep Deb is because I I want to make sure I'm super clear on what it is and isn't cuz when you say the word debt
00:47:55
I assume it's kind of like I I owe the Sleep bank manager a couple of hours
00:48:00
um but but I I've kind of gone back on forward on this idea of sleep debt I think some people have told me that it's
00:48:06
real some people have told me that it's not real um and I don't know where where I should stand on it so if I if I
00:48:12
haven't so for example I flew into La first couple of nights my sleep wasn't great am I still but I had good sleep
00:48:18
last night am I still paying for it now the way I explain the concept of sleep dead is that your body requires a
00:48:24
certain amount every single night again we talked but individual variability but let's just say you need 8 hours every
00:48:31
night and conceptually if you don't meet that 8 hours then you build up a debt so if you're only getting six hours a night
00:48:36
you now have two hours of debt built up if you go Monday to Friday that's 5 days now you have 10 hours built
00:48:42
up right two hours every night becomes 10 hours and if you then sleep in on a Saturday and you get let's just say 10
00:48:49
hours of sleep you've paid back two of those hours but you still have eight hours left to go and my buddy knows yes
00:48:57
so conceptually that's the idea of accumulating sleep debt I do stand in the camp that believes that that does
00:49:02
accumulate over time we do think that you can pay back some of that debt on
00:49:07
the short term right so what you lost like you said this past day or this past week maybe this past month you should
00:49:14
pay that back with getting extra sleep or we call Sleep extension we don't
00:49:19
think that you can Surplus and Bank more and that you can pull from that in the
00:49:25
future but we re recognize that if you've got insufficient sleep that if you extend it over a couple of days
00:49:33
maybe a couple weeks then you will see benefits in your reaction time in your fatigue levels in your performance
00:49:39
outcomes and so we do recommend that as a tool especially if you know that
00:49:44
you're going to have a day where you're going to have sleep loss so it's a strategy for example if you know okay in
00:49:51
a week I'm going to have a project and I'm not going to be getting enough sleep that night night then what you can do in
00:49:58
the days leading up to it is getting sufficient sleep but arguably even more so that we know when it gets to that
00:50:05
project the decrements that you'll experience tend to be less robust than if you went into it with just say that
00:50:11
was 5 hours so what evidence do you have that sleep debt is a real thing what's the first thing that comes to mind so my
00:50:19
my what I've dedicated my career to is trying to understand how to pay back sleep debt with sleep extension
00:50:25
interventions so what that means is typically I'm working with a number of Collegiate athletes where many of them
00:50:31
are not getting what they need because when we start these studies many of them have high fatigue levels they are
00:50:37
reacting slowly we often see lapses in their um their judgment and their
00:50:43
ability to ultimately perform and function which is what they consider
00:50:49
their Baseline but then when we actually challenge them by paying back some of
00:50:54
that debt by getting additional hours when we monitor the the differences that can make over multiple weeks that's
00:51:01
where we see there's Improvement in the reaction time their fatigue levels drop
00:51:07
their performance on the field improves and so we recognize what has changed in
00:51:13
this is trying to pay back some of that accumulated debt when the rest of their
00:51:18
training has been held consistent where we've been trying to maintain the rest of their their training which is key
00:51:24
which is the key point because in my mind I go well maybe if you've got the athlete to sleep well on that first
00:51:30
night then when they've showed up to training they've trained a little bit harder they've built their muscles a little bit more they've had better
00:51:36
recovery in their muscles so then the next day the same thing happens
00:51:41
because they've slept so it's actually just that they're training better which is causing them to improve their that's
00:51:46
fair we we've tried to hold their training to be consistent and choosing periods where their training isn't going
00:51:52
to vary significantly as well as you can almost make the argument too that sometimes as the season goes on athletes
00:51:59
get more fatigued more tired and that can be actually a decrement to how they'll perform so when we see the
00:52:05
benefits come down the road as the season potentially gets even longer that at least is some suggestion that the
00:52:11
intervention of sleep while we also have the measures of how much more they were getting actually were at least
00:52:18
associated with these performance outcomes because REM one of the key things about REM sleep which is the sort
00:52:23
of final stage of sleep is that it helps with Muscle Recovery uh deep sleep is actually deep sleep is where we uh deep
00:52:31
sleep is where it's implied that there's more R Muscle Recovery regeneration because there's the biggest pulse of
00:52:36
growth hormone during your deep sleep so to back up a bit you have light stages of sleep then you have deep stages of
00:52:43
sleep and then you have that rapid eye movement sleep or when you dream that is tends to be more associated with
00:52:50
consolidation of learning in memory and skill consolidation so you go through these Cycles during the night time about
00:52:57
90 to 120 minutes but the proportion changes through the night the beginning
00:53:02
of the night you get more of that deep sleep and then in the early morning hours is when you get more of that REM
00:53:08
sleep so you might have woken up in an earlier morning and had the recall of these vivid dreams it's because you
00:53:14
often will be waking up from the that REM sleep yes that happened last night actually CU I woke up suspiciously early
00:53:20
for me so I woke up at about 5 or 6:00 and I was just kind of dipping in and out of Dreams MH and were very vivid
00:53:27
dreams that I can still remember now yeah um so the muscle memory element of
00:53:32
all of this what is muscle memory and how is that sort of implicated with sleep so muscle memory there's different
00:53:39
types of memory and you need sleep think of sleep as hitting that save button
00:53:44
right you need to sleep after you have learned new information learned a new
00:53:49
skill so that you can consolidate those those uh those memories and be able to
00:53:55
retrieve it later so I always use an analogy of hitting that save button after you learn new material or learn a
00:54:02
new skill set you need to go home and sleep so that it goes into long-term storage and that you can retrieve that
00:54:07
the following day and subsequently without that sleep we know that that groundwork for that new skill or that
00:54:14
new memory is not going to be as strong and so in the context of students who
00:54:20
are trying to study for a test or an athlete that's trying to remember the Playbook you want to space those
00:54:27
intervals that you're learning that material and have sleep that follows so that you strengthen those
00:54:34
connections and also you mentioned when you were talking about one of your athletes encouraging them to nap before
00:54:40
a game yes um I I read this fascinating word in the research that I was doing on
00:54:46
your work I think it's napino yes what's a napino the nappuccino so this is a
00:54:52
useful tool if you're trying to have a temporary boost and aler and performance so the nappuccino you go and take your
00:55:00
favorite caffeinated beverage the caffeine will start to kick in in about 15 minutes and you go and then take your
00:55:07
20 to 30 minute power nap so if you're able to fall asleep within that 5 to 10
00:55:12
minutes while the caffeine will start to come on board then when you wake up after 20 to 30 minutes then bam both the
00:55:18
caffeine will have kicked in and the power naap will have kicked in and there's research to show that that's
00:55:23
more effective for alertness and performance Improvement for a couple of hours than if you only did the caffeine
00:55:30
alone or only did the power nap alone so the nappuccino is is a useful tool for
00:55:36
some who who utilize caffeine and you can partner that together with a short 20 to 30 minute nap so if I wanted to
00:55:43
take a nap now I have an espresso and then go and have my nap exactly yes the
00:55:50
cettas you do need to fall asleep within about 10 minutes or else the caffeine will start to come on board but if if
00:55:56
you do this in the late morning or early afternoon it can be a helpful tool so that you have a boost in your alertness
00:56:02
for a couple of hours and I grew up thinking that naps didn't work because
00:56:07
the minute I learned about sleep and these sleep cycles and that it takes I don't know 45 60 Minutes whatever it is to get into late stage sleep like the
00:56:14
Rems sleep the deep sleep I thought what's the point taking a 15 20 minute nap if I'm not going to get into deep or
00:56:20
REM sleep so there's benefit of just that 15minute nap you mentioned you want to stay in lighter stages of sleep cuz
00:56:26
there's benefits of lighter stages of sleep and that can give you that alertness and performance boost even
00:56:32
when you're in lighter stages of sleep you actually don't want to go into deeper stages of sleep because when you
00:56:37
take the longer naps as I think you you might have shared you you've taken the 2-hour nap the three p you wake up and
00:56:43
you're much more sluggish much more groggy that's not a good state for you to go out and then do you know work
00:56:52
after that or it's not the state that you want to be if you're a a basketball player and have to go and play a game
00:56:58
but those deeper stages you come out of what we call Sleep inertia with that sluggishness and so it can also affect
00:57:04
your sleep at night and make it harder to sleep subsequently so you actually want to stay in those lighter stages of
00:57:10
sleep and keep those naps very short so what's the maximum length that a nap should be I like 30 minutes okay yes so
00:57:17
you can time that by setting an alarm if it takes you 5 or 10 minutes to fall asleep you can plan for that as well and
00:57:24
the setting alarm to wake yourself up 30 minutes later I think it's a great strategy when again you don't get
00:57:30
sufficient sleep at night or you had poor sleep leading into that night and you need a little bit of a boost later
00:57:36
in the day what do you think of the snooze button the snooze button I'm not a huge fan of the snooze um I fully
00:57:44
understand why people love to hit the snooze and then go back to bed uh and if you're someone who does that one of my
00:57:50
suggestions is just to cut down so that you only hit the snooze once 5 minutes later start your day the reason why is
00:57:57
because it helps to maximize your rem or your dreaming sleep in those early morning hours if you can actually sleep
00:58:04
Consolidated all the way until the time you have to wake up so for example if you're someone who hits the snooze
00:58:09
button five times every five minutes for a half hour it means that you're having
00:58:14
very interrupted sleep for the last half hour of your night versus if you just
00:58:20
let yourself sleep Consolidated all the way through and then maybe hit the snooze button just one time and then got
00:58:26
yourself up to start your day it means you would have given yourself another 25 minutes of Consolidated sleep likely
00:58:33
that dreaming REM sleep that's so important for learning and memory and so that is one just easy adjustment that
00:58:40
you can make in terms of your morning approach to maximizing what you get during the night so what's the what's
00:58:46
the value in consolidating it versus just having fragmented sleep yeah so then if you're getting a lot of that REM
00:58:53
sleep in those early morning hours and you're snoozing you're going to be waking up and coming out of that REM
00:58:59
sleep so you likely are changing the stages of sleep you would be getting in those early hours so you would then be
00:59:05
awake and then probably going into lighter stages of sleep awake lighter stages of sleep than necessarily having
00:59:11
a solid REM period all the way until you wake up what's the cost of that so
00:59:16
learning a memory and consolidation is definitely one area that we recognize is
00:59:22
associated with that REM sleep and so you want as we talked about it changes through the night you want to have as
00:59:27
much as possible but you part have to have just the duration so when you get the most of it in the morning hours if
00:59:34
you cut that short and either wake up earlier or you're snoozing and you're interrupting it you're not going to
00:59:40
maximize the value you get of the hours in rem okay so I just want to make sure that I those 25 minutes I give them to
00:59:48
REM sleep versus just giving them to little fragmented light sleep exactly so
00:59:54
I'm better off just putting my alarm to the time that I actually have to get out of bed exactly just to maximize the
00:59:59
amount of R sleep that I get to consolidate my memories are you a snoozer no not really okay well I mean
01:00:06
we all have our moments but not really I can't remember the last time I pressed pressed the snooze button but the thing
01:00:12
that I do and I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not is because I have told myself and I say told myself because I'm
01:00:18
quite conscious of the BS that I believe about myself but um I've told myself that I'm like an alow chronotype or
01:00:24
something which by the way I don't even know if it's true and I don't know if chronotypes are true um and I typically
01:00:31
work quite late and I love working late I get better ideas late I do my writing pretty late at night as well and so what
01:00:37
I've done in my life is I've basically made sure that I don't have any meetings or any engagements before 11:00 so even
01:00:44
like this podcast today started at 11:00 yes um basically nothing in my life starts till 11:00 for that very reason
01:00:51
just to because if I do end up staying up a little bit late I want to be able to kind of sleep through without having
01:00:56
to set an alarm and just wake up naturally what do you think of that is that suboptimal no I think it's a great
01:01:02
strategy so there are chronotypes where you've mentioned you're more of an evening owl you go to bed later you like
01:01:08
to wake up later as a natural predilection is is that real or I just myself this is justifying myself no
01:01:15
there is a natural tendency for some to feel like they are evening owls and there's others who feel like they do
01:01:21
much better in the morning so they go to bed earlier they wake up earlier they're more productive in the morning those are are morning Larks and then there is a
01:01:28
group that's somewhere in the middle that don't strongly lean one way or another but really what you're doing is
01:01:33
you're you're making your sleep work to your your chronotype and to your advantage where you do feel like you're
01:01:39
more productive in the evenings and then you want to be able to maximize your sleep waking up without an alarm and
01:01:44
starting your day later I think that's like a great strategy because a lot of people aren't able to have that
01:01:50
flexibility and so Society often will force particularly the night owls onto
01:01:55
an earlier schedule where you have to wake up whether to go to work or other obligations or kids earlier Point yeah
01:02:03
and and then you're cutting your sleep short like you mentioned like with school and then we're getting these um
01:02:10
and then you're on a schedule that doesn't work synergistically with what your chronotype is they should do some
01:02:16
studies on kids in school and like Disobedience and ability to pay attention and do homework in grades
01:02:22
because honestly I was so useless in school and I really I really think of it now I'm not entirely sure here because I
01:02:29
got diagnosed with ADHD when I was like 30 years old so part of me thinks I've just got like a very active brain and part part of having an active brain
01:02:35
meant that late at night I was Finding ways to stimulate it by playing Video Games Etc so that might just be the reason but the other reason might be
01:02:41
that I'm an Al Chron type and I found it really hard to get up at like 7:30 to
01:02:46
get to go to school by sort of 8:30ish and so I would miss school I would show
01:02:52
up knacked I would sleep in lessons um and I feel like school just starts way
01:02:58
too early for kids it's a ongoing uh it's an ongoing problem and actually in
01:03:03
a very interesting way there has been a change to school start times particularly in California um this this
01:03:10
year was the first year that school start start times for high schools and for middle schools was shifted much
01:03:16
later because there are studies to show that our when our students are better rested they have higher attendance rates
01:03:22
their GPA and grades are much higher there's less mental health issues um there's less car accidents and so this
01:03:29
these Studies have um been over the last decade and longer in which they have built evidence to help make decisions to
01:03:38
start school time later um and that is in California been enacted this year and
01:03:44
some other states are starting to follow suit but to your point what makes it challenging is that at the age of high
01:03:51
school many of those body clocks are shifted and so students St want to an
01:03:56
adolescence go to bed later and wake up later naturally that's just how our sleep changes through the life cycle but
01:04:03
when they stay up late and then we cut their sleep short by forcing them to get up really early for school now they have
01:04:09
insufficient sleep and that builds like a sleep debt and so they're not setting themselves up for success in school for
01:04:15
learning and memory so that's where again there's more evidence of if we can shift the school start time get these
01:04:20
students to have a little bit more sleep they ultimately are better prepared for school come to school have less uh car
01:04:28
accidents and are just healthier students do you think there's anything parents need to know about sleep when it
01:04:34
as it relates to their children and sleep hygiene with their children I think it's important for parents to
01:04:40
start at the early early years of instilling good sleep habits a good sleep routine and giving their their
01:04:48
children the tools and skills to be able to make sure that it's a priority as
01:04:54
they go through early childhood into adolescence and hopefully then sets themselves up for making sure it's a
01:05:00
priority for their adult life um I'm a young parent myself I just had uh my first son and so um I recognize and can
01:05:08
empathize with the TR the struggles of getting sufficient sleep when they're very young but then trying to instill
01:05:15
how they can approach their sleep from early age I think would be incredibly helpful to also just change culturally
01:05:20
how we think about sleep because so many of us now have never learned about sleep for or what we should do until you're an
01:05:27
adult but if we can make that change earlier on I think we're going to have healthier kids better families um who
01:05:34
are better rested and and also just this generation where we recognize this is so important that we shouldn't sacrifice it
01:05:41
because we're doing ourselves a disservice to letting us be the best that we can possibly be how old is your
01:05:47
son 11 months 11 months so how are you sleeping oh I transparently am quite
01:05:52
tired okay I I as a yeah new Young mom also um I don't have the ideal sleep
01:05:58
that I know I would love um it's a for a short time but I'm trying to be strategic of the things that I can do
01:06:06
with some of the tools that we've talked about trying to leverage power naps um when for example I do have to still wake
01:06:12
up during the night time to tend to him um and you know the early morning starts are not always consistent so my sleep
01:06:19
schedule is not always consistent so you know going back to those three buckets we talked about earlier like if I don't
01:06:26
get the full duration that I want then how do I maximize the quality right I've optimized my sleep environment I try to
01:06:32
have a process to wind down at nighttime um or the timing you know is and the sleep schedule is another area that you
01:06:39
can still work on when for example you may not be getting the duration um so these are strategies that I try to
01:06:45
employ when I know that I um also am a work in progress and trying to get the best sleep possible Once Upon a Time if
01:06:52
you had a business idea it was exceptionally difficult to get going but now in the age of Shopify it is
01:07:01
exceptionally easy as many of you will know Shopify are a sponsor of this podcast if you don't know Shopify it's
01:07:07
an exceptionally simple web platform for anybody that's got an idea that wants to transact on a global scale so things
01:07:14
like these conversation cards which we sell we've sold using Shopify and it only took us a couple of clicks to get
01:07:21
going so why did we choose Shopify for a number of reasons but I think one of the big ones which goes and appreciated is
01:07:26
their checkout system converts 36% better compared to other platforms and
01:07:31
here's what I'm going to do to remove the cost for you if you go to shopify.com Bartlet you'll be able to
01:07:37
try Shopify for $1 a month I've seen Shopify completely
01:07:43
change people's lives and for many of you I think it could change yours what are the other examples of sort of case
01:07:50
studies that you're you're most proud of or that were most pivotal in shaping your thinking about sleep I mentioned
01:07:56
the Philadelphia Eagles back in 2017 and tried to help them educate their players
01:08:02
about sleep how to have a more strategic approach to their wind down routine to
01:08:07
thinking about how they're integrating sleep into their training practices and thinking about ultimately how they
01:08:14
travel and and having for example strategies to minimize jet lag when you're Crossing time zones and having to
01:08:20
play in different locations than the give me some of those then so some the tips you'd give me someone that travels
01:08:26
a lot yeah um pre- during and post travel yeah what should I be thinking about before I travel while I'm
01:08:31
traveling and after I I land yes so have a a game plan for every trip I think
01:08:37
most people have no strategies in place when they travel they just get onto an airplane get to a new location and try
01:08:42
to adjust when they get there that is not really a great strategy you want to have at least a pre-flight strategy
01:08:48
inflight strategy and post-flight strategies because that will set yourself up better to minimize jet lag
01:08:54
also travel fatigue and ultimately then be able to acclimate faster if you're
01:08:59
Crossing multiple time zones before pre-flight try not to panic pack I know all of us do do Panic packing right
01:09:06
before bed right before we're getting on a flight um so you want to try and be strategic and pack early you want to get
01:09:12
at least why do I want to not panic pack because most people will Panic pack the night before they they have a flight and
01:09:17
then they'll cut their sleep short so they'll get only say 5 hours of sleep because they're staying up late trying
01:09:22
to pack everything and get ready for that early morning flight or for the next day well I I pack the morning of
01:09:28
travel so okay but I'm I'm out here in La for I'm out here for 2 weeks and I packed a carryon carryon suitcase okay
01:09:36
cuz I so look at what I'm wearing I wear just the same outfit every day so I have like the same outfit um but I pack
01:09:42
literally an hour before I go to the airport okay okay so but you're right it does cut my sleep because I could have
01:09:47
been in bed whether it's beginning of the day or the end of the day if it's affecting then the duration of your
01:09:53
sleep I would recommend trying to a little more strategic and do it a day before two days before don't pain it
01:09:59
pack number two try to get at least those seven hours if not
01:10:04
your your amount of sleep that makes you feel like you're functioning and Performing well um at least a day if not
01:10:11
two days if you get insufficient sleep before you get onto an airplane jet lag will be worse and that travel fatigue
01:10:17
can feel much more robust and you're more likely to have the quas on in the airport which is going to destroy the
01:10:23
whole thing for for you so those are things that you can do before flight depending on where you're going you can
01:10:29
actually start to adjust your body clock before you even get onto the airplane so let's just take a 3-hour time difference
01:10:36
here in the US if you're in the west coast and you're going to the east coast three time zones you can actually start
01:10:41
to go to bed a half hour early wake up a half hour early do that for two or 3
01:10:48
days and and get sunlight in the morning because that sunlight reinforces to your brain to start to shift that body clock
01:10:56
so if you can do that a day before 2 days before maybe 3 days before when you actually get to the new location you
01:11:01
don't have to shift your body clock three time zones you've already shifted it one time zone or two time zones
01:11:08
because the rule of thumb is for every time zone you cross it takes about a day to re acclimate even if you feel better
01:11:14
after the first day usually jetti feels the worst in that first day when you arrive um but physiologically you
01:11:21
haven't really adjusted fully even if it's over you know a couple of days so that's the rule of thumb so those are
01:11:27
some things pre-flight you can do when you're in Flight you want to hydrate throughout the flight because
01:11:33
dehydration can worsen jet lag you want to think about getting onto the new time zone schedule so again depending on
01:11:40
which direction you're flying and how many times when you're Crossing you want to start to synchronize perhaps like when you're actually sleeping or some of
01:11:47
your meal times so that you're getting onto that schedule and then you partner that with for example building a travel
01:11:53
sleep kit I'm a huge fan of investing in sleep tools that will help you sleep when you need to in non- ideal
01:11:59
situations whether you're on the plane and now trying to take a nap or shift your sleep schedule then you actually
01:12:05
have an eye mask and ear plugs you have noise cancelling headphones you have your own travel pillow you have the
01:12:12
tools with you to S drugs sorry sleeping medication okay so some uh medications
01:12:18
can be helpful like melatonin particularly if you're trying to advance your clock has um evidence that it can
01:12:25
help shift that a little bit more quickly when you're trying to advance your clock earlier would you recommend
01:12:30
it to athletes um it I would say if it's something that you've used before and
01:12:35
you know that you don't experience some of the side effects it could be a useful tool so melatonin while it's one of the
01:12:41
most commonly used supplements and sleep aids there are still side effects that to be wary of so specifically for
01:12:47
athletes too you can feel more groggy and sluggish when you wake up from it um it's not regulated by the the FDA here
01:12:55
in the US and so you don't always know what's actually in those supplements so for my lead athletes they use what's
01:13:01
called NSF Sports certified versions um they're just there's more um regulation
01:13:06
around them but in for the for the you know everyday person you know there's a study where they looked at the amount of
01:13:13
melatone that was actually in a variety of these supplements and it was a wide range from over 400% of what was on the
01:13:20
label to obviously sub you know you know uh under 100% of what they actually
01:13:25
indicated so there's a wide range of what's actually going to be in the supplement but it can help particularly
01:13:31
when you're on travel with um re acclimating my team here we most of them
01:13:36
use a certain app when we travel and it just tells you basically you say where
01:13:41
you're going and then it'll tell you what time to eat what time not to eat Etc so you can get aligned with that
01:13:47
with your destinations like circadian rhythm I guess so we'll link below one of the apps that our team use we're not
01:13:53
affiliated with them in any way but we're flying out here I know will and my team sent me a screenshot and said Steve this is what time you need to be eating
01:13:59
and everything cuz we're going to La so it's been super helpful for all of us I I'll link that below because I know some people are going to be wondering what
01:14:05
apps they should be using so we're in the flight we've got our postt trvel flight kit with the ey masks and all
01:14:11
those kinds of things in we've got our app is we're hydrated um noise cancelling headphones
01:14:18
is there anything else we need to be thinking about while we're traveling when you're traveling so on a plane on a
01:14:23
plane so we talked about hydration minim Al and caffeine or eliminating entirely
01:14:28
is a straty inad of having on board because that can also potentially worsen
01:14:36
um jet lag and or make it more difficult to sleep when you're actually trying to when you arrive and again seeking light
01:14:43
that is the most powerful signal to your brain to help shift your body clock also bringing sunglasses so that you actually
01:14:50
avoid sunlight at certain times because your body can respond differently
01:14:55
depending again on your home location and how many time zones youve crossed so there's certain times that these apps can be helpful that will likely tell you
01:15:02
you don't want to get sunlight during these hours and so you want to be strategic about that and just make sure
01:15:07
you have sunglasses so that you can still go about your day but trying to minimize that sun exposure um getting
01:15:14
well rested and getting sufficient sleep even if it might be a little bit more fragmented than usual just giving
01:15:19
yourself at least a day to acclimate so that I would recommend not scheduling your most important meetings right when
01:15:25
you get in or in that first day for athletes they don't want to do maximal exercise because there's a risk that
01:15:32
that jetl could increase injury in that acute period so you want your body clock to be able to readjust and then using
01:15:39
caffeine and power nap strategically so for example our afternoon 1 to 4:00 is
01:15:45
typically when we have this dip in our alertness now when you get to a new time zone that can occur at a different time
01:15:51
point in the day but strategically then you can use CA and and uh Power naaps to
01:15:57
be able to help you through those lulls when you're in that new time zone what about sex sleep and sex in bed and that
01:16:05
is it because I think so many people actually make the mistake of being in bed and being on their computer on their
01:16:12
phone doing other work while they're awake and that actually helps strengthen that connection that when you're in bed
01:16:18
you're awake and your brain will start to associate that so sleep and sex are all that you want in bed everything else
01:16:24
should be outside so when we talked about that wind down routine or that racing mind all that should happen outside of bed because you want to
01:16:30
actually tease apart that Association that your brain is making of being awake in bed and that will be one small
01:16:37
adjustment that's helpful to to get better rest at night but will will sex improve or hurt my sleep I'm thinking
01:16:45
you know CU I'm really trying to get out like should you be in bed with someone does it does it improve your sleep to sleep with someone and does sex have an
01:16:52
impact on your sleep cuz I you know speaking from personal experience I think that if I have sex before bed I
01:16:58
sleep better I don't think that there's great literature on sleep and sex out there but um I will say that there has
01:17:05
been um there's definitely an impact potentially of a bed partner sleeping with you in bed because their movements
01:17:12
can affect your sleep if they snore that can very much affect your waking up
01:17:17
during the night time um and then you know with sex I think that that is something anecdotally some people will
01:17:23
definitely say it helps them to be able to consolidate their sleep and they feel like the quality is better um but I
01:17:29
don't think there's a lot of great studies that are are being funded for research right now what is the most
01:17:35
popular question you typically get asked about sleep from people most popular question is napping which we've
01:17:40
discussed keep them short 20 to 30 minutes I I get asked a fair amount about can you oversleep so no we don't
01:17:48
think you really you should you can overs sleep when some people say they get say 9 hours or 10 hours and feel
01:17:55
much more groggy it's because often they've shifted their sleep schedule or they have an accumulated debt that say
01:18:01
built up and then they're finally allowing their body to relax and so now that they're they're they don't have the
01:18:06
mask of stimulating activities from their day or their work that can read I read I didn't read a study one of my
01:18:12
podcast guests told me that there is a harm to oversleeping but I think from what I managed to
01:18:18
ascertain the studies they were citing just proved that people who sleep for like 10 or 11 hours
01:18:25
typically have a higher risk of um disease and mental health but then it's hard to establish cause and effect
01:18:31
because if you're in bed for 11 hours maybe you're a depressed and B one would assume you're exercising and moving a
01:18:37
little bit less so you probably got a lot of like cardiovascular issues yes so there are studies of looking at the more
01:18:43
extremes of Less hours of sleep and then even more hours of sleep like the 10 hours and obviously there can be other
01:18:49
comorbid conditions uh that go along with individuals like who sleep much longer you mentioned you can sleep much
01:18:56
longer because of depression or other um chronic health issues and so um that's a
01:19:01
different context of thinking about oversleeping I think in the question I typically get is oh I slept one night of
01:19:06
10 hours and I feel worse so I'm never going to do that again and that's actually not true right I think we want
01:19:12
to have just more consistent hours that are timed so you're not having a shift in the bedtime and wake Time by like
01:19:18
three hours later um because that could be why you're having that grogginess when you wake up not because you got the
01:19:23
10 hours but because you're waking up up now at 11:00 a.m. instead of your typical you know 8:00 a.m. wake up time
01:19:29
um you could be more dehydrated because of that longer time um snoring is one that I get asked a fair amount about is
01:19:37
you know is it completely benign and I would say if you're snoring you should go talk with your primary care doctor
01:19:43
and you should potentially ask about getting a sleep study there is Sleep Disorders like obstructive sleep apnea
01:19:50
we mentioned before that's incredibly common and that's when that Airway has partial or full collapse and can lead to
01:19:56
very fragmented sleep so you can wake up not refreshed because you really didn't get quality sleep during the night time
01:20:02
and snoring I think in our society has become just an accepted Norm that can happen as you get older but that is not
01:20:08
always the case that it is uh a benign a benign symptom and so um making sure
01:20:14
that you talk to your primary care doctor and potentially get a sleep study I think is incredibly important is sleep
01:20:21
apnea the the most common um disease disorder you see yes yes it
01:20:27
isapa can be incredibly common I believe it's about 26% of people of people in
01:20:33
the ages of 30 to 70 and so that as you imagine that's like one in four individuals but many individuals don't
01:20:40
actually get tested or diagnosed and then treated until they're way into
01:20:45
their adulthood or even pasted into their 6070s so with asleep apnea often
01:20:51
times people will not wake up refreshed they will often feel tired in the daytime they may have a lot of caffeine
01:20:59
or have to rely on power kns to keep their alertness up a lot of individuals will have early morning Awakenings so in
01:21:06
those 3 4 5:00 in the morning they'll wake up and not realize why they're waking up frequently snoring can be very
01:21:12
common if you've ever had a bed partner or a roommate and they've ever noted that you stop breathing or pause
01:21:18
breathing or gasp and choke those are very suggestive that you might have
01:21:24
sleep apnea um and again it is incredibly common but very manageable so
01:21:29
something that I would highly recommend if you your bed partner your your
01:21:35
roommate snore just uh suggest to have um I would suggest they go see their
01:21:40
primary care doctor and typically is it people that are slightly overweight that are more likely and susceptible to
01:21:46
having sleep apnea yes yes a lot of individuals who are overweight or obese
01:21:52
um will be more at risk for Sleep back as you imagine the collapse of the airway typically is here around the neck
01:21:58
and so more weight um typically is is not helpful for for apne but you can also be a very fit healthy young
01:22:06
individual so I work with Elite athletes and I have a number of my professional athletes who again are young healthy
01:22:13
males but their Anatomy is just more susceptible for this condition what are
01:22:18
the um the big rebuttal you get the big excuses that you hear from people I don't have enough time
01:22:25
yeah I don't have enough time to sleep okay I don't have enough time to sleep and what do you think of that one uh I
01:22:30
don't think that that's true I think we we all are going to make sacrifices and
01:22:36
priorities in our day and I think if you are saying you don't have enough time I
01:22:41
think there's ways to be strategic about how you manage your time in the day I think we all have five minutes to
01:22:47
implement a windown routine we can all do that at the very least I think all of us can um optim ize our environment I
01:22:56
think we all can invest in some sleep tools I think we can make better choices about how you go about your day so you
01:23:02
set yourself up better for sleep so I think that those are just small adjustments but will be huge in terms of
01:23:08
what that will mean at night um I hear that you know I will sleep you know I'll
01:23:13
sleep in the offseason right now in season is when I want to focus on being my best but really I think that's the a
01:23:20
backwards way of thinking about it if you're thinking about optimizing your sleep when it gets to the season or the
01:23:26
postseason when some of the most important games come down the line you're just playing catchup because if you have a sleep that built up and
01:23:33
you're just trying to maintain that through the season you actually are at a deficit versus the other guy or growl on
01:23:40
the team who has paid that back in the off seon now you have given yourself you
01:23:46
know zero sleep debt you're at your best and now you're just trying to maintain that through the
01:23:51
season what about injury what if I if I'm an athlete and I'm underslept are
01:23:57
there any studies that suggest I'm more prone to injury there are a few studies that do suggest getting insufficient
01:24:03
sleep so under 6 hours there's been more fatigue related injuries in adolescent
01:24:08
athletes there's also a study that has looked at under eight hours of sleep still has a increased risk around 1.7
01:24:15
fold higher of inj fold 170% yes yeah of
01:24:21
higher risk of injury when you're getting under 8 hours of sleep versus those that got more than 8 hours of
01:24:27
sleep and so I think it's unclear exactly why you're specifically more at
01:24:33
risk for injury but I tried to take a look at the biomechanical changes of
01:24:39
what happens when athletes are not getting sufficient sleep in one of my early studies um that has explored the
01:24:48
biomechanical changes and what we showed is that when you're not getting sufficient sleep for multiple days you
01:24:53
have more more variability in your biomechanics yeah so you're moving
01:24:59
differently so you're not actually selecting probably your preferred coordination strategy so for example I
01:25:05
had them doing a vertical jump and if you're well rested you likely should be able to do that very consistently as an
01:25:11
elite athlete but when you're not well rested it's much more variable so they're moving differently and that may
01:25:17
put people at risk for injury they like Landing differently a little bit jumping yeah how their knees their hips um are
01:25:24
coordinated together differs and so that may put you at risk for injury down the road but more to come hopefully on that
01:25:31
front there's just not that many studies that currently exist I've noticed something recently because recently I've
01:25:38
had to get up quite early on a few occas so when I say early I mean I've had to go get wake up at 4:00 a.m. because I've
01:25:45
got a flight at 6:00 a.m. and really interestingly if I so say if I go in bed at like 11:00 p.m. at night and I and I
01:25:52
have to wake up at say 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. when I wake up at 3:00 or 4 a.m. I'm really hungry but if I wake up at 8:00
01:25:59
a.m. M I'm not hungry well you are starting your day much earlier so your body clock is starting at a much earlier
01:26:06
time than you typically would versus 8:00 so you almost have what we call socially jetlagged yourself right where
01:26:13
you didn't get on an airplane yet but you literally shifted your whole sleep schedule to be an earlier wakeup time
01:26:20
and so you can feel some of the symptoms of jet lag where you can have and you can have stomach GI upset you can feel
01:26:26
more fatigued you can have those symptoms as if you gotone onto a new time zone and flew there but you hadn't
01:26:33
yet if it it almost feels dare I say like hormonal like it because I was
01:26:39
trying to understand what hunger is and hunger is essentially a bunch of hormones isn't it so yes you have
01:26:44
certain hormones that regulate your appetite so leptin and gin are two hormones that impact your appetite um
01:26:52
gin makes you more hungry leptin feels more satiated if you don't get
01:26:57
sufficient sleep these levels can be imbalanced and so that's where people tend to as we've talked about grav
01:27:04
gravitate towards you know carb and unhealthy Foods in the later evening time um but also when these are not well
01:27:11
balanced that can also lead to weight gain or situations where you're not able
01:27:16
to potentially um regulate your weight appropriately and so when I have individuals who are wondering about not
01:27:22
making weight goals I ask them about their sleep and they don't recognize that sometimes being able to address how
01:27:27
they sleep will actually help them to get to the weight management goals that they're really striving for Jack what
01:27:33
about you we've talked about sleep before how how are you sleeping at the moment I've got pretty good at my sleep
01:27:38
but waking up in the middle of the night you spoke about it in terms of like sleep happena but it feels like it
01:27:43
should be normal to wake up so Awakenings actually can be very normal
01:27:49
this is a very common question I get asked is you know should I never wake up at night and that's actually not true so
01:27:54
you shouldn't necessarily hit your head on the pillow and then you're out for the full night and then never have an Awakening if you wake up you go to the
01:28:01
bathroom one time you come back fall asleep in the 5 to 10 minutes great that's actually very normal um so you
01:28:09
can have Awakenings that happen at even in the early morning hours and that can be just a typical part of your sleep
01:28:16
cycle because it can be as your transitioning between these sleep stages that you'll have these Awakenings sometimes you'll consciously know that
01:28:22
you're awake and other times you will unconsciously awaken um and so something like a wereable might actually show you
01:28:29
that you have these Awakenings during the night time that you don't recall um but when it becomes very frequent then
01:28:35
you have these Awakenings and over multiple weeks or it makes it more difficult and challenging than to
01:28:41
function in the daytime that's when we get more concerned about Awakenings because there's a number of ways reasons
01:28:47
why you can awaken at nighttime um to name a few it could be environmental factors that affect your sleep it could
01:28:53
be that you had alcohol you know that right before bedtime maybe there's caffeine that's causing you to be awake
01:28:59
there's also just stress or if you just have a racing mind that potentially could cuse those Awakenings a bed
01:29:05
partner is something that is a common culprit um or underlying sleep apnea
01:29:10
that can happen and so there's early Awakenings that need to be investigated with your doctor how much does um
01:29:16
alcohol impact my sleep in percentage times I I don't know the specific statistics of how that's going to impact
01:29:23
um um the the duration but I will say that when we look at the studies of moderate to high consumption of alcohol
01:29:30
that very much has a association with more fragmented sleep more Awakenings
01:29:35
during the night time and so the quality of your sleep is significantly impaired so if you're trying to um have an
01:29:42
important meeting the following day an important game or you're just trying to be able to be your best that following
01:29:49
day at least try to minimize or eliminate the alcohol or in the sleep in the sleep docks world we say drink when
01:29:55
you wake up we'd rather you have that alcohol in the morning or the or the early afternoon not not necessarily
01:30:02
right before bed and so um yeah that's that's one of the strategies is to eliminate the alcohol right before
01:30:08
sleeping Dr M we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to
01:30:14
leave it for and the question that has been left for you is if you could go
01:30:21
back and fix your worst mistake but it would change everything afterwards with
01:30:27
no guarantees would you do
01:30:32
it no I would not do it I think we make mistakes in life and we learn from them
01:30:39
and we adapt and we it can set us off in a different direction but that
01:30:45
ultimately is going to influence who we become who we interact with how we build
01:30:50
a life forward and I wouldn't change my life life if I could go back and it
01:30:56
could would set me on a completely different trajectory could you think of a worst mistake when I said that did one come to mind or was that a category of
01:31:03
there wasn't I maybe I haven't spent a lot of time to try and dive into some of
01:31:09
my worst mistakes I definitely have made mistakes along the way and uh obviously would have done some things differently
01:31:15
in my personal or professional life but I do think that that is what has made me
01:31:20
who I am today right I think I have tried to learn from those mistakes try not to make them again um and try to
01:31:27
figure out how to adapt from there but that has I think set me on a path that uh is where I am today so I wouldn't I
01:31:33
wouldn't change that it's so interesting the subject of sleep for me because I I was part of the like burnout Brigade The
01:31:41
like badge of honor burnout Brigade for a long period of time and I I definitely thought in my early career when I
01:31:47
started my first business around 18 19 20 21 up until probably about I'm going
01:31:52
to say up until about 26 I thought that me not sleeping was something to show off and I thought that
01:31:59
I was more impressive if I communicated to people how little I slept and how
01:32:04
much I was able to accomplish in spite of that I think actually the greatest en enabler to my productivity is like being
01:32:10
really obsessive about my sleep and having that rule that I said where nothing in my life unless there's a
01:32:16
something that's immovable is booked before 11 o00 and I really hope other people um after listening to you after
01:32:24
going through your work which is all available online really prioritize their sleep because as you've shown through
01:32:29
your research and the studies the the impact the very real impact on our lives
01:32:35
is so profound maybe one shift in your mindset too that I encourage you but
01:32:40
everyone that's listening as well is the way I frame it to athletes is it's a
01:32:45
small tweak but if you think about sleep is not the end of today it's the
01:32:50
beginning of tomorrow what you do to prepare what you do to try and get the the duration that you're striving for and
01:32:57
how you set yourself up will affect everything about how you function how
01:33:03
you interact with individuals and ultimately perform tomorrow if you're willing to do everything it takes for
01:33:09
you to be your best sleep has to be foundational in every day and if you're
01:33:16
willing to put in that time and that effort you'll reap the benefits that come down the line and it can be completely
01:33:22
lifechanging but you have to give yourself that Grace and that patience to be able to make these small adjustments
01:33:30
but as some of my athletes have shown it can be a GameChanger for them it can completely change the trajectory of
01:33:36
their career and even life once they actually get quality sleep under their
01:33:41
belt and so I challenge everyone to make small adjustments starting tonight and
01:33:47
reach out if you have questions but where do we find you uh you can reach me at um Instagram Twitter or x uh Facebook
01:33:56
um LinkedIn at Dr Sherry ma d r c h r i
01:34:02
Mah or you can find me my website is Dr sherim ma.com thank you so much I I know
01:34:09
that there's a lot of different individuals from various sports teams that listen because I speak to them I was speaking to um some of the guys at
01:34:15
Manchester United um two weeks ago in a hotel about from the well-being team about these subjects and the sort of um
01:34:22
interconnected subjects of sleep and well-being generally but also I've spoken to people at Chelsea Football Club that listen to the podcast about
01:34:28
these themes so I'm I'm convinced there's going to be a lot of athletes and aspiring athletes and just people
01:34:34
like me who are going to benefit profoundly from the work that you do and the research that you've you've done that really shines the light on the
01:34:39
importance of sleep which is often misunderstood and is seen as a negotiable part of our lives so thank
01:34:44
you so much for the work that you do and I'm very excited to see um where your research and where your studies take you
01:34:50
because it will be pioneering research No Doubt thank you so much thanks for having me it's been a
01:34:56
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