S5E14 Dr. Kirk Parsley Former Navy Seal and Renowned Sleep Doctor on How Sleep is far more Important than you know...

And as always, if there's an episode, you really like send it over to your friends They'll probably like it too. Thank you so much. And let's get back to the show. So welcome back to Success Engineering. I'm your host, Michael Bauman. And I have the pleasure of having Dr. Kirk Parsley on the show today. So he actually joined the Navy seals at 17, served with them for 10 years, and then got his medical degree from Bethesda and then served as a medical officer for Naval special warfare group.

He did his residency in hyperbarics diving medicine. And now he lectures worldwide on sleep, especially is known as a sleep doctor, wellness, hormonal optimization. He's been on Dr. Oz, CBS, done Ted talks, multiple corporations and stuff, consulted with them. And then professional athletes teams. He has his own company, which we'll get into as well. So just pleasure to have you on the show. I know that there's going to be tons of tremendous insight to share.

Coming from a very blue collar family military service was just something everybody expected, it was just part of life and what you did, and so I always knew I would do some military service. I just didn't, I didn't necessarily have a plan as to what it would be. I was a pretty good athlete and I did a lot of sports and I boxed in high school and hence the crooked nose. And my boxing coach was actually the Marine recruiter for my hometown.

So, I worked with him for two years and it was never a logistically planned out, but just always assumed that I was going to do Marine recon. Cause I wanted to do something, more challenging in the regular military and a little more elite. Early in the fall of 87, a documentary came out on it was a news documentary, and they covered the first 48 hours of seal training. And I didn't even know what a seal was right. And I was like what's this.

And then they talk about the training, they share all these things they're doing. They talk about how this is the toughest training in the world. And these are the most elite in the world. And I was like that's the one I want to do. Like I want to do the hardest one. And so I just went down one day when I knew my boxing coach wasn't at the office.

I went down to the recruiting station and I joined the Navy and he was heartbroken when he found out and then and then to make matters worse a few months later, I got in a fight with a couple of his Marine recruits and beat up a couple of his guys and

He said something about hazardous duty pay or die pay or something. And I was like, what do you mean? And he was trying to explain it to me. And I was like, oh, I'm going to get paid. And he's like, what?! I didn't know they're paying me to do this. And he's like, what. What are you going to do for money? I don't know. What do I need money for? They feed me, they gave me clothes, give me a place to live. I figured I'd just be training or, fighting. What do I need money for?

And so he took me around to the, he took me around to the office of everyone he knew and made me tell that story over and over again. Yeah. So anyways, that was my story about becoming a seal. I remember pretty clearly about a month before graduation. They take you around to the various seal teams because in those days, The seal teams all had their own sort of specialty.

So there were platoons that focused on cold weather training there were teams that did more desert stuff and there was teams that did more jungle stuff. And so we went around to the teams and then we had to choose the teams that we wanted to go to. And I realized, I remember realizing pretty clearly at that point. Like I never really thought about this part. Like I never really thought about what I was gonna do after training.

I just basically chose all the west coast because I didn't want to go to the east coast. I figured I'd stay out on the west coast where the beaches were nicer. So I that's what I did. And Yeah. It all worked out, obviously.

Like you have your boat on your head and all the guys running, and you're going up and down over sand berms and you can't breathe and you can hear yourself wheezing, your heart feels like it's beating out of your chest and you can't stop. If you stop, you fail, you quit like essentially the same. And just thinking I guess I'm going to die then. And I remember like looking down at my legs and going, how are they still moving?

I don't feel like I'm moving and I'm like, they're still going like I like just completely numb. So it's definitely a job that pushes you past anything you could ever do to yourself. Like you, there's no way you could ever train yourself to that level. But that's the overall theme is just, I'm doing something so challenging or so so overwhelming or I'm like so exhausted that I feel like I might actually die, but I'm just going to go do it anyway.

And the only people who make it through training are people who are, I would say literally mean it when they say it that I'd rather die than quit.

And can you talk just that culture, one of peak performance and how much you have to push yourself to be there, and then how you started to notice that sleep such a huge role in terms of everything basically.

The military makes you do one year of residency, and then you go out into the fleet and you work essentially as a general practitioner somewhere so that they can have general practice positions. Otherwise everybody would just, specialize and you'd never have doctors out in the fleet. I wanted to go back to the seal teams, get back to the community that had, completely shaped me as an adult, changed my life. And and then I was going to go back into orthopedic surgery.

And so I got there right at a time where they just gotten the funding to build a sports medicine facility. And most people would've thought that, seals were this elite unit and you had all these people working to maintain the aisle. Not at all like that. Nothing we didn't have any kind of healthcare services at all. And so this was our big move, our big push towards that. So we're building a sports medicine facility.

I was supervising the build out of that because it was a sports medicine facility, which I'd spent six years working in. We got great and great people. We had this healthcare Mecca at that point We pulled people from professional sports teams and Olympic training center and, division one colleges. We had great assets so once we built all that up, I was the dumbest guy there at that point because I hadn't completed my training. And so we had all these great practitioners coming through.

And so in the military, when you're the dumbest guy, they put you in charge. And so they said why don't you supervise all these people? And I'm like, great. So my job really became the supervisor which is what the command wanted me to do. But more important to me was what did the Seals want from me? Cause that's why I was there. I wasn't there to satisfy, leadership or pew med or any of that stuff. I was there give back to my community and the Seals started coming in my office.

The thing to recognize is being a seal in a sense is, like being a professional athlete, you have to maintain your performance at a level high enough to be able to stay on the team. And when you're. Injured or your performance is down for whatever reason you can be put on the bench. And so they usually don't share the truth with the doctors because you're the guy who can put them on the bench. And so when they go see the doctors for their mandatory checkups, they're just like, everything's fine.

I feel great, man. And they'll do whatever they have to be able to be good that day. But because I'd been a Seal, and I'd been a seal recently enough to where there were still a lot of Seals there that I had served with. And I had a good enough reputation where guys trusted me and they came in my office and said, Hey, let me tell you what's really going on with me. And, they shut the door behind him and hush tones, say, here's what I'm experiencing. And it's basically, my, my motivation sucks.

And you have to temper all this by Navy seal standards. So they're like, yeah. So like my motivation sucks. My concentration sucks. My emotions are all over the place. Irritable I'm getting fatter, I'm getting weaker. I'm losing muscle. I'm getting slower. My sex drive is down. My sex life is down. I can't pay attention. I can't focus. I can't concentrate. I can't remember anything. And they'd be like, maybe I'm just getting old doc I'd be like sure man, you're 32. It's over.

Got one foot in gray for sure. And I was a Western trained medical physician. I went to a Western medical school, like I've probably went to the most conservative medical school in the country. The military is medical school. And so I only knew how to diagnose and treat disease and these guys didn't have any diseases, but they were coming to me for help. And I was like, I don't know I don't know. So I just started shotgunning these lab tests. It could be this.

It could be that so I would just send them all to get these ridiculous blood draws, like 17 vials of blood and was fingers. It was 98 different serum markers. And I'm just like looking at everything I can think of. And I noticed a pattern in him. They're anabolic hormones. So things like testosterone and IGF 1 and DHA, and like all those were really low and not just low for what you would expect for a Navy seal, but just low.

And not so far as to be outside of the normal, but just barely inside of the normal. And the range is enormous and a lot of those things and so their anabolic hormones were low or catabolic hormones were high, their insulin sensitivity was low. So, they're deficient in a lot of micronutrients deficient in a lot of vitamins. I still couldn't really figure it out, but I thought it looked like an adrenal pattern and it was like, this was 2009, 2010.

So they'd already been in combat for eight or nine years. And I, you hear things like in old wars, we had shell shock and combat fatigue and these syndromes that nobody really knew what they were. So that would maybe it's that, and maybe that's adrenal. And I started looking at kind of alternative things where I could go what could I treat that would help these guys perform better? This is not necessarily a disease. It's not something they would be disqualified for.

If a Navy seal comes to see me and I have to put him on medication that he needs, if he has to have a medication every day he's no longer fit to be. a seal What if it was out in the field and he doesn't have medication for a week or two weeks? If he can't operate, if he can't be functional, then like he can't do it. What I wanted to do was give them hormones and give them anabolic hormone and get all their whole anabolic hormones up.

But, military wasn't about to let me do that because of the political crap around hormones. And it wouldn't have been the right thing to do anyway, cause they were too young for it. So anyway, I don't know, maybe 50, 60 guys came in my office and told me the exact same story over three or four months. And while one guy was talking to me, he said something about taking Ambien and it just this light bulb went off in my head. I was like, huh, it really seems like a lot of guys have said that.

And I remember putting a little note in the margin and when he left, I went back through all my files and looked at all my looked at all the people who've been in my office and every single one of them had been on Ambien. And I was like, huh, I wonder if that could be playing a role. Now I hadn't had a single class in medical school on sleep. I didn't know anything about sleep. I knew we did it. I knew it was somehow recharging and I don't really know what goes on.

And so, I knew what Ambien was. I knew the mechanism of action, as they say in medical school, like how it works what's the pharmacological trick that it does. And almost all pharmacy pharmaceuticals are, they're a trick, right? They're tricking your biology into believing something's true and behaving in a way that something's true. That is not. And I didn't know what the consequences were that of that.

When pharmaceutical industry when they come up with a new drug, they want to test and get FDA approval on. They actually do the research themselves and they own the research. And so they give the FDA, the research, they want to give them, and they don't give them what they don't want to give them. And so a lot of times you don't know the truth about what are the side effects of drugs and what could be side effects.

And so, the exception to that is if they get sued over drug, then they have to cough up all the research. The makers of Ambien and Lunesta were getting sued right around that time. Because people were taking these drugs and then getting in their cars and driving to the casino and gambling way to life savings and coming back and getting in bed and waking up the next morning and having no recollection of it whatsoever or picking up prostitutes or whatever, just doing primal things.

That's because those drugs dissociate your brain from your brain stem, right from your lizard brain and your lizard brain is basically your survival, right? And you want a fornicate you want to eat and you want it to be excited and take risky behaviors. And so that's how they'd behave on these drugs and have no recollection of them. So once they started suing 'em, then you could get the data. And I'd learned enough about sleep at that point to where I knew what should be happening.

I knew the different stages of sleep and that I was looking for how there were these interfering, how do these drugs interfere with sleep and the stages of sleep? And when you take a pharmaceutical, it will decrease REM sleep by about 80% and it'll decrease deep sleep by about 20 to 40%. And then alcohol does the opposite. It'll decrease deep sleep by about 80% and REM sleep by about 20 to 40%.

So if you take Ambien with alcohol, which is what almost all of them were doing I'd send them to get sleep studies and they came back with 99.9% stage two sleep, which has neither deep sleep or REM sleep. So how they were even surviving. I didn't know. But the thing that I had going for me was, the seals had already done amazing things in the war. They had this sort of celebrity status and I could call up anybody and say, Hey man I read your book. I saw your lecture.

I heard your Ted talk, blah, blah, whatever. And I'm the doctor for the west coast seal teams. I was wondering if I could come train with you, if I could consult with you on clients or whatever, and every single one of them were, overly generous with their time. And so I got to learn a lot really quickly. And and I realized in pretty short order that using the sleep drugs with alcohol could explain every symptom they had.

Now. I wasn't naive enough to think that it would explain every symptom they have, but I knew it would be a big mover. And so when I learned all this and I started talking to them and they, when they came in my office, man, they got, I got an hour long whiteboard lecture about what was going on with them. And I convinced them, to get off of the sleep drugs and every single guy who wanted to get off to sleep drugs, we got off the sleep drugs and that's where my sleep supplement came from.

Cause I had to give them something else and I worked with them. And so having that super motivated population worked to my benefit because like I wasn't thinking about making any kind of product or ever, I was trying to help them. So I was trying to come up with. What's deficient, where do I see this deficient in their labs and what could be playing a role in them not being able to sleep.

And so I came up with a stack of eight different supplements that they're having to go buy, pre-Amazon days, and they're having to go around to all the different health food stores in San Diego and get these bottles.

And it was a pain for them to travel with, because they're, eight bottles and some were liquids and some were powders and some were capsules and some came in 90 day supply and some came in 30 days supply and they had and it was just a pain and they kept haranguing me to make a product out of it. And I was like, I don't know how to do that. That's not what I do. So I finally I've, obviously I finally did that, I would work with them and say, Hey, you should take this.

And then they would, a dozen of them, we'd all be taking it and they'd come back and report to me. And we adjusted the dosage. We came up with this perfect combination. So I, I owed a lot to them. And then when I got them off of the sleep drugs and the alcohol before bed, their total testosterone would triple. Their free testosterone would go up four or 500%. Their inflammatory markers would go from outside of the high end of normal to like immeasurable.

I had guys getting personal records in the gym and in athletic events and stuff in their mid forties. And not for their forties, but like for their whole life, this is the best they'd ever perform. And honestly, I didn't think it was going to be that big of a mover. Like I thought it would be significant, but I didn't realize how significant it was. And so I, I just kept learning more and more about sleep and how we could optimize it more.

And I drank my own Kool-Aid, the more success I had in the clinic, I'm like, wow, this is more powerful than I thought. And once I started having some really good success with the individuals, then the command wanted to know what I was doing at that point. And then then I was lecturing to, whole seal teams about it. And I would go to they're taking me out to the training site to change how their sleeping environment, to put like red lights in and blackout curtains and, keep things cold.

And I was working with them on training schedules so that people could get mid-day naps when they're doing a hard day, hard training sessions and just had a lot of success and we brought in guest lectures. Guys like Rob Wolf and Chris Kresser and John Wellborn and mark Sisson and guys like that. And these were all health and wellness influencers which I didn't know anything about, I didn't know what a podcast was. I didn't do any kind of social media or any of that stuff.

I'd lecture with these guys share the stage with them. And then they were really interested in what I was talking about. So they would bring me on their podcast and invite me to health symposiums, and all this to lecture on sleep. And I became the sleep guy just over the course of just talking about that over and over again, and in those days, like I was the only one talking about it. There's that Dr. Bruce up in Canada and me, and that was it like, there was no one else talking about sleep.

And then now everybody's talking about sleep. So.

And that's an important conversation, even in peak performance in general, right? When we were

And it's the same thing that I was seeing whatever, 12, 13 years ago. And now it's a thing and now it's recognized and now it's treated as a syndrome, but. If you think about it, I probably chose the the two worst professions in the world for somebody who value sleep. Part of seal training is to go a week without sleep is not an organization that thinks that sleep is critical.

And when we do training and when we got on and real life operations there's a very realistic possibility that you've had two or three hours of sleep total two or three days for the previous two or three days before you go out and do a mission. It was just, the culture that if you just had a strong enough mind and you had the willpower and you wanted it and you were hard, you suck it up and you would do it. And now I work with entrepreneurs and C-suite executives. They have the same idea.

So, I'll get to sleep when I'm dead. Like I'm going to get up and work harder than everybody, and I'm going to have this liquidity event and I'm going to retire and Yeah. whatever, all the fantasies that come along with entrepreneurship. The reason that I treated 400 guys was because they all tell their buddies, right? They don't trust many people. It's a very closed off network. They don't let people in easily. They don't trust outsiders at all. They don't even trust all the insiders.

And so, when you have success, then people want to know what's going on? Like, why are you doing so right now? And then they talk to him and then that guy comes to see me. And then he tells his friends and they come to see me. And it just became a critical mass. But I was trying to convince a leader ship of this for at least a year before they took me seriously. And I'm not exaggerating when I say they literally laughed me out of their office when I was telling them.

That people's hormones were low because they weren't sleeping. And they thought that was the dumbest thing they'd ever heard in their lives. And the leadership was all convinced that everybody who had low hormones, it was because they had abused steroids at some point in their life. And now that's why they have these low hormones. And I'm like, that's not, what's going on. I'm telling you I'm the guy on the ground and it's not what's going on. And sure.

There's probably some cases of that, but, as young as these guys where they wouldn't have completely shut down like that anyway, even if they had been abusing steroids. And so, it wasn't an easy sale. And even now, like when I work with private clients, I have an annual program and I work again with C-suite executives and entrepreneurs and they know on the sleep guy. That's not all I do, obviously I do all lifestyle stuff and I do all PR I do everything performance. I do regenerative medicine.

I do hormones. I do peptides, nutrition, exercise, stress, stress, mitigation, all of that. But when people are coming to me to be my client, they know I'm the sleep guy. And when you apply to be in my program, there's a ton in there about sleep. And then when I start working with them, they're still resistant to it, yeah, I could tell him, I say, I can say, I want you to eat nothing but kale. And they'd be like, okay, let me take notes. Neat. Nothing but kale.

And I want you to exercise three hours a day. Okay. Exercise three hours a day, meditate two hours a day. Okay. Imagine, and I'd be like, I want you to sleep eight hours a night. Woah, Woah, Woah. Oh, I can't do that. No. I don't have the time to sleep eight hours a day. And it's getting better every year. I would have a lot easier time doing what I did now than I did a decade ago.

And then the other thing is from working with entrepreneurs and what's the worst marketing pitch in the world is that this does everything fixes everything, but it does. It literally does everything.

You'll feel really tired the next day. And you'll know it was because you didn't get enough sleep but maybe on the third day, definitely by the fourth day, you'll say, oh, I feel totally fine. On six hours of sleep. I think I'm doing as well as I've ever done before. But when we test you on that Nope, you're actually getting worse every single day. And you just feel like you're getting better. If I'm coaching on your fitness, you can feel yourself getting more fit. You can measure that.

You can see you're moving more weight or you're running faster, whatever you do. It's harder to quantify sleep like that.. So one of the things that's been done is they've compared it to alcohol and intoxication. And so they've done, coordination test and learning test and driving tests. And they'll compare people who are sleep deprived to people who are drinking and They've tried to correlate with, how sleep deprived do you have to be performing like someone who's drunk.

And then, when you've been awake this long, which like, what's the corollary of alcohol, like intoxication and it turns out to be not that far. So, the contract we're all born into one is that we're going to die. And then two is that it takes eight hours of sleep to recover from being awake for 16 hours. And doesn't matter if you like either one of those things they're true. When you start looking at how are you performing at that 16 hour mark?

Your performance is nearly at the drinking and driving limit. So you're when you've been awake for 16 or 17 hours, you're operating pretty close to a 0.08. That would be comparable to your performance. Obviously you don't have blood alcohol level cause you haven't slept, but like your performance is on par with that. When you've been awake for 24 hours, you skipped the night.

You perform just like somebody who's like legitimately drunk, like 0.1 -.13 if you've been awake for 48 hours, which happens all the time in medical training You're performing like somebody with a blood alcohol level of 0.2, which is fall down, stupid drunk. And that's how you're performing. That's how your cognition is your problem solving skills, your memory, your coordination reactive time reaction time, all of that. And so that's why I put that into TedTalk. And I actually wrote a blog once.

It said, why you should hire an alcoholic CEO or why your CEO should always be drunk or something like that. And I made the argument it's like, would you hire a CEO who admitted to drinking all day, every day? And he didn't get drunk. He just he had to calculate it out where he never exceeded the limit. was the surgeon, examples like, Hey, I only have a drink every two hours and I don't ever go above 0.08 alcohol level. And it seems ludicrous, right?

It's ridiculous to say that you would seek that out. But when you're hiring a CEO who sleeps six hours a night or five hours a night, that's exactly what you're getting. Literally getting that. Exactly. Another research that's been done people say I don't stay up for 24 hours, but if you sleep 6 hours a night for 10 days in a row, you perform exactly like somebody who hasn't slept for 24 hours.

If you're just sleeping six hours a night on average, every night after a couple of weeks, you perform just like somebody who hasn't slept for 48 hours, which again is like drunk, fall down, drunk, stupid, drunk, but you don't recognize it in yourself. And so when you say what goes wrong, when you don't sleep well, or you don't get enough sleep, everything goes wrong. To the degree, which it goes wrong, there's a lot of individuality on that, right?

It depends on one thing, like what your aptitudes are, what you're really good at, One of the arguments that you'll hear is this billionaire or whatever, this Uber successful guy claims that he only slept four or five hours a night. First of all, we don't know what that's true, but if it is true, How much better would that person have been if they did sleep every night. One of the things that people confuse is what can you survive with and what can you thrive with?

You can survive off of five or six hours a night. You'll definitely die a lot younger, but you can survive for quite a while that way. On average, you'll die about 12 years younger than somebody who sleeps well. And there's very few things that shorten your life by 12 years, right? That's a big enchilada. That's on par with cigarettes. So, we know that chronic sleep deprivation kills people earlier. We know that it impairs function, but again, it depends on what you're doing.

It's going to impair all of your function. But what you're measuring yourself by. Presumably everybody is moving towards a future that they want, right? So you have an idea of what your future looks like that you want, and you're moving towards that. So you're everyday, you're trying to make decisions that are getting closer to that. Your ability one to imagine that future and predict how to get to that future that's impaired, right?

And now you're taking steps, you're solving problems and trying to make take actions to move you towards that's impaired. And so whether you want to be an Olympic athlete or the smartest guy in the boardroom or the richest person in the world, or the, whatever your goal is, your ability to get there is diminished. And I can say it really simply like this, when I go to sleep tonight, the entire point of that is for me to to repair from today and to prepare for tomorrow.

And my brain and my body are going to use today as the template to prepare me for tomorrow. If I went to sleep tonight and I had a perfect night's sleep, my exercise was dialed in, my nutrition was dialed in, and my psychology was dialed in, everything was perfect. And I went to sleep and I repaired a hundred percent, everything I did today to deplete myself or damage myself gets repaired tonight.

And then my body stockpiled, everything, every kind of nutrient, everything that it needed for me to do tomorrow better than I did today. I wouldn't age. I'd be waking up tomorrow as good as I am today or maybe slightly better. And when you're a kid you're waking up slightly better, you're growing. And then about 25 to 35, it's a plateau.

And about after 35. Dropping off a little bit and you don't repair a hundred percent every night, you prepare 99.9, five or 99.98, whatever, but you're getting, and that little repair is it's diminishing you. It's diminishing your capabilities, whether it's neurological, muscular, emotional, cognitive, doesn't matter. Like you're diminishing. And that's where getting older means is that you're diminishing your your aptitudes are diminishing and your resources are diminishing.

And the reason being old is associated with death is because you don't have as many resources. You don't have as much aptitude to fight off and disease. The world's a hostile environment. Your world is trying to kill you every day and you're fighting it. And so as you have fewer resources and less aptitude, you're gonna be more likely to succumb to that disease or did to death of any costs.

If I go to sleep tonight and I want to repair a 100 and be as good tomorrow, or maybe slightly better tomorrow than I am today, I have to get eight hours of sleep, at least eight hours of sleep, probably. And if I choose to only sleep six hours because I want to get up early and beat everybody to the office, or I want to get up and get my work done before the world wakes up and get ahead on whatever I'm choosing to age 25% faster, but I'm also choosing to have 25% fewer resources the next day.

So if it takes eight hours to get to 99.9 8%, and I only sleep six hours, there's no way I got to 99.98, tomorrow is still comes at exactly the same time. And I still have to do everything tomorrow that I would have done if I slept eight hours. So if I don't have the resources, if I didn't prepare, how do I do it? Like how do I get them? Like, how do I get through tomorrow? I'll tell you, you release more stress hormones. And stress hormones are catabolic.

Catabolic means that I'm taking big, complex things and I'm breaking them down into simple things. And anabolic means I'm taking simple things and building complex things. So if I eat a steak and I chew it up and I digest it, it becomes amino acids. And those amino acids can go to build my muscles and I can have a bigger, stronger muscle tomorrow. That's anabolic.

When I'm under a lot of stress when I'm starving, when I'm sleep deprived, when I'm being pursued by an animal or chased by someone with a gun I'm catabolic, my body is actually using my body as a fuel source. So now I'm using my muscles as a fuel source to get amino acids, to other cells that need amino acids. So that's catabolic. So you can see there's a very distinct limit to being catabolic. You only have so many resources to eat.

And so if you're choosing to do that every day, you're one you're choosing to be suboptimal. You're choosing to impair your performance and you're choosing to not be your best. You're also choosing to age faster, and you're choosing to break yourself down and use yourself as a fuel source. Everything you get better at happens when you go to sleep. When you go to sleep, the first thing you do is deep sleep. Deep sleep is defined by a certain brainwave pattern the slower brainwaves.

And that's the most anabolic time in your life. Most people have heard of fight or flight is maximum stress, man, just literally the maximum amount of stress hormones your body can dump at one time. That's that happens when you're a car crash or a fistfight or somebody's shooting at you or threatening you, or, a big tiger jumps out of the bushes or something like that. All that matters is getting away from the tiger. So you're 100% catabolic.

You're gonna dump all your resources and to getting away from that threat, you'll be superhuman. You'll be faster, stronger, faster reflexes, bigger lungs, faster heart rate, higher blood pressure, higher blood glucose, everything like. But if you ran around like that all the time, you'd last, maybe two days, and then you die because you've depleted all your resources. So you don't want to be that way all the time. You only want to be that way when you have to be that way.

When you're in deep sleep, that's the lowest stress hormones you will ever have during any 24 hour period is when you're in deep sleep, you have almost no stress hormones, which allows you to have maximum anabolic hormones. that's when you're repairing your muscles. So that's when you're repairing your tendons and your ligaments. That's when your immune system is fighting off infections, parasites, viruses, bacteria, everything, So most people know when you lift weights, you don't get stronger.

You get weaker. It actually damaged the muscles. You tear those muscles apart. And then if you train hard enough, you actually rupture the muscles, like you will rupture muscle cells and kill off muscle cells. And then when you sleep, when you're anabolic and that's when all your anabolic hormones are being secreted, when you first go to sleep and you're in deep sleep, that's when your testosterone is being secreted. That's when growth hormone being secreted.

That's when DHA is at its highest, like everything is going to make you anabolic. And it's actually going to repair that muscle to be stronger and thicker so that it can do the work you did today. You can do that. And the next couple of days from now, and be a hundred percent repaired, if you did the same amount of work, you wouldn't damage that muscle cell nearly as much. Again, it'd be easier to repair. That's how you get stronger. And that's how you build endurance.

And again, that's when you're fighting off infections and repairing strained tendons, strained ligament, all that. So, and then the other thing you're doing is you're flushing all the waste products. So you can think of every cell in your body, as a miniature you., there's a time to be awake as a time to be asleep. And when those cells are awake, they're taking in nutrients, they're doing work and they're producing waste.

Some of that waste gets whisked away immediately, but some of it builds up. And so you do the same, right? You take in food, you do work, you produce waste in your bathroom. And one of the things that happens in the anabolic period is it gets rid of all the waste. It cleans the bathroom, right? Cleans the toilet out. And so you have you build. Essentially toxins, right? Those waste products are toxic and you build that up in your brain and you build it up in your muscles.

You build it up in your interstitium like the area between cells and all that has to be fleshed out.

And when you go to sleep, your brain opens up these canals and it allows the cerebral spinal fluid to get rid of the waste product and allows you to start replenishing the, the blood glucose and the neurotransmitters in your brain and repairing your muscles and repairing your damage tendons and fighting off infections again, boosting your immunity From deep sleep, you go up into REM sleep and then REM sleep. You start rehearsing, everything you learned, you rehearse everything you did that day.

You rehearse all the conversations you rehearse things that you already knew that's related to what you did today. And then you form connections, new neural connections between the information you knew that that you already knew, and the information that you brought on board and the experiences that you brought on board and you emotionally categorize things that were emotional.

So if you had to fight with your spouse about dirty dishes in the sink, that, the emotional content of that should be gone. As soon as that conversation has gone.

But if you don't sleep well and you don't emotionally categorize that well, then that will have a lot more impacts the next time you think about that, the next time that comes up And we think this is where a lot of PTSD comes from, because usually when people go through a traumatic event, they have problems sleeping for emotional reasons. And they had an emotional event, a traumatic event by definition as emotional. And so now they don't emotionally categorize that well.

And if it's not categorized that well, then it gets connected to everything. Instead of just connected to the few things that it should be connected to. And now, any stimulus that looks anything like that things is connected. Everything gets charged and you have a bigger emotional event around it. You're understanding like you and I are having a conversation right now, and we're looking at each other's facial expressions.

And second, we aren't thinking much about it, but we're going to rehearse this tonight. And if there was something off today that I didn't catch on consciously, I'll catch on some caught subconsciously to it tonight. And I'll learn to understand you better. I'll understand our conversation better. I can even learn tonight from things that I'm telling you. I can learn from that tonight, and I can connect that to new information and you do multiple cycles of this.

First sleep cycle is at 80% deep sleep, 20% REM. And then the next sleep cycle is about 50 50. And then the next sleep cycle is primarily REM and minority deep sleep. And then by the time I wake up, my last sleep cycle is like 80, 90% REM and only 10 or 20% deep. And so if I miss hours at the beginning of the night, I don't get deep sleep. If I wake up too early, I don't get REM sleep.

So I'm not repairing my brain or I'm not repairing my body either way, but you can see if you sleep drugs, you diminish those both. If you use alcohol, you diminish both of those. If you use sleep drugs and alcohol, you get rid of the, essentially all of it and you're backsliding every day. And so then even if you're sleeping eight hours. You're not getting the benefit of eight hours.

So yeah, the answer is everything's impaired and everything gets better when you sleep everything you want to get better at, you actually get better at while you're sleeping. You're not getting better at anything during the day. Everything you're learning today, that's just in your short-term memory. If you don't sleep, it's never going to go to your long-term memory.

It's never going to get connected to other information, and once it gets connected to other information, now you can truly work with it. Now you truly know that, and you can come up with novel thoughts and novel ideas of how to think about what you learned today and now. And that's where, being an expert in any field comes from is having multiple, really durable connections between disparate information that actually, is, contingent, which you just, the layman would know.

There's research if either you or I we're sleep deprived right now. If one of us slept six hours last night during our conversation, first of all, we'd have to know each other, if we knew each other pretty well already, we would we'd have a conversation today. And I would say, nah, Michael's a little off today. He's not quite there. Like his communication. Isn't that great. And you'd say the same thing about me and it doesn't matter which one of us is sleep deprived.

We'll both think that about the other one. So our ability to communicate our ability to recognize facial expressions, to understand what people are saying to pick up on nuance. All of that's diminished our emotional stability diminished our problem, solving skills to the prefrontal cortex area, right behind my forehead, above my eyes, back to my temple. That's our executive functioning. Which is exactly what it sounds like. We think of what an executive does for company.

That's what your executive functioning does plans for the future looks at complex problems comes up with multiple courses of actions, multiple ideas to compare works through those solves problems, right? Communicates those problems. All of that's impaired that's the area that's most impaired by sleep deprivation. Most of the rest of your brain is involved with movement and sensory. And so this area that makes us really smart is the most impaired region.

And it's also the region, this the most impaired by stress. So if I don't get enough sleep tonight, I've impaired my prefrontal cortex. Just by not sleeping enough. I didn't repair it enough. I didn't provide it with what it needs to do its job today. Now add on top of that. I told you if I didn't sleep enough, I'm going to need to release more stress hormones to get through the day. Okay? Just add the resources. Now I'm impairing my prefrontal cortex even further.

Now, if my stress hormones get up high enough, I'll have a hard time going to sleep. Because one of the reasons that you go to sleep is because your stress hormones go down. I told you deep sleep, the lowest stress hormones you'll ever have. If your stress hormones are halfway to fight or flight, you're not going to be able to fall asleep. And even if you do, you're not going to get the same deep sleep cause your stress hormones are too high. And now I'm having a hard time sleeping, right?

I'm having a hard time sleeping because my stress hormones are too high. And because I'm not sleeping, my stress hormones keep getting higher. And the thing about stress hormones is they actually make you feel pretty good. If you think about how do you feel. Not after a fight or flight, but if you've ever been in a fight or flight situation, you feel pretty damn amazing, right? Like you're strong and fast and focused and right. Like you're on right after that, you crash.

And that comes down and you start shaking and you're like all over the place. And one of the, one of the things about gestural mentioned, like you want your prefrontal cortex to be impulsive, and if you're in fight or flight, you don't want to be thinking it's too slow. You want to be completely reactionary. So we shut down the thinking center in fight or flight. So if we're running high stress hormones, we're shutting down our prefrontal cortex already.

But you feel pretty good on stress hormone. so if I only sleep six hours instead of eight, and I do that for a few nights in a row, my, my brain and body catch onto this, they say, oh, we're just going to do a big, we're going to do a big stress hormone flush at about six hours. And that way, when he wakes up, he's going to feel pretty good and then I'll feel pretty good. And then I think I'm doing well and I'm running on stress hormones all day.

And I think I'm doing pretty well, but if I objectively measured myself, I'd realize that my performance is actually declining. And even if my performance is staying the same, it's staying the same because I'm using my body as a fuel source and I'm eating myself up and I'm catabolic. So it's not sustainable.

And anything you care about sleep and communication, sleep and concentration, sleep and cognition, sleep and memory, sleep, and athletic performance, sleep and strength, sleeping, endurance, sleep, and parenting, whatever. I don't care what you, whatever you value, sleep and that, and read until you're petrified. Now, once you've scared yourself into submission, you're going okay. Sleep's the most important thing. Now you're ready. Once you're motivated. It's not that complex, right?

We're designed to sleep. We've taught ourselves not to sleep, right? So all you have to do is unlearn some bad things. You'll be able to go online and find tons of books and blogs and videos about all sorts of tricks and hacks and techniques and rituals and all this other stuff. But they all boil down to three things. So sleep hygiene, sleep rituals sleep routines, but it all comes down to three things. You think about the way your ancestors evolve, right?

This body that we're having right now is at least a hundred thousand years old, meaning that if literally, if we could find, that the sperm and ovum of some people frozen in the snow and we could revive those, they would have the, it would produce a baby. That looks exactly like us right there, cognitively everything. It would be exactly like modern day, man. And it's took millions of years to get here. So this is a hundred thousand year old version of this body.

And we have had electricity for about 120 years. All right. So do the math, it's a flicker, it's a blink of an eye that we've had the sleep environment that we have right now. So pre industrialization, it didn't make any sense to not sleep. Like why would you not sleep? What the hell are you going to do? You don't have light bulbs. Like you don't have televisions. You don't have anything to keep you like to do at night.

And there's no reason to be up before the sun comes up because you can't see well enough to do your work. So what, like, why are you going to go tend to your animals or tend to your farm or build furniture, whatever it is you do. Why are you going to do that when you can't see you? You wouldn't. So you would go to sleep, a few hours after the sun went down and you'd wait. Around the time the sun came up.

And if you there, believe it or not, there's still tens of thousands of hunter gatherers in the world who have never experienced electricity and they still live like our ancestors and we've studied these people. And what do we find? If you've ever been camping, you've experienced this, right? The sun goes down and a few hours later, you start feeling groggy and about two to three hours after the sun goes down, you really feel like sleeping.

And then you wake up right around the time the sun comes up a little bit before, a little bit after And hunter gatherers who've never experienced electricity, do that every single night. And they all live pretty equatorial. So there's not a whole lot of shifts. But obviously the further north or south, you li you, you move the longer the nights get during the winter.

And so, you might end up with some disparity, cause you're not going to, if you have a 14 hour winter night, you're not going to sleep 14 hours. But by and large, if you lived around the equator that's what happens. And so what happens when the, when the sun goes down, every, so every animal on this planet, definitely every mammal, but almost every form of life, including plants. They use the sun as cues. So like when to do "wake" things and when to do sleep things.

About 80% of our brain is dedicated to vision and processing and vision. So we are very visual animals and we can't see at night. And if you think about it, we're not very good predators without weapons. So 50,000 years ago, maybe we had a spear. There's not many things we could fight. You think about it without a weapon. I wouldn't fight an angry raccoon. We're just not that tough. We don't have claws, we don't have fangs. We're not super fast.

We're not super strong, so we have pretty fragile skin, so we're like we're not a great predator. So it made sense visual animal, we need to tuck away when it's at night. And so the only time any animal on this planet sleep deprived themselves other than humans is when they're starving or when they're being stalked, like they're being preyed upon.

So if they're being stalked, they're only going to sleep when they absolutely can't stay awake and they're going to sleep for a few minutes and get up and go again, when they're starving, they need to be able to go further and forge further for new food, for more food. And they're going to become more impulsive of under the stress hormones, because they need to take some risk taking behavior and maybe try eating something they've never eaten before.

And this is what happens with starving animals coming down to people's trash cans and stuff, in neighborhoods, because they're just going to take the risk because they're starving. And so animals will sleep deprived themselves if something's hunting down or if they're starving. So evolutionarily, it makes sense we would have done the same. And so it makes sense that our brain and body perceives us as possibly being stalked starving, if we aren't getting enough sleep. So the way it should work.

As the sun goes down and the blue light triggers some nerves in the back of our eyes that don't actually have anything to do with vision. All they do is sense blue light, presumably because the sky is blue. And so when the blue light leaves our eyes, that's our brains trigger that, oh, it's time for us to go to sleep. But obviously it's not a light switch. It doesn't flip out flip and we go to sleep. It takes hours to make chemical changes.

The first thing that happens is we released melatonin hormone. Most people have heard of, and that doesn't make us go to sleep that initiated the thousands of changes that have to happen for us to feel sleepy. And then we go to sleep and then thousands and thousands of more chemical changes happen to keep us asleep and to shift us in between different phases of sleep and then eventually wake us up. So it's super complex.

Your brain is just as active at night when you're sleeping as it is during the day. So when people ask me what goes on when you're sleep, I'm like what goes on when you're awake, a million things happen when you're asleep, a million things happen when you're awake. And so the blue light goes away. Melatonin gets released that triggers a bunch of reactions. One of the things that happens is you build up this neuropeptide called Gabba gamma-Aminobutyric acid.

And what that is it's a molecule that binds to the receptors on your neurons, and it makes it harder to fire those neurons. All that it means for us to be asleep is that we aren't engaged with our environment. And our brainwaves are changing. So if you think about it, your eyes still work when you're asleep, you can still smell, taste, feel sharp, pain, hot, right? Everything's still working. You're just not paying attention to it.

But by evidence of me being able to flip on a light and wake somebody up or shout someone's name and wake them up or shake someone to wake them up, everything's still working. They just aren't paying attention. So it's harder for me to get past the threshold of their attention. So that's all that being asleep means. And then your brain waves change and you start doing those different hormonal shifts and all that I was talking about.

So blue light goes down, melatonin, initiate Gabba starts shutting off our perception, our engagement with our environment. We can overcome that. If you've ever been really tired, like you've ever woken up in the morning and being like, I'm so exhausted, got to go to work, let me get up. I'm going to go to work and I'm going to come straight home and from work and I'm going to go to sleep. And one of your friends talk to you and you go and happy hour and you have a couple of beers.

What should make you more tired? And then all of a sudden, you're not sleeping at all and you should stay out till 11 o'clock or whatever. And you go home, go to sleep at midnight, you wake up the next day in the same boat Oh man. I'm just going to come home. How do you do that? You just overcame it, right? Because you're paying attention to everything. You had plenty of GABAA in your brain, right? Your brain was ready for you to be asleep, but you overrode it.

And then the other thing that happens when the sun goes down, I can't see very well. Sun goes down. There's not much for me to interact with right. 50,000 years ago, there's not buildings and lights and cell phones and stuff. What is there for me to pay attention to maybe a fire, like that's about it. So I don't have much to pay attention to. I'm not engaged with the, my environment, the chemical changes are happening in my brain.

And the other thing that happens when the sun goes down before we had HVAC, the world got colder. So I got colder. Those three things are all that there is the sleep hygiene, decrease the blue light, decrease the stimulation, what you're giving attention to and what you're interpreting and receiving and decreased body temperature. And this is what we do to little kids. You don't take a two year old kid.

Who's like banging on his drums and just throw him in a bed and turn a flight, walk out of the room and expect them to fall asleep. That he'll chase you right out of the room, right? Because you didn't prepare for bed. We know a little kids need a ritual. They needed protracted time to get ready for bed. We need the same thing as adults. We just don't think we need it. And so what do we do? The little kid? No, like no banging the drums. No banging trust together. No, no rough housing.

Now you're gonna, you're gonna work on puzzles. You're going to work with blocks or something. Ideally we even dim the lights down a little bit. We turn off the television, we turn off the noise. We start decreasing the stimulation of the environment and then we take them and do what we put them in a bath. Why do we put them in a bath? Their body temperature is 98.8 degrees. Do you have a kid in 98 degree bath? Now you give them like an 85 degree bath.

So we dropped their body temperature down and now we put them in the bed. And we read stories to them, but we don't read them war and peace and we don't read them, something crazy and stimulating or even super funny and entertaining. We read them something that they re they've heard a thousand times because they're trying to make them not pay attention. You just want it to be, that's why Dr. Seuss was like, soothing. Is this rhythmic thing you've heard over and over again.

It's just like lulling and just sleep. And, oh, when we get them out of the bathtub, what we put the ones that he's pajamas on them, we fill a powder. Why decreasing the sensation on their skin? And we put them in the bed and they're soft and it's everything's safe and smooth. And we read them the story. And then we dim the lights and reassure them that they're safe. And we love them are right outside the door. And then we flipped the light out and I walk out and they go to sleep.

We don't quite need that as adults, but we need some kind of routine. So you can block the blue lights in your eyes by, there's programs. You can put on your computer, your television, whatever. That blocked the blue lights there's light bulbs you can have in your house. Now that don't have any blue light in them. After dark there, you can wear the blue blocking glasses, or you could just not have light, right?

Whatever it is, but decrease the blue light in your eyes, decrease what you're paying attention to. So you can't wear blue blocking glasses and get on your computer and work on the last minute project to work until 9 59 and get in bed at 10 o'clock and wonder why you're not asleep at 10, 15, your brains going, man, you're stimulated here, right? So you've broken one of the rules. So decrease the blue light. However you do that, decrease your stimulation, what you're thinking about.

And if you're really stressed, I have a PDF on my website that talks about how do you get stress out of your life? Get stressed out of your sleep. That's it take an hour to explain and then decrease your body temperatures. For adults, it's put on some blue blocking glasses. If you're going to watch television, you don't watch the Texas chainsaw massacre.

You watch some kind of soothing, pretty, easy light programming turn the air conditioner on your house, start getting your body temperature down, give yourself an hour, 90 minutes or something to get ready for bed and then, get in bed. And one of the things I tell people, you should have two alarms. You should have alarm when it's time to get ready for bed, and you should have an alarm to wake up in the morning and those two are equal. They're just as important.

So if you don't prepare for bed, you're not going to get enough sleep. And then that morning alarm clock is going to be a lot harsher on your life, and so those two things balance each other out.

This many hours took this many vacations. There would be an ideal, but there's a reality, because like you can do everything, ideally, even if you had that kind of willpower and determination, there's just things that get in your way. There's other people's schedules. There's kids that have to go to school in the morning, whatever. So there's ideal and there's reality in between here. That's where we supplement by definition. It's supplemental.

So we try to do, I try to do everything I can with lifestyle. Let's get as close as we can with lifestyle. And then in between there. That's when we're taking nutritional supplements, that's already taken peptides as we're doing hormones. Maybe that's when we're using gadgets. There's the muse that like, you're just saying you helped you learn how to meditate, there's things there's things that you can do to, track and monitor your sleep. There's things you can do to help decrease your stress.

And, there's breath work, there's gadgets. There's there's even supplements. You can take, like you can take GABA, right? That neuropeptide I was telling you about. You can take that'll help settle you down. There's meditation, there's yoga, there's all sorts of things that you can do to, adjust that gap to try to get in there. My supplement is one of those things, right? So, I told you, melatonin is to initiator. We have to make melatonin and melatonin requires tryptophan.

Tryptophan becomes five hydroxy tryptophan with magnesium and vitamin D three, five hydroxytryptophan becomes serotonin. Serotonin could become melatonin, then initiates everything. My supplement is that pathway. So it's tryptophan, 5-hydroxytryptophan, vitamin D three, magnesium, and little light dusting and melatonin to initiate. And then enough substrate. You can keep making melatonin, so your brain can do the work. And then there's Gabba in my product.

For one, the reason I just told you, that's just a supplement, right? And ideally, if you don't need supplements, you don't use supplements. But depending on how big that gap is, you might need a lot of stuff. You can go so deep into the stuff you can say. I want to completely pitch black room because I don't want any chance of any light being stimulating to me. So you can buy $10,000 blackout curtains and, cover every little led in your room. You can get all the electronics out of your room.

You can sleep in an EMF tent. Do you have to keep it any type of, and you can have a grounding pad to ground you to the earth. You can go on forever with this stuff, and some people need that. And some people don't right. It's would it be better to sleep on a grounding pad for everybody? Probably. But does everyone need it? No. Would it be better to not have EMS? I don't know, I'm not that convinced by that cause lights and lights EMF, and not just visible light.

So there's all sorts of light coming to earth, from all sorts of celestial bodies. And we're bombarded by EMF all the time, whether electronics exist or not. So I don't know how important that is, probably we're polluting the environment. So probably it makes sense to put some controls over that. But again, that's just that's that supplemental, that's just going, and tropical thunder phrase, that's just going full retard. You're doing every little detail you possibly can.

And that's, that's to get from 99% to a hundred percent. I'm pretty much a Pareto distribution guy, it's 80 20 rule. I think is the realistic way for me and my clients to live the world. There are Uber disciplines, people that strive for that a hundred percent, their whole lives and more power to them.

If you park your car for four blocks from your office and you use the stairs and you mow your own lawn and wash your own car, clean your own house, you're active. That's enough. Like you can stay healthy forever. That way. If you have fitness goals, you exercise, if you sleep eight hours and you have. Low inflammatory non-inflammatory diet, this nutritionally dense, and you stay active and you control your stress and you can control stress through whatever works for you, Right.

That can be box breathing, meditation, gadgets, spirituality, community, all of the above, whatever combination of the above, all of those things. Again, that's the 80%, 80% of it right there. And that will get you pretty damn close to your ideal. And then you can figure out what you want to be better, right? Maybe you care more about your athletic performance than your cognitive performance. And so you skew that bridge towards that or whatever, but it.

It's amazing that I have a job because it's really not that complex, to be honest. If you just look back to how we evolved, just go back a thousand years and I'm like, all right, what did people eat? How did they work through the day? Like how active were they? How much did they sleep? And how, what was their stress level like, approximately that you're pretty close to your ideal,

And then my supplements on there as well, we have a tea, which is not really it, but it's like a nighttime drink. That's T like that's the supplement. We have some capsules for people who don't want the liquid. And then we have a kid's formulation. That's a Berry flavored kind of drink. The kids obviously is a lower concentration of all the ingredients, but they had the adult versions, the capsules and the teas are pretty comparable depending on whichever you prefer.

Yeah. And then I have links to other people's sites, other articles in journals and research and things like that on the site.