[00:01] Katie: Welcome to the Focus B show, where Katie Stoddart, high performance coach, interviews experts around the world in performance and mindfulness. Now here's your host. Katie.
[00:33] Katie: Welcome to a brand new episode of the Focus B show. I am very excited to have here today Tara Youngblood. Tara is a world renowned expert on sleep. She's a TEDx speaker and the founder of Chili sleep.
[00:51] Tara: Hello, Tara. Welcome to the show.
[00:53] Katie: It's a real pleasure to meet you and to have you here.
[00:56] Tara: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
[00:58] Katie: Sleep is such a fascinating topic. I'm sure you've read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walkers. There's so many different areas we could go into with this. The first place I'd like to begin is something we were talking about a bit offline, which is or off air, which is what rules can we break? And what rules can't we break when.
[01:18] Tara: It comes to sleep? Yeah. So that's really my sweet spot. I do a lot of coaching for professional athletes and we kind of talked about the fact that, unfortunately, that age group and like all of us, we all want to break rules. Sleep is kind of a Buzkill. You have to go to bed at a certain time and wake up. You're not supposed to eat or drink before 3 hours before you go to bed. And who wants to go partying with that person? So when you think about sleep, one of the things we really need to do is think about it in terms of your sleep ritual. Just like when you're putting little kids to bed, if you go back to when you were a little person, or if you put your kids to bed and you think about, well, you read them a bedtime story, you have a bath, you do all of those things. The ritual of going to sleep is actually something that you can duplicate no matter where you go. And if your body gets used to that and there's different triggers, I kind of talk about the pillars of sleep. It's your environment of light and sound and temperature, but then it's also managing stress and mindfulness. And when you put those together, you kind of figure out what is your recipe. Now, some people, a lot of the athletes, use a song, a particular song to get them pumped up. You'll see a lot of them as they warm up with their headphones on or they're managing that. And it's the same for sleep. So if there's a soundtrack lullabies, we think are for babies, but it turns out a soundtrack that sort of gets you in the mode for sleep can actually be really helpful. It sounds like a low level trick, but it actually works to sort of trick your brain into thinking, oh, I'm supposed to do this now. And tying all of those things actually helps. Sleep, temperature and light are different sensitivities for different people. So understanding again, there is something called a sleep switch. You can turn sleep on and you can turn sleep off. And so understanding what a change of light or a change of temperature and how much of a change is required for you. Some people it's putting on a pair of socks, some people it's all the way to an ice bath and there's lots of room in between, obviously. So it's about figuring out what's going to flip that. But once you have your list of your ritual or sort of things that you do before bed, then it really helps you kind of get in that mode and it really helps break through the I just can't fall asleep problem.
[03:26] Katie: I love this. It's combining all these different little tools, pulling them together in terms of the temperature or the sound or the lighting to ensure that we fall asleep easily. I'm wondering, do you also help people in terms of waking up? Because this is the other side of sleep. We always talk about going to sleep, but there are a lot of people who struggle with the other side after they've fallen asleep and actually getting up. Have you seen certain ways that also help people on the other side?
[03:57] Tara: Yeah, so my husband and I are co founders and a company that really focuses on temperature regulation. And as a physicist, temperature regulation and thermodynamics is sort of my background, so I always kind of do that and it is tied back to that sleep switch. So just like cooling down. And if you think about as humans, we evolved to be outside, right? So the last 100, 200 years, even if we've been in buildings, those buildings didn't have central heat. They still sort of adapted and changed to what was happening outside. So we're pretty used to it getting cool at night and then warming up in the morning. And if you think about it, that's really what your body's looking for is those cues to turn on sleep and off sleep. So if you want to turn off sleep, you actually just have to heat yourself up pretty warm. So if you get warmed up, some people will do that with exercise. They'll warm up their bodies and kind of get a burst of cortisol to do that. But if you're having a hard time getting out of bed, warming up or having if you have a digital thermostat, you can set or our product also sort of you can set a schedule, but if you warm yourself out of bed, your brain will automatically sort of be more awake. And that's one of the easy cues. Other thing to think about is a lot of people you're basically fasting while you're sleeping. And so if you have a tendency to be a little more susceptible to those highs and lows of sugar and low blood sugar levels, if you have a low glycemic, like you have some nuts or something before you go to bed, you'll actually wake up better in the morning because your body will be able to get through that fast time period better. And so that's a lot of the drag. And then there's obviously hydration gets into it too. Just on a very simple level, if you're highly dehydrated again because you've basically fasted from drinking for that period of time, you're going to wake up feeling kind of crappy little mini hangover. Basically you've dehydrated yourself. So make sure you're good on magnesium and thinking all water is not created equal. So I drink a glass of water may be okay, but if you're really low on some of those electrolytes, kind of think about electrolytes, not just water as hydration.
[06:02] Katie: Amazing. I've never thought of the electrolytes side of things and I love exercising in the morning. I definitely see the difference. Even when I don't fancy or I don't have as much time, I try and do just five minutes a bit because I feel sort of not awake if I don't. It's interesting what you're talking about in terms of temperature because I actually like to wake up afterward with a cold shower and that's actually cold and you're saying we need heat to wake up and I feel that the cold shower wakes me up. So I'm wondering how that sort of balances out in terms of temperature.
[06:36] Tara: Yeah, so cold is absolutely phenomenal. And what you've basically done, if you've done an interval training for your body for temperature when you've done that, so you've warmed up first and then you do cold. And so in an interval training kind of thing, if you've ever done any sort of workout with interval training, you can kind of push your body more and your body loves cold heat cycling. When you think about an injury and you've put hot and cold on it versus just icing it or just heating it, it's way, way more effective to cold cycle and to move through both of those if you can. Although a lot of people, again, you're trying to manage what people were willing or not willing to do. Some people don't like the idea of the cold shower but definitely thinking about what you can do to cold cycle being uncomfortable is really part of what our body needs to send those cues. And so when we think about comfort and kind of put ourselves in the place of comfort all the time, we're kind of doing ourselves a disservice. So anytime we can interval, we even think about sleep as one of those just bigger intervals, we're on and then we're off. That on and off is really vital to our bodies. So we got to manage our intervals throughout our lives.
[07:47] Katie: That is so beautifully put and it's so aligned with what I talk all about in terms of taking breaks and then being in flow, being in flow, working, taking breaks. I love seeing this in terms of intervals. I will think of that more. Let's go back to the falling asleep part, because I was curious about the getting up because it took me years to put together my exercise and then cold shower. That works really well. Now I understand even better why. And falling asleep, I feel one of the biggest struggles for most people is an overly active brain. Too many sorts. This is what I come across most. Would you confirm that this is the biggest struggle for people to fall asleep?
[08:23] Tara: Yeah, people generally with insomnia fall into sort of buckets of I have a hard time falling asleep. I either wake up in the middle of the night or I wake up too early. And that first sort of what happens at bedtime is it is it's sort of messy. That's why I like buckets, because it's not really a clean, neat, tidy thing that we're messing with. And so that is definitely one of the hardest ones. There's a couple of different ways to fix that or at least look at fixing it. One is stress is a monster, but it can be a good monster. So when you just worked out in the morning, you're actually getting cortisol. And that's a good monster, right? It's waking you up, it's making you more alert, cognitive best, all those big pieces. So it's friendly. It's a cute monster, like a puppet, like a kid's monster. But if it gets out of control, so then you have a bad conversation or you get cut off in your car or all those little things that add stress to that conversation, the monster gets uglier and uglier. And if we don't do timeouts, we don't take those intervals to control the stress throughout the day. Take a break, be mindful, do breathing. Even just a minute of breath work can really reduce that monster back down to normal levels in your bloodstream. And so if we get to bedtime and that monster is really big and overwhelming, then it is making our mind spin and we're not able to shut down. So stress is our first lift and you got to manage it throughout the day. But the second half of that is really thinking about those pillars of sound, light and temperature and what you can do to do that. And so we actually have another product. We're using it in Olympic athletes right now. And so the old grandma saying, well, keep a cool head. Turns out she was right. Keeping a cool head is a thing. And so cooling your prefrontal cortex, which is just your forehead for both of us that want to think about it, right there. Putting a cloth on your forehead that's cool will also help. So if you're really struggling, you just can't do that. We really recommend thinking about something. There's yoga, nidra, there's mindfulness again, all sorts of different ways of just taking a few moments to be mindful. But putting a cool compress on your head will actually help you get there a little bit faster. It slows it down just a little bit. Again, using that discomfort to actually trigger a different mode of hormonal release in your brain is an old trick. Our bodies love sort of some outer thing making us interval. Again, change the interval. Instead of being warm, I want to be cooler. That triggers our brain to settle down. So kind of using those in conjunction will help you settle that brain down at night.
[11:01] Katie: Amazing. I love what you just said about managing the stress throughout the day so that it doesn't accumulate at night. Because I feel that most people when they're struggling to fall asleep because they have too many thoughts, they think this is a problem on the moment. They don't realize that this is an accumulation of the entire day or weeks or months. So this is so insightful to actually realize how we start our day. I also read impacts how we fall asleep. Could you maybe say a bit more on this? I've read it in terms of exercise and it released certain hormones and then it made it easier for us to fall asleep.
[11:36] Tara: Yeah, it is a light switch kind of thing. When you switch off sleep, your brain and body all start working towards what that next interval is. And if you really think about it in intervals, you're going to hit the ground running and you're going to work hard all day towards that time frame. And that is sort of governed. And we started with what rules can you fix and hack through and what can't you hack through. That process of I'm working towards being tired, I'm working towards wanting to go to sleep is sort of a chemical physiological process that your body goes through. And so keeping in mind that what you do during the day and if exercise is definitely one of those things, it warms your body up, heats your body up, gets you moving that temperature, but also getting outside, getting light and sunshine trying to do that. And again, sound is one of those huge cues. It's the first sense that develops in the womb. So again, if you're musically inclined or like sound, having your morning routine include something that's going to get you going anytime. We can add that sense of ritual to what we're doing and one of the sort of big habit changes when you think about it. Habits are like we start out every new year going, okay, we're going to change all these habits. We think big. Right? Because you don't want to think, well I just want to change a little thing. But habits actually work really well if you anchor it to something you're already doing and it's small, it's not a big thing and you can add it in a very small way. So back to that breath work or back to the things that are going to make you feel good. If it's going outside and getting a little light. Do it as part of your morning routine. Anchor it to something you're doing. So if you go out to the car, it's getting your car to go to work or you're going to go commute, how much time can you spend outside instead? So do you walk an extra lap around the block first and then go to work? Or can you make something happen where you're adding just a little bit more? It doesn't have to be a big lift, but if you're thinking about, I'm going to start working on my interval and I have an interval back to interval training, it's all based on you time it if you've ever done that, you're going to time and you're going to go from here to here. Think about how much time you have working towards sleep and what are all the things you want to pack in and do and manage that so that it's the best interval it can be. So sleep can be also the best interval that it could be on the other side.
[13:54] Katie: Amazing. And how do you feel that sleep then relates to high performance? Because we're doing it almost the other way around. We're looking at what we do during the day, the intervals we have, the exercise, the fresh air, and that contributes to a great night's sleep. That's amazing. Now tell us a bit more why basically having such a good night's sleep and high quality night's sleep is so important for our performance the next day.
[14:17] Tara: Yeah. So again, back to when I work with athletes, there's been some great studies that have come out from a physical perspective. Injuries are reduced significantly. And when we think about it, all of us have had that flutzy day after we haven't slept well. That magnified obviously becomes way more important if you're a professional athlete, if that's your business of performing physically and cognitively, you have to be at your best. And so that is absolutely tied to sleep deprivation. But they've also had studies tied to financial day traders and getting sleep and that cognitive performance. But when you think about it over long term, because sleep is an investment, it's like creating a savings account when you're 20 and then by the time you're 60, you're going to realize those benefits you're investing every day in your future health. And so now every disease of the elderly, your Alzheimer's, your cognitive loss, even the physical autoimmune, chronic disease, chronic pain, are all being tied to this lack of sleep, specifically lack of deep sleep. And so if you didn't invest early on, it's not to say you can't get sleep and heal better, but the sooner you really think about that interval and the importance of it, and the sooner you kind of consistently try to create time for sleep, even if it's just the respective sleep, right? We kind of treat it like I'll do it whenever it's not that important. That rest interval is just as important as the performance interval and it allows us to perform even better. And so investing in that is you feel it the next day when you sleep well, but you also will feel it in 60 years when you sleep well.
[15:51] Katie: Wonderful. So it accumulates over time. And what are some practices that people can do to actually have better quality sleep? Deeper sleep.
[16:01] Tara: Yeah. So again, back to all of those temperature cues. Talk to your unconscious brain so temperature, light, sound, all talk to that unconscious part, just like your heart beating and all the functions you don't have to think about, all of those are triggered by some of those outside cues. So it's really important to keep those in mind as far as like, that's just an easy hack to make sure you're sleeping cooler, certainly in the first half of the night, that really helps deep sleep. The stress is absolutely there. So if you haven't heard of Yoga Nidra, it's a little different kind of yoga. It's a specific practice. What I like about it is you basically lay like a pencil and you work through you can Google it, there's like YouTube videos and all sorts of things out. There plenty of opportunities, but it's literally you're tensing and relaxing your muscles as you work through your body and you're just thinking about being in the moment. So that actually for doing that for 2030 minutes can get you a lot of the rest and recovery that you would from deep sleep. Even so, it's really important to think about that relaxing part of sleep. And so giving it time, respecting it, and making sure that you've put all those right rituals in place and work yourself to this is my recipe. You even mentioned it like, well, I worked through years to get my right recipe. That right recipe is really worth its weight and gold because that's where, okay, I traveled, I did this, it didn't work. But go back to the recipe and have like, okay, this is what really works. When you get stuck, you have somewhere to go to and the work you need to do to kind of test and figure out for yourself what's right really is worth it because then you always have that tool in your toolbox to go back to.
[17:42] Katie: And the Yoga Nidra, do you recommend it before falling asleep to increase the quality or as a break during the day also?
[17:51] Tara: Any and all of the above. It's an alternative. I feel like mindfulness and meditation is something that's become really popular and some people are like, oh yeah, that works. And immediately they figured out the right thing. For a lot of people, it's kind of confusing. And how do I do that? There's some apps that walk you through yoga Nidra seems to be one where if you're not sure, especially if you're a physically moving person, like if you physically move to learn, physically move to do something. It allows you to kind of be very still, especially in the middle of the night is another good one to go back to. Instead of getting up, you're basically kind of focused on settling yourself back down. So it's just another tool in the toolbox. Looking at what that is instead of counting sheep and counting sheep can sort of work. That's another one. It's almost like the chanting that you've heard monks do back to that. That sort of chanting, that repetitive, like, pick a word, pick a thought, and repeat it over and over again until your mind clears. There's so many different ways of doing meditation and mindfulness, it's almost overwhelming. So find something that seems to speak to you enough, like a yoga nidra, and then you'll probably expand and want more. But that one seems to be a good, like, oh, yeah, okay. I actually felt different after I did it. For even people that just listening to an app or listening for a minute of someone talking to you doesn't feel that relaxing. You haven't settled yourself down. That physical part of it, I feel like, helps some people bridge that gap.
[19:21] Katie: Absolutely. And the whole meditation before going to sleep and actually even upon waking up, I also find it's a really nice way to start the day before my exercise and my cold shower, because it centers yourself and helps you with that clarity. I thought that you studied Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, also neuroscience and psychology. So that all ties in very nicely. I think that's a really nice way to sort of be able to relax before actually falling asleep. I'm curious, why do you feel that people don't prioritize their sleep as much as they should? Because we talk about it a lot, we read about it a lot, and yet a lot of people still are reluctant to dedicating that time to sleep.
[20:04] Tara: Yeah, so actually, I encounter this a lot with coaching, and there's an approach to insomnia that is actually used psychologically all over the place. But it's CBTi, it's cognitive behavioral therapy. And so much of what goes into sleep is our own self sabotage like anything else. Right. What's going to hurt us very rarely is some outside force. It's our own thoughts and actions and behaviors getting in the way and stopping us. And so someone that has chronically got insomnia are probably, again, they haven't figured out where to go back to for their ritual. They often feel like they're not successful. A lot of them are high achieving individuals where they're really good at it. And a lot of them have even done the sleep tracking, and then they got a bad score, and they're like, okay, but I'm an A person. I want to get 100% on everything, and I'm getting sixty s, and I'm terrible at this. I'm not going to give time to something I'm terrible at. None of us do. If you're really chronically terrible at something, you are not going to invest time in it. So that's where we have to make that mind flip of like, I can be good at this. I was good at it as a baby. I figured this out at some point. Sleep wasn't as hard as it is today. Rewind figure out where that is, find the value. It's amazing. Just a small win in sleep will change that altogether. Like example after example of like, okay, I woke up in the middle of night and I was hot and sweaty, and I did that for decades. I only went to bed at like one or two in the morning because it was going to be a miserable experience. I hated it. But as soon as they didn't get up hot in the middle of the night and they were able to sleep, then suddenly like, well, I go to bed at nine. Now I read before I go to bed because sleep is amazing. If you've had an amazing night's sleep, that is amazing. It just is. It just feels great. There's really no other duplicate for it. So when it can feel amazing consistently, then you generally treat it better too. But that's just human nature of if I don't like it, if I'm terrible at it, we don't do it. We don't want to do it.
[22:06] Katie: I never thought of it from that perspective, that the high achievers want to also be great at the sleep, and if they're not, then they're even more reluctant to do it because it doesn't actually suit them. I want to ask a quick question about something I heard, which is that if we wake up during the night or if we're struggling to fall asleep, it's better to leave the bed in the bedroom and do something else. Read a book, another room, and then come back because we want the bedroom to be associated to the place where we sleep. Is this true?
[22:36] Tara: Yeah. So again, back to what we think. Our behaviors and thoughts and actions really govern a lot of that. Don't turn your bed into a place of torture. Don't have it be the place where you're not successful. Don't have it be other things. Again, the confusion of what that space is, it goes back to that ritual mentality. If you precondition your body that this space is going to be used for sleeping, it'll treat it for sleeping. And if you don't use it for that, then you should get out. That's where the yoga nidra, even for just ten minutes is a good bridge. So you haven't totally given up on sleep. You're going to focus on meditation and mindfulness and say, I'm going to do that. But if you're truly wide awake because you've got, I don't know, some project do at work the next day and you can't get it out of your head, at least writing down the outline or trying to dump that out of your head is probably worth it. Get it out of your head. Keep the bed not for sort of spitting on things, but keep it for actual sleep is really a big part of that success. Huge success of just keeping the bed for sleeping. It doesn't sound complicated, but keeping it for sleeping is really valuable.
[23:43] Katie: Amazing. I feel we've touched on already so many topics. We're slowly approaching the end of today's podcast. What would be one key piece of information that we haven't covered yet in terms of sleep that my audience could benefit from implementing to improve their quality of their sleep or to improve their sleep ritual?
[24:03] Tara: Yeah, I think we've covered a fair amount, but to just almost recap that there are pillars of sleep as far as those key elements that are going to influence your sleep and its sleep outcome. And so go back to this sense of what is my sleep ritual? What is something I do when I go to sleep? Keeping the bed for sleep, all of those rules make it sound heavy, but actually what they do is give us a framework to be free and not think about it. And so when you've created a ritual, you're actually then free to not think about it. And it's just something you do. Kind of like brushing your teeth. Once you've been trained as a little person, you brush your teeth before you go to bed. It shouldn't feel like, oh my gosh, it's a terrible thing. I don't want to do that. Those rituals, those habits that we have, once they're in place, it makes everything easier and you don't have to stress about what you're going to do or not do.
[24:52] Katie: We become very rebellious as we get older, losing these habits, and then we have to learn to be good again and go back into how we were as children. Wonderful. Tara, this has been so insightful. I've loved so many of the different aspects that you've shared and how you combine the different knowledge from the different fields, like putting the cold cloth on your forehead to make you feel colder before falling asleep. So those tips were great. So thank you so, so much. Wonderful topic. And thank you for being on the show today.
[25:23] Tara: Yeah, thank you for having me. And if anyone in your audience has questions, definitely reach out. Our website has lots of blogs about this, ChiliSleep, Co, UK, and you can go and peruse more if you want to learn more information and they have links to the studies and things that go behind that too.
[25:43] Katie: Fantastic. I'll put all of this in the show notes. And yes, please do get in touch if you have any questions on Sleep to Terrace. She's a world renowned expert on sleep and has worked with presidents and athletes, et cetera. So you will have your answers. Okay, thanks once more, Tara. It's been fantastic. Thank you.
[26:01] Tara: Thank you.
[26:05] Katie: Thank you for listening to the Focus B show. We would love to hear your feedback. Let us know in a review how this episode inspired you. Keep buzzing.