Bryan Johnson's Case for Becoming a "Professional Sleeper"
Bryan Johnson
In this episode of the Don't Die Podcast, Bryan Johnson, Blueprint co-founder Kate Tolo, and Johnson's lead physician Dr. Mike Mallin argue that sleep is not something that simply happens when you lie down. Johnson calls it "the number one performance-enhancing drug" and says it deserves the discipline people give to a job or a craft. His central claim is practical. Most of the complexity of sleep can be reduced to one controllable number: your resting heart rate just before bed. The conversation moves between his protocol, the hosts' own sleep failures, and some candid disagreement about whether tracking helps or hurts.
The hosts said listener feedback asked for practical tips up front, so they planned to lead with the protocol and follow with the science. In practice the episode stays mostly conversational and ends with a condensed list of rules.
A bad night in Las Vegas
The episode starts with a failure. Johnson and Tolo had just spent two nights in Las Vegas, and both slept badly the first night. Tolo pointed to the unfamiliar hotel room. Johnson traced his bad night to food. The pair had brought half their day's calories with them and planned to find vegetables for the rest. Several unexpected "emergency" events pushed their meal to 4 or 5 p.m., leaving him with a choice between fasting and eating late. He "rolled the dice" and ate. He says it raised his heart rate and "did everything I talk about non-stop," wrecking his sleep.
Mallin asked whether they had hit a Vegas buffet. Johnson said the meal was hummus and raw vegetables, "very, very clean," and it still had a large effect. Mallin's summary was that digestion keeps you awake regardless of what you're digesting. Johnson and Mallin both said they were short on sleep while recording and joked that the episode should therefore be technically worse than earlier ones.
Why sleep maps onto everything else
Johnson argued that people usually link sleep to health but rarely to income, promotions, finding a partner, or raising children, and that "everything you do in life maps back to sleep."
Mallin, a former emergency medicine physician, said sleep deprivation was built into his life through medical school, residency, and ER work, and that he is "five years into playing catch-up." He described extreme sleep deprivation as the sinking feeling of waking too early for a flight, "magnified 10x." It came with an overwhelming urge to put his head down wherever he was, half-listening to a patient or nurse while wanting to close his eyes. Johnson and Tolo pointed out the irony that the medical system expects the people society trusts most with its health to neglect their own. Mallin added that the data shows physicians make poor choices when sleep-deprived, and the system encourages it anyway.
Tolo told of a friend who went to a prestigious school with a mandatory schedule that forced students into very little sleep. Johnson then described his children during a split-custody arrangement. They sometimes had homework until 11 p.m. or midnight and got up around 5 a.m. for early-morning seminary at their church, leaving them with four or five hours of sleep. He says he begged them to sleep and told them he didn't care about their grades. The evidence he had found suggested lost sleep would impair their emotional capacity now and in adulthood, because they would miss an important developmental phase. He describes being "one step removed" from their care as grueling, and says he felt powerless. His point was that sleep is about the well-being of others as well as your own.
The Kernel willpower experiment
At Tolo's request, Johnson described a small study done with Kernel, the brain-interface company he founded. He described the device as helmet-like and working somewhat like a fingertip pulse oximeter. It uses light to measure oxygen levels in the brain, which serve as a proxy for neural activity. The study was N=1 and used only Johnson as the subject. It compared his deep sleep with his performance on a go/no-go task, in which he had to stop himself from pressing a button when a red image appeared rather than a green one. That task measures impulse control.
He reports that on nights with roughly 35 to 45 minutes of deep sleep, compared with an hour and a half to two hours, his willpower "plummeted." He connected this to everyday temptations like a pint of ice cream or a bag of chips, arguing that without deep sleep your ability to resist whatever your vice is will be very low. He described a domino effect. Poor sleep weakens self-control, which feeds more poor sleep.
Mallin added that the frontal lobe, which governs decision-making and willpower, is where performance drops first under sleep disruption. That affects driving and life-or-death decisions in a hospital as much as a button test. He cited a study, from memory, showing that the effects of sleep deprivation resemble being legally drunk. He noted that society still lets truck drivers and physicians work while sleep-impaired and doesn't monitor anyone's sleep to decide whether they can do their job.
Mindset: treat bedtime like a meeting
Johnson opened his protocol with the observation that nobody is ever taught how to sleep. People take driving lessons, sex education, algebra, and history, but no course anywhere teaches sleep. He says he tried to become an expert himself, achieving what he calls eight months of perfect sleep as measured by a wearable, partly to show it could be done. Along the way he found things he hadn't seen written anywhere. His claim is that the body responds "in a very predictable way" to what you do, so sleep need not remain a mystery.
His first principle is to treat sleep like anything else you take seriously, "a hobby, your job, being a parent," and try to perfect the craft. His analogy is the meeting. If you arrive at a 9 a.m. meeting at 9:04, you apologize, because being late disrespects other people's time. If your bedtime is 10 p.m. and you get in bed at 10:04, nobody apologizes to themselves. At 11, midnight, or 2 a.m., most people don't care at all. He argues you should bring the same social rigor to bedtime and see even a few minutes' lateness as disrespect toward yourself. Otherwise sleep becomes something you "just push around."
Tolo added two practices. First, she has heard of people setting an alarm for bedtime rather than for waking, though she said none of the three hosts does this. Second, she and Johnson don't book flights that compromise their sleep. On a trip to Honduras, they flew to Miami, slept a night there, and continued the next day rather than arriving around 2 a.m. Her view is that these rules seem impossible until you accept sleep as the top priority, after which you quickly build systems around it.
Resting heart rate before bed as the anchor metric
Mallin laid out the physiology. Resting heart rate is a marker of parasympathetic, "rest and relax," nervous system activation and of sleep adequacy, and the goal is to stay at or slightly below your baseline. Aerobic fitness lowers your baseline. Youth tends to as well, though Mallin said age isn't strictly predictive. People usually lose fitness and restfulness as they get older, so the number creeps up. He noted that devices like Whoop typically report the lowest heart rate during sleep. Johnson instead focuses on his heart rate before sleep.
Johnson said his sleep depends on his resting heart rate before bed, and he has "tried to structure my entire life around" it. Leaving exercise aside as a separate topic, anything that raises the pre-bed number is bad and anything that lowers it is good. Eating close to bedtime raises heart rate and lowers sleep quality. So does a fight right before bed, and so does working on screens in a stressed or aroused state. Following Mallin, he framed each as activating the sympathetic nervous system through stress, arousal, or the metabolic work of digestion. The one number decides what he eats, when he eats, and how he winds down. That includes working through stress and worry to avoid rumination, and keeping a 30 to 60 minute screen-free block before bed for walking, meditating, or reading, to separate the workday from rest.
The hosts dug into his numbers. On the Tuesday night in Vegas, after eating late, his pre-bed heart rate was about 53 bpm. He says he's typically around 46 to 47 at that point in the evening and about 44 once his head is on the pillow. He checked his lowest overnight reading from the previous night and found it was 42. Mallin found it remarkable that Johnson sits only three or four beats above his overnight low before sleep. He attributed this to the wind-down routine, avoiding late exercise, and a pre-bed fasting window he estimated at six or seven hours, which Johnson confirmed. Mallin's view is that the average American doesn't reach their lowest heart rate until 2 or 3 a.m., while Johnson is "pretty much already there" at bedtime.
Tolo described a "pre-sleep Bryan" who shows up during the wind-down. She says she has seen a clear difference between days when he follows his routine closely and days on the road when he doesn't. She suggested that the gap between pre-bed and overnight resting heart rate might reveal how well someone followed their sleep protocol that day. Mallin agreed and speculated that the evening number could be a better overall metric than the overnight low. His reasoning was that it measures how prepared you are for sleep rather than how well you slept. He noted what it misses: a poorly set-up bedroom or disruptions during the night wouldn't show up in it.
Does measuring sleep create sleep anxiety?
Mallin raised the main objection of the episode. He asked Johnson whether he experiences anxiety. Johnson said his anxiety takes the form of a mind that keeps grinding on a problem until it feels properly addressed. Mallin then said that if he personally checked his pre-bed heart rate and saw it elevated, he would conclude he was "guaranteed to have a bad night of sleep." That worry would cause the bad night. He noted that sleep anxiety is common, and for people who "run a little hotter," the check could become a self-reinforcing loop.
Johnson admitted that on Tuesday night he told Tolo, "Oh no," because a 53 bpm reading in an unfamiliar room without his cooled mattress meant trouble, and a bad night followed. He allowed that he might have psyched himself out. His own view, though, is that after years of close attention his body feels "so algorithmic" that he can almost predict his heart rate, stress, REM, and deep sleep from his inputs, so the result feels inevitable rather than self-fulfilling. He agreed with Mallin that many people avoid wearables because a bad morning score makes them feel terrible all day, "because the algorithm told them." He called it a valid concern that he doesn't personally share.
Tolo said she doesn't loop much herself. When she does wake up anxious about a bad score, she found that if you keep going with the process, the anxious attachment to the data eventually fades and "you just live your life." She acknowledged she may be less prone to looping than others.
Johnson explained why he promotes the metric despite the risk. The people he talks to feel overwhelmed by health questions like how much protein and fat, whether seed oils are good or bad, and the cholesterol debate. They don't know whom to trust and feel stranded "on an island." Pre-bed resting heart rate is where "you can anchor your boat." Unlike those debates, it's a variable you largely control, and it forces the decisions that matter most. Do you eat ice cream or cookies on the couch? Have a glass of wine, smoke weed, work until the moment you sleep? He says the most common thing people tell him after getting a wearable is that they discovered alcohol wrecks their sleep. That leads to other connections, such as eating late leads to poor sleep, which leads to feeling bad. Tolo compared this to wearing a continuous glucose monitor, where you collect data until you see which inputs matter.
What wrecks each host's sleep
Tolo asked each host to name the single thing that hurts their sleep most. Mallin, after some pressure, admitted it was intense television, specifically The Pit on Max, a new emergency medicine drama. He says watching it is like "reliving all of the trauma in my adult life." He finds it somewhat therapeutic because it forces him through experiences he had "walled off," such as the families and patients who died. Watching it right before bed "jacks me up." Asked whether it would hit the same at 11 a.m., he said he's in work mode then and doubted he could open up emotionally enough to connect with it.
He described what it does to his data. Heart rate variability drops. He briefly misstated its direction and then corrected himself to say higher HRV indicates less sympathetic activation and is the ideal. Resting heart rate rises, and his lowest heart rate of the night comes much later. The same happens with alcohol or a late meal. Any sympathetic activation, whether exercise, a meal, work stress, midnight emails, or The Pit, takes time to settle, and you can see it in the overnight trend. He described the ideal curve as a "hammock": slightly higher at the start, fairly flat, lowest around the middle of the night, then gently rising as the body prepares to wake. The typical American pattern, he said, looks more like a mountain followed by a valley just before waking. Tolo said she would start checking when her lowest heart rate occurs.
Tolo and Johnson both named food. Tolo said people often tell her they already eat dinner at 5 p.m. but don't count the snacks they have before bed as part of their ritual. Johnson named stress and food. He said many people imagine his life is lavish and carefree, when in his words it's "brutal," with hard things happening constantly. His mood is usually stable, but when a stressful issue gets intense and he can't reach resolution, either by accepting it or by solving it, it hits him the way The Pit hits Mallin.
His takeaway from Tuesday was an update to his own protocol. He'd rather go hungry and miss calories than eat late. He described Blueprint as constantly evolving, with daily self-experiments checking whether old assumptions still hold. For example, after 23 days of sauna use he had been testing whether improved cardiovascular fitness would let him eat a bit later without the same effect. His conclusion now is a hard cutoff around noon or 1 p.m. He said he still had a slight headache on the day of recording despite a good night's sleep the night before, because it takes a couple of days to recover from one bad night.
Measuring your pre-bed heart rate and the 10% goal
Johnson referenced an on-screen chart of how much various factors raise heart rate. Alcohol before bed adds 5 to 10 bpm, anxiety, stress, and rumination add 5 to 25 bpm, and late-night exercise adds 4 to 10 bpm. Tolo joked that The Pit should be added, and Mallin said it falls under anxiety, stress, and rumination.
Tolo asked how he actually takes the measurement. Johnson lies down with his head on the pillow and takes a few deep breaths. Breathing can bring his heart rate down within about 60 seconds. He noted that arousal from a movie, a fight, work, or an intense social situation takes 30 to 60 minutes to settle and is very hard to speed up. With a wearable that shows real-time heart rate, read the number. Without one, find the pulse at the side of your neck, count beats for six seconds, and multiply by 10. He expects most people to land somewhere between 50 and 70 bpm.
His challenge is to take a baseline tonight and aim to lower it by 10% within 30 days. His example was going from 60 to 56 bpm. You do this by learning, intuitively or with data, what raises and lowers your number. His condensed guidance: with a 10 p.m. bedtime, finish eating by 6 p.m. and start winding down at 9 p.m., with screens off and a walk, meditation, breathwork, a conversation with a friend, or a book instead. Use red and amber lights rather than blue. Watch stimulants: with a roughly six-hour caffeine half-life, which he noted varies by person, a 4 p.m. coffee leaves half a cup's worth in you at 10 p.m. ADHD medications can also raise heart rate. Don't fight right before bed. Have it in the morning, when both people are rested. He called pre-bed heart rate "your best accountability partner," because knowing a vice will push the number up helps you resist it.
He added a cultural argument. The idea that successful people don't sleep is "foolish." In his view, successful people who skip sleep succeed despite it and would do better if they slept.
Tolo pushed back from experience. She says she can move her resting heart rate only a couple of beats up or down, and a change that large has taken her more like six months. Johnson suggested she is already dialed in, and that most people have low-hanging fruit they aren't aware of, so 10% is achievable for them. Mallin agreed, saying nearly everyone he talks to still eats late, watches tense TV, and answers work email until 9 p.m.
Bryan's ten rules
Johnson then gave a condensed version meant to be shareable as a two- or three-minute segment:
- Become a professional sleeper. Take sleep as seriously as work and invest in the craft.
- Eat your last meal at least four hours before bed. Experiment with longer gaps. He eats about eight hours before bed. Timing and content both matter: heavy foods like pasta, bread, or pizza keep heart rate elevated longer. "Eat earlier and lighter."
- Have a 30 to 60 minute wind-down routine. You can't finish work and fall asleep 30 seconds later. He avoids screens entirely and keeps a book in hand. He cited evidence that reading a book is as effective as a sleep pill. He acknowledged phone addiction and said to recognize it and set the phone aside.
- Get morning light fast. He gets it within about five minutes and said the window is roughly 20 to 30 minutes. Because he wakes around 4:30 a.m., before sunrise, he uses a 10,000-lux light. Otherwise, go outside. He says this sets the circadian rhythm.
- Keep a consistent bedtime. Exceptions happen, but when you can, go to bed at the same time. During his eight months of perfect sleep, his bedtime was 8:30 p.m., kept to within about a minute. He says he fell asleep almost instantly and calls what the body does with consistency "amazing."
- Be mindful of stimulants. This covers caffeine, given its half-life, and other stimulants like modafinil. Take them earlier in the day.
- Avoid blue light in the evening. Turn screens off, or use tools like f.lux or a phone's red mode, and favor red and amber lighting. He says blue light suppresses melatonin.
- Keep the room cool. He cites roughly 69 to 71°F. He uses an Eight Sleep temperature-controlled mattress and says sleeping hot is very hard.
- Create a peaceful environment. Place your bed away from noisy neighbors or streets where possible. A sound machine or earplugs can help, though he warned these can themselves interrupt sleep.
- Use a wearable. He named Apple Watch, Oura, and Whoop as all fine. The purpose is to build intuitions about how daily life affects sleep. He called this the best thing he has done, adding that most of health is "lifestyle and habits," not supplements or therapies.
Mallin's and Tolo's additions
Mallin said he liked that Johnson ended on personalization, since some rules will matter more for some people than others. He added three more. First, charge your phone away from the bed, in another room or across the room, so you aren't tempted to check it one last time. Second, journal as part of the wind-down, whether that's writing down worries, gratitude, or just the day. He likened the pen-on-paper feel to holding a book and said it helps people set down the day's anxiety. Third, a technique from CBT-I, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia: reserve the bed for sleep and sex only. He said it helps people with true insomnia, who can't fall asleep or wake during the night, by training the brain to associate the bed with those activities, and it can benefit anyone.
Tolo added what she called the most painful one: sleep separately from your partner, even if only in a separate bed in the same room. She says it has made an enormous difference in her life, while acknowledging not everyone has the space.
The stigma of sleeping apart
Mallin said he struggles with this one. He shares a bed with his partner, who has told him several times that he disrupts her sleep. He traces his resistance to childhood. His grandparents slept in separate rooms, and he came to associate that with a relationship that had broken down. He called the association irrational but deeply ingrained, and suspects many people feel the same way. Tolo said she once held the same perception but found that "nothing changed about the relationship" and her sleep improved. She suggested he try it for a few days. Mallin said they did sleep apart for about a month after his shoulder surgery, but he was in an uncomfortable bed without his Eight Sleep, so it didn't sell him on the idea. The hosts joked that the podcast was really therapy for the three of them.
Johnson recalled, from his reading, that the evidence is mixed: some people sleep better alone, while others genuinely sleep better with a partner. He had initially assumed everyone would benefit from sleeping apart because of mismatched bedtimes, nighttime waking, and sounds. Mallin wanted to know whether the studies compared people after a normal adjustment period or were short-term, and proposed a dedicated episode with a sleep expert. Asked about his own history, Johnson said he has no data from past relationships. He does remember having three to six wake events a night back then, compared with zero to one now. He says that at 47 he is getting the best sleep of his life, even though sleep comes more easily in your teens and early twenties, when "you have all your biology in your favor."
Pills, professional help, and mental health
Johnson acknowledged that some people with insomnia or serious sleep problems need professional help. His criticism is that American culture reaches for a pill first rather than lifestyle. Because no one teaches sleep, most people haven't tried the basics: when and what they eat, alcohol, stimulants. He advised giving the body a few weeks to adjust to a new rhythm, and seeking other solutions if problems persist.
He extended the argument to mood disorders. He said the episode could just as well have been about depression and anxiety, because nailing sleep is the first line of defense for both. He acknowledged the difficulty from his own experience. When he was depressed, sleep was very hard, and he was overeating to cope with his symptoms. Still, he said, the first step is getting basic biological processes like bodily repair in place. That is why he believes sleep should be the top priority for "everybody on planet Earth."
Closing: "I just wish somebody would have been in my life to tell me"
Johnson's final remarks were personal. He said he wished someone had told him these "very obvious" things and wondered why he had to work through it alone for 20 years, going through "so much pain." He said he hates seeing others suffer when the solutions are so reachable.
The episode closed with Mallin's unresolved Pit problem. He is on episode three of what he believes is around 15. He has no plan, since 11 a.m. doesn't work and he's "not sure that I'm ready to trash my sleep for it." The hosts suggested a Saturday slot around 4 or 5 p.m., and Mallin joked it would need to be followed by two hours of meditation.
So sleep, a lot of people just are whimsical about it. They think, I'm just going to lay my head on the pillow and it's just going to happen or not. But you really need to invest in establishing the habits and hygiene around this. You need to think about sleep as you would anything you take seriously. You need to try to perfect the craft.
Actually, I'm super interested for each of you. What do you think has the greatest impact on your sleep negatively? Like if you could choose one thing that's like the highest. I'll share first. Mine is like intense television. So like, you know, like, what are you watching, Mike? Oh, nothing right now. If I watch it... Mike, tell us more. Okay. All right. Fine. Fine.
If you realize sleep is the number one performance-enhancing drug. There's no more powerful drug in the world you can take on a daily basis. Then it's worth prioritizing your life around sleep.
Hi everybody. This is the Don't Die Podcast with Bryan Johnson. Today we're talking about sleep and how it is the number one best performance-enhancing drug in the world that you can take every single day. If you are struggling with sleep, we are going to try to condense the shortest and best list ever created to help you achieve high quality sleep every single day.
Yeah. I think ironically we're talking about sleep today, are we not? I'm so tired. I'm exhausted. Mike, how are you? I'm doing fine. You're good. I'm just great. Kate and I went to Las Vegas. We went to Vegas on Monday. Today's Thursday, so we had two nights there. And yeah, I had a terrible night's sleep the first night. Me, too. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard there's lots of sleep in Vegas. That's a general, right? It was like evening Bryan, evening Kate. We went out.
No, I'm just joking. We actually tried to go to sleep early and then it's just so hard when you're in a new hotel room, not in your environment. That environment is so key to getting good sleep, right? Yeah. I mean, actually, the first day we were there, we had a whole bunch of unexpected events that happened. So we brought half our calories with us. We're always prepared, but then the other half requires us to be prepared to find some form of, you know, vegetables, like some dish, and we had no time. We had kind of some emergency things pop up. And so we didn't get to eat until 4 or 5 pm. And so then it was like a complicated situation, like do you fast or do you eat? And I rolled the dice and I ate and it raised my heart rate. Like it did everything I talk about non-stop and it wrecked my sleep.
Did you guys hit the buffet? Was it like an all you can eat Vegas buffet? That's the crazy thing. It was like hummus, raw vegetables. It was all very, very clean but still made a huge impact. Yeah, digestion, doesn't matter what it is, keeps you awake.
Today we are talking about sleep and we got some feedback from previous sessions. So we're learning and the feedback is hitting and people want to hear practical tips as fast as possible and then if we jump into the science a bit later that's cool as well. So we're going to try to do that format today and walk into some of the more specific suggestions we have. And so we have been talking about sleep over the past couple years and the importance to basically every other thing you care about in life. So people typically think about sleep as it relates to health, but people don't typically think about sleep as it relates to how much money they make and whether they're going to get a promotion and whether they can find, you know, a mate, whether they can have, you know, like imagine having children. Like everything you do in life maps back to sleep. And today we want to talk about why that's the case, the science behind it, and then some things you can do to improve your sleep and life.
First half we're going to talk about the practical protocol, what you should know that you should do. And the second half we'll get more in deep in the science and what the literature says that supports how we've arrived at this protocol. And also to remind you, Dr. Mallin was formerly an emergency medicine doctor, actually going through medical school and residency and then ER doctor. Sleep was not a part of your daily routine or your lifestyle for many, many years.
No, the lack of sleep was a part of my daily routine and lifestyle for many, many years. So I'm still playing catch-up. Yeah, I'm five years into playing catch-up and I'm still figuring things out.
Yeah, the irony that the system actually encourages doctors, the people that we hold most sacred for our health, to service their own health in that wild. Yeah. Like when I'm in a moment of crisis, right? Yeah. And with the data, like we have the data that physicians make poor choices when they're sleep deprived, yet we still encourage the same very thing. So yeah, it's crazy.
Mike, do you remember what it felt like to be that sleep deprived or is it just kind of a blur? Oh god. Yeah, I do. It is the worst feeling. You know that sinking sensation in your gut when you wake up too early or maybe you're getting up for a plane or something like that. It's that sinking sensation in your gut magnified 10x and just this overwhelming urge to lay your head down wherever you are at that very moment. Like at a computer, in a patient's room, like wherever you are, you're constantly like, you're half listening to the patient or the nurse or whomever and half just wanting to put your head down sideways and close your eyes. It's the worst feeling in the world for sure. That's so messed up.
Yeah. Same thing with, we were recently, on this weekend we were catching up with some friends and one of these people went to a very prestigious school growing up and they were saying how the same thing, they put their students through rigorous, intense educational programs that are at the detriment of their sleep. Like the schedule that they're required to follow that's mandatory required them to get little sleep. And so the same thing, it's like wild that we would do that to the brain.
When I was in a split custody situation with the children's mom, I would beg them to get good sleep. Like, you know, they would have homework until like 11:00, midnight, and they'd get up at like 5 in the morning to do early morning seminary for their church. So they'd be getting four, five hours of sleep and I just went all out, like please, like please get sleep. I don't care what your grades are, just please get sleep. Because the evidence I was finding was that it was significantly going to impair their emotional capacity, not just now but also later in adulthood, that you missed out on that important development phase. But man, it was such a grueling situation and it was so hard personally to be one step removed from being able to care for them and just seeing this happen and I was powerless. So it really is, it's not just about your own well-being but it's about others as well.
Totally. Actually, before we jump into the protocol, do you want to mention the Kernel study that you... because I find that so fascinating. I think that resonates with a lot of people in their lived experience of being sleep deprived.
Yeah. So at Kernel, we built this device, this brain interface you put on your head. It's like a bike helmet and it's like a blood oxygenation device, you know, the one you put on your fingers. It uses light to look at oxygen levels of the brain. And you could then use that as a proxy for neurons firing. And we did a small study. This is N equals 1. We looked at my deep sleep, well actually my sleep, as it relates to my willpower. And what we found is when I had lower levels of deep sleep, I think the average was somewhere around 35 to 45 minutes versus an hour and a half to two hours of deep sleep, my willpower plummeted. And the way we measured this is a go/no-go task where you see images on the screen and you try to basically stop yourself from pushing the button when you see red versus green. And that measures your ability to control, like impulse control.
And so this intuitively makes sense that if you don't get good sleep, the following day, you know, when you're staring down the pint of ice cream or the bag of chips or whatever your vice is, your likelihood of withstanding that temptation is very low if you haven't had deep sleep the night before. Significant influence on the willpower. So yeah, it really forms this domino effect, either pointing positively or negatively, but you get into a vicious loop otherwise, negatively, if you start skipping on sleep and you fall into that cycle. Anyways, we'll get into the habits of how these effects compound.
Yeah, frontal lobe is first to go, I guess, right? So the decision-making, the willpower section of the brain is the area where we start to see the most reduction in performance with sleep disruption, which is important for not just whether you're pushing a red or a blue button but also your ability to drive a car, your ability to make life-saving decisions if you work in a hospital, your ability to prevent yourself from, you know, eating a bag of potato chips. Whatever that decision-making capacity is, it's going to be impaired. And yeah, it's interesting you used the word impair earlier, Bryan, and there was I think a study looking at people with sleep deprivation and actually showing that the effects are similar to being legally drunk, which is interesting because we allow, you know, tractor trailer drivers to drive sleep impaired. We allow physicians to work sleep impaired. You know, we don't monitor people's sleep to determine if they're capable of performing their job or not. And that's kind of scary.
Yeah. So, if you're watching this podcast, give us a rating. How are we doing so far? And then compare that to previous podcasts. Bryan and I are both a little sleep deprived. So, theoretically, this should technically be a worse podcast. So, let us know.
All right. Should we get going? Let's do it. So, this is all of your power laws to have amazing sleep, coming from the man that got eight months of perfect sleep.
Okay. So, as I go through this, Kate and Mike, jump in at any point if you want to add personal anecdote, evidence, observations. Cool. Sounds great. Let's do it.
The first observation is for someone to realize that you have never been taught how to sleep. You know, you've been taught how to drive a car potentially. You've been taught sex ed in school. You learned how to, you know, do algebra and geometry and you learned history lessons, but in society there is no course anywhere to learn how to sleep, which is really insane, that it's such a fundamental part of our existence and there's just no education anywhere. I tried to become an expert in sleep and the way I did this is I achieved eight months of perfect sleep using a wearable, and I wanted to demonstrate you really can. And doing that, I discovered a lot of things that I just didn't find anywhere. And so, I'm going to explain to you in very simple terms how you can also master sleep, if it's evaded you for years, where you feel like no matter what you do, you just can't get good sleep. I'm going to try to make this so it's not mysterious anymore. The body actually responds in a very predictable way to what you do in life. And hopefully these tips will help you unravel that mystery and then be able to start making gains on a daily basis.
And I'm probably going to jump in while you're talking and ask questions that I know people often ask you when you bring up each of these things.
All right. So the first idea, the first concept, is that you need to think about sleep as you would anything you take seriously. A hobby, your job, you know, being a parent, you need to try to perfect the craft. And that means you need to take it seriously. So sleep, a lot of people just are whimsical about it. They think, I'm just going to lay my head on the pillow and it's just going to happen or not. But you really need to invest in establishing the habits and hygiene around this. And so the mindset is really important.
And what I like to frame this as is, for example, every day, you know, most of us have meetings and we have set times those meetings begin. So, if the meeting begins at 9:00 a.m. and you show up at 9:04, you typically acknowledge the group and say, "I'm sorry for being late," right? Even a 4-minute infraction basically violates a social norm where you've disrespected other people's time in doing that. Now, if your bedtime is 10 p.m. and you go to bed at 10:04 p.m., it's not customary that you apologize to yourself for being late, right? You're just like whatever. And if it's 11 or 12 or 1 or 2, you don't even care. And what I want to suggest is that you need to approach sleep with the same level of social rigor as you would a meeting. That your bedtime is 10 p.m. Be on time at 10 p.m. And if you're even a few minutes late, acknowledge that's a form of disrespect to yourself. That's how serious sleep is. Otherwise, it slips in your mind as being this lackadaisical thing that you can just push around. That's number one on mindset around sleep.
I was just going to say, some things that, we don't do this, I don't do this, I don't think you do, Bryan or Mike, but I've heard that some people set an alarm for their bedtime as opposed to their wake time to indicate that kind of importance in their life. And then the other thing that comes up when people talk about this is they're like, I need to make this, you know, travel. And so something that both Bryan and I do when we're traveling is we don't book any flights that compromise our sleep. So, I think when we flew to Honduras, for example, we intentionally flew to Miami, slept one night, and then got on a flight the next day to avoid having to get there at like 2:00 a.m. or whatever the time was. So it seems impossible until you accept it as fact. And then pretty quickly, you self-resolve and create systems in your life to actually put sleep as your number one priority.
Honestly, your experience with resting heart rate before going to bed is important. So I'd like for you to share about that. But in general, the concept behind resting heart rate is the idea that we are attempting to achieve a lower resting heart rate when we sleep. And that's because resting heart rate is a marker for parasympathetic nervous system activation and for adequacy of sleep. The higher sleep duration you get, the more recovered you are, the higher your resting heart rate will be and the more activated your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and relax version of your nervous system. So, we're certainly using resting heart rate to track and monitor our success on a nightly basis in terms of how well we are resting our bodies. And the goal should be that you stay at your baseline and/or slightly lower.
Now, things will determine where your resting heart rate baseline is. For example, your aerobic fitness: the more aerobically fit you are, the lower your resting heart rate will be. Traditionally, the younger you are, the lower your resting heart rate will be, although age is not necessarily predictive of that. It's just that as we get older, we often lose some fitness and lose restfulness. So it tends to creep up. But in general, we should be focusing on heart rate. Now, what you do, Bryan, which I think is super interesting and I think you should share with the listeners, is tracking your resting heart rate prior to sleep as opposed to the lowest heart rate you've had while you're sleeping, which is what most of these devices like Whoop and things like that do. What are you doing there, Bryan?
What Mike said about resting heart rate is exactly right. And my experience has been this: that my sleep depends upon my resting heart rate
before bed. And so I've tried to structure my entire life around this idea of things that increase my resting heart rate are bad. You know, of course, excluding exercise, like that's a different topic. Things that lower my resting heart rate are good. And then you can map your daily life habits and decisions on these two, whether it goes up or whether it goes down. So for example, when you eat food close to bedtime, your heart rate goes up. And when your heart rate goes up, your sleep quality goes down. If you have a fight with someone right before bed, your heart rate goes up, your sleep goes down. If you are on your screens or working and you're in a high stress or in a more aroused state, heart rate goes up, sleep goes down. And so you start pattern matching all these things in your life where anything that increases your heart rate is going to lessen the quality of your sleep.
And it goes back to what Mike said is the increase in the heart rate, you know, is you're activating your sympathetic nervous system either in terms of stress or some kind of arousal or like metabolic activity to digest food. And so I've tried to build my entire life around this one number to lower my heart rate before bed, which means it determines what I eat, when I eat, how I do a nighttime wind-down routine. So, for example, I'm trying to resolve my internal stress and my worries, trying to avoid rumination. I'm trying to have a 30 to 60 minute block of time before bed where I can turn screens off, go for a walk, meditate, read a book, like take it easy, but have a demarcation between workday and rest day. But I've built all these sets of habits around how to reduce my resting heart rate in that final moment before bed. And that will then boost sleep quality.
Can I ask you a question, Bryan? Like, yeah, maybe it's a personal question. Do you experience anxiety?
I think I experience anxiety in the form of that my mind is always working on problems, and if it hasn't solved the problem in a way that I feel like is appropriate, my mind will just continue to grind on that problem until it feels like it's actually addressed it.
Okay. Just because like the description that you gave around checking your resting heart rate before sleep, like I could just see, like personally I see myself doing, if I did that on a regular basis, I would struggle if I checked it and it were elevated, because I would be like, ah, I'm going to have a bad night of sleep, I'm guaranteed to have a bad night of sleep, I'm screwed, like, you know, and then I will inevitably have a bad night of sleep because I now have anxiety about having a bad night of sleep. Like sleep anxiety is a thing that a lot of people have to worry about. So like I love the fact that you have found this like check my resting heart rate before I go to sleep to know how I'm going to sleep kind of thing, but I could see how for some people who maybe run a little hotter, it might be sort of like a loop that it puts them in, that it makes it harder for them to get good sleep. I don't know, your thoughts on that. Has anybody ever expressed that to you or thought about that?
Yeah, and I'm curious, Bryan, like when you do see an elevated heart rate, what's your experience of it before bed?
Yeah. I mean, this happened actually on Tuesday night when Kate and I, we were actually finishing up the day. We had eaten late. I rolled the dice in deciding to eat to get my calories today. And I did a quick check on my resting heart rate and it was, I think, 53 beats per minute. Typically, by that point, I'm around like 46 to 47. And then by the time I put my head on the pillow, I'm 44 beats per minute. And so I did say to Kate, "Oh no, like this is a challenging situation, because I know that at this level of heartbeat, and I'm in a room that is not my home environment, you know, my mattress is not cold." So I know these circumstances are going to probably create a troubled environment. And sure enough, it happened. And so maybe, you know, did I psych myself out by saying that? You know, possibly.
But I would say that now that I've been so attuned to my sleep pattern for so many years, I can almost guess exactly what's going to happen with my heart rate, my stress, my REM, my deep. It just feels so algorithmic to me that I guess the way I think about it, Mike, is my body is so predictable with the inputs that I don't feel like I really psych myself out. It just kind of feels it's inevitable. And that's true if my heart rate is low or heart rate's high. But I think your point is correct that a lot of people don't have wearables because they wake up in the morning and if they see they got a bad score, they're like, "Now I feel terrible." Like, and they feel terrible about themselves the entire day because the algorithm told them they feel terrible. So yeah, I know it's a thing and people struggle with that. And I think it's a great point. I personally don't. I really love the data, and whether it affects me or not, it doesn't bother me if it affects me or not, but it does seem like the patterns I just are very stable, of what I see is what I get.
Yeah. And I feel like maybe I'm not the kind of person that indexes really high on that loop cycle, but when I do experience that kind of anxiety where I wake up and I'm like, my sleep score, it's crap, am I going to feel like crap today? I think if you do it enough times, if you stick through the process, eventually it evens out, because you can't keep, at least in my experience, you can't keep having this anxious attachment to the data, because eventually you kind of disassociate from it anyway and you just live your life. So that's been my experience, but again, maybe I'm less of a looper than some people out there.
I'm interested in how low your resting heart rate is before sleep, Bryan. Like I think that's worth calling out. So, you just said that out loud, that your resting heart rate is generally in like the 45, 46 range before sleep, correct? And if I'm not mistaken, your like resting heart rate while you're sleeping, like your lowest heart rate of the night, is not much lower. Is that correct?
That's correct. Yeah. I think last night, let me check. I think last night I was 42.
Okay. So maybe like you are 3 to 4 points above your actual resting heart rate. I think that's pretty remarkable. Like I'm pretty sure most people are not nearly that low before they go to bed. And that's probably a function of wind-down routine, lack of exercise, you know, late in the day, not eating for hours. I mean, your fasting window prior to bed is what, six or seven hours right now. Is that right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so like that's notable for sure. You're not like most people. I would say the average American is not reaching that lowest heart rate until 2 to 3:00 a.m., and you're pretty much already there by the time you're going to sleep.
That's the crazy thing about Bryan. I feel like he's almost, it's like a pre-sleep Bryan that exists during this wind-down routine that is a form of sleeping in a way. It's like the, you know, prelude to sleeping, that like it feels like all of the habits he does throughout the day, because I've been around Bryan when he's been really diligent with his routine for the day and then when he hasn't, like when we're traveling, and there's a really big difference to the type of person that he is. So I wonder, Mike, like deviation between resting heart rate before bed and resting heart rate itself might also be an indication of how well you followed a sleep protocol for the day.
Yeah, totally agree. I think like I guess what we're getting at here, what is super interesting is, is this indicator in and of itself, the heart rate prior to sleep, is it even a better metric than your resting heart rate, right? While you're sleeping. Classically, we think about the resting heart rate while you're sleeping. But it's an interesting point because what it's showing is how prepared you are for sleep rather than how successfully you slept, right? And I wouldn't be surprised if the earlier heart rate in the evening is a better overall metric than what you finally got to at the end of your sleep cycle.
I love that. It's like you're a professional sleeper and here's how you measure how well of a professional you are at it. Like here's your job score for being a professional sleeper.
There are things that could get in the way. Like so if your bedroom's not optimized, you're having disrupted sleep, things like that, this metric wouldn't really speak to that. This is really speaking to like the performance of your day, evening, and how well you've set yourself up for success during sleep.
I mean, one of the reasons why I talk about this, and I take your point as a valid one, that when you create a measurement for people, it can create anxiety. You know, it can become a bigger problem than it is an effective solution. And I guess I do this because of two reasons. One is most people I personally engage with feel absolutely overwhelmed with health. You have to think about a hundred different things, like how much protein, how much fat, what kind of fat, are seed oils good, are they bad? Like you have to dice through like an infinite number of questions and you never know who to trust. You don't know what to believe. You're just like all on an island stuck by yourself and you don't know what to do.
And so I talk about resting heart rate as a way to simplify that complexity and just say, look, yes, the world of health and wellness is very complicated. You know, it's not like there's just one answer, but where you can find stability, where you can anchor your boat, is your resting heart rate before bed. That is where you can find peace and comfort and control. Like you control that variable to a very large degree, versus you can't control like, you know, are seed oils good or bad, like solving that debate is a very hard thing to do, or the cholesterol debate.
And so then if you just say what elevates heart rate and what lowers it, you get into basically the most important life decisions people make. Do you have late night snacks? You know, if you're on the couch and you're watching your favorite movie, do you down a pint of ice cream? Do you have a bag of cookies? Do you, you know, smoke some weed? Do you have a glass of wine? Do you, like, all these questions that come up, you know, do you work until the very moment you go to sleep? And so all those things fall into the area of control that the person has over their life. And so that's why I like this, is that it really gives people a tangible thing they can measure.
When people get wearables, like the very first thing they say, they'll tell me, I got a wearable and I saw that alcohol wrecks my sleep, right? Like that is like the number one thing people say. And so this is like, and then they see like, okay, alcohol is bad for sleep. When I sleep poorly, I feel miserable. And then they make other connections. When I eat late, I sleep poorly and I feel bad. And so like you make these series of discoveries. So that's why I just want to put them on the path to say, learn what increases your heart rate and learn what lowers your heart rate, and you will just build life habits based upon these observations.
Yeah, it reminds me of wearing a CGM and just like learning, just like, you know, you're just getting data and you're just collecting data and starting to figure out like what are the inputs that matter, right? Like actually I'm super interested for each of you. What do you think has the greatest impact on your sleep negatively? Like if you could choose one thing that's like the highest. I'll share first. Mine is like intense television. So like, yeah, like...
What are you watching, Mike?
Oh, nothing right now. I'll watch it. Mike, tell us more.
Okay. All right. Fine. Fine. So I recently, I have dabbled in The Pitt, which is on Max. It's a new like emergency medicine show that's like hyper... This is good. Yeah. It's basically for me just like reliving all of the trauma in my adult life. Yeah. If I watch that right before bed, yeah, it jacks me up for sure. So that's at the top of the list.
In what way? Like, does it take you back to where you were? Is it like a form of therapy, or like, what is it?
You know, it's interesting. And I've been thinking about that. Like I don't know, this is totally a tangent, but like I think it is a bit therapeutic in a way, but it forces me through things that maybe I think I've just walled off and haven't processed. So like it's representing these things for me that like, okay, time to work through those feelings and that like trauma that I took on from that family, that person who died, and you know, like all that stuff. But like it is not conducive to getting a good night of sleep for sure, especially if you watch in the evening right before bed. So yeah, that's my bad one right now.
I'm so curious if you imagined watching that show at like 11 a.m. Does it hit the same? Like I can kind of imagine that there's like this link between before bed activity. It's like a weird wind-down in a way, but ironically you're kind of getting yourself more aroused.
Yeah. I don't know. I'm like, at 11:00 a.m. I'm in work mode, you know? I'm not sure that I could like open up emotionally enough to even connect with it at that time. Like I don't know. That's a good question. Yeah. Thought about or think I could find the time in my life to watch a TV show at 11 o'clock in the morning. Exactly. It doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike, have you seen through the data how much does watching The Pitt, it's The Pitt, right?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like a lot. It's like, so it'll do multiple things. Heart rate variability decreases, which we haven't talked about yet, but that's another metric for sympathetic-parasympathetic nervous system activation, right? So the higher your heart rate variability, the more sympathetically activated you are, or I guess less sympathetically activated you are, which is ideal. So higher heart rate variability is ideal. Resting heart rate also goes up, and traditionally you want resting heart rate down, just like we were talking about.
And then the other thing that is very remarkable, similar to alcohol or a late meal, my lowest resting heart rate happens much later at night. So earlier in the evening while I'm sleeping, my resting heart rate stays up. So it takes your nervous system a while to relax after you activate it, right? And that's what we're seeing with all of these different types of inputs, whether it's exercise or a meal or stress, thinking about work, answering emails until midnight, watching The Pitt, whatever it is, you're activating your sympathetic nervous system. It takes a while to relax. And you see that by looking at your heart rate trend throughout the night and not seeing it drop until late in the morning or late at night.
That's really cool. I've never thought about looking at when my lowest resting heart rate happens. I'm going to start doing that every morning. That's a cool tip.
You're looking for a hammock. You actually want the view, you want it to look like a hammock, where it starts just a little bit higher. It's relatively flat, hits lowest around like the midpoint of the night, and then slowly increases as your body prepares to wake back up. That's ideal. The standard American generally sees it's more like a mountain and then a valley, a valley right before they wake up, which is not what you want.
Yeah. What do you think has the greatest impact on your sleep negatively?
I think both Bryan and I say the same thing, which is food. Like that, if you, man, that without doubt is the number one thing. Any snacks before bed. I think like a lot of times Bryan and I will be in public with people and be like, you know, like have dinner at
5:00 p.m. just try that. And they're like, yeah, I eat early. But they don't take into account the snacks that they're having before bed. I feel like that's just like part of their ritual. But I feel like that makes the biggest difference for me for resting heart rate.
Yeah. I mean, I guess stress and food. So my mood is usually very stable and I typically do a very good job with stress. I think a lot of people have this misconception that my life is like this lavish, carefree, and like my life is brutal, like it's tough, stuff happening all the time. And so I guess I've had to work very, very hard for that. But sometimes the topic of the stress becomes really intense and I'm trying to somehow achieve some kind of reconciliation with it, either resolving myself with the situation or trying to solve the problem of the situation, and I can't quite do it. That will get me, almost like the pit, like that will nail me as well. But then definitely food.
And so my lesson from Tuesday in eating later is I would rather go hungry and miss out on some calories for the day than I would try to pick up the calories later in the day. And this is again an update for me because we're always evolving in Blueprint and I'm always trying to test my body to say, are the conditions I thought were true before still true now? For example, with the sauna over the past 23 days, is it the case that my cardiovascular fitness has changed and now if I eat a bit later in the day it's not going to have the same kind of effect? I'm always doing these experiments every day in all these different capacities, and now it's like, okay, I should just have a cutoff. If it's noon or 1 and I hit that point and I haven't had a chance to eat, I'm not doing it.
And then the consequence on how I feel is so devastating to me because I love feeling great. And like today I've got a little bit of a headache, right? Even though last night was a great night's sleep, it takes you a couple days to recover from a really bad night's sleep. And so that one night I'm still trying to recover from. So it's not worth it to me in almost any capacity. I mean, we try our very best, but yeah, it's very rarely worth it to me.
You guys, I want to get through all these tips and we've got a lot of time to go. So, one, become a professional sleeper. Two, measure it with your resting heart rate. And just really quickly before we move on for that, Bryan, because I'm even more motivated from this conversation, can you talk me through how you measure it? So, do you lie down for 5 minutes, close your eyes, like is there any practical way, or is it more like a rough estimate?
Yeah. So first, just to wrap up that previous segment on the heart rate, let's throw this up on screen, this image I have that shows which things increase heart rate by what amounts. For example, alcohol before bedtime is between 5 and 10 beats per minute. Anxiety, stress, rumination has the biggest one, of 5 to 25 beats per minute. Late night exercise, 4 to 10 beats per minute. So, we'll put that on screen just so you get some context on how significant of an increase a given thing is that you can anticipate.
We need to add the pit there that we're missing. I was just about to say that falls under anxiety, stress, and rumination, right?
I'm sorry, Kate. What was your comment on moving on? Yeah. Just, we've got it. So, professional sleeper number one, resting heart rate before bed. Oh, yeah. That's right. I want to know how to measure resting heart rate. Okay, that's right.
So, if you have a wearable, this is what I do personally. I will put my head on the pillow and I will take a few deep breaths. As Mike said, it takes a minute for your body to calm down. I can calm my heart rate down in like 60 seconds, but over a longer duration, if you're aroused from watching a movie or from having a fight or from working or some high intense social engagement, it's going to take you 30 to 60 minutes to calm your body down. It's very, very hard to accelerate that process. So I'll get back to that in just a minute on the protocol in a very concise fashion.
But yeah, so put your head on the pillow, take a few deep breaths, and then if you have a wearable, you might have a real-time indicator of what your heart rate is. And if you don't, just simply take your fingers, put them on the side of your neck, measure your pulse, count the number of beats in six seconds, and then multiply that by 10. And so you're probably somewhere between 50 and 70 beats per minute, thereabouts. And then your goal is to lower your heart rate.
So let me just do this in a very concise fashion. Here's what I would suggest you do. Get your baseline measurement tonight and now make it your goal in 30 days to lower your resting heart rate by 10%. So, if you measure in tonight at 60, within 30 days, try to be at 56 beats per minute. And the way you do that is you intuitively learn or quantitatively learn what things increase your heart rate and which things lower your heart rate.
So, eat as you start. If your bedtime's 10, have your final meal of the day at 6:00 p.m. If you are going to bed at 10, begin your wind down routine by 9:00 p.m. That means screens are off. You're going for a walk, meditating, breath work, talking to a friend. You have a book in hand, but you are not on a screen. That is challenging because we are all addicted to our screens. You have to acknowledge you're addicted and you have to make that separation.
Helpful things in your home environment: have blue, I'm sorry, have red and amber lights. Turn off blues. Be mindful of stimulants. You know, a cup of coffee at 4 p.m. leaves half a cup of coffee of caffeine in your body by 10 p.m. because there's roughly a 6-hour half-life. Everybody metabolizes caffeine differently, but there's an approximation. Be mindful of certain medications and stimulants, like ADHD medication will also elevate your heart rate. And then if you're going to have a fight with your partner or someone, don't do it in that last moment before bed. Try to plan a morning fight when you're both well rested and ready to go, but don't do that, that's really, really bad for sleep. But you're going to learn all these intuitions.
So if you realize sleep is the number one performance-enhancing drug, there's no more powerful drug in the world you can take on a daily basis, then it's worth prioritizing your life around sleep. And if you also believe that sleep will make you more successful in everything you do, then it justifies it. And that is very counter to our current culture where people say sleep doesn't matter and actually successful people don't sleep. That's a ridiculous idea. It's foolish. I mean, I think people who are successful who don't sleep could be more successful if they slept. They're successful despite their lack of sleep. And so we've bought this really bad notion of success and lack of sleep with a few characters. It's just not right, it's foolish.
So yeah, that would be basically my suggestion. In all the stuff we're talking about, this is the single thing you can do in your life to have control, and your resting heart rate before bed is your best accountability partner, because if you're looking at whatever your vice is right before you go to bed, if you eat it or you do it, you know it's going to increase it, and it will help stop you. So that'd be my take on how you collapse the complexity of health into something very simple and controllable.
I know you've been saying this recently, like lower by 10% in 30 days. I found that I can only move my resting heart rate both up and down by a couple of beats, and across maybe six months I could do that kind of dramatic change.
Yeah. No, I think that's fine because I'm guessing that a lot of people have a meaningful amount to move. There's low hanging fruit; most people are not aware of this at all. They're not aware of the things that elevate it. And I think you're probably already pretty dialed in with your own protocol. So my guess would be 10% would be totally achievable for most people. Mike, what's your take?
Most people, I think so. I think the average American has a lot of room to move on this. Just about everyone I talk to is still eating late meals, watching tense television, doing work emails until 9:00 p.m. Yeah, I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit out there in the world.
Okay, cool. All right. So now should we get into the actual steps that someone can do to lower the resting heart rate? All right, you guys. So we've been very conversational about these topics, and let me try to run through these in a very short time frame that you can send to a loved one and just say, listen to this two or three minute segment on how to get great sleep. So let me try to move through this very quickly. I'm going to give you 10 tips on how to achieve high quality sleep.
So, number one, reframe your identity that you are a professional sleeper. You take sleep as seriously as you do your work. And that means you really invest in creating the craft. Okay? So, you are a professional sleeper.
Number two is that you want to have your final meal of the day at least 4 hours before bed. You can experiment with two, three, four, five, six, seven. I have my last meal of the day around 8 hours or so before my bedtime and that allows my body to digest food. You're going to find when you eat earlier that it will give your body time to digest and will lower your heart rate and improve your sleep. You're also going to find that certain foods you eat, for example, if you have something heavy like a pasta or a bread or a pizza, are going to cause a longer elevated heart rate. So, the kinds of foods will increase your heart rate. So, what you eat and when you eat will dramatically affect your heart rate, which then affects your sleep. So eat earlier and lighter to achieve high quality sleep.
Number three is you need to have a 30 to 60 minute wind down routine every day. You can't just finish work and then 30 seconds later put your head on the pillow and fall asleep. Your body needs to wind down. You need to calm your mind, calm your body. And so the way I do this is I need to have a book in my hand. I try not to do any screens whatsoever. So screens off and then something like go for a walk, meditate, breath work, call a friend, have a book in hand, but you want to do something calm and relaxing. Evidence shows that a book in hand, for example, is as efficacious as a sleep pill. So you really want to have that last 30 to 60 minutes to get your body ready for sleep. You really need that time duration. And I realize we are all addicted to our phones. So just go through the process of acknowledging your addiction and setting it aside.
Next is when you wake up, you want morning light almost immediately. I get my morning light within five minutes. I think the window is around 20 to 30 minutes. I wake up before the sun rises, around 4:30 a.m., so I use a 10,000 lux light in my home. Otherwise, you can just go out and get sunlight, but that sets your circadian rhythm and it starts all of the positive processes your body needs to be on a certain rhythm.
Four is you want to be consistent in your bedtime. So if your bedtime's at 10 p.m., be in bed at 10:00 p.m. every night. Now, of course, you're going to have exceptions. There will be social events. There'll be other things. So just try your best. But when you have the ability to do so in your schedule, try to be in bed at the same time every single night. When I was achieving 8 months of perfect sleep, my bedtime was 8:30 p.m. I was in bed plus or minus like 1 minute every night. At least I tried. It was a very, very close time frame. And I'll tell you, it is amazing what the body does when it's given consistency. I would fall asleep instantaneously.
Next is you want to be mindful of stimulants. And that's because caffeine has roughly a 6-hour half-life. So a cup of coffee at 4 p.m. is half a cup of coffee in you at 10 p.m. when you're asleep. So if you're going to consume caffeine, try to have it earlier in the day to give your body time to process it. And that's also true for other stimulants like modafinil.
And then for the evening light, you want to be mindful to not have blue lights. So try to have screens off, or if your screens are on in the evening, there's tools like f.lux that you can have on a browser that kill the blue light. You can also turn your mobile device to red mode. So you have red light, but you want to try to eliminate blues, which will suppress melatonin. So red lights and amber lights.
Next, for your room temperature, you want to have a cooler temperature. Your body is going to do better with a temperature around 69 to 71 Fahrenheit, thereabouts. I use a temperature controlled mattress in asleep, which really is very useful to modulate my temperature throughout the night, but sleeping hot is very challenging.
You also want to have a peaceful sleep environment. So you want to be mindful of noise. Oftentimes people can have noisy neighbors, you can be by a noisy street. So try your best to situate where you sleep in your home and the environment so you don't get interrupted by various noises. If you do have noise around, you can use a sound machine to try to offset that. That does a good job. Or have some earplugs, but be mindful that those things will interrupt your sleep.
And then finally, you can have a wearable, whether you use Apple Watch, Oura, Whoop. They're all good. Just so you create intuitions on what things you do in life and how those relate to your sleep quality. That's been the best thing I've done: I've really learned what I do in life and how it affects my sleep, which then allows me to build lifestyle and routines. So much of health is not about take this supplement and do this therapy. It's about lifestyle and habits. And that's what this entirely is about, making sleep a number one life priority and then building systems around that.
I like that, Bryan. I also like that you ended with it's very personalized, right? Some of those things that you recommended are really going to land for some people and some of them might not be as important for other people. If I might, I've got three others that I might add to that list.
So just to be specific about the cell phone, you mentioned cell phone use. I think that there is a significant advantage to literally plugging your phone in away from your bed. So many people sleep with their phone right beside them and they have difficulty fighting that urge to pick it up just to check it one last time before they go to sleep. If you plug it in in a different room or on the other side of the room, you're much less likely to be drawn to that phone. So, I think that's just a nice little trick for people to help keep it out of their environment right before they sleep.
Another one is, you mentioned the nighttime routine, which is super important. I think a really beneficial part of that, at least for some people, is journaling. Whether that's writing down your worries, which you've mentioned in the past, or whether it's gratitude journaling or just writing about your day, whatever it is, there's something really, I don't know, connecting about just putting a pen on paper, just like holding a book in your hand. And I think that it allows people to put down some of that anxiety from the day and transition into their sleep environment. And then the third one I'll
mention is really common in something called CBTI, which is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. That is a really helpful thing for people who have true insomnia. Like they literally cannot fall asleep or they wake up in the middle of the night. And this tool is where basically bed is reserved for sex and sleep. And you literally do nothing in your bed except for have sex and go to sleep. Like those are the only things. And this allows you to sort of train your brain to realize what bed is for. And this can be beneficial for anyone, not just people with insomnia, but actually like creating a relationship between all I do in this position in this place is either sleep or have sex and that's it. And that can be really helpful for a lot of people. So, just thought I'd add those few caveats, too.
Okay. I'll come in with the last one that's going to be the most painful potentially for people, which is to sleep separately from their partner. I will say that has made an enormous difference in my life. And so if you can, even if it's just another bed in the same room, if you can sleep separately to your partner, I would highly encourage it. I know some people can't. They don't have the luxury of that. So, you know, do what you can, but that is a really big one.
I struggle with this one so much. Kate, do you sleep in the same bed as your partner? We do. We do. And like she has brought up on a couple occasions how much I disrupt her sleep and yeah, but I have this like attachment. I don't know, I think it's from my childhood, like with my grandparents sleeping in separate rooms and me associating that with them not having a good relationship anymore, and it is so ingrained in me that I just have this mental block around the idea, you know what I mean, just to be totally honest. And I recognize that's stupid, like it doesn't make any sense. I should be able to recognize that I can still love someone and sleep in a different bed with them, but it's just challenging for me and I suspect it's that way for a lot of people.
Definitely. There is such a stigma about it. It means that there's something wrong and it's not being acknowledged. It's not being communicated. I had originally the same perception. And to maybe give you some voice from the other side, once you start doing it, it's like, oh, nothing changed about the relationship and you have better quality sleep. Yeah, I think you should try it out even if it's just a couple of days or something like that and then see how you feel about it.
When I had shoulder surgery we did actually do it for about a month because it's just hard to do that. And the challenge was I think I was in a really uncomfortable bed and I didn't have my Eight Sleep so I wasn't as stoked about it. Yeah. And you just had surgery so that would have been painful. True.
You guys, I think this podcast is really just therapy. Yeah, I think so. For the three of us. Yeah, mostly. I think hopefully that's okay. I think a lot of people need the same therapy. That's true.
If I remember correctly looking through the evidence, I think it was a mixed bag in terms of I think some people actually experienced a higher quality sleep when they were paired with someone else and then others improved their sleep. So I initially imagined that everybody would have better sleep because you just have the asynchronous nature of sleep where you've got disruptive patterns: going to bed, getting up at night, sounds, etc. But if I'm not mistaken, there's data to suggest that some people do legitimately sleep better when they are paired.
Yeah, I'd be curious to see if that's after a normalized length of time in both scenarios or if that's a short study. Yeah, I'd be very curious to look into that. Maybe we can add that to our topic list. I think we should do another, I mean, we do lots of episodes on sleep, but I feel like we could do one on this specifically and maybe even have, I don't know, somebody who knows what they're talking about. Not to say that we don't, but like an expert in sleep to come and talk to us about this. That'd be kind of cool.
Yeah. I mean, Bryan, in your data, what was your experience? Because obviously you've had partners in the past. You would have shared a bed with plenty of people. Sounds inappropriate, but you know what I mean. Yeah. I don't have data from those time periods in my life, but I do remember that the number of wake events that I had was, you know, three, four, five, six, whereas now the number of wake events that I actually can remember is zero to one. So substantially, I mean, I think oddly at age 47 I am getting the best sleep of my life legitimately, even though my biological processes, you know, are of a 47-year-old, right? I mean, we're doing good to push these things down. But it's just much easier to get sleep when you're a teenager, early 20s. You have all your biology just in your favor.
And so yeah, I think for other people who are asking questions, I would say if you have insomnia or you're struggling with sleep, of course there are situations where you do need professional help to address these sleep challenges. And so these things are simply to say that in American society, when something is wrong, we turn to a pill, and that is our way of thinking. We don't turn to lifestyle habits. And what we're trying to point out here is that no one has ever taught you how to sleep, including like when you eat something dramatically affects your sleep quality. And so if you start knocking out this low-hanging fruit on basically when you eat, what you eat, alcohol, stimulants, etc., you may find gains here that dramatically improve your situation. But give your body time to adjust. Give it a few weeks. Your body needs some time to get into a new rhythm. If you still have challenges, that's certainly fine. You can step up and try to find other solutions. But most of the time, people are not even doing these basic things.
This is also true, you guys. This podcast could essentially be about mental disorders too, right? It could be about mood disorders. So we could be talking about depression or anxiety, and the best protocol to address, the first line of defense for depression and anxiety, is to nail your sleep. Now I know that's hard to say. I've been depressed, and when you're depressed it's very hard to sleep because you've got a whole bunch of other complicated situations, and I was also overeating to try to address my depressive symptoms. It's complicated. Also, that first line of defense is getting these basic biological processes in place, like your body repair. So I'd say yeah, this is why sleep warrants being the number one priority for everybody on planet Earth. There's just nothing that does the body more good.
Did you want to drop your mic, Bryan? That felt pretty good. Thanks. Yeah. I mean, gosh, I just wish somebody would have been in my life to tell me these things. I don't know why did I have to navigate this for 20 years by myself without someone pointing out these very obvious things in life. I just feel like I went through so much pain. And I hate to see other people go through pain when these solutions are just so reachable and doable by people.
I think it's a poetic ending for today's episode. Feels good. Yeah. Mike, as a conclusion, can you tell us what's happening on the pit? What episode are you in? I might need to know this. How is this? Is this a series? Yeah, it's a whole series. I'm only on episode three. So, and how many are there? Too far in. I think there's like 15 or something. There's quite a few. Yeah. What's your plan? I don't know. I don't have a plan. Admittedly, there is no plan. Because as I mentioned earlier, it doesn't make sense to watch it at 11 a.m. And I'm not sure that I'm ready to trash my sleep for it. So, I don't know. Maybe it's a Saturday.
Oh, that's a good idea. Like a Saturday 5 p.m., like a 4 to 5. Yeah. Like a special time slot. I love that. Followed by two hours of meditation to try to get my name right.
Good podcast. Good luck. And then Mike, keep us posted on your pit-watching episodes. How you go. All right.
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