Dr. Michael Breus: Why your chronotype runs your sleep

1. 0:00 – 2:23

   Intro

   1. SBSteven Bartlett0:00

      What are the most popular questions people come to you with as a sleep doctor?

   2. MBDr. Michael Breus0:04

      There's three biggies. Number one is, what do I do if I fall asleep okay, and I wake up in the middle of the night, and I can't fall back asleep?

   3. SBSteven Bartlett0:10

      And you can help people with that?

   4. MBDr. Michael Breus0:11

      Absolutely. The second question is, what pillow should I buy? And I'm gonna walk you through which pillows make sense for which people. And then another one that people ask me all the time is, what's the best time to have sex?

   5. SBSteven Bartlett0:22

      That's a strange thing for somebody of your profession to be-

   6. MBDr. Michael Breus0:25

      Yeah

   7. SBSteven Bartlett0:25

      -thinking much about.

   8. MBDr. Michael Breus0:26

      Well, let me explain why. So I've been an actively practicing sleep specialist for twenty-six years, and I take care of people's sleep problems like apnea, insomnia, and I'm really interested in the things that you might be doing right now that are messing up your sleep, that are easy to fix. So, for example, most people don't know that they have a genetic sleep code inside them, called their chronotype, which decides when your brain releases things like melatonin, cortisol, adrenaline, and dopamine. And so I can show you, based on your chronotype, when it's bedtime, but also the perfect time of day to do almost any activity, including the perfect time to have coffee and alcohol.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett0:58

      Crazy.

   10. MBDr. Michael Breus0:59

       There's even data to show that your ability to understand complicated concepts improves when you're more in line with your chronotype. Now, there are three known chronotypes, but what I'm famous for is discovering a fourth one, which I think might be you. So we're gonna talk a lot about that. We're also gonna talk about dreams, because dreams can tell you things about yourself that you may not wanna know. And then there's how to fix jet lag, whether you should sleep with a TV on, the truth about melatonin supplementation, and my favorite way to get magnesium.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett1:27

       But before we get into all of that, shall we go and look at the best possible sleep position?

   12. MBDr. Michael Breus1:31

       Yeah, let's check it out.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett1:35

       Guys, I've got a quick favor to ask you. We're approaching a significant subscriber milestone on this show, and roughly sixty-nine percent of you that listen and love this show haven't yet subscribed for whatever reason. If there was ever a time for you to do us a favor, if we've ever done anything for you, given you value in any way, it is simply hitting that subscribe button, and it means so much to myself, but also to my team. 'Cause when we hit these milestones, we go away as a team and celebrate. And it's the thing, the simple, free, easy thing you can do to help make this show a little bit better every single week. So that's a favor I would ask you, and, um, if you do hit the subscribe button, I won't let you down, and we'll continue to find small ways to make this whole production better. Thank you so much for being part of this journey. It means the world and, uh, yeah, let's do this. [upbeat music] Dr. Breus.

   14. MBDr. Michael Breus2:21

       Yes.

2. 2:23 – 4:28

   Why This Sleep Expert Spent 20 Years Fixing People’s Sleep

   1. SBSteven Bartlett2:23

      What is it you do? Why does it matter so much now? And what perspective do you take on what you do that is atypical versus other people I might have spoken to about this subject?

   2. MBDr. Michael Breus2:35

      I'm a sleep doctor. Um, I take care of people's sleep problems like apnea, narcolepsy, insomnia, things like that. I've dedicated a good portion of my career not just to understanding how to treat those disorders, which are sleep disorders, but what I s- also I call disordered sleep. I'm really interested in behavioral habits, what's going on, what are the things that you might be doing right now that are kind of messing up your sleep, that are easy to fix, um, and be able to maybe change how things are going forward. You know, I, I didn't start out thinking I was gonna become a sleep doctor, if I'm gonna be honest with you. Like, that, that was not on the, on the path. Um, I was actually going in a completely different direction, and [lips smack] one of the things I really discovered was when you change someone's sleep, dude, you change their life. Like, it is fundamental to who they are, and it's important for me to be a sleep educator in a way, shape, and form that's practical, so that people can actually get something from what I'm talking about and apply it right then and there.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett3:31

      And there's probably a couple of million people that have clicked onto this conversation to listen.

   4. MBDr. Michael Breus3:34

      Yeah.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett3:35

      Who is this conversation for?

   6. MBDr. Michael Breus3:37

      I think it's for anybody out there who's either curious about sleep or wants to try to improve their sleep or may be suspicious that they could have a problem with their sleep. I think any one of those three types of people would find tremendous value here.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett3:49

      And what are we gonna be able to do for those people today, specifically?

   8. MBDr. Michael Breus3:53

      So I'm gonna give people, um, several different, like, plans, if you will, uh, maybe even a five-step plan of things that they can absolutely learn how to do. They're also gonna learn about a genetic sleep code that they have inside them, called their chronotype. A lot of people don't even know that they have a chronotype, or maybe they've heard of the, of the idea, but they haven't ever heard of the term. We're gonna learn a lot about that. We're also gonna talk about dreams a little bit. Um, I'm excited to have the opportunity to do that. I've spent the last year and a half learning more about how to use dreams in my clinical work as a psychologist, which is very interesting stuff, so I'm excited to share some of that. So I think people are gonna learn a whole

3. 4:28 – 7:02

   What Your Dreams Secretly Reveal About You

   1. MBDr. Michael Breus4:28

      bunch.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett4:28

      And dreams matter?

   3. MBDr. Michael Breus4:29

      Oh, yeah, they absolutely matter. Um, I call dreams emotional metabolism, right? And so when you're dreaming, what is you-- what is the function? What is the purpose? What are you doing? You're actually working through your emotional states that you had during the daytime. Um, this is why we have nightmares, right? And so in a nightmare, it's a scary scene, and all of a sudden it gets so emotional, [whistles] you wake up. That is officially called a nightmare, that awakening, but you stop processing, and when you go back to sleep, you go back to the dream, and you get to that scary point, [whistles] you wake up again, and you get caught in this loop, right? And so dreams matter because they can be incredibly disruptive. Also, they can tell you things about yourself that you may not wanna know or may not have in the front of your mind at all times, right? Sometimes people have very interesting dreams, like dreams of being chased or dreams of their teeth falling out or all these different things, and they can mean a whole host of different things. But I wanna be super clear, there's no guidebook that says, "Hey, you know, if you're, if you're dreaming that you're in water, you hate your mother." Like, it doesn't really work that way.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett5:31

      Mm.

   5. MBDr. Michael Breus5:31

      Dreams mean something to the dreamer.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett5:32

      Mm-hmm.

   7. MBDr. Michael Breus5:33

      And so the goal is to understand the context within that. So who is the dreamer? What is the dream? And then how do those two work together?

   8. SBSteven Bartlett5:41

      ... And what is the experience that you're drawing from academically, but also professionally? Give me a-

   9. MBDr. Michael Breus5:46

      Sure

   10. SBSteven Bartlett5:47

       ... a view of how many people you've worked with and-

   11. MBDr. Michael Breus5:48

       Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah

   12. SBSteven Bartlett5:49

       - capacities, and-

   13. MBDr. Michael Breus5:49

       Yeah, so-

   14. SBSteven Bartlett5:50

       - the range of-

   15. MBDr. Michael Breus5:51

       [laughing]

   16. SBSteven Bartlett5:51

       - things people come to you with.

   17. MBDr. Michael Breus5:52

       Yeah, so I've been an actively practicing sleep specialist for twenty-six years. So I work in offices with medical doctors, 'cause I'm not a medical doctor, I have a PhD, and I work with them on their patients. A lot of insomnia patients, but also the apneas, the restless legs, the narcolepsies of the world. Because I have kind of a unique distinction in that I'm one of one hundred and sixty-eight people in the world who took the medical boards without going to medical school, and passed. So I can work within that framework and really understand a lot of what's going on. I don't prescribe medication, but if I'm honest with you, most people don't need sleep medication. As, as far as I'm concerned, I can get them to sleep usually without any medication at all.

   18. SBSteven Bartlett6:28

       And you're a psychologist as well?

   19. MBDr. Michael Breus6:29

       I am. I'm a clinical psychologist.

   20. SBSteven Bartlett6:31

       And how does those two worlds make one plus one equal three?

   21. MBDr. Michael Breus6:34

       Sure. So when you talk about sleep, psychology is all over the place. I would argue seventy-five percent of the reason people don't sleep is anxiety or fear. That really falls well within the range of psychology, for sure. Um, and it's different kinds of fears. It's fears that you know about, that are right in your face, like something that's going on in your daytime. But it could be other fears. It could be fears of your relationship, it could be financial fears. It could be a whole host of different things. So I think there's a lot of psychology that gets to be played in all of this kind of thing.

4. 7:02 – 9:12

   How to Choose the Right Bed and Pillow for Better Sleep

   1. SBSteven Bartlett7:02

      And I've got two more questions before we really get into the details-

   2. MBDr. Michael Breus7:04

      Sure

   3. SBSteven Bartlett7:04

      ... and specifics, and start really helping the audience with whatever they're dealing with.

   4. MBDr. Michael Breus7:08

      Mm-hmm.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett7:08

      The first is, we have lots of props here.

   6. MBDr. Michael Breus7:11

      Yes.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett7:12

      Give me a, a, a top-line view of the types of things you're gonna show me, and why you've brought all of these wonderful props.

   8. MBDr. Michael Breus7:17

      Absolutely. So I get asked a lot of questions, as you might imagine, and, um, one of the big questions that I get asked is: What bed and pillow should I buy? So sitting next to you is a large stack of pillows, all different types, actually, and I wanna be able to show some of your viewers how you look at pillows and which pillows make sense for which people. Believe it or not, there's, like, a fitting process. We're gonna go through that. This device right here is a sleep test, believe it or not. So it used to be we'd have to send you to the hospital... Yeah, you can unwind it. Uh, we'd have to send you to the hospital. We'd put twenty-seven electrodes all over your body, respiratory belts across your chest. We'd have cameras zoomed in on you, and then, by the way, you're supposed to be able to go to sleep, right? And we're supposed to be able to monitor you. Now, historically, we were able to do that pretty well, but once COVID hit, nobody wanted to sleep in the same bed that somebody else had been sleeping in the day before. So now we have what are called HSTs, or home sleep tests.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett8:09

      Wow!

   10. MBDr. Michael Breus8:10

       Yeah. We'll talk about how to use it and, and what it can tell you.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett8:12

       My last question before we get into the details-

   12. MBDr. Michael Breus8:14

       Sure

   13. SBSteven Bartlett8:14

       ... is: What are the most popular questions-

   14. MBDr. Michael Breus8:17

       Yeah

   15. SBSteven Bartlett8:17

       - that people come to you with as a sleep doctor?

   16. MBDr. Michael Breus8:19

       Yeah. So I'd say there's probably three biggies, right? Number one is, "Hey, Dr. Breus, I fall asleep just fine, but I wake up somewhere between one and three o'clock in the morning, and it either takes me twenty minutes or three hours to fall back asleep. What the heck is going on there?"

   17. SBSteven Bartlett8:35

       And you can help people with that?

   18. MBDr. Michael Breus8:36

       Absolutely. I'm gonna give everybody a- exactly what I do in clinic. Like, I'm gonna explain to everybody exactly what I say to my patients and how to go about getting through that particular problem, because it's, it's so flagrant, everybody needs to know how to, how to work with that. The second question would be, um: What bed should I buy, or what pillow should I buy? I think we're gonna address that over here. Um, and then another one that people ask me all the time is, you know: "Is there some kind of timing? Is there some... Like, I feel like my body is off." They say this all the time. They're like, "If I just lived in a different time zone, I feel like everything would work out well."

5. 9:12 – 13:04

   How a “Caffeine Nap” Gives You 4 Hours of Extra Energy

   1. SBSteven Bartlett9:12

      So the very basics of sleep.

   2. MBDr. Michael Breus9:14

      Uh-huh.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett9:15

      What do I need to know about what sleep is, the role it serves, for us to even understand the context of the things we're gonna talk about today?

   4. MBDr. Michael Breus9:21

      Yep. There's only a few things that are truly important to understand about sleep. One is, how does sleep work in the brain? It turns out that there's two separate systems in the brain. One is called your sleep drive, the other is called your sleep rhythm, and they both work, uh, in an interesting way. They're both a little bit like hunger, right? So sleep drive is like hunger, 'cause right, I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry. I eat something, and that hunger begins to dissipate. Same holds true with sleep. The longer you stay awake, the more, the more sleepy that you get. When you look at it from a biology standpoint, it's kind of interesting. So when a cell eats a piece of glucose, something comes out the back end. One of those things is called adenosine. It works its way through your system and goes to a very specific receptor area. As adenosine accumulates, you get sleepier and sleepier and sleepier. Now, why am I going into so much detail? Turns out, when you look at adenosine and you look at caffeine, they're off by one molecule. So here's a little tip or trick early in the pod for everyone. I call it the nap-a-latte. So what you do is you take a cup of drip black coffee, just throw in a couple of ice cubes, right, merely to cool it down. Drink it as fast as you can, then immediately take a twenty-five-minute nap. The adenosine that's built up in your brain will burn through while you're napping. Caffeine, since it's so close in molecular structure, can fit into that receptor site. It blocks any new adenosine. You're good for four hours, guaranteed. I use it with every CEO that I work with. So let's say you only got three hours of sleep the other night, and you've got a big presentation to do, or an award ceremony, or something like that, you can do a nap-a-latte for about twenty-five minutes or so, and you will feel much better. That's sleep drive.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett10:56

      Let me just-

   6. MBDr. Michael Breus10:57

      Sure.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett10:57

      I, I wanna make sure I really understand this.

   8. MBDr. Michael Breus10:58

      Uh-huh.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett10:59

      Can you explain this to me again, as if I'm a sixteen-year-old, why having a coffee and then taking a nap would make me feel energetic? Because one would think that having a coffee and taking a nap are like, uh, opposites.

   10. MBDr. Michael Breus11:11

       Would be almost impossible, right?

   11. SBSteven Bartlett11:13

       Yeah.

   12. MBDr. Michael Breus11:13

       So number one, the caffeine doesn't kick in before the end of the nap. So a lot of people think, "When I drink coffee, boom, it just kind of spins up, and all of a sudden I'm able to... You know, I get a lot of energy from it." That's really not actually how caffeine works. It has to go down, it has to get absorbed, it has to be digested. And so while all that's going on, which takes approximately twenty-five to thirty minutes, you're actually taking a nap to lower the amount of adenosine that has built up in your brain. Let's say it's two o'clock in the afternoon, and you only slept for four hours, and you are dragging, right? All that adenosine that's built up, when you take that twenty-five-minute nap, you'll burn through a lot of it, and then caffeine-... fits in and blocks any additional adenosine from coming in. So that way, you're actually adding caffeine to the situation, and boom, your energy goes straight up.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett11:57

       Oh, okay, so adenosine is, makes me tired-

   14. MBDr. Michael Breus12:00

       Exactly

   15. SBSteven Bartlett12:01

       -when it's docked in my brain?

   16. MBDr. Michael Breus12:02

       Exactly.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett12:03

       So I have four hours sleep, which means there's lots of adenosine.

   18. MBDr. Michael Breus12:06

       Lots.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett12:06

       And sleep get- clears the adenosine.

   20. MBDr. Michael Breus12:09

       Correct.

   21. SBSteven Bartlett12:09

       Okay.

   22. MBDr. Michael Breus12:09

       And then caffeine comes in 'cause it fits so perfectly into that receptor site, and off you go. That's sleep drive. Sleep rhythm has to do with your circadian rhythm-

   23. SBSteven Bartlett12:18

       Mm-hmm

   24. MBDr. Michael Breus12:18

       ... right? And so lots of, lots of information about that, but basically, your circadian rhythm is also a lot like hunger, right? You ever notice you're hungry around breakfast time, around lunchtime, around dinner time, right? That's your circadian rhythm for hunger. For sleep, most people, at least here in North America, have a tendency to fall asleep somewhere between, like, ten thirty and eleven o'clock, eleven thirty at night. So that's kind of the circadian rhythm there. So when your circadian rhythm is high and your drive is high, you sleep. But if either one of them is off, that's when you have a sleep disorder or disordered sleep.

   25. SBSteven Bartlett12:48

       My circadian rhythm is high?

   26. MBDr. Michael Breus12:50

       When your circadian rhythm is on point.

   27. SBSteven Bartlett12:52

       On point, okay.

   28. MBDr. Michael Breus12:52

       Hi- high is probably not the right word. On point, so meaning you are abiding by your circadian rhythm. Now, another question you might say to me is, "Well, how do I know what my circadian rhythm is?" And we're gonna talk a lot about chronotypes, 'cause that's what your circadian

6. 13:04 – 14:25

   Why Knowing Your Sleep Chronotype Changes Everything

   1. MBDr. Michael Breus13:04

      rhythm is.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett13:04

      Okay, so let's do chronotypes then.

   3. MBDr. Michael Breus13:05

      Sure.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett13:05

      You've got some cards in front of you.

   5. MBDr. Michael Breus13:07

      I do. I kind of like these cards. So when we talk about chronotypes, a lot of people may have heard of the idea but not actually heard the term chronotype before. So if anybody out there has ever been called an early bird or a night owl, those are chronotypes. So we've got early birds. These are people who... By the way, this is genetic. You don't let, you don't actually get to choose this. There's a special area on your genome called the PER3 area, and when you have something called a single nucleotide polymorphism, or a SNP, if it's flipped one way, you're an early bird. If it's flipped another way, you're a night owl. If it's not flipped, you're in the middle, okay? So, so far, I haven't told anybody anything new. Like, this is, this is all stuff that we've already learned. The new part is this irregularity that seems to happen for people during, for their sleep schedule, specifically an irregularity in their melatonin and cortisol production. So all of this is predicated on when does your body make melatonin? So if you're an early bird, your body makes melatonin earlier in the night, starting at around eight o'clock in the evening. It makes you want to go to bed around nine thirty. You have a question?

   6. SBSteven Bartlett14:12

      So melatonin is a hormone-

   7. MBDr. Michael Breus14:14

      It is

   8. SBSteven Bartlett14:14

      ... that helps me sleep.

   9. MBDr. Michael Breus14:15

      You produce inside of your body that actually helps you sleep. It guides, it tells your body when it's bedtime, which is a little bit different than the adenosine, which makes you

7. 14:25 – 16:42

   The Science Behind the Perfect Time to Have Sex

   1. MBDr. Michael Breus14:25

      feel sleepy.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett14:26

      I guess people listening now would be asking themselves: Why does it matter to know my chronotype? Like, i- as it relates to my productivity, the way I live my life, my relationships-

   3. MBDr. Michael Breus14:33

      Yeah

   4. SBSteven Bartlett14:33

      ... whatever matters to me, why does it matter?

   5. MBDr. Michael Breus14:34

      Because I can show you, based on your chronotype, the perfect time of day to do almost any activity. So if you fi- if you know when your body is doing certain things, when it has melatonin or when it has cortisol or adrenaline or all these other things, if you know the schedule, you can actually just change your activity to when your body is naturally producing the hormone, and then you do the hormone better.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett14:55

      Okay.

   7. MBDr. Michael Breus14:56

      So let's talk about the easy one, which is sex, right? So a lot of people want to know, "Hey, Michael, what's the best time to have sex?" By the way, I think that might be the third question that I [chuckles] get asked most, um, often, other than, uh, the insomnia one and the mattress one, I think is, "What's the best time for sex?" Might be the, the other question that I get asked more than anything.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett15:12

      God, it must be tricky if you, the time you want to have sex and the time your partner wants to have sex are off.

   9. MBDr. Michael Breus15:17

      Well, think about it like this: What if your partner's an early bird and you're a night owl?

   10. SBSteven Bartlett15:21

       Yeah, I think that's me.

   11. MBDr. Michael Breus15:22

       [laughs] Don't worry, we're, we're gonna be able to fix you.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett15:25

       Yeah.

   13. MBDr. Michael Breus15:25

       So first of all, there's a couple of different answers to this question. So number one is you want to have a time... So first of all, most people are intimate between ten thirty and eleven thirty at night. That's just a survey that we did. So it makes kind of a lot of sense. But here's what's interesting, is your hormone profile doesn't look too good at eleven thirty at night for having sex. In order to have successful sex, you want to have estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, adrenaline, and cortisol all to be high and melatonin to be low.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett15:51

       Mm-hmm.

   15. MBDr. Michael Breus15:51

       What do you think your hormone profile looks like at ten thirty at night? It's literally the opposite, right? Melatonin is high, and all those other things are low. That's hint number one as to when would probably be the best time to have sex. Hint number two: if you happen to be having sex with somebody who was born biologically male, what do most men wake up with in the morning? An erection. If that's not Mother Nature telling you when to use that thing, I don't know what is, right? So when you start to look at it, and we actually did the surveys, we discovered that people actually have greater connection and greater performance in their sex when they have sex in the morning time. Now, do you have to brush your teeth and throw in a little mouthwash first? Yes, of course you do. Like, let's be fair to your partner here.

   16. SBSteven Bartlett16:31

       [chuckles]

   17. MBDr. Michael Breus16:31

       But you end up learning quite a bit. Again, your body is telling you this is actually the perfect time to do something like this. Did you know there's, like, a perfect time to have coffee?

8. 16:42 – 21:17

   The Best Time to Drink Coffee for Maximum Brainpower

   1. SBSteven Bartlett16:42

      I didn't.

   2. MBDr. Michael Breus16:42

      Yeah, there's absolutely a perfect time, based on your chronotype, too. One of the first things that I ask people all the time, I'll ask you, um, is the first liquid that crosses over your lips in the morning caffeinated?

   3. SBSteven Bartlett16:52

      Yes.

   4. MBDr. Michael Breus16:53

      So let's talk about why that's probably not the best idea. So most people don't know... Sorry. Most people don't know, but, uh, sleep in and of itself is a dehydrative event. You lose almost a full liter of water just from the humidity in your breath by, by breathing all night long. Caffeine is a diuretic, which means it makes you have to go pee. So when you're already lost a liter, now you add a couple of cups of caffeine, which makes you have to pee, you're gonna turn into a raisin before this whole thing is through, okay? So we need to get some [chuckles] water inside of you, and so one of the big recommendations that I give all of my patients is: don't have caffeine for the first ninety minutes you're awake. Now, you're gonna sit here and say, "Ninety minutes, that's a... Michael, that's a long time not to have any caffeine. Like, how am I gonna do that? Like, I've got my morning routine. I can smell the coffee in the morning. It smells so good. Everything's going. How's, how's this gonna work?" Let me explain the biology. In order to exit a state of unconsciousness, you need two hormones, and you need a lot of them. You need adrenaline and cortisol, and they both schw-... wake you up. When you have a brain that's full of adrenaline and cortisol, and you add caffeine to it, it's like, it's like adding weak tea to somebody who's taking cocaine, okay? It's not a very powerful stimulant compared to the hormones that are in your brain that are a powerful stimulant. But if you just wait ninety minutes, cortisol and adrenaline naturally drop. If you have your caffeine then, it actually boosts the cortisol and gives you a bigger bang for your buck.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett18:20

      Hmm.

   6. MBDr. Michael Breus18:20

      So you hydrate before you caffeinate, and about the amount, somewhere between fifteen and twenty ounces of water. If you can get that down in the first hour and a half that you're awake-

   7. SBSteven Bartlett18:30

      What's that in English terms? [chuckles]

   8. MBDr. Michael Breus18:32

      Oh, I don't know what the- We'll have to look it up.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett18:33

      Is it one cup? Is it two cups?

   10. MBDr. Michael Breus18:34

       Oh, I would say it's probably three to four cups of water.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett18:38

       Okay. Well, that's a lot.

   12. MBDr. Michael Breus18:39

       Well, don't forget, you've lost a lot of water while you're sleeping, and you might have lost it the previous day because let's say you worked out or things like that.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett18:47

       So let's get into these chronotypes then.

   14. MBDr. Michael Breus18:48

       Yeah. So let's start off with the lion. So lions are my early birds. Um, you know you've got a lion in your midst when you get an email at six AM.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett18:58

       Hmm.

   16. MBDr. Michael Breus18:58

       Right? That's somebody who's been up for a while and who's got their brain kind of cooking. Um, lions like to make a list and go from step one to step two to step three every single day. They get a lot of confidence, and they get a lot of pleasure following, uh, this list. But if I'm honest with you, being a lion isn't all it's cracked up to be because dinner and a movie is out for a lion. They've been up since, like, four thirty, five o'clock in the morning, right? They don't want to go see a concert late at night. They want to go to bed at, like, eight thirty, nine o'clock. So when you're looking at lions or w- what I... Early birds, what I call lions, they've got some very interesting characteristics. They make up between ten and fifteen percent of the population. From a biological characteristic standpoint, their melatonin stops early, and their cortisol starts early. So their melatonin stops at about four thirty, five o'clock in the morning, and that's when cortisol starts, and that's the reason why they wake up so early.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett19:47

       What sort of window do, do lions wake up in?

   18. MBDr. Michael Breus19:49

       So it's interesting because I've got some lions who are kind of extreme, like they're getting up at four thirty in the morning-

   19. SBSteven Bartlett19:54

       Yeah

   20. MBDr. Michael Breus19:55

       ... which is not really probably the best idea. But generally speaking, my lions get up right around five, five fifteen, up until about six, six thirty.

   21. SBSteven Bartlett20:03

       Yep.

   22. MBDr. Michael Breus20:03

       They are definitely my early risers. They have a small breakfast. They don't like to eat a lot of food early in the m- in the morning time because a lot of these people like to go work out fairly quickly after they've, uh, after they've woken up, um, which is very different than some of my other chronotypes. My night owls don't like to work out in the morning. They don't like to do anything in the morning. So my lions like to work out early in the morning, a light breakfast, and also, their best work window is usually somewhere between, like, nine thirty and eleven thirty. Like, that's when all the good stuff gets done. Like, when they have- if they'd have to get details, or if they have to do brainstorming or things like that, that's really kind of where a lot of the magic happens for them. By about two o'clock in the afternoon, there's not a lot of stuff left inside the lion to be able to do, do a lot of good things. That's when I have lions do more physical activities that don't require a lot of cognition. So maybe you go for an afternoon walk, or maybe you have, uh, you know, you're, you're meeting with your folks that may not be really detail-oriented but more process-oriented in the afternoon.

   23. SBSteven Bartlett20:58

       Admin and stuff.

   24. MBDr. Michael Breus20:59

       Yeah, absolutely.

   25. SBSteven Bartlett21:00

       Okay.

   26. MBDr. Michael Breus21:00

       I actually had one, uh, fellow chronotype his entire company and then move meetings based on who was gonna be in the meeting. Like, it, like, he had all the early birds, and he had a meeting at eight o'clock in the morning, and then all the night owls, he had a meeting at four o'clock in the afternoon. He said it was amazing. He said it worked

9. 21:17 – 26:04

   What It Means If You're Most Productive in the Late Morning

   1. MBDr. Michael Breus21:17

      out really, really well.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett21:18

      Wow! What's the next one?

   3. MBDr. Michael Breus21:19

      So the next one is the bear. So bears are representative of people that are in between early birds and night owls, right? So bears are the best. Honestly, dude, I wish I was a bear because the whole schedule of life works on a bear schedule. Nine to five is perfect for a bear, and they make up between fifty and fifty-five percent of the population, so literally one out of two people is a bear.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett21:41

      And when's their peak work time?

   5. MBDr. Michael Breus21:44

      So their peak work time has a tendency to be sort of in the noon to two o'clock e- range. Um, they're a little bit later than what you would see with the lion. Some of them, I think, can actually be better at eleven. It's kind of interesting. We've had almost three million people take the quiz, and we've discovered that inside of bears, there appear to be early bears and later bears. So there are people who fall into that category but like to get up a little bit early. So for them, their productivity window is probably ten thirty, eleven. But for the later bears, it's more like eleven thirty, twelve, and then it's about a two-hour window after that.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett22:13

      For people listening, um, on screen at the moment is a grid showing you the different chronotypes, the wait times, the peak work window, and the sort of afternoon slump time. What's the next chronotype?

   7. MBDr. Michael Breus22:25

      So the next chronotype is me, the wolf.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett22:27

      I think I'm a wolf. [chuckles]

   9. MBDr. Michael Breus22:29

      [chuckles] You might be a wolf.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett22:29

       As much as I love lions-

   11. MBDr. Michael Breus22:31

       I get it. I get it

   12. SBSteven Bartlett22:32

       ... I think I'm a wolf.

   13. MBDr. Michael Breus22:32

       I... Well, you might be. Hey, look, join me. It'd be great. So wolves represent the night owls, right? And so wolves are my artists, my actors, my creatives. If you know a creative, when do they get their biggest idea? It's not two o'clock in the afternoon. It's two o'clock in the morning. Wolves are my highest risk-takers. I know that, that probably you fall into that category as well. Wolves are the folks that show up at the party at eleven o'clock at night, but they stay till two o'clock in the morning, and they help you clean up, and they hate mornings more than anything.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett23:02

       Mm-hmm.

   15. MBDr. Michael Breus23:03

       So should we talk about dolphins?

   16. SBSteven Bartlett23:04

       What's the next one? Yeah.

   17. MBDr. Michael Breus23:05

       Dolphins. This is the category that you fell into. So let's talk about who are the dolphins and, and what does this actually represent? So dolphins are usually highly intelligent. They're usually people who are fast-talking, well-read. These are people who are a lot like a lion in terms of they like to get up. They crave longer bouts of sleep, but unfortunately, their body just doesn't have a long sleep drive, and so they get really frustrated a lot of times. Um, also, I think they have just a teeny bit of anxiety behind them, so a lot of them... For example, the details really matter to a dolphin, right? Versus other people, where details might not matter nearly as much. I think a lot of my dolphins have got just a little bit of obsessive-compulsive disorder, so they're kind of focused in on the, on the din- different things. Like, if I ask a dolphin to do a project, generally speaking, they're never finished with it until I say, "Can you just give me the project back now?" [chuckles] Because they're-

   18. SBSteven Bartlett23:56

       Ah

   19. MBDr. Michael Breus23:56

       ... always working on a little detail here or working on a detail there. Um, but dolphins are my favorite. They're the people that I actually wrote the book for. Um, they're the ones that I, I enjoy working with the most, um, because they're actually the easiest to work with because we can- once I explain to them how their hormones can be up and down and sideways, it can- it starts to make a lot more sense for them.

   20. SBSteven Bartlett24:15

       And for anyone trying to figure out which one of these they are, where do they go to do the test-

   21. MBDr. Michael Breus24:19

       Yeah

   22. SBSteven Bartlett24:19

       ... and how long does it take?

   23. MBDr. Michael Breus24:20

       Yeah, you can go to my website. It's called chronoquiz.com. Uh, and, uh, it takes about three, four minutes. It's not very long at all. It's gonna ask you a bunch of questions about your sleep, about timing, things like that.

   24. SBSteven Bartlett24:31

       Okay, I'll put that in the description, so after you finish listening, you can all go take it.

   25. MBDr. Michael Breus24:34

       Yeah.

   26. SBSteven Bartlett24:35

       And let me know your thoughts in the comment section as well. So once you figure out what your chronotype is, come back to the episode and, and let me know below.

   27. MBDr. Michael Breus24:40

       Please.

   28. SBSteven Bartlett24:41

       And does my sleep change with age, Michael?

   29. MBDr. Michael Breus24:43

       It does.... Absolutely.

   30. SBSteven Bartlett24:45

       So do my, do my chronotypes change with age?
10. 26:04 – 27:01

    Are You Getting Grumpier With Age? Here’s Why

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus26:04

       can happen as you age.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett26:05

       So do I start sleeping less as I get older?

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus26:07

       You start sleeping of poorer quality. I'm not convinced that it's always less.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett26:10

       And is that gonna make me grumpy?

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus26:12

       Yes, it is.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett26:13

       Really?

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus26:13

       Absolutely. Poor-quality sleep, as I would argue, is much worse than poor-quantity sleep. I, I would rather I've got somebody who got five hours of really great sleep versus seven hours of really light, crappy sleep, every time.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett26:26

       Does that mean that as I get older, I'm gonna be more grumpy?

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus26:29

       [laughing] It depends on the quality of your sleep. So what I can teach you is how to not get poor-quality sleep as you age. Perfect example, a lot of folks who are a little bit on the older side are used to drinking coffee late in the day. Well, if you change that habit, then you don't have as many sleep problems.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett26:44

        And I shouldn't, I shouldn't be having coffee late in the day at all?

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus26:46

        Probably you wanna stop by about 2:00 PM, right? So if you stop around 2:00 PM, the half-life of caffeine is between six and eight hours, so eight hours later is roughly 10, which is roughly when people are kind of g- wanting to go to sleep. So I would say that that would probably be the, the time to do it.

11. 27:01 – 31:17

    How Early School Start Times Hurt Kids’ Academic Success

    1. SBSteven Bartlett27:01

       I think about my siblings and us all being woken up for school, and I think about my performance in school, and of all my siblings, there's four of us-

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus27:09

       Uh-huh.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett27:09

       -I was the one that always struggled with being woken up in the morning, in part because I'd gone to bed later.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus27:14

       Yep.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett27:14

       But then I was also the one that struggled with school the most.

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus27:17

       Yeah, that characteristic of a wolf, characteristic of this night person. If I'm honest with you, dude, like, most kids should not be waking up at the time they're waking up to go to school, right? I mean, so many kids are waking up at real... like, you know, 5:30, six o'clock in the morning. They have an hour-long bus ride, then they get there, and if you're an adolescent, I don't think anything could be worse, right?

    7. SBSteven Bartlett27:38

       Worse, yeah.

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus27:39

       So we have to really start to try to be a little bit more thoughtful and look at, like, what are some of the activities that kids are doing? How can we get them to maybe take naps during the day if they need them? Um, athletic performance can depend on sleep. Academic performance can depend on sleep. It's, it's unbelievable, all the different things, yes.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett27:54

       Has there ever been any research done-

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus27:56

        There has

    11. SBSteven Bartlett27:56

        ... on different-

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus27:58

        Absolutely

    13. SBSteven Bartlett27:58

        -chronotypes' academic performance?

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus27:59

        There has been, actually. They haven't... They labeled it directly as chronotypes, but they've looked at it based on age range, and we know that, for example, here in the United States, there's a big push for to change school start times, so that way, high schoolers aren't starting at seven o'clock in the morning, because high schools shouldn't be starting at seven o'clock in the morning. Preschoolers should be starting at seven o'clock in the morning 'cause their body naturally wakes up at that time. So we've actually seen... There was a great study, um, that was done at the University of Minnesota that discovered that, um, when they just had people come in one hour later from their first period, they improved by one full letter grade, meaning they went from being C students to being B students or from B students to A students, merely by changing the timing of their first class. So that should give you pretty good insight as to sort of these big area- Like, and, and all children are vulnerable to this. Like, this is not... Like, I'm not telling you anything that's new. This is- these are studies that have been going on for quite a while, and there's actually a whole movement trying to get school start times to, to slow down now.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett29:01

        Looking at some of the research here, it says, "Research consistently shows that morning types," which is the-

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus29:06

        Lion.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett29:07

        -the lion, "earn higher grades, not due to higher IQ, but because exams are scheduled during their peak alertness windows."

    18. MBDr. Michael Breus29:12

        You got it.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett29:13

        That's crazy.

    20. MBDr. Michael Breus29:14

        Sometimes wolves turn out to be much smarter, but because they're- they can't perform at those early times, nobody knows. Remember, wolves are my creatives. Like, where do you think some of these crea- great creative innovations and ideas come from in the tech world, right?

    21. SBSteven Bartlett29:28

        Mm.

    22. MBDr. Michael Breus29:28

        Like, these are the wolves that are out there that are up late at night coding and trying to figure out what's going on. It's pretty cool when you think about it.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett29:36

        And, uh, just there's this thing called the synchronous- synchrony effect-

    24. MBDr. Michael Breus29:39

        Mm-hmm

    25. SBSteven Bartlett29:40

        ... from a study in 2020, where nearly eight hundred students found a clear synchrony effect. Students performed significantly better when their class schedule matched their chronotype.

    26. MBDr. Michael Breus29:49

        Exactly.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett29:50

        Those morning people dominated in morning classes, and, and the owls, um, or the wolves-

    28. MBDr. Michael Breus29:54

        Mm-hmm

    29. SBSteven Bartlett29:54

        ... have often caught up and outperformed the morning people when tested in the afternoon or evening.

    30. MBDr. Michael Breus29:59

        Exactly.
12. 31:17 – 33:57

    The #1 Parenting Strategy to Prevent Childhood Sleep Issues

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus31:17

       well.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett31:17

       We, we do have to stop here and talk about parents, because, listen, you're either a parent now, or you might be someday.

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus31:22

       Absolutely.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett31:23

       Maybe you won't be, but for those... I've just got a huge amount of respect for parents because, you know, I've gone- I'm not a parent yet, I hope I will become one, but when I see what my brother, who has three kids under the age of, what, seven now?

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus31:36

       Wow!

    6. SBSteven Bartlett31:36

       Um, three-

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus31:37

       How much sleep has he lost? [laughing]

    8. SBSteven Bartlett31:39

       A lot, and, and, and his wife as well. But, um, you must get parents coming to you all the time being like: "What the hell do I do? Like, I've got the k- I've got to wake up when the kids wake up-

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus31:48

       Yeah

    10. SBSteven Bartlett31:48

        ... and, but I'm, it's destroying my, my relationship, my marriage-

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus31:51

        Absolutely

    12. SBSteven Bartlett31:51

        ... my sex," whatever it might be.

    13. MBDr. Michael Breus31:52

        Yeah. So parenting children and sleep are difficult to coexist, but they're not impossible. It really has to do with discipline and kind of thinking through some ideas for yourself. When my ki- so I have a twenty-three-year-old son and a twenty-two-year-old daughter, so I'm a little bit out of the, the realm of having to deal with them every day. Um, but I was... Like I said before, I was in charge of mornings, uh, at our house, waking them up, and it's a lot, right? And so the very first thing that I try to explain to parents, especially if they have a child who has an irregular sleep pattern and is really causing chaos for the rest, like one child who won't go to sleep and it's keeping every, the whole house up. First thing you want to do, educate the kid, right? A lot of kids don't know what they're doing is causing a lot of problems. They, they're just kids. They're just hanging out, having fun, you know? They're- they've got energy. They want to be awake. So that, you want to educate them and say: "Hey, now is a particular time to wind down. This is where your body recovers. This is how you get to do sports the next day or theater the next day, or ac-" whatever, your computers, whatever your thing is, you can tie it to sleep and performance pretty easily. And so getting them to understand that becomes very, very critical. Number two is have some guidelines, right? Have bedtimes, have wake-up times, and follow them as quick, as closely as you can. For parents, uh, oftentimes, what I try to tell them to do is, like: "Look, after your child goes to bed, if you've got a child that has problems for sleeping, take turns." Do what I call the on-call method. So as a doctor, sometimes, you know, you get a call in the middle of the night because you're, you're covering patients at the hospital for your buddy or something like that. You're on call. So when you've got two people who are managing one child, one person handles Monday night, Wednesday night, Friday night, the other one handles Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. You flip a coin for Sunday. So if the kid wakes up at two o'clock in the morning, both parents aren't awake. One parent has that responsibility. The other one can keep their eyes closed and go to sleep. Interesting study was done looking at men and women in bed when a child cries. So women take care of the child, whereas men lie there and fake sleeping in order to be able to stay asleep. Right. That's problematic,

13. 33:57 – 36:48

    Can You Drink Alcohol and Still Sleep Well? Here's How

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus33:57

       um, in a lot of different ways.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett33:58

       How did they know in the study that they were fake sleeping?

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus33:59

       'Cause they asked the men afterwards, "What were you doing?"

    4. SBSteven Bartlett34:01

       [laughing]

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus34:01

       And they all said they woke up, and they were faking it. It's pretty crazy when you think about it, but this is a big, this is a big deal for parents, right? A lot of parents turn to me, and they're like, "This is killing our marriage. Like, we haven't had sex in, you know, three years because we've got a child who..." Maybe the child has special needs, or maybe the child doesn't have special needs but has other things going on, or maybe it's just normal development, and, and, you know, they're worried about it. And so what I like to sit down with parents and do is, number one, let's figure out when your kid needs to sleep, and let's set some guidelines and rules. But number two, let's do the same for you.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett34:32

       Mm-hmm.

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus34:32

       Right? But a lot of parents, when they're super stressed out, one of the first things they do, grab a glass of wine, right? Wine's about the worst thing you could possibly do for sleep, to be fair. Now, I'm going to teach people how you can still have a glass or two of alcohol and not completely destroy your sleep, but I want to be very clear about something. If you're using alcohol as a stress relief tool at night before bed, it's messing up your sleep probably pretty bad.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett34:54

       You might be asleep, but the quality of your sleep is-

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus34:57

       Is shit.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett34:58

        Okay.

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus34:58

        It's awful, right? And interestingly enough, during the one stage of sleep that alcohol knocks out, which is stage three and four sleep, what's the most interesting is that dur- during that particular stage of sleep, there's something called the glymphatic system that comes in and scoops out these proteins that have a tendency to accumulate in your brain. And when proteins accumulate in your brain, they wrap around the nerves, and that's called Alzheimer's disease.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett35:19

        Mm-hmm.

    13. MBDr. Michael Breus35:19

        So stage four sleep is imperative to avoid Alzheimer's disease, and when you drink alcohol, you destroy stage four sleep.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett35:27

        Hmm.

    15. MBDr. Michael Breus35:28

        So it would be great if nobody drank alcohol, but I'm not so stupid as to think that. Plus, I like bourbon, I like whiskey. I enjoy a glass of champagne every once in a while. So how can you successfully still drink alcohol and still get a decent night's sleep? I'm gonna give you a, a quick one, right? Let's say you're having dinner at six thirty. Have your first glass of wine, then have a glass of water, right? Then your second glass of wine starts at, let's say, almost seven o'clock, right? Then you have your second glass of water. Then you stop everything by seven thirty. You wait three hours, which would be ten thirty, and then you can go to bed.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett36:00

        Why the water? Why the wait?

    17. MBDr. Michael Breus36:02

        So the water helps br- wash it through the system, also fills your stomach up, so you don't have too much-- so you, you've got more fluid in there, so that way, you don't drink extra wine. Um, and it makes you have to pee, which flushes the system out as well. The three hours-

    18. SBSteven Bartlett36:14

        And it hydrates you?

    19. MBDr. Michael Breus36:15

        It does.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett36:16

        Okay.

    21. MBDr. Michael Breus36:16

        Absolutely, because remember, wine pulls, uh, both magnesium and, uh, most water out of your system because it makes you have to go pee.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett36:23

        Helps with the ha- hangover?

    23. MBDr. Michael Breus36:25

        So there's a couple of different things that I would say. Number one, this definitely helps with the hangover because you've got water going in. For a lot of my patients, what I tell them is, the very last thing that you could do is have a little bit of coconut water. So coconut water is loaded with zinc, magnesium, and vitamin B, and those are some of the things that get pulled out of your system, uh, when you're drinking. By the way, did you know that there are happy hours specific to your chronotype?

14. 36:48 – 38:02

    How Your Chronotype Dictates the Best Time to Drink Alcohol

    1. SBSteven Bartlett36:48

       ... I didn't know that, no.

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus36:49

       Yeah, so it's kind of interesting. So here's what's cool about it, is your body produces something called alcohol dehydrogenase, which is how you metabolize alcohol, but it does it at a particular time, and the time is different for each chronotype.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett37:00

       Hmm.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus37:01

       So your body is most efficient at drinking between basically the hours of 4:00 and 8:00, happy hour, as a lot of people know it.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett37:09

       And how do you think about what time you eat at nighttime?

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus37:12

       Such a great question. So three hours before bed, you want to stop fluids, including alcohol, um, and food. You want to just stop it all three hours before bed, if you possibly-

    7. SBSteven Bartlett37:22

       Why three hours?

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus37:23

       So it takes your body about that level of time to, number one, digest, clear all the food, and then have all the mechanisms that are working towards digestion now be able to be refocused onto the recovery process of sleep. However, I, I will tell you that there's this, uh... I've seen a couple people, and there are people out there that are claiming that if they stop eating at 11 o'clock in the morning, that it helps their sleep dramatically at night, and it turns out it has to do with your heart rate. So one of the big metrics that is very important that all of our viewers and listeners want to know is you need a heart rate of 60 or below in order to enter into a state of unconsciousness, and when you've got food in your stomach, shht-

    9. SBSteven Bartlett38:01

       Yeah

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus38:01

        ...

15. 38:02 – 39:34

    Why Late-Night Snacking Is Ruining Your Sleep

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus38:02

       your heart rate is up.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett38:02

       That tracks.

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus38:03

       So right? So if the longer you can wait, the lower your heart rate is, the easier it gets in to sleep. And so when we're talking about... So a great example, when- let's get back to parents for a second, right? You feed your kids at an earlier time, and then what do you do? Oh, then you go back and have dinner with your spouse, right? Maybe that's not the best idea because you're having dinner so late. Maybe you should have dinner with your kids, right? A- and enjoy that time with them and eat earlier because that gives you more space later on to be able to relax and go to bed.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett38:32

       I said, "That tracks," because I remember, I've told this story once or twice before.

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus38:35

       Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett38:35

       I remember when I was doing some podcasts over here in LA.

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus38:37

       Uh-huh.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett38:37

       And we had Seth Rogen on.

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus38:39

       Sure.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett38:39

        And the day before, in the hotel before I lived here, I had a cookie from the minibar. I'm going to admit it. I had the cookie.

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus38:46

        [chuckles] They're so good. [chuckles]

    12. SBSteven Bartlett38:47

        It was... And then I went to bed pretty quickly.

    13. MBDr. Michael Breus38:50

        Oh, God.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett38:50

        It was just-

    15. MBDr. Michael Breus38:51

        Yeah. [laughs]

    16. SBSteven Bartlett38:51

        ... terrible. And I was looking at my Whoop the next day.

    17. MBDr. Michael Breus38:54

        Yeah, it was-

    18. SBSteven Bartlett38:54

        Hashtag ad Shunk. And it- my heart rate-

    19. MBDr. Michael Breus38:57

        Straight up

    20. SBSteven Bartlett38:57

        ... was, like, 75 or, uh, 80-

    21. MBDr. Michael Breus39:00

        Yeah

    22. SBSteven Bartlett39:00

        ... for the first two to three hours-

    23. MBDr. Michael Breus39:02

        Isn't that-

    24. SBSteven Bartlett39:02

        ... after I got into bed.

    25. MBDr. Michael Breus39:03

        Isn't that crazy?

    26. SBSteven Bartlett39:04

        And I woke up feeling-

    27. MBDr. Michael Breus39:05

        Oh, my...

    28. SBSteven Bartlett39:05

        ... like hell.

    29. MBDr. Michael Breus39:06

        Yep.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett39:07

        Terrible day the next day.
16. 39:34 – 43:47

    The Best Relaxation Exercises to Help You Fall Asleep Fast

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus39:34

       all kinds of things.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett39:34

       Brings my heart rate down.

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus39:35

       Yeah, absolutely. So what a lot of people don't realize is just because we're breathing, doesn't mean we're actually breathing in a way, shape, and form that can be helpful for us for sleep. So in my most recent book, Sleep Drink Breathe, I talk a lot about breathwork and what is it and how does it work for you. But I'd love to teach you my favorite form of breathwork and meditation-

    4. SBSteven Bartlett39:56

       Sure

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus39:56

       ... um, that I think you'll, you'll get a lot out of. So-

    6. SBSteven Bartlett39:58

       And I do this before bed?

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus40:00

       Exactly.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett40:00

       Okay.

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus40:01

       And you can... By the way, you can do it in the middle of the night if you wake up as well, right? So let's talk about how to get- how to fall asleep and do some relaxation exercises for that, and then I'm going to give you some different ones for in the middle of the night. So let's talk the beginning of the night. So number one, you need runway to land the plane, okay? So many people think they're just waiting for their head to be bobbing in front of the TV, and then they go brush their teeth, and they get in bed, and then all of a sudden, they're wide awake, and they don't know what's going on, right? So you need time for your system to shut down. It's not an on/off switch. It's more like slowly pulling your foot off the gas and slowly putting your foot on the brake. There's a process. It should take you about 12 to 15 minutes to actually fall asleep, okay? So number one, what I ask people to do is take the last hour before bed and chop it up into three 20-minute segments, right? So let's say you're going to bed at 11:00, starting at 10:00 o'clock... And by the way, set an alarm on your phone to, to tell you that it's 10:00 o'clock because it's really easy to slide by your bedtime, and then all of a sudden, it's like all bets are off. So set the alarm 20 minutes for shit you just gotta do. So in our house, it used to be getting backpacks together for school, for our kids, finding sports equipment, maybe laying out my stuff for work the next day, or getting the last email sent, something like that. Twenty minutes for hygiene, right? Brush your teeth, wash your face, maybe take a shower or something along those lines. And then 20 minutes for some form of meditation, relaxation, prayer. I don't care what you do, but it has to be something that's calming to get you there, okay?

    10. SBSteven Bartlett41:27

        Mm-hmm.

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus41:28

        So my- one of my favorite techniques to do is meditation. Now, I'm going to be honest with you, I'm a terrible meditator. I have never been able to do it. I've actually gotten kicked out of meditation retreats 'cause I'm the guy that's like: "What's going on? Like, am I doing it right?" You know, I'm kind of that, that person. And so I was, I, I was told about this tool called a Muse headband. We have one right here. So this is my personal Muse. I actually brought it from home. And, um, you'll notice on the inside, there are sensors here, and there are sensors along the earpiece here. And so what happens is, is you wear it on your head, right, and it's measuring your brainwaves. And so when we're... Yeah, check it out. And so when we're, when we're doing it, and we're measuring brainwaves... Yep, exactly. And that goes on the back part. Yeah, there you go. So what's cool about this is it's attached to an app, and then while it's measuring your brainwaves, you're listening to a particular music. It could be a guided meditation. It could be any of those things. And while you're doing this, the volume gets lower, and then you know you're getting closer to a meditative state.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett42:27

        The volume comes down when?

    13. MBDr. Michael Breus42:28

        On the app, when your brainwave starts to relax.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett42:31

        Oh, okay.

    15. MBDr. Michael Breus42:32

        So you're immediately getting feedback. We can try it if you want.... [lips smack] um, but it's pretty interesting, and then when you get to the alpha state, little birds start chirping.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett42:40

        The alpha state?

    17. MBDr. Michael Breus42:41

        Yeah, the alpha state is when your eyes are closed, and you're at the most relaxed state of your brainwaves. It's called the alpha state, and that's really what people are trying to get to for meditation.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett42:49

        And are you affiliated with this company in any way?

    19. MBDr. Michael Breus42:51

        I am not.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett42:51

        And how much does it cost?

    21. MBDr. Michael Breus42:53

        I think it's around $275, I think is the headband.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett42:57

        Okay, interesting.

    23. MBDr. Michael Breus42:58

        It's pretty fascinating. Um, I, I've been pretty impressed with them.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett43:01

        So that's meditation.

    25. MBDr. Michael Breus43:02

        Mm-hmm.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett43:03

        You talked about breathwork as well before?

    27. MBDr. Michael Breus43:04

        Yeah, let's talk about it. So one of the other things that I do is I do something... Well, this isn't breathwork. This is called progressive muscle relaxation. So this is where you tense and relax muscles, starting from your feet and going all the way up your body, and as you tense and relax the muscles, you feel that relaxation from releasing that tension, and it helps you fall asleep. Um, actually, you know what I can do is I can send you a, an audio file that has me walking through progressive muscle relaxation that we can make available for everybody if you want, we- for free. It's no big deal. Um-

    28. SBSteven Bartlett43:34

        Amazing. I'll put that in the description below as well.

    29. MBDr. Michael Breus43:36

        Yeah, yeah, people will really dig it. I think they'll really enjoy it. So that's another thing that we do, but now let's talk about the middle of the night, right? So do- by the way, do you have this as an issue? Have this... Has this happened to you before?

17. 43:47 – 47:29

    What the Ideal Sleep Environment Looks Like

    1. SBSteven Bartlett43:47

       It happens sometimes, and it's typically when, like, my sleep is somewhat dis- disordered or disruptive-

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus43:52

       Yeah

    3. SBSteven Bartlett43:52

       ... or when there's really something on my mind.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus43:54

       Yes, so that, that precipitatory anxiety, like before a flight.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett43:58

       Mm-hmm.

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus43:58

       Like, if I have an eight o'clock in the morning flight, like, I sleep like shit the night before [chuckles] because I'm constantly worried about that, right? But a lot of times, what people do normally is they just wake up in the middle of the night, and they can't return to sleep, and they're really not sure why. So number one, there's biology involved. So your core body temperature rises, rises, rises, and when it hits a peak, it drops. That drop is then a signal to your brain to release melatonin, right? Again, the key that starts the engine for sleep. However, your core body temperature continues to drop, drop, drop. By the way, this is the reason why we tell people you want to sleep in the cool, not the warm environment. Because, again, your core body temperature is dropping. If it's too hot, your core body temperature can't go down, and you can't get to sleep.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett44:35

       Which tracks with evolution.

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus44:36

       Exactly. So here's where it gets interesting, is it keeps going, going, going, and then at some point in time, your body has to heat up, and if it doesn't heat up, you go hypothermic. Guess what time that is? Between one and three o'clock in the morning.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett44:49

       Oh, your body starts heating up at one, one and three?

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus44:51

        Every single person's body on Earth does this. Everybody on Earth wakes up between one and three o'clock in the morning. However, most people burp, roll over, get comfortable, and fall back asleep in 30 seconds. However, there's a select group of people, who end up being my patients, [chuckles] who don't have that, and there- herein lies the problem. So here are the steps you wanna take in the middle of the night to be able to solve this issue. So number one, don't go pee. I know, I know, I know. [chuckles] People are like, "What? What are you talking about, Michael?" So here's what ends up happening is, when people wake up in the middle of the night, they say to themselves, "Well, I'm up. I might as well go pee," right? Here's the problem. Remember, I told you the big metric was in order to enter into a state of unconsciousness, you need a heart rate of 60 or below, right? What do you think happens to your heart rate when you go from a lying position to a seated position to a standing position? You walk across the room. [whistles] Your heart rate goes straight up. So what we wanna do is keep your heart rate down, so if you don't really have to go to the bathroom, don't go to the bathroom. Seventy-five percent of people sleep on their sides, and they kind of scrunch up, which means they're putting pressure on their bladder. So my guess is, is that most of those people, if all you did was when you woke up, is lie and get on your back for about 25 seconds and see if you still need to pee. If you don't need to pee, stay in bed and keep your heart rate down. If you need to pee, please, go pee, right? If you're gonna go to the bathroom, have a strategically placed nightlight along the way, so you don't have to flip on the light in the water closet. 'Cause if you do that, you just told your brain it's morning, and it stops producing melatonin. But let's say you don't have to pee. The second thing, don't look at your phone. Now, this turns out to be very difficult for 99% [chuckles] of the people out there. 'Cause the first thing they do is they grab their phone, and they head to the bathroom, right? And they're either checking emails, looking at Facebook or Twitter or whatever social media they're on-

    11. SBSteven Bartlett46:35

        Or just trying to figure out what time it is.

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus46:36

        Or... And that's where the problem is, is as soon as you see the time, you [snaps] instantly do the mental math, and now you're pissed off, right? "It's 3:30 in the morning. I gotta get up at 6:00. Sleep! Sleep! Sleep." And you try to force your brain to sleep. Dude, in the history of time, nobody has been able to force their brain to sleep, okay?

    13. SBSteven Bartlett46:56

        Mm-hmm.

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus46:56

        'Cause your heart rate's going in the wrong way, right? It needs to be coming down. So if you can, don't look at the clock. All right, so you haven't peed, you haven't looked at the clock, but you're still awake, and nothing's going on. Here's where the breathing technique comes in. It's called 4-7-8 breathing. I did not develop this technique. It was developed by Dr. Andrew Weil, Harvard-trained natural doctor, super smart dude, um, and, uh, he did it for the military to teach them how to lower their heart rate during stressful situations. We use it because it helps lower our heart rate past 60, and it's super simple. I'm gonna get you to try it, so go ahead and sit up straight. Okay,

18. 47:29 – 52:54

    How the Military Trains Soldiers to Fall Asleep in Minutes

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus47:29

       and so all you're gonna do is breathe in for a count of four, you're gonna hold for a count of seven, and you're gonna breathe out for a count of eight, and I'm gonna walk you through it. I want you to have your eyes closed, and what I also want you to do, you're gonna go in through the nose, out through the mouth, and then what I also want you to do is picture the number in your head. So when I say breathe in, two, three, four, you should picture the two, the three, the four in your mind's eye, okay?

    2. SBSteven Bartlett47:53

       With my eyes closed?

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus47:54

       With your eyes closed. You ready?

    4. SBSteven Bartlett47:56

       Yep.

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus47:56

       Breathe in, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Push, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Good. You now wanna get through about 20 cycles of that. It's incredibly relaxing. I actually did it before I came out here to do the pod because it helps lower my heart rate and gets me centered.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett48:24

       Hmm.

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus48:25

       It's pretty remarkable. Now, there's some problems with the technique. Number one, sometimes it's hard to hold for seven, and sometimes it's really hard to push for eight, so I tell people, "You can do this four, five, six-"... four, six, seven, or four, seven, eight. So just work your way up to it, right? If, if it's too hard to hold your breath for seven seconds, or it's too h- too hard to push your breath for eight, you can do it a little bit less just while you're getting used to it. And then the other big thing is, it's hard to figure out where the 20 cycles is, 'cause you need to get to 20 cycles of this. So what I have people do is take their hands and make light fists while they're doing this, and when they do one cycle, they put out a finger, another cycle, put out a finger, and before you know it, you got 10, and when you bring it back, you've done 20 cycles.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett49:04

       It's funny, I just did two, and I started yawning. [laughing]

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus49:05

       I know. I just saw that. I'm telling you, dude, this thing works, right? And so I have people do this technique. Here's the best part, is it avoids monkey mind, right? So what is monkey mind? Monkey mind is, I'm thinking about stuff that I have no business thinking about in the middle of the night for absolutely no reason. Like, what's on the grocery list, or what did I say to my spouse? Or, did that podcast go okay, or any of the things that might be floating through your head. You cannot count and worry at the same time.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett49:36

        And why does it work? What's going on in my physiology?

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus49:39

        Uh-huh. You're distracting the brain from the thing that's stressing you out, and it's lowering your heart rate, and then the natural sleep process comes in after it. So all these are, are distraction techniques, to be clear. Now, there's, there's several of them out there. One of the other ones I use for some of my patients is, I tell them, "Hey, count backwards from three hundred by threes." It's mathematically so complicated, you can't think of anything else, and it's so damn boring, [snap] you're out like a light.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett50:05

        On that point of distractions-

    13. MBDr. Michael Breus50:06

        Mm-hmm.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett50:06

        ... a lot of people go to bed listening to podcasts or movies. Jack was just saying that-

    15. MBDr. Michael Breus50:11

        Mm-hmm

    16. SBSteven Bartlett50:11

        ... you know, he, he needs to listen to something to fall asleep.

    17. MBDr. Michael Breus50:12

        Yep.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett50:12

        I'm the same. I listen to, like, serial killer stuff, which is, you know-

    19. MBDr. Michael Breus50:16

        That's interesting. [laughing]

    20. SBSteven Bartlett50:18

        Don't, don't judge me.

    21. MBDr. Michael Breus50:18

        Wait till we get to the dreams part of the podcast. I can't wait to hear what you dream about.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett50:22

        I, I don't know. I think I always try and figure out why it is, and I... My sister's the same-

    23. MBDr. Michael Breus50:26

        Mm

    24. SBSteven Bartlett50:26

        ... my sister, Amanda, and she, she listens to serial killer stuff to fall asleep. I think it's because, this is just hypothesis-

    25. MBDr. Michael Breus50:33

        Mm

    26. SBSteven Bartlett50:33

        ... my mum would always ask me to put on Forensic Files, which is this, like, serial-

    27. MBDr. Michael Breus50:38

        Yeah, yeah, yeah

    28. SBSteven Bartlett50:38

        ... murder documentary thing-

    29. MBDr. Michael Breus50:40

        Yep

    30. SBSteven Bartlett50:40

        ... when we were younger-
19. 52:54 – 57:20

    These Earphones Adapt Music to Your Brainwaves—Here’s What Happens

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus52:54

       [laughing]

    2. SBSteven Bartlett52:54

       Well, a lot of people do. I, I, I wouldn't put the TV on in our bedroom. I mean, we've done it once or twice, whatever-

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus53:00

       Right

    4. SBSteven Bartlett53:00

       ... 'cause we're watching something, and we slip off to sleep, and we-

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus53:01

       Yeah

    6. SBSteven Bartlett53:02

       ... I, and I wake up, and I realize it's on, and I turn it off.

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus53:05

       Mm.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett53:05

       But I, I also really think it's an important point to say that people will listen to podcasts like this, they'll listen to the, like, biohackers of the world-

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus53:12

       Yes

    10. SBSteven Bartlett53:12

        ... and then they'll get so militant about how they fall asleep, that it will cause friction because one partner's different.

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus53:17

        Don't do that.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett53:18

        And I had this problem in my relationship-

    13. MBDr. Michael Breus53:19

        [laughing]

    14. SBSteven Bartlett53:19

        ... which was, my girlfriend sleeps in silence, and it has, like, just a such a glorious routine to everything she does.

    15. MBDr. Michael Breus53:25

        Right.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett53:26

        And I am-

    17. MBDr. Michael Breus53:26

        Completely the opposite? [laughing]

    18. SBSteven Bartlett53:27

        ... I'm op- the opposite. Like, I need to like, I want to listen to a murder-

    19. MBDr. Michael Breus53:30

        Opposites attract. [laughing]

    20. SBSteven Bartlett53:30

        I could be on my phone. It's like, when I look at my WHOOP scores, works for me.

    21. MBDr. Michael Breus53:35

        Yeah!

    22. SBSteven Bartlett53:35

        It's like I am getting... I have, I get great sleep, even if I'm listening to a serial killer documentary.

    23. MBDr. Michael Breus53:41

        Yeah.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett53:41

        So-

    25. MBDr. Michael Breus53:41

        But not if you eat a cookie before bed. [laughing]

    26. SBSteven Bartlett53:42

        Not if I eat a cookie. That's, that's gone. But so what I do is, I put one AirPod in-

    27. MBDr. Michael Breus53:46

        Uh-huh

    28. SBSteven Bartlett53:46

        ... in my right ear.

    29. MBDr. Michael Breus53:48

        Mm-hmm.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett53:48

        So which, whichever ear is not gonna be on the pillow, and it means I can listen to her if she says something-
20. 57:20 – 1:00:41

    Why 2026 Could Be the Year of a Global Sleep Crisis

    1. SBSteven Bartlett57:20

       I love having these conversations on The Diary of a CEO, because I have a huge amount of sympathy and concern for people that don't get sufficient sleep, and I know there's a lot of people that don't. And I actually think it's, uh, to some degree, it's somewhat increasing because of the way we live our lives. I was looking at some of the stats around the increase-

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus57:38

       Yes

    3. SBSteven Bartlett57:38

       ... and there's a study done in two thousand and twenty-five and early two thousand and twenty-six that revealed we're in a global sleep crisis.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus57:45

       Oh, yes, we are. [laughing]

    5. SBSteven Bartlett57:47

       Both the CDC and Stanford Medicine report said that one in three adults and nearly eighty percent of teenagers are now chronically sleep-deprived.

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus57:55

       Correct.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett57:55

       A twenty twenty-six survey by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found that ninety-three percent of Gen Z admit to regularly losing sleep due to social media usage.

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus58:04

       Mm-hmm.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett58:04

       And seventy-one percent of employed respondents globally have said that they sometimes call in sick at least once or twice-

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus58:11

        Just to sleep

    11. SBSteven Bartlett58:12

        ... due to poor sleep.

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus58:13

        Just to sleep, yeah. When I was down in Australia doing some work down there, a lot of Australians, they take holiday, and they just sleep-

    13. SBSteven Bartlett58:21

        Yeah

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus58:21

        ... just to catch up. Like, it's, it's pretty remarkable. We're in a very sleep-deprived society, and I think there's a couple of different reasons why that is. Number one, have you seen what's going on outside in the world today? It's pretty crazy out there.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett58:33

        Well-

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus58:34

        I can understand why people are getting a little anxious.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett58:36

        I think one can argue it's been c- crazier through history, but we never-

    18. MBDr. Michael Breus58:39

        For sure

    19. SBSteven Bartlett58:39

        ... knew about it.

    20. MBDr. Michael Breus58:40

        Right. Well, I mean, the media getting it to-- getting us this information so quickly, I think, is definitely what it... I would agree with you. It was much crazier during, like, World War II, you know-

    21. SBSteven Bartlett58:48

        Yeah

    22. MBDr. Michael Breus58:48

        ... and stuff like that. But now we're getting information so quickly, and people are getting so ratcheted up about it. I think that has something to do with it. But if I-- I think the bigger culprit is people being overweight. You know, when you look here in the United States, and you look at the obesity epidemic, and you look at people being overweight, it's something close to, like, seventy-something percent of people in America are overweight. When you're overweight, that puts you in line for potentially having something called sleep apnea. Now, I want to be clear: not everybody with sleep apnea is overweight, but a large percentage of the people with sleep apnea are bigger people. And so when you look at a society that's getting bigger and all of the unhealthy food that we've got going on, like all this highly processed food, things of that nature, that isn't helping anybody, it's adding the pounds. And specifically, like, for men, we gain weight through our necks. Like, I, I don't know if you've ever noticed it, but, like, if you ever were heavy and you lose weight, the first thing somebody says is, "Oh, it looks like you lost weight, 'cause I can tell from your face," right? And they're like: "Oh, your neck looks, you know, different now." And so we see a lot of what's going on in the world from a weight perspective and a food perspective could be driving some of the sleep problems. Then there's the anxiety perspective that I spoke of earlier that I think comes in. And again, I, I agree with you, I don't think we have more crazy stuff going on. I think we know about more crazy stuff that's going on.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:00

        But also, work is now largely digital, and I imagine for my great-grandfather, he would go to, I don't know, the factory or wherever he worked.

    24. MBDr. Michael Breus1:00:07

        Yeah.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:08

        His work would finish at six.

    26. MBDr. Michael Breus1:00:09

        Yes.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:10

        Your work doesn't finish at six now-

    28. MBDr. Michael Breus1:00:12

        Ever

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:12

        ... it finishes when you're awake.

    30. MBDr. Michael Breus1:00:13

        Yeah, absolutely. It finishes when you go to sleep.
21. 1:00:41 – 1:02:31

    Ads

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:41

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22. 1:02:31 – 1:04:46

    1 in 7 People Have Sleep Apnea—But 90% Don’t Know It

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:31

       Which sleep disorder should we start with?

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:02:33

       Sleep apnea-

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:33

       Mm-hmm.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus1:02:34

       -and insomnia. Sleep apnea, for folks out there who may not know what it is, is when you are snoring at night. Almost everybody who has sleep apnea snores. Not everybody, but almost everybody. And when you're sucking air in, you pull your tongue to the back of your throat, [snaps finger] and you cut off your air, and you literally stop breathing, right, for a few seconds, and then all of a sudden, you [mimicking choking] and you make all this kind of grunt and groaning noises, and then you wake up. This can happen hundreds of times a night, and it can be very problematic because, of course, it wakes you up every single time that you have one of these events, right? And so, as an example, w- we measure the events per hour. So as an example, somebody with sleep apnea could have between five and fifteen times per hour that they stop breathing, and that's mild.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:19

       So how are they gonna get into the deep sleep that clears out the-

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus1:03:21

       They can't

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:22

       ... brain?

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus1:03:23

       That's the problem.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:24

       Oh, okay.

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus1:03:24

        Right? And so apnea prevents them from getting into a lot of that deep sleep, and so their brain doesn't clear out, and then they got-- they're, they're kind of screwed. So at the end of the day, the, the goal here is to get as many people to, number one, identify if they have a sleep disorder and then be able to try to figure out what to do about it. And the percentage of people in the US that have undiagnosed sleep apnea is pretty big. It's, like, somewhere between, I think, like, eighteen to twenty percent.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:48

        This is crazy. I was just looking at the stats. It says, "According to 2026 data, approximately nine hundred and thirty-six million people to one billion adults worldwide-

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus1:03:58

        Mm-hmm

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:58

        ... have obstructive sleep apnea," which is what? One in seven?

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus1:04:01

        Yeah, that's about right. Yeah.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:02

        Making it as common as diabetes. One in seven-

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus1:04:05

        Correct

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:05

        ... people listening have sleep apnea?

    18. MBDr. Michael Breus1:04:06

        Yes.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:07

        Wow!

    20. MBDr. Michael Breus1:04:07

        As popular as diabetes. Let that sink in for, like, half a second. Everybody knows what diabetes is. Almost nobody knows what sleep disorders are, specifically sleep apnea.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:16

        And it says eighty to ninety percent of those people remain undiagnosed.

    22. MBDr. Michael Breus1:04:21

        Undiagnosed. That is correct.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:22

        Wow! So there's people listening right... There's actually a huge percentage of people listening right now-

    24. MBDr. Michael Breus1:04:25

        Yeah

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:25

        ... that have sleep apnea and have no idea that they have it.

    26. MBDr. Michael Breus1:04:28

        Exactly right.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:29

        How would they know?

    28. MBDr. Michael Breus1:04:30

        Do the sleep test.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:31

        This thing here?

    30. MBDr. Michael Breus1:04:32

        Yeah.
23. 1:04:46 – 1:06:19

    6 Warning Signs of Sleep Apnea You Shouldn’t Ignore

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:46

       And what would this... So, you know, 'cause people are gonna be saying, "Well, like, how do I know if I need to do the test?"

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:04:50

       So great question. So you wanna think about the symptoms that you might have.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:54

       Yeah.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus1:04:54

       So do you snore? Do you wake up gasping for air? Has anybody told you that your snoring stops for brief periods of time, or that you- they've heard you gasping for air? Do you wake up with a headache in the morning? Do you find your moods are up and down? All of those are signs and symptoms of sleep apnea.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:11

       And this test, are you affiliated with this company at all?

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus1:05:13

       I am not, but, um, we do have that test on my website. We sell it to people, so that way, we can test them.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:18

       And how much does it cost?

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus1:05:20

       A hundred and eighty-nine dollars.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:21

       Okay, so it's not-

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus1:05:22

        It's not exorbitantly expensive.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:24

        It's not extortionate.

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus1:05:25

        And it also is covered by insurance.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:27

        And it connects to an app?

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus1:05:28

        Uh-huh, absolutely.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:29

        So-

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus1:05:30

        So you'd put it through your sleeve.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:31

        So I'd, I'd put that there, and then-

    18. MBDr. Michael Breus1:05:32

        Exactly

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:33

        ... like this.

    20. MBDr. Michael Breus1:05:33

        Yeah, exactly. And that's it. You go to bed, wake up, then the information ports over to your phone and then tells us exactly what's going on. Now, here's where it gets even better. I know, right?

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:44

        Can you imagine me getting in bed with my fiancée and being like, "Come on, babe, let's..."

    22. MBDr. Michael Breus1:05:48

        We're recording all kinds of good stuff. Who knows what she might like?

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:50

        Is this gonna help my sex life?

    24. MBDr. Michael Breus1:05:52

        It's... Absolutely, it will. Because getting into bed and knowing how well you sleep and knowing if you have sleep apnea or not will definitely affect your sex life. Also, by the way, I've saved more marriages as a sleep doctor than I ever would've as a marital therapist, dealing with snoring in the middle of the night and things like that. So you'd be, you'd be surprised. But what's nice about this is it's one night. You don't have to do it multiple nights. It's super easy. Um, and again, believe it or not, that's disposable. You can actually throw that whole thing away a- after it's all said and done.

24. 1:06:19 – 1:07:43

    Should Couples Sleep Separately? The Surprising Answer

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:19

       And on that point, before we just go a little bit further into sleep apnea, should, should we be sleeping in bed with our partners? And I know that's an interesting thing to say.

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:06:24

       Great question, great question. The strength of your relationship has nothing to do with where you sleep, okay? So lots of people are like: "I gotta sleep with my partner, otherwise my relationship's gonna go to shit, and everything's gonna go terrible, and we're never gonna have sex, and we're..." Bl- Not true, okay? So a lot of times, for people that I have... So, for example, I've got people who, um, have sleep apnea, and they use a m- a machine to help them sleep called a CPAP machine, right? And, um, that noise, for some people, can be disruptive, and so they sleep, let's say, in a different room, right? So is that, is that detrimental to your marriage? No, it's not. Because here's what you do, is you vacation on the weekends in your bedroom.... right? I can't count the number of people who sleep separately during the week and then t- together on the weekends, and it turns out that they get much better sleep during the week. And then guess what? Intimacy shows up much faster on the weekends because they're not so tired. Used to be, you know, "Not tonight, I have a headache." It was really, "Not tonight, I'm exhausted." When you allow your partner to get good sleep during the week, there's a reasonably good shot that you're gonna be able to be intimate over the weekend if they got good sleep. So wearing that to bed might not be the sexiest thing in the universe, but it's better than having sleep apnea and eventually ending up dead.

25. 1:07:43 – 1:11:23

    Why Sleep Apnea Looks Different in Men vs. Women

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:43

       Are the symptoms of sleep apnea different for men and women?

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:07:46

       They are. Great question. So it turns out that men and women are quite different, uh, but we've historically been scoring them the same. So women don't have a tendency to have as much snoring as men do. Um, women have a tendency to have more arousals, where they wake up constantly. Women have a tendency to report headaches in the morning, more so than men do. So it's actually different types of symptoms for women versus men when it comes to sleep apnea, to the point where we're now considering using different testing devices. So this testing device, um, would not necessarily measure EEG, and in women, EEG might be important. That's what we're learning. So as an example, our company is finding a device specifically to send to women, so that way we can more accurately measure sleep apnea in women. Now, there's a lot of questions about treatment for sleep apnea, and the biggest reason why nobody gets sleep tested is because they're afraid that they're gonna end up sleeping with a CPAP machine on their face at night. And so let me describe to your audience what that is. Also, full disclosure, I have sleep apnea. I don't look like somebody who has sleep apnea. I stop breathing in my sleep, I think it's twenty-six times an hour. I know, right? Kinda crazy, and I wear a CPAP machine, and it helps me sleep every single night. Let me explain what it is. So when your throat closes here, CPAP machine is a little air compressor with a tube and a mask that sits on your nose, pushes a just thin stream of just air, and when it hits that blockage, it ever so slightly opens it up, shoots air straight down to your lungs. Now, you might be saying to yourself, "That sounds barbaric. That is insane. That's a hairdryer blowing up my nose all night long." Here's what I can tell you, is when you have a severe case of sleep apnea, this can be a lifesaver. This can be one of the biggest, most important things that you possibly do. Now, a lot of people say, "Oh, I don't think I could sleep with a mask on my face." Well, that's not the only treatment.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:37

       Mm-hmm.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus1:09:38

       There are other treatments called oral appliances. This is like a, a mouth guard, like you see the footballers wear, but it's an upper and a lower, and the lower slowly brings your jaw forward, which opens up your posterior airway space. The same way that air pushes things aside, the oral appliance structurally moves your jaw slightly forward, thereby opening up your airway. So that works well, and then there's no mask on your face. There's a third device that you can wear on your tongue that vibrates, that shrinks your tongue by a couple of millimeters, which opens up this posterior airway space and allows you to breathe better.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:10

       Have you tried all of them?

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus1:10:11

       I have, as a matter of fact.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:12

       And why did you choose the apnea machine?

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus1:10:14

       So for me, the apnea machine worked the best and made the most sense for me right now. But I'll be honest with you, I will probably get the, uh, mouth guard for when I travel. There's a lot that can be done out there, and by the way, there's also surgeries, and surgeries are a little bit more permanent fix. Um, but in many cases, those surgeries can be quite effective. Also, by the way, they're working on a pill-

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:35

       Mm

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus1:10:36

        ... for sleep apnea now, and that's just apnea. We haven't even talked about insomnia yet.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:39

        I was just reading about the FDA approving a drug.

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus1:10:42

        Yeah, it's, it's quite remarkable, and there's actually two... I think there's actually three different companies that are working on different drugs right now for sleep apnea. And, I mean, to be clear, when that happens, I think it's pretty much game over for sleep apnea, right? I mean, once we can get it in a pill form, which means compliance increases dramatically, we can help a lot of people with sleep apnea, which I think would be pretty amazing.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:03

        And women are heavily undiagnosed, right? Because we-

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus1:11:05

        Heavily

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:06

        ... we think of it as, uh, I mean, I've heard it ref- being referred to as a sort of an old man's disease.

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus1:11:10

        Yeah, an o- absolutely, and here's the thing. Many women have a tendency to report insomnia types of symptoms over sleep apnea types of symptoms, when in fact, they actually have under- undiagnosed sleep apnea, which we

26. 1:11:23 – 1:13:57

    The Terrifying Health Risks of Not Sleeping Well

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus1:11:23

       can catch.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:23

       We talked a little bit earlier, but, um, from many of the conversations I've had on the show about Alzheimer's-

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus1:11:28

       Yes

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:28

       ... y- your chance of, um, getting Alzheimer's, I imagine, is gonna increase, right? Because-

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus1:11:33

       Absolutely

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:33

       ... you have sleep apnea.

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus1:11:34

       Yeah, well, becau- when you have sleep apnea, it keeps you out of the deeper stages of sleep. The deeper stages of sleep is where that glymphatic system comes in and scoops out those proteins, and that's really probably one of those big causes for it. So that's one of the things that we always want people to understand. But there's also something else that I think is important to maybe talk about, which is on the other side, not sleep apnea side, but on the insomnia side, which is there's a lot of people who go, and they go to the drugstore, and they buy an over-the-counter sleep aid, right? Now, I'm not talking about supplementation yet. We can get into supplements in a minute if you want to, but I'm talking about things like the PM medications, right? You know, they... So h- here in America, we have them where there's like, there's like an analgesic plus a PM.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:12:13

       What's that?

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus1:12:13

       So there's Tylenol PM, Advil PM, and what it is, is it's, it's a pain reliever, but they add something called diphenhydramine, and it makes you feel sleepy, and it makes you fall asleep. Diphenhydramine is actually an antihistamine, right? So it's used for congestion and things like that, but there's now data to suggest that daily use of the PM part of this, not the pain-relieving part, but the PM part, can lead almost directly to Alzheimer's.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:12:39

        Oh, wow.

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus1:12:40

        Right. So if people can just go to bed and follow a couple simple rules and go to bed naturally, you'd be shocked at how much better your world is gonna be.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:12:49

        The Queensland Brain Institute-

    13. MBDr. Michael Breus1:12:51

        Mm

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:12:52

        ... um, at the University of Queensland found that people with untreated apnea have a forty-five percent higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.

    15. MBDr. Michael Breus1:13:00

        Like I said. [chuckles]

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:01

        Which is crazy.

    17. MBDr. Michael Breus1:13:03

        So-

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:03

        It's really important.

    19. MBDr. Michael Breus1:13:03

        Here's the thing, is we've got all these people who are watching your show right now. They need to start thinking in their head, like-... maybe I have sleep apnea, maybe I don't, but maybe I should take a look at what are some of the symptoms and see if that's something that could be going on for me. Because, again, testing is available. And to be clear, it's not like I'm the only guy out there testing people. I mean, there are sleep doctors all over the world that are testing people. My encouragement to people is, "Hey, figure it out. If, if you can't figure it out, you know, shoot us an email, we'll find a sleep center for you to go to." But i- if you think there's something going on, it's definitely worth checking out. Because, by the way, you can stay with undiagnosed sleep apnea for your entire life, and all it does is basically break down everything that's going on inside. And that's not what you want. Like, remember, sleep is recovery, right? This is how your body still functions. Like, if you wanna lead a nice, prosperous life, you wanna sleep.

27. 1:13:57 – 1:18:59

    The Biggest Myths About Insomnia—Debunked

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:57

       Insomnia has become a bit of a word that people throw around.

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:14:00

       For sure.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:00

       Right? They, they kind of self-diagnose themselves. We kind of think of it as this one specific thing. I think people say, "I have insomnia," when they just don't sleep well.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus1:14:07

       Right. [laughs]

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:07

       What is insomnia, and, and what, what's the big myth around it?

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus1:14:10

       Yeah, so number one, there's a couple of different flavors of insomnia. There's the, "I can't fall asleep," there's the, "I can't stay asleep," which we talked about quite a bit, there's the, "I wake up too early," and then there's just the, "I wake up from unrefreshing sleep." So we really think that there are four sort of types of insomnia, right? And, um, when people... I would say some of the biggest myths that a lot of people have surrounding insomnia is- or, like, the biggest problem that they do, is when somebody has a really crappy night, then what they try to do is the next evening go to bed early and try to catch up on some of that sleep that they missed. So to be clear, this is a terrible idea, because your circadian rhythm isn't ready to go to bed early. So you lie in bed, and you're exhausted, but you can't fall asleep. You're what I call wired and tired, right? And so what we want people to do is, if you do have a bout of insomnia where you have difficulty falling asleep or difficulty staying asleep, number one, don't over-caffeinate during the daytime. So many people are like, "Oh, I'm dragging, I gotta get a coffee," you know? And, and they, and they caffeinate, caffeinate, caffeinate, and then they caffeinate so late into the day that they have shitty sleep that night, and now we're in the washing machine cycle, going over and over and over. It sounds like you might be relating to this, uh-

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:22

       Mm-hmm

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus1:15:23

       ... a little bit maybe yourself. And then, so we wanna avoid that. The other thing we want to avoid is overstimulation at night, right? So a lot of times people get that nervous energy, and so they're just doing, doing, doing. Again, you need runway to land the plane, so give yourself s- kind of that space. Um, and then just make sure that you've got some level of regularity. I would argue for my insomnia patients, but quite honestly, for anybody who's watching this, the number one sleep tip that I can give people is to wake up at the same time seven days a week. Not go to bed. I don't actually care when you go to bed that much. I know there's a lot of sleep specialists out there who are like, "You gotta go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time." I'm not of that ilk. I don't really care that much about the going to bed time. I really only care about the wake-up time. Let me explain why. When you wake up in the morning, sunlight hits your eye, and you have a special cell in your eye called the melanopsin cell, which sends a signal to your brain to turn off the melatonin faucet in your head. But it sets a timer for exactly 14 hours later. It's called the melatonin phase response curve. So if you're waking up at 6:00, melatonin turns off until about 8:00 PM, then it takes about a couple hours for it to get up and in, so then you start to get sleepy around 9:30, and you go to bed. But if you did that, and now it's Saturday, and you sleep in until 8:00, melatonin doesn't kick off until 10:00 Saturday night. So what I'm saying is, the time that you wake up directly determines when your internal melatonin kicks into gear. So if everybody woke up at the exact same time every single day, seven days a week, automatically you would get tired at the right time, and you would start going to sleep.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:16:58

       And is there two different types of insomnia? Sometimes I hear primary, secondary insomnia-

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus1:17:03

        Oh, yeah

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:03

        ... I think you have that on your YouTube channel.

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus1:17:04

        So when you look at primary insomnia versus secondary insomnia, the way we categorize that, secondary insomnia is usually due to something else that's going on in your life. So-

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:13

        Psychology.

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus1:17:14

        So maybe caffeine abuse.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:15

        Oh, okay.

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus1:17:16

        Right? Um, maybe something along those lines. Whereas primary insomnia is, there's nothing else, you- the only thing you've got going on is sleep disorder. Another example of s- of something where insomnia might be secondary would be pain.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:28

        Okay.

    18. MBDr. Michael Breus1:17:28

        Right, so if you have a pain syndrome, if you have fibromyalgia or low back pain, that could prevent you from sleeping, that would be secondary insomnia, secondary to pain.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:36

        And I hear that the most common treatment for insomnia is CBT therapy?

    20. MBDr. Michael Breus1:17:40

        So yes and no.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:42

        Okay.

    22. MBDr. Michael Breus1:17:42

        So I would say that the most common therapy for insomnia is alcohol.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:47

        Oh.

    24. MBDr. Michael Breus1:17:47

        More people drink themselves to sleep [laughs]

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:50

        Right

    26. MBDr. Michael Breus1:17:50

        ... than any other single thing out there. Um, and then you start to get into the pharmacy of it all, and there's a lot of pharmaceutical drugs out there that people utilize for, for sleep. And I wanna make a point, if I can, is there's nothing wrong with needing a pill to sleep, okay? I wanna be very clear about this. There are people out there who need pills, right? All kinds of different ones. Thank you. There's a whole host of reasons why you and your doctor may have come to the conclusion that a sleeping tablet is good for you. The problem comes when those sleeping tablets are overprescribed. So insomnia is, in the, in the sleep world, we call it a door handle diagnosis, because when the doctor has their hand on the door, and they're just about to leave, that's when the patient says, "Oh, and by the way, I'm not sleeping."

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:35

        Mm-hmm.

    28. MBDr. Michael Breus1:18:36

        And then the doctor usually pulls out the prescription pad and says, you know, "Ambien or Trazodone," or something like that, writes it up, says, "Here, come back in 30 days." Well, you haven't really done anything for this person. You've handed them a pill, and by the way, now they're probably either psychologically or physiologically addicted to said pill, right? Now, once again, if you've got a major mental health issue, I don't think I care. I think it's okay for you to have your Ambien and be

28. 1:18:59 – 1:20:54

    The Powerful Link Between Poor Sleep and Depression

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus1:18:59

       fine.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:59

       And, and a lot of people that do have insomnia have depression.

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus1:19:02

       Oh, I think it's one of the biggest things that we see. But I would argue anxiety might be a little bit more than depression, but yes, anxiety and depression, I would argue, make up 75%.... of insomnia at any given time, right? I work with people, and I do something called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which you correctly identified as CBT-I, right? And so I work with patients all the time, um, and that's exactly what we do, is we reschedule them, so that's the behavioral part, and then the cognitive part is we talk to them about: How do you think about sleep? 'Cause a lot of people think about sleep in disastrous ways. They're like, "If I don't get eight hours, my whole day is screwed, and everything's gonna happen..." It rarely happens that way. Like, it's called catastrophizing. You just make it worse and worse and worse. And so we look at those cognitive distortions, and we help fix them in therapy by really kind of, what I call doing the math. And so I say, "Well, have you ever had four hours of sleep?" "Yes." "Did you do something terrible the next day?" "No." "So where's your evidence?", right? And you start to get people to challenge themselves, and all of a sudden they kinda-- they can kinda get there. There's also another area of, uh... that a lot of people go to, somewhere in between the pills and therapy, and that's supplementation. So there's a lot of people out there who like to use supplements and try to understand how to fix, quote, "their insomnia" with supplementation. So if we can, let's talk a little bit about supplements and sort of what's good and what's bad.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:21

       What is the difference between a supplement and a pill? Or is it, are you talking about the same thing here?

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus1:20:26

       So under the context of this conversation, a supplement is a non-FDA-regulated thing that you can purchase at any drugstore.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:35

       Right.

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus1:20:35

       And a pill is a by prescription only from a doctor.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:40

       Okay, so-

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus1:20:41

       That's how we're gonna make the distinction for this particular conversation.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:43

        Okay, so those pills that are in front of you there-

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus1:20:46

        So right in front of me, these are most... These are actually all supplements. So these are different th- so these are not pharmaceuticals. These are different things. So we've

29. 1:20:54 – 1:26:11

    The Truth Behind Melatonin: What They’re Not Telling You

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus1:20:54

       got-

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:54

       I mean, in different countries, it's different, right?

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus1:20:56

       Great point. So let's talk about melatonin, since that's kind of the biggie that a lot of people like to know about. So number one, melatonin is by prescription only almost everywhere other than the United States.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:06

       Yeah.

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus1:21:06

       Right? So in England, in Australia, in Europe, you can't just walk into the drugstore and buy melatonin, and there's a reason. A lot of people don't realize it, but melatonin is a hormone. There's a reason you can't go to the CVS and get testosterone and estrogen, right? Because hormones affect the entire system. They affect all three-- almost 300 different things in your body. So what you don't want to do is have somebody just willy-nilly grabbing a hormone and starting to pop it without somebody understanding what's going on with them. More importantly, melatonin in particular, and the point I wanted to make earlier about depression, melatonin interacts with all SSRI medication. An SSRI is a serotonin specific reuptake inhibitor, an antidepressant. So things like Prozac, Zoloft, um, Celexa, all of those are medications that will be affected by melatonin ingestion, and nobody knows that it is. In addition, melatonin affects birth control. Yes, you heard it here, birth control. It affects blood pressure medication, and it affects diabetes medication. So one of the problems is that people go into the local drugstore, and they're like, "Oh, I'm gonna grab some melatonin, and I'm gonna make my sleep better 'cause I'm sleeping poorly." So first of all, that's not what melatonin does. Melatonin is a sleep regulator, not a sleep initiator. Melatonin doesn't affect sleep drive. Melatonin affects sleep rhythm. So remember in the beginning of our conversation, we were talking about the two systems. Melatonin only affects your brain, telling it when it's time to go to bed. It does not make you sleepy. That's adenosine. We already talked about adenosine and caffeine and how similar their molecular structures are. So when you look at something like melatonin, you need to really be thoughtful about using it. Number two, melatonin is not to be used in children, okay? So a lot of people are like, "Michael, I've got pediatricians all over the country telling my-- telling me to give my children melatonin." I'm gonna say it right here in front of everybody: That is the dumbest idea I have heard in a long time, because you just taught your child that they need a pill to sleep. Normally, no child needs pills to sleep, and by the way, most children make almost four times the amount of melatonin that their brain even needs. So giving them extra melatonin doesn't do you any good. There is, however, one group of children where melatonin does work well, and that's in kids on the autism spectrum. Um, we don't know exactly why, but, um-- or at least I don't, but there is data to suggest that at five, six, seven milligrams, that that can be very helpful for them. Dosage also is a problem. Like, if you go to the drugstore, you can-- you almost can't find it in the appropriate dose. The appropriate dose is anywhere from about half a milligram to one and a half milligrams, maybe top out at three, but that's about as high as you wanna go. But when you go to CVS, you find the gummies in ten and 20 milligrams, and people tell me all the time, "Oh, I can't take melatonin. It gives me crazy dreams." Number one side effect of overdosing on melatonin is crazy dreams.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:05

       On this point of going to a supermarket and picking some melatonin off the shelf-

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus1:24:10

       Mm.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:11

       ... FDA approval and the lack of FDA approval in melatonin means that there's less clarity on what's actually in there, right?

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus1:24:19

       That's exactly right. It-

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:20

        I was reading about a study in 2024, um, where they looked at different melatonins that were found on the shelf.

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus1:24:26

        And they found very different things inside the bottle.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:29

        Very, very different things. [laughing] They looked at an analysis of melatonin gummies marketed for children and found that the actual amount of melatonin ranged from zero percent-

    13. MBDr. Michael Breus1:24:38

        Right

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:38

        ... to six hundred and sixty-seven percent of what was listed on the label.

    15. MBDr. Michael Breus1:24:42

        Yep, see it all the time.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:44

        And in the same study, melatonin gummies, some melatonin gummies contained absolutely no melatonin-

    17. MBDr. Michael Breus1:24:49

        Yep

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:49

        ... while others contained hazardous contaminants, like CBD, that were not disclosed on the label.

    19. MBDr. Michael Breus1:24:54

        Yep.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:55

        Because melatonin is sold as a supplement in the US and not a drug, the FDA does not test it for safety or accuracy before it hits the shelf.

    21. MBDr. Michael Breus1:25:01

        You are 100% correct-

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:03

        Hundred percent

    23. MBDr. Michael Breus1:25:03

        ... and that's a huge problem. Just think about that for a second. I mean, the market for melatonin is tremendous. It's huge in the supplement world, yet there's no regulation whatsoever. Nobody knows about these interaction effects, which are big, big, big, and by the way, most people are using it wrong. There's really only-... three, maybe four different instances when melatonin would be useful. I would use melatonin for jet lag, and we should talk about jet lag.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:28

        Mm-hmm.

    25. MBDr. Michael Breus1:25:29

        Um, I, I would use, uh, melatonin for shift workers, right? So for people who work, you know, night shift, who have to sleep during the daytime, they would be excellent people to use melatonin. People with a melatonin deficiency, a lot of people don't think about that, but right around age 50 is when if you're gonna have a melatonin deficiency, we start to see that happening for people, is that their ability to produce melatonin begins to decline. So I think those three situations absolutely would be on board for melatonin. Believe it or not, there's some data to show that in ADD and ADHD, there's, uh, some use for melatonin, and then also for a very specific sleeping disorder called REM behavior disorder.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:26:05

        We're going melatonin crazy as a society, aren't we?

    27. MBDr. Michael Breus1:26:07

        Absolutely. We don't need it. It's completely unnecessary.

30. 1:26:11 – 1:27:50

    Why Kids Are Overdosing on Melatonin—And How to Prevent It

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:26:11

       I was looking at the data. In 1999, 0.4% of Americans said they used melatonin. Today, it's almost 30%, so-

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:26:19

       That's-

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:26:20

       ... seventy million Americans

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus1:26:21

       - messed up.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:26:21

       That's crazy.

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus1:26:22

       Dude, that is problematic. And again, they have no idea what it's doing to them, right? And they're giving it to their kids. Like, I can't think of anything worse for a young female developing body than to add a contraceptive when it's not necessary. Like, it just doesn't make sense to me.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:26:36

       The rise in children overdosing on sleep gummies is the fastest-growing trend in poison control data.

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus1:26:42

       Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, like, almost 600% increase or something crazy like that, uh, for kids who have, uh, gotten- uh, who've overdosed on melatonin, like, within the... I- There was a study that came out, uh, maybe a year ago, a year and a half ago, showed, like, almost 600% of, uh, increase in, uh, overdose issues for kids. Like, that's pretty messed up when you start to think about it. And here's the thing: Kids know how to sleep.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:04

       Mm-hmm.

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus1:27:04

        Right? You just gotta stop- you just gotta let 'em sleep, right? You gotta give 'em some parameters. You go, "Here's when you go to bed. Here's when you wake up. Don't get out of bed. You know, don't come in and ask for 12 glasses of water." You know, all the, all the stuff that goes on there.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:16

        Mm-hmm.

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus1:27:16

        I mean, it- this isn't hard.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:18

        So when and how... So I used melatonin once in my life.

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus1:27:21

        Okay.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:22

        And I've gotta be honest, it fucking worked.

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus1:27:24

        Yeah. Oh!

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:24

        Um [chuckles]

    18. MBDr. Michael Breus1:27:25

        If you use it right-

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:26

        Yeah [chuckles]

    20. MBDr. Michael Breus1:27:26

        ... it works, bro.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:27

        And it was, it was actually about a week ago, because I'd been struggling with lots of jet lag. I'd flown from the UK to the, um, LA to UK to LA to Cape Town to s- Middle East to wherever, and I was getting to bed every night at, like, 4:00, 5:00 AM-

    22. MBDr. Michael Breus1:27:40

        Yeah

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:40

        ... and then still waking up at, you know, having to wake up at about 10:00. So I thought, "I need to correct this."

    24. MBDr. Michael Breus1:27:45

        Yes, you do. [chuckles]

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:45

        "It's been going for two weeks, and I need to correct this."

    26. MBDr. Michael Breus1:27:47

        Absolutely. [chuckles]

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:48

        So I thought, "Fuck it. I'm gonna cave." I ga- I took the melatonin

31. 1:27:50 – 1:31:50

    The Smart Way to Beat Jet Lag Fast

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:51

       and [snaps finger] corrected it.

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:27:53

       Yes, it does. So let's talk about jet lag. So it's a bit of a story, but I got involved with a company that, um, has got an app, which is very interesting, okay? Um, I don't have any, uh... Like, I'm not invested in the company, just to be clear, but it's one of my close friends who developed this. So I'm kind of a space nerd.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:11

       It's not Timeshifter?

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus1:28:12

       It is Timeshifter.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:13

       Oh, really? [chuckles]

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus1:28:13

       [laughs] It is Timeshifter.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:15

       I would like an affiliation with Timeshifter-

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus1:28:17

       [chuckles]

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:18

       - 'cause I-

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus1:28:18

        No problem

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:18

        ... I use them. Yeah. [chuckles]

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus1:28:19

        Yeah, I will get you that. So here's what's fascinating, is the way the whole Timeshifter started was, um... So aren't you kind of a space guy? Like, aren't you into space?

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:27

        I love... I'm, I'm an investor in SpaceX and-

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus1:28:29

        Okay

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:29

        ... other space yeah.

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus1:28:29

        So I'm a space nerd myself, right? So you know, the s- the ISS is moving around at 17,500 miles an hour around the Earth. It's cooking.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:37

        ISS meaning the International Space Station.

    18. MBDr. Michael Breus1:28:38

        Space Station.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:39

        Yeah.

    20. MBDr. Michael Breus1:28:39

        It's whipping around, right? Can you imagine how many sunrises and sunsets they get in a given day?

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:45

        Oh, how many?

    22. MBDr. Michael Breus1:28:46

        Every two hours, so they basically get 12.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:49

        Wow!

    24. MBDr. Michael Breus1:28:50

        Think about how messed up their circadian rhythms would be from seeing the sunrise and seeing it go and seeing... It gets really messed up, right? And by the way, you don't wanna make big mistakes in the space station. Like, you don't leave the airlock open, you know, or shit like that. Like, that's when things get really, really bad. So they called down to NASA, and they were like: "Hey, we got a problem up here. Everybody wants to use the lab at the same time. Like, people have seen the sun. Like, what's going on?" So they called a buddy of mine named Steven Lockley over at Harvard. Steven is arguably the b- one of the best circadian researchers in the world. Um, super smart dude. And he was like: "Well, let's send up a lighting kit, and let's create shifts on the space station."

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:25

        Mm-hmm.

    26. MBDr. Michael Breus1:29:25

        Right? So that's exactly what they did. So they sent up a lighting kit, I think it was on the Columbia, um, shuttle before it got decommissioned, and they set up lighting, and then they set up timing for lighting, and so there was a morning shift, a mid shift, and a night shift for the astronauts. Once they got the algorithm working, they brought it down terrestrially, and they put it into the Mercedes-Benz, uh, Formula 1 race car team. So they gave it to Lewis Hamilton.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:46

        Mm-hmm.

    28. MBDr. Michael Breus1:29:47

        Right? Because when you think about it, think about what he has to do, right? He's on or off the podium on hundredths of a second, right? And he's in a different country every three weeks.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:55

        Mm-hmm.

    30. MBDr. Michael Breus1:29:55

        Right? So this guy's got jet lag like you wouldn't believe, and so once we were able to get it going there, then we created the Timeshifter app, and so it's an app. You can get it on your phone, and what you do is you put in your flight number, and it automatically pulls up the flight and knows where you are. This is why I think that jet lag is a math problem. Let me explain. We learned about 20 years ago that when you take a certain frequency and intensity of light, and you shine it in somebody's eyes, you can move their circadian rhythm by about eight hours if you want to.
32. 1:31:50 – 1:34:27

    Is It Safe to Take Melatonin Every Night?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:50

       And what's the risk there of having it every day? Is it-

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:31:52

       Uh, it's a good question. So when you start to look at melatonin overdose, and you start to look at melatonin on board for long periods of time, there's been some conflict in the, in the research. Um, there's a group of people that say, "If you stay on melatonin for extended periods of time, your body stops producing it." There's another group of people that have looked at research and have said, "Actually, that's not the case." So right now, we have, we have studies that lead out to about a year or so, uh, on melatonin, and when you stop their melatonin production after they've been taking it for a year, their body seems to start back up, no problem. It's different than testosterone, right? So with testosterone, we know that when men start taking testosterone, their body actually stops producing it. With melatonin, that does not appear to be the case, but we don't have studies that go out past, you know, that year long. And so if somebody's been taking melatonin every day for five, 10 years, you know, you, you kind of start to wonder, uh, what's gonna happen. Also, don't forget that that melatonin is different than the melatonin that's actually produced in your head.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:50

       I think it was Andrew Huberman, who I was speaking to a couple of weeks ago, that was, was saying about not giving kids an overdose of melatonin.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus1:32:58

       Mm.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:58

       And I think afterwards, I, I was doing some research on it, and I read something that said it has an impact on puberty, potentially.

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus1:33:05

       So in high dosages, melatonin is a contraceptive.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:33:09

       So that would pause puberty?

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus1:33:10

       Exactly, or change it-

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:33:13

       Okay

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus1:33:13

        ... in ways we may or may not know. So I agree with Andrew on that point, that, again, melatonin is not something that kids need, unless you've got kids on the spectrum, which is, again, where I find it to be helpful, and I've treated kids with that before. But generally speaking, I don't put melatonin on anybody under the age of 18.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:33:30

        Am I more likely to have nightmares if I'm having lots of melatonin?

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus1:33:34

        If you're overdosing, you are.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:33:36

        Why?

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus1:33:36

        So the number one side effect of a high dose of melatonin is super vivid dreams and then eventually nightmares.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:33:42

        Why?

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus1:33:43

        I'm not really sure. If I was garnering a guess, then what I would say is that part of the reason why that you have crazy, vivid dreams from melatonin is because it probably does put you into REM sleep a little bit quicker than you normally would and might keep you there a little bit longer. I don't have any data to support that-

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:01

        Mm-hmm

    18. MBDr. Michael Breus1:34:01

        ... so I want to be clear. Um, this is more of a hypothesis on my end, but that might make intuitive sense to me.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:07

        Just done a quick search. Um-

    20. MBDr. Michael Breus1:34:08

        Sure.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:08

        It's, uh, you're right. It says it keep- keeps you in REM sleep a little bit longer and more intensely.

    22. MBDr. Michael Breus1:34:13

        There you go. [chuckles]

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:14

        This leads to vivid, highly vivid dreams or night terrors, which paradoxically makes you wake up feeling more exhausted. Mm.

    24. MBDr. Michael Breus1:34:19

        Right.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:20

        Interesting.

    26. MBDr. Michael Breus1:34:20

        I can't count the number of people who tell me, "I need to go back to sleep 'cause I'm so exhausted from my dreams."

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:25

        Oh, wow.

    28. MBDr. Michael Breus1:34:26

        Right?

33. 1:34:27 – 1:36:28

    The Most Researched Sleep Supplement You’ve Never Heard Of

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:27

       So let's finish off on these supplements then.

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:34:28

       Yeah, absolutely!

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:29

       Well-

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus1:34:29

       So we talked a little bit about melatonin, which, like I said, select usage. Um, a couple of other ones that we've got here, um, uh, one of them is valerian, right? So when we talk... Valerian is probably the most studied. It's a root. Um, it's called the valerian root. But to be clear, it's an anti-anxiety medication, right? So what it is, is it's- it helps lower your level of anxiety, um, and that is the reason why it has a tendency to work. Interestingly, when you look at the data, it works better when combined with hops, like what you'd find in beer. So a lot of times when you're looking for a preparation, you should look for valerian plus hops as the preparation. Also, we should talk a- for a second about supplements. A lot of people don't understand this, but a lot of people will put a whole bunch of different supplements together and put it into a capsule. I don't think that's the best idea. I think you should have single-ingredient supplementation.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:20

       Why?

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus1:35:20

       Well, number one, you get the correct dose-

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:22

       Yeah

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus1:35:22

       ... so you know it's actually working for you. There's a lot of companies out there that are, uh, that make a powder or something, and they put a bunch of stuff in it, and they put just enough in there to be able to say it on the ingredient profile, but not enough for it to [chuckles] actually do any good for the patient.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:36

       Mm-hmm.

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus1:35:36

        So I like using single-ingredient pro- uh, supplement profiles because I know exactly how much of each thing that I'm gonna get in there, and I can make sure that it's the correct dosage for the- what the person needs. So I prefer single-ingredient supplementation.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:49

        Okay, so valer, valer, valerian?

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus1:35:52

        Yep, valerian root.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:54

        Not gonna mess up my hormones?

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus1:35:55

        Nope, it's not gonna mess up your hormones.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:57

        Gonna help me with overthinking?

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus1:35:59

        [sighs] Probably not. What it'll probably do is slow your thinking down a, a little bit, depending upon how much of it you take. Um, I think if you were looking for a... If you're looking for something that's gonna slow down your thinking, then I would say we don't have the, the thing here, but it's called GABA, G-A-B-A, um, gamma-aminobutyric acid. So this is a substance that your body makes. It's kind of the brakes of the brain, and you can buy it, um, a- as a supplement. I've had several people use that, and that seems to help calm people down in the evening

34. 1:36:28 – 1:37:21

    Can Ashwagandha Help With Nighttime Overthinking?

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus1:36:28

       times.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:36:28

       What about ashwagandha or whatever it's called?

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus1:36:30

       Ashwagandha.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:36:31

       Ashwagandha.

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus1:36:31

       Exactly. I just kind of like saying it. So here's my theory on supplementation is the first thing I tell people to do is go do blood work. Okay? What deficiencies do you have? Fix your deficiencies first.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:36:44

       Ah.

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus1:36:44

       Before we start going to the valerians and the melatonins of it all, if you're deficient in vitamin D, magnesium, iron, fix those three things first. Dude, I can't tell you, I've probably 15% of the people that show up at my doorstep, we do blood work on, and all I do is fix their deficiencies, and their sleep magically gets better.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:03

       What are some of the surprising things, though, that you discover? Like blood sug- like diabetes, that impacts sleep, no?

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus1:37:07

       It absolutely does. I also think that a lot of people who have uncontrolled diabetes, it wakes them up in the middle of the night-

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:13

        Ah

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus1:37:14

        ... um, because their blood sugar gets so low, and then they're hungry in the middle of the night. Then they end up eating in the middle of the night, then they end up with sleep eating syndrome, which is kind of a pain.

35. 1:37:21 – 1:39:58

    The Science Behind Turkey, Milk, and Better Sleep

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:21

       There's this one here that I've never heard of before. What's this one?

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:37:23

       Uh, it's called tryptophan, so, uh, L-tryptophan in, in, in particular. So tryptophan is the substance that we find in turkey-... that has a tendency to make people sleepy. However, when you really look at the data, you'd have to eat a 46-pound turkey in order to get enough tryptophan to make you sleepy. Even in my best days in college, dude, I couldn't eat a 46-pound turkey, okay? Same holds true with milk. Um, tryptophan is the thing in warm milk that supposedly makes people, uh, sleepy, but once again, you'd have to drink almost a half a gallon of warm milk, which is kind of disgusting, um, in order to do it. Tryptophan can be helpful for people if you have a tryptophan deficiency, but it's definitely something that lowers a little bit of anxiety and can make you feel a little bit sleepy, but it is a naturally occurring amino acid in your system.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:38:08

       Calcium?

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus1:38:09

       So calcium, turns out, is interesting because when you mix calcium with magnesium, it's easier to absorb. So, uh, for some people, mag- mag- we've- what we've discovered is if you have a magnesium deficiency, and you fix the magnesium deficiency, in many cases, it can actually help with overall sleep, and calcium is one of the things that can be added to it that helps with absorption. Now, unfortunately, the big problem is that there are 13 different kinds of magnesium out there, and so people don't know what's been studied and what hasn't. So I'm here to let you know there's only a couple of brands out there that have actually been studied for magnesium. The ones I like is there's one called Magnesium Threonate, which is made by a company called Magtein. Um, they actually have a published research study in the journals. That's why I mentioned their brand name. I have no association with them. There's also another company called Upgraded Formulas. They make a magnesium, and it's kind of funny story is the guy who runs mag- uh, Upgraded Formulas told me, he says, "My magnesium is the best in the world. I can make anybody fall asleep." And I said, "Hey, you wanna put your money where your mouth is? Let's do a clinical trial." He handed me a check for 75 grand. I went and did a clinical trial, and he was right. His magnesium really made people sleep better.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:23

       What is magnesium doing?

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus1:39:25

       So we're not 100% sure. In the deficient people, it's, it's obviously clearing up the deficiency of magnesium, and then magnesium is used in about, I think, almost 300 different functions in the body, so it probably lets the body work more efficiently, and probably that helps to overall sleep. But I'm not convinced that we have the whole mechanism of action worked out. I will tell you that when people take magnesium, they tell me that, uh, they introspectively feel calmer, and we definitely know that it can definitely help, uh, cause a relaxation response in the musculature, so I think that might have something to do

36. 1:39:58 – 1:42:35

    This Simple Banana Trick Could Help You Sleep Faster

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus1:39:58

       with it.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:58

       Why did you bring a banana and a knife and a teapot?

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus1:40:00

       [laughing] This is my favorite way to get magnesium.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:40:03

       Oh.

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus1:40:03

       A lot of people want to know, "How should I take my supplements? I'm tired of taking a fistful of pills every morning, Michael. There's these powders. Like, what, what's the best way?" The best way... So number one, supplementation is when you're not getting it, all of the things, the vitamins and minerals that you need from your food. So the best place to get it from is food, generally speaking. Turns out magnesium is one of the best ones, but it's problematic because we have to eat our magnesium. Our body doesn't actually produce it our, ourselves. And by the way, you could eat a bushel of kale and still not get enough magnesium because here in the United States, the soil has been over-tilled, which means the magnesium isn't in the soil, so it's not coming up through the root stalks-

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:40:41

       Mm-hmm

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus1:40:42

       ... and allowing people to have it. So a lot of people require magnesium supplementation. Believe it or not, between magnesium and vitamin D, I'd say we've probably covered most of America in terms of having a deficiency. Bananas are loaded with magnesium, but it turns out it's not the fruit, it's the peel-

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:40:58

       Oh

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus1:40:59

       ... itself. So, no, I'm not gonna make you eat the peel.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:01

        I was gonna say.

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus1:41:01

        Don't worry. So I developed a recipe that I call banana tea. All it is, is a regular old banana. So what I- what you do is you cut off the stem, right? And cut it in half, and then you drop it in to some boiling water. Okay, so we've already done this, right? And you can see the banana has turned brown, right? It's been soaking in the boiling water. So it's not really tea. It's just basically hot banana water. But with the banana, from the skin, you also get these things called phytosteroids that actually help you absorb the magnesium better than if you just had it from a supplement. So you have to really like bananas. My daughter k- says, "It's very banana-y, Dad." The flavor, I mean.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:42

        [sniffs] Ooh, it does smell like bananas.

    13. MBDr. Michael Breus1:41:45

        I'm telling you, if you like bananas...

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:48

        It's nice.

    15. MBDr. Michael Breus1:41:48

        I know! It's-

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:49

        It's nice.

    17. MBDr. Michael Breus1:41:49

        And you can use this as a, like, an evening ritual, and you can make banana tea and have it in the evening with, you know, a biscuit or what have you, and have a nice... And read a book and just be chill.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:59

        How do I know the magnesium's actually in there?

    19. MBDr. Michael Breus1:42:01

        'Cause it came through from the, from the, um, steeping in the water.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:05

        Oh, okay.

    21. MBDr. Michael Breus1:42:05

        We could test it if we want, but I can assure you it's in there. You need to leave it in there for about five minutes, and we've been talking for a while, so I'm pretty sure it's there.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:11

        And, and how long before sleep to get those effects?

    23. MBDr. Michael Breus1:42:13

        I would say about twenty-five, thirty minutes. You don't wanna have too much, by the way, 'cause then you're gonna have to wake up and pee.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:18

        Mm.

    25. MBDr. Michael Breus1:42:18

        So try, if you can, to be able to have it about thirty, forty minutes before bed.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:22

        So you can put it in anything, 'cause a lot of people have different types of tea, so you could just use that-

    27. MBDr. Michael Breus1:42:25

        Absolutely

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:25

        ... as the water instead?

    29. MBDr. Michael Breus1:42:26

        Yeah. Oh, without question. Actually, that would be a really good idea. And you c- if you did it, if you mix it with, like, a fruit tea, like an herbal fruit tea, that would be really delicious.

37. 1:42:35 – 1:43:41

    Why Vitamin D Is Essential for Your Sleep Cycle

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:35

       Are there any other supplements that you, you know, you do encourage people to take if they're struggling with sleep that we haven't talked about yet?

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:42:40

       We haven't talked about vitamin D, and that's a big one.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:42

       Mm-hmm.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus1:42:42

       So it turns out that vitamin D is a circadian pacemaker. So when light comes into your eyeballs, it helps change your whole, uh, circadian system, and if you're... If light is coming in for a certain amount of time, about 15 minutes, your body will start to produce vitamin D. Vitamin D does a whole host of important things to your body, but most importantly, from a sleep perspective, is it helps regulate melatonin and when your body produces it. So by taking vitamin D every day or getting 15 minutes of sunshine, either way, you're gonna be in better shape. So, like, as an example, my morning routine that I have all my patients do is I have them, when they wake up in the morning, I have them, uh, go outside if it's, if it's, you know, nice out, sit in a chair, and have 15 deep breaths merely to wake up the respiratory system, then 15 ounces of water, 'cause once again, remember, you're dehydrated-

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:31

       Mm-hmm

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus1:43:31

       ... and then 15 minutes of sunshine. So they can do all of this together at the same time, and it's a nice way to wake up in the morning.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:39

       ... I don't know any founder who started

38. 1:43:41 – 1:45:56

    Ads

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:41

       their business because they like doing admin, but whether you like it or not, it's a huge part of running a business successfully, and it's something that can quickly become all-consuming, confusing, and honestly, a real tax, because you know it's taking your attention away from the most important work. And that's why our sponsor, Intuit QuickBooks, helps my team streamline a lot of their admin. I asked my team about it, and they said it saves them around twelve hours a month. Seventy-eight percent of Intuit QuickBooks users say it's made running their business significantly easier. And Intuit QuickBooks' new AI agent works with you to streamline all of your workflows. They sync with all of the tools that you currently use. They automate things that slow the wheel in the process of your business. They look after invoicing, payments, financial analysis, all of it in one place. But what is great is that it's not just AI. There's still human support on hand if you need it. Intuit QuickBooks has evolved into a platform that scales with growing businesses, so if you want help getting out of the weeds, out of admin, just search for Intuit QuickBooks now. [paper flipping] This is something that I've made for you. I've realized that The Diary of a CEO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learnt is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps, and we call this in our team the one percent. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have, is we've made these one percent diaries, and we released these last year, and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours now at thediary.com, where you can get twenty percent off our Black Friday bundle. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. [paper flipping] So let's talk about waking up in the morning.

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:45:54

       Sure.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:54

       Morning routines.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus1:45:55

       Yep.

39. 1:45:56 – 1:47:09

    The Power of Sleep Routines and How to Build Yours

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:56

       A lot of people talk about what's the perfect morning routine? Do you need to have a morning routine? What's your take on that?

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:46:00

       So it depends upon how disciplined you want to be, and it depends upon how much time you have. I can tell you what my morning routine is 'cause it's very specific, and I've, I've discovered that it works really, really well for me. So I wake up naturally somewhere between six ten and about six twenty-five or so. My body just seems to naturally wake up. I do fifteen minutes of red light therapy, so I have a red light, uh, in my office that I sit in front of, and I do my meditation at the same time in the morning time. So I have about fifteen minutes of meditation. Sometimes what I'll do is, um, I'll sit on the floor, and the boys will come and sit on my lap, and then we'll all meditate together. I know that sounds a little weird. Then, um, we use a-- we do a fifteen-minute walk. I try not to have any music or any telephone or anything like that, uh, up, at all up until this point. I put the dogs away, and then I hit the gym. I'm at the gym from about eight till about nine thirty, ten o'clock. I do a sauna every day afterwards, and then I'm in front of my desk by about ten thirty, and that's where is when I have my breakfast, and so I make the same breakfast [chuckles] almost every morning. I do, uh, ground turkey with... uh, a third of a pound of ground turkey, three eggs, and broccoli, and I s- I put it all into a skillet, and I make it every morning.

40. 1:47:09 – 1:50:18

    Should You Use a Sleep-Tracking Wearable? Pros and Cons

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:47:09

       Do you use any sleep trackers?

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:47:10

       In the past, I've used, uh, a few of them. I, I tried them out because a lot of my patients tried them out. Um, I think if I was gonna be looking at them, I think the Oura Ring probably does the best job. I really don't think they've gotten there quite yet, because remember, depth of sleep is based on brainwaves, and it's hard to get brainwaves from your finger, right? And so what they're doing is they're creating a proxy, so they're looking at heart rate or oxygen or pulse or something along those lines, and then saying, "Okay, when Steven's at this pulse, we think he's in REM sleep, so we're gonna label every time that REM sleep," when in fact, they don't really know because they're not measuring your brainwaves. So I think until we get to the point where we can measure brainwaves from distally, I think we'll have a little bit better shot at it. However, there's some interesting things that are going on kind of in the sleep tracker world, and some people get a little too into the whole tracking of it all, if you know what I mean.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:01

       Mm-hmm.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus1:48:01

       Like, I can't count the number of people that are like, "Oh, my God, Dr. Breus, you know, this says I only slept fourteen minutes last night. Like, what do I do?" And I'm like: Well, number one, how much did you sleep the night before? And they say, "Oh, sixteen minutes." I'm like, "Okay, well, let's check you tomorrow." They come back in tomorrow, "It's even worse, twelve minutes!" I'm like: Oh, you're fine. They're like, "What?" I'm like: Look, it's being consistently inaccurate. There's no way you only got fourteen minutes of deep sleep, right? That's just not how the body works, right? But if you got fourteen minutes, fourteen minutes, and then one night you look at your score and it's four hundred and seven minutes-

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:31

       Mm-hmm

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus1:48:32

       ... I wanna know what happened on that night.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:33

       My friend was a big fan of Whoop, so he told me to try Whoop. I tried a Whoop. The, the most, I think, critical thing it's done for me is it allowed me to create some understanding of, like, causation and, like-

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus1:48:47

       Associations, yeah

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:48

       ... associations with my sleep.

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus1:48:49

        Yep.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:49

        So one of the ones that completely changed my life when I first w- wore my Whoop, which, by the way, I'm an investor in the company, so I have to disclaimer that-

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus1:48:55

        Mm-hmm

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:56

        ... um, was I didn't realize how impactful sleep, uh, alcohol was on my sleep.

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus1:49:00

        It's massive, dude. [chuckles]

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:01

        Like, it blew my mind. Because I had had one glass of wine-

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus1:49:04

        Yep

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:05

        ... and then the bloody Whoop thing said, "Shh, you're either really sick, um, really stressed, or you drank alcohol."

    18. MBDr. Michael Breus1:49:11

        Yep.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:12

        And then I watched a video online where they compared all of the devices to the hospital-grade stuff.

    20. MBDr. Michael Breus1:49:17

        Yep, polysomnography.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:19

        And the Whoop 4 was the closest to the hospital grade.

    22. MBDr. Michael Breus1:49:22

        [chuckles]

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:22

        And then I contacted the company and said, "Can I invest?" et cetera, et cetera.

    24. MBDr. Michael Breus1:49:24

        Right.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:24

        I also tried... I've also tried, like, Eight Sleep, and-

    26. MBDr. Michael Breus1:49:27

        I would argue that temperature, like, if we're talking about what is the easiest thing to manipulate to change your sleep, either good or bad, temperature is it. Um, and people don't realize it, but you can change the temperature in your bedroom, even in your bed, and you can change the quality of your sleep. You mentioned Eight Sleep. That's a company that has a, a topper type of thing that can change the, uh, the temperature underneath the covers. There's also taking a look at the, the accoutrement that's on, so pillows, sheets, comforters, all of those things. But if you can get your body to cool down, your body will go down and get into deeper stages of sleep. If you can stay cool versus go-... bumping up and down all night long, let's say you're a woman in menopause, right? That becomes highly disruptive, and so by en- by being able to s- keep a consistent temperature stimulus to the body, it ends up sleeping a whole lot better.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:50:17

        Dreams.

41. 1:50:18 – 1:53:54

    What Your Dreams Are Really Trying to Tell You

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus1:50:18

       Let's talk about dreams.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:50:19

       People are so fascinated by dreams.

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus1:50:20

       Aren't they? I love it.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:50:22

       But, but so little is known about dreams.

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus1:50:24

       Yeah. Well, yes and no. I mean, here's the thing, dreams have been studied, honestly, since the dawn of time. If you look in the Bible, you will see that people are talking about dreams. If you look at ancient texts, people are wondering about these crazy movies that are going on in my head, right? When you start to look at dreams, here's the thing that I will tell you is, dreams mean something to the dreamer. They don't necessarily mean something to somebody who is not the dreamer. And so when I do dream work, and so I- so to be clear, just take a step back, I took a year and a half, and I became a dream therapist. So what does that mean? What is that even... Is that even a thing? So dream therapy, by the way, is not dream interpretation. That is not, here's a symbol, here's what that means. Dream therapy is where you use dreams in the therapeutic context to help people with things like depression and anxiety.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:18

       Mm.

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus1:51:19

       Let me give you an example, a nightmare, right? So when somebody has-- let's say somebody was in an active theater of war, and they watched one of their friends, God forbid, something terrible happen to them, and that image is now in their head, and now they constantly have this image over and over and over. But what happens is they're going, going, going, and they wake up. They're going, going, going, they wake up. We talked a little bit about it earlier, that dreams are emotional metabolism, right? So dreams are where you work out all of these different things that are going on in your head and kind of become okay with them, so that way, next day, you can kind of move forward and kee- keep doing your thing.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:53

       Do we need to explain why we dream? 'Cause I think that's the big sort of-

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus1:51:57

       Sure. So there's a couple of theories. One theory is, is that this is a great stage for, for practice, right? So we dream about things that we're eventually gonna try in the real world, and so we get a chance to practice them in our head beforehand to, to make sure it doesn't- we don't kind of screw the whole thing up. So there's that whole idea of being able to kind of work stuff out in my head. Then there's the processing idea that we talked about before, where this is emotional metabolism, so-

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:52:22

        Therapy.

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus1:52:23

        Right. Exactly. It's like you go to therapy every single night. I... Actually, it's a really good way to think about it. I hadn't thought about it like that, but I think I'm gonna use that. I'm gonna take that from you.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:52:31

        [chuckles]

    13. MBDr. Michael Breus1:52:31

        Um, I like that, dreams are therapy every single night, because they really are. You're really moving through a lot of that emotionality. Some people think dreams are complete nonsense. Some people think that's just some crazy movie in your head, and it's just this aftereffect of your brain moving into a different mode, and who knows what it could mean. I find that one hard to believe myself.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:52:49

        Because humans don't do anything-

    15. MBDr. Michael Breus1:52:51

        I don't think so

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:52:52

        ... that isn't for some s- type of survival benefit.

    17. MBDr. Michael Breus1:52:54

        For sure.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:52:55

        It's a waste of energy or, you know-

    19. MBDr. Michael Breus1:52:57

        Yeah, I agree. And so if we looked at it from an evolutionary perspective, like w- what is the evolutionary purpose of dreams? I would argue that it probably has something to do with emotions and being able to, uh, move through some emotionally difficult times, and/or it's an early warning system. A lot of people dream things, and, uh, it helps them understand something else that's going on in their life. You ever heard the, um, s- thing, uh, people say, "I- before I make this big decision, I want to sleep on it"?

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:53:24

        Yeah.

    21. MBDr. Michael Breus1:53:24

        Right? This is what they're doing is when they sleep on it, all these disparate pieces of information come together and work themselves so that you can come to a solution. So I think the other thing that, reason that we dream is to come to solutions and to create innovation.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:53:38

        That tracks in my life. I, I can be going to bed really thinking about something, quite like, you know, hi- uh, remunerating about something to the point that it's, like, overthinking and-

    23. MBDr. Michael Breus1:53:48

        Right

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:53:48

        ... it's a problem, it's stressing me out. I can get eight hours sleep and wake up, and it's like

42. 1:53:54 – 2:00:21

    How to Reprogram Recurring Nightmares (And Why It Works)

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:53:54

       the clouds have parted.

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus1:53:55

       Right, it's like magic.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:53:56

       It's like magic.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus1:53:57

       It's great.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:53:57

       And I've really re- realized this in the last couple of years when, you know, business, my business has got bigger, and there was more problems just to work through-

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus1:54:04

       That's right [chuckles]

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:05

       ... that, like, actually, I could use sleep as a weapon against the problem-

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus1:54:09

       Absolutely

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:09

       ... versus trying to stay up all night and solve the problem, I could focus on the sleep to solve the problem.

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus1:54:13

        Yeah, I do it all the time, and, and what you can actually do, it's called priming, is you can s- think about the problem in a y- in a way before you go to sleep, and then it triggers your brain to think about the problem while you're sleeping.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:26

        What, you write it down, or would you-

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus1:54:27

        There's a lot of different ways you can go about doing it. So for example, what I have some people do is write down everything they can remember in their dream beforehand, before they come to therapy. But what you can do is something different. If you wanna change your dream, you write it all down, but then you change the ending, okay? And you read it several times before bed, and it will actually change your dream.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:47

        So what am I writing down before bed then?

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus1:54:49

        So let's say you had a scary dream, okay? You're walking through a haunted house, and something terrible is gonna happen when you walk out the back door.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:54

        The night before?

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus1:54:55

        Yeah, the night before. Then I have you write all of that down, and then when you come into session with me, I say, "Okay, we're gonna change the ending," 'cause at the, at the very end, you walk down onto the porch and somebody, ah, gotcha, right? So instead of that happening, you're gonna walk onto the porch, and you're gonna pull out a gun, and you're gonna shoot the guy. Okay? And so we change that in the dream, in the wr- in what you wrote down, and then we talk about it in therapy, and then right before bed, you read this to yourself multiple times, and it- over seven to ten days, you change the ending of the dream.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:26

        And how does that help?

    18. MBDr. Michael Breus1:55:28

        So it makes it more positive, and when you change the ending, it- the, the reason you're waking up is something is scaring you so much that you're waking up, and you stop processing. And so when you change the ending and you don't wake up, you continue to process, and then you move past the dream. Just like you said, when you wake up and the clouds have cleared-

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:42

        Mm-hmm

    20. MBDr. Michael Breus1:55:43

        ... a lot of people wake up, and the clouds don't clear 'cause they have nightmares-

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:46

        Mm

    22. MBDr. Michael Breus1:55:46

        ... and they keep repeating it over and over and over again.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:49

        Hmm.

    24. MBDr. Michael Breus1:55:50

        It's quite remarkable. The process is very interesting. So what I do is I bring them into session, put them into a mild hypnotic state, uh, only by doing some simple breathwork, right? So let me give you an example of somebody that I worked with and tell you exactly how it went. So I was working with somebody who had had, uh, pretty significant trauma. They had been raped, right? And so they were having nightmares about this. So serious situation, right? So she had a, she had a nightmare of being in a jungle.... and so, uh, I had her come in session, wrote it all down, and when we got to the end, we were walking through the jungle, where she was actually being chased through the jungle. So I turned to her and I say, "Okay, well, we're in the jungle. Tell me more about this jungle." And she said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, in jungles, there's lots of tropical plants, are there a lot of colorful flowers?" And she'll stop, and you can see she's looking around inside her head at the dreamscape, and then she says, "Oh, there are, there's some beautiful flowers over there." I've now advanced the dream, right? Because she didn't know there were flowers before. Now, she's imagined that there are flowers, I'm moving the dream forward. So we go over and we smell the flower, and I say, "Well, you know, usually in jungles, there's, there's animals. Are there any animals?" Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. "Yeah, there's a lion." "Oh, gosh. Is the lion friendly?" "Yeah, the lion is friendly." "Can we go over and talk to the lion?" "Yeah, Michael, we can." So a- again, in her head, we walk over. So I say to her, "Uh, does the lion have a name?" And she said: "I don't know. Let me ask." So she asked the lion his name, and she said, "Yeah, his name is Jack." And I said: What does Jack mean to you? And instantly she says, "Jack was my uncle, and he saved me from getting raped by my stepfather." Now, we're getting somewhere. Now, we understand what's chasing her. Now, we understand where she's headed to. She's trying to head to the person that saved her. Now, she starts to understand where this dream is coming from, and guess what? In three or four more sessions, she doesn't have the dream anymore.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:57:40

        Because you did what?

    26. MBDr. Michael Breus1:57:42

        Because she now understands where it is. She's no longer scared in the middle of her dream. She's able to understand it, wake up, and move forward.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:57:48

        Mm.

    28. MBDr. Michael Breus1:57:49

        It's remarkable. It's kind of the coolest thing ever, if you want to know the truth of the matter. [laughing] Working with people's dreams is just ma- amazing stuff.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:57:57

        And for people at home that might not have access to you-

    30. MBDr. Michael Breus1:58:00

        Mm.
43. 2:00:21 – 2:02:10

    The “First Night Effect” Explained—And Why It Matters

    1. SBSteven Bartlett2:00:21

       to cover my eyes when I go to sleep, because, gosh, the amount of nights per week where, I don't know, there's like a crack in the, in the curtains or, I don't know, someone gets up early and-

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus2:00:31

       Well, also for you, you're traveling all the time.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett2:00:33

       Yeah, on planes.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus2:00:33

       So you're in different- you're in planes, you're in different environments. Also, by the way, every time you're in a different environment, you have something called the first-night effect. So we see this e- with every human on Earth. When you sleep in a new place for the first night, you never sleep well because it's new sounds, new sights, you know, new smells, all that stuff is new. So what's nice about having this is when I put one of these on, I don't have to worry about light, I don't have to worry about anything, like-

    5. SBSteven Bartlett2:00:56

       Does CO2 play a role?

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus2:00:57

       In what way?

    7. SBSteven Bartlett2:00:58

       Uh, in changing sleep. I was thinking if ventilation, the amount of oxygen in the room matters at all.

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus2:01:03

       Mm.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett2:01:03

       Because sometimes I go to hotels, and they don't have windows you can open.

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus2:01:06

        Right. So air quality is also a important thing, not just air quantity.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett2:01:11

        Mm-hmm.

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus2:01:12

        Right? And so number, number one thing, if I were to tell people, "Hey, here's an easy thing to do to, to make your sleep better, just go out and buy an air purifier for your bedroom." Think about it, it's the room you spend more time in than any other room in the house. You want that air to be fresh and filtered, right? And it's not a big... It's not expensive. Twenty, twenty-five bucks, one sits in the corner, just runs the air cycles all day long. That way, you know you have good, clean, fresh air. Um, also, I tell people, "Open the windows once a week. Um, it's good to get fresh air in." Now, the only problem comes is if you have allergies, and the allergens fly in, and there's pollen or dust or things like that, that can be somewhat problematic. But generally speaking, if you don't have enough oxygen going on, you're definitely not gonna sleep well, and your body's gonna wake up. So if you were in, let's say, a oxygen-restrictive environment, so let's say that you were underneath the covers-

    13. SBSteven Bartlett2:02:02

        Mm-hmm

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus2:02:02

        ... right? And you've got the thing all, all the way over your head, you're not gonna sleep particularly well, and eventually you're gonna get so- feel so restricted that you're gonna open up the covers.

44. 2:02:10 – 2:06:32

    Why Arguing Before Bed Is Ruining Your Sleep

    1. SBSteven Bartlett2:02:10

       I wanna understand the best possible sleep position. I do have a bed, um, in the room next door-

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus2:02:15

       Yeah

    3. SBSteven Bartlett2:02:15

       ... that we can go to and talk about these pillows. But before we do that-

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus2:02:18

       Sure

    5. SBSteven Bartlett2:02:18

       ... I would like to talk about-... relationships,

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus2:02:22

       [chuckles]

    7. SBSteven Bartlett2:02:23

       arguing with your partner, sex-

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus2:02:25

       Sure

    9. SBSteven Bartlett2:02:25

       ... all those kinds of things. What do I need to know to protect my sleep, but also to protect my relationship? If we start with talking about, I know you, you wrote about it in your book-

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus2:02:32

        Mm-hmm

    11. SBSteven Bartlett2:02:32

        ... um, The Power of When. You talked about, I think it's on page a hundred and, 101. You talk about arguing with your partner before bed.

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus2:02:39

        Yes. Possibly the worst thing you can possibly do is argue with your partner before bed, um, because it's increasing heart rate, right? What I tell all my patients to do is if you, if you need to have an important discussion with your spouse or your partner, do it right after dinner, right? So like in that seven o'clock, eight range, seven to eight o'clock range, so that way you have enough space and time to be able to discuss something and not hopefully go to bed angry, if you can avoid it at all possible. It happens. Look, I can't say that I've never gone to bed angry. I'm sure you can't say that either. Sometimes things are a bigger deal, but if you can find better times to schedule those things, they work out a lot better. For me, the other thing that I oftentimes ask a lot of my patients to do is, for example, if there's known issues that are going on, like let's say somebody's going through marital therapy, or there's a, there's an issue that they're trying to work on, then maybe that's better off done at 11 o'clock in the daytime, versus starting to kind of address some of those issues in the evening time. I like evening times to be as stress-free as humanly possible. Now, if you've got something you've got to talk about, you've got to talk about it. But generally speaking, I would say the li- the less emotionality that you have in, towards the evening, the better, unless it's joy or happiness.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett2:03:55

        So many couples, they have these difficult conversations on the pillow-

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus2:03:58

        Yeah

    15. SBSteven Bartlett2:03:58

        ... including me sometimes.

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus2:03:59

        Yeah. Well, and-

    17. SBSteven Bartlett2:04:00

        Yeah

    18. MBDr. Michael Breus2:04:00

        ... it makes sense. Like, when else do you see that person, right? You haven't seen them all day. You're, you're literally face to face, like: "Hey, I got something I got to talk to you about." This is kind of the best time to do it.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett2:04:08

        It ruins your sex life as well, doesn't it? Just-

    20. MBDr. Michael Breus2:04:10

        It absolutely ruins your sex life, unless you have make-up sex afterwards, and then it's great. But at the end of the day, it's not a lot of fun to have those conversations at night. That's, again, why I choose to... If I'm going to have that conversation, the best time, honestly, to do it is right after breakfast.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett2:04:24

        In my relationship, we've banned, uh, difficult conversations at nighttime.

    22. MBDr. Michael Breus2:04:27

        Good.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett2:04:28

        Because-

    24. MBDr. Michael Breus2:04:28

        That's probably a smart move, dude

    25. SBSteven Bartlett2:04:29

        ... you're tired, and it's going to destroy your sleep.

    26. MBDr. Michael Breus2:04:32

        Right.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett2:04:32

        You, you can't think straight.

    28. MBDr. Michael Breus2:04:33

        Exactly.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett2:04:33

        You're probably more emotional.

    30. MBDr. Michael Breus2:04:35

        And you haven't put all the pieces together yet-
45. 2:06:32 – 2:07:53

    Is There a Best Time of Day to Fall in Love?

    1. MBDr. Michael Breus2:06:32

       in love at that time.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett2:06:33

       Okay, so in your book-

    3. MBDr. Michael Breus2:06:34

       Mm-hmm

    4. SBSteven Bartlett2:06:34

       ... um, Power of When-

    5. MBDr. Michael Breus2:06:35

       Yes

    6. SBSteven Bartlett2:06:36

       ... on page ninety, uh, four-

    7. MBDr. Michael Breus2:06:38

       Uh-huh

    8. SBSteven Bartlett2:06:38

       ... you say, "Dolphins' best mood is in the afternoon to evening," so, uh, the best time for them to fall in love is 8:00 PM.

    9. MBDr. Michael Breus2:06:43

       Yep.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett2:06:44

        "Lions, 7:00 AM."

    11. MBDr. Michael Breus2:06:46

        Right, 'cause remember, they're early morning people. They're exhausted at the end.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett2:06:49

        Damn, so they should be going on morning dates.

    13. MBDr. Michael Breus2:06:51

        Yes.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett2:06:52

        "Bears-

    15. MBDr. Michael Breus2:06:53

        Mm-hmm

    16. SBSteven Bartlett2:06:53

        ... 4:00 PM."

    17. MBDr. Michael Breus2:06:54

        Yep.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett2:06:54

        And the wolf, like me-

    19. MBDr. Michael Breus2:06:56

        Yes

    20. SBSteven Bartlett2:06:56

        ... 11:00 PM. That tracks.

    21. MBDr. Michael Breus2:06:57

        Yeah, I get it. It-

    22. SBSteven Bartlett2:06:59

        So should I be doing my... You know, I'm, uh, okay, I'm in a relationship. I'm- [chuckles]

    23. MBDr. Michael Breus2:07:03

        [chuckles]

    24. SBSteven Bartlett2:07:03

        ... about to be married.

    25. MBDr. Michael Breus2:07:04

        Yes. [chuckles]

    26. SBSteven Bartlett2:07:04

        But, um, I should be doing-

    27. MBDr. Michael Breus2:07:05

        I heard you got engaged.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett2:07:06

        I did.

    29. MBDr. Michael Breus2:07:06

        Congratulations.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett2:07:06

        Thank you so much.
46. 2:07:53 – 2:16:43

    How to Pick the Perfect Pillow in 4 Simple Steps

    1. SBSteven Bartlett2:07:53

       Okay, so we're now downstairs in a bedroom we have in the house.

    2. MBDr. Michael Breus2:07:56

       Yep.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett2:07:57

       I have lots of pillows here.

    4. MBDr. Michael Breus2:07:58

       Quite a few.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett2:07:59

       And there's a bunch of questions I have for you. The first is, pillows, do they matter? Is there a perfect one?

    6. MBDr. Michael Breus2:08:03

       Sure.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett2:08:03

       Is it different for every individual? Sleeping position-

    8. MBDr. Michael Breus2:08:07

       Okay

    9. SBSteven Bartlett2:08:07

       ... is there a perfect sleeping position?

    10. MBDr. Michael Breus2:08:09

        There is.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett2:08:09

        And the third one is about temperature.

    12. MBDr. Michael Breus2:08:12

        You got it. Let's go.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett2:08:13

        So-... I just grab whatever pillow is in the bed wherever I travel.

    14. MBDr. Michael Breus2:08:16

        Terrible idea.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett2:08:17

        Really?

    16. MBDr. Michael Breus2:08:17

        Terrible idea. So first of all, a lot of people need to understand that a pillow is a bed for your head, right? And so the goal here is to keep your nose in line with your sternum, which is sort of the center part of your chest, right? And but you don't want it facing down, and you don't want it facing up. You want it to be completely in the center like that. And so if you have a pillow that tilts your head to the one way or tilts your head to the other, it causes a pain signal from the strain of the musculature that goes to your brain, and you don't get into a deep sleep. So you really want to make sure that you've got a good pillow, otherwise, you end up with a crick in your neck. You don't get good, deep sleep. It becomes problematic.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett2:08:52

        Okay.

    18. MBDr. Michael Breus2:08:52

        All right, so the big question is: how do you pick a pillow, right? So first question you want to ask yourself is squishy or firm, right? So let's take a look at our-

    19. SBSteven Bartlett2:09:01

        Yeah

    20. MBDr. Michael Breus2:09:01

        ... tower of pillows here. So for you, let's, let's take a look. So this is a pretty firm one. This is a f- basically a foam-based, hunk of foam pillow, right? Versus this one, which is sort of the normal kind of pillow, much more squishy. So which are you, are you a squishy or a firm?

    21. SBSteven Bartlett2:09:17

        That one.

    22. MBDr. Michael Breus2:09:18

        Okay, perfect. So you're more on the squishy, which means you like to manipulate the pillow. You don't want it to have a huge-

    23. SBSteven Bartlett2:09:23

        Yeah

    24. MBDr. Michael Breus2:09:23

        ... form factor where your, like, head is on a block of cheese, right?

    25. SBSteven Bartlett2:09:25

        Yep.

    26. MBDr. Michael Breus2:09:25

        Got it. So perfect. So let's move this foam pillow out of the way. The second thing you want to look at from the pillow is when the fabric comes together here, it forms what's called a knife's edge, so it's where the two pieces of fabric meet. Now, why is that important? Because when you have your head on a pillow like this, and the knife's edge is down here, you're not getting as much support underneath your neck here, right?

    27. SBSteven Bartlett2:09:50

        Yeah.

    28. MBDr. Michael Breus2:09:50

        So in order to fix that, we have something called a gusset. So a gusset is this piece of fabric that comes along here. So you notice these two pieces of fabric don't meet. There's a thickness here, so when you were to sleep on it, it actually catches you all the way down. So let's say you would be like this, you...

    29. SBSteven Bartlett2:10:06

        Mm-hmm

    30. MBDr. Michael Breus2:10:06

        ... it gives you support all the way down. Now, you don't like the foam of it all, but you do like the, the gusset, right?

Episode duration: 2:24:14