EFR 878. The Sleep Doctor's Top Tips for Better Sleep TONIGHT! How to Fall Asleep, Stay Asleep and Go Back to Sleep with Dr. Michael Breus

00:01 - Chase (Host) The following is an Operation Podcast production.

00:04 - Michael (Guest) I've actually fixed more people's sleep with this one tip than any other single tip out there. Period Full stop.

00:13 - Chase (Host) You've been talking about this for a minute. 25 years. 25 years as a personal, huge sleep health advocate and professional. Yes, what has been the biggest consistent through line that is accurate, easiest one?

00:29 - Michael (Guest) If all every one of your listeners did was do that, I can guarantee a 20 to 30% improvement in their overall sleep quality. Wow, this is one of the best questions I've ever been asked when it comes to circadian rhythms. All right, so I like where your head is at. So, hey everyone, this is Dr Michael Bruce. I'm known as the sleep doctor, and I'm pretty stoked to be here on Ever Forward to talk about sleep with you.

00:57 - Chase (Host) My episode today is going to help you me, everybody get a better night's sleep. And look, I know that you'll reach your dreams, but you won't get there without hitting the pillow every night. If you're looking for a little extra help one thing that has provided immense help to me should I reach for a supplement? Odds are I'm reaching for the sleep and recovery line from Cured Nutrition. At the end of the day, if I'm looking for a little extra help to wind down, I'm grabbing one of their delicious Serenity gummies for enhanced relaxation and relief to unwind my body and mind. Then, if I want to double down and really guarantee that I'm getting my Zs, their nightcaps are unparalleled. Packed with a six to one ratio of full spectrum CBD to CBN, they not only help me get asleep but stay asleep and, more importantly, not wake up the next day feeling groggy and, best part, they're non-habit forming. So if you're looking for a little help to reduce overall feelings of stress, allow the body and mind to unwind and take a little something to encourage deep, restorative sleep, join me over at curednutritioncom. In fact, you can save an additional 20% when, at checkout, you use our code everforward curednutritioncom Checkout code everforward to save 20% Linked for you, as always in the show notes today under episode resources.

02:23 My guest today is Michael Bruce Dr Michael Bruce, the sleep doctor, in fact, and he is both a double-boarded clinical psychologist and a clinical sleep specialist. He has the distinction of also being a diplomat of the American Board of Sleep Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. He is one of only 168 people in the world to have passed the Sleep Medical Specialty Board without going to medical school. Let that just sink in Bottom line. My dude knows his stuff when it comes to sleep and I'm so stoked to have Dr Bruce back on the show. I actually found his work years ago when his book the Power of when came out all about learning your chronotype, to learn how to best when really to go to sleep, when to rise and everything in between. He was on the show way, way, way back in episode 24 on how to improve every area of your life through the power of when. I will have it linked for you down in the show notes. It is a powerhouse to learn. If you're a morning person, a night owl, there's no need to try to make yourself fit into the constructs of the world. His work in that conversation really breaks down how you can make the world fit into you in terms of how you prefer to wake up, when you prefer to go to bed, your natural circadian rhythm, your energy cycles and so much more, Linked for you, as always, with everything we talk about in the show down in the show notes under episode resources.

03:49 But this episode is a masterclass and a half on all things sleep health. It is going to be some familiarity to some things maybe that you've heard, but the way that Michael breaks it down is truly one of a kind. He's also is going to be shedding light on some myths, half truths, debunking a lot of this stuff that actually does not have our best sleep interest at heart. He's going to be talking about the biggest signs that we're not getting enough sleep or sufficient restorative sleep. Are there any hidden symptoms of sleep deprivation or just suboptimal sleep? And pay attention, because he's going to share one thing that we probably are all doing if we wake up in the middle of the night, that is so detrimental to getting back to sleep, more importantly, getting back to quality sleep. And for all my new parents out there, I'm raising my hand. I took advantage of the time to sit across the table from the man, the myth, the sleep legend, to talk all things.

04:44 New parent sleep, health, Like how the hell do I get my baby to go to sleep? Do babies have circadian rhythms or is it how we parent them that develops them? And what is the worst thing a new parent could do in terms of their baby's sleep? Share it out with a friend. If you find value in this episode and if you learn something that's going to help you get a better night's sleep tonight, please don't keep it to yourself. Share this episode, share the show with a friend, a colleague, a coworker, your partner. We all deserve better sleep and it really does help the show grow. Thank you so much. Welcome to Ever Forward Radio. Welcome back, Dr Michael Bruce. Yeah, so episode what did I say? 24?

05:24 - Michael (Guest) 24.

05:25 - Chase (Host) So, from episode 24 july 2017 now to now, april 2025 great to finally sit down with you in person. I know I'm excited. Yeah, welcome to be here, dr michael bruce. Thanks for having me. Doctor, that's me. Um, sleep is one of my favorite things in the world me too, but that's why we're here. I gotta got to ask.

05:44 - Michael (Guest) As a new dad this is my chance to be selfish. You're going to be crushed. How old is your baby? 10 weeks this Thursday.

05:51 - Chase (Host) Oh, congratulations. Like newborn. That's amazing. I love him. Baby Dean. Shout out baby Dean. We're in a much better place now, but I know I'm not alone?

06:00 - Michael (Guest) No, you are not. So the data would suggest that new parents, specifically the first year, actually the first three years, you lose almost. I think it's like seven months of sleep, like 24 hours, like if you just collected it all within three.

06:16 - Chase (Host) Over the course of the year.

06:18 - Michael (Guest) Over the course of three years, you're losing roughly seven months of sleep. I think that's the right data. My heart, oh my God. Well, no, no, no, there's an easy way out of it, right? So I don't know what you and your partner are doing, but what I recommend very first, shot out of the gate an on-call system, right? So doctors do this all the time.

06:40 So when you're a group of doctors and you have to cover the hospital, one guy stays up all night and covers for the other four. Guys and gals right, Same process, except for you. Only have one person that can cover for you. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday you take the baby If the baby, baby Dean wakes up. Uh, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday your partner takes the baby. If the baby wakes up, you flip a coin for Sundays, Okay, and that way you know that you're going to get at least three decent nights of sleep in a week, and so is your partner. The problem, what a lot of people do is they'll say I'll take Monday through Wednesday, you take Thursday through Saturday, and by the time Wednesday hits, you're so exhausted you get crushed.

07:17 - Chase (Host) Oh, so you can't just group them together.

07:18 - Michael (Guest) That need to be broken up Every other day is really the best way to go about doing what I call the on-call system. Now there's a second system that you can utilize, depending upon your chronotype. So we talked about chronotypes last time. As you may remember, I'm a night owl, or what I call a wolf. Now here's the good news. If you happen to have a partner who's an early bird, like a lion that's me and your partner is a wolf, what you can do is you can just split the night in half. So if I'm already going to be up until 1230, one o'clock in the morning, staying up and covering the kid until two or three is probably not the worst scenario for me, versus my partner, who might be an early bird, can wake up at four 30, no problem and probably does on the regular. So that person can cover the second half of the night.

08:00 - Chase (Host) This is great information because actually I've been running this kind of AB test recently. So my wife is on maternity leave now. For how much longer? Well, we're extending another month, so she's got two more months. Nice, yeah. So what we've been doing recently now because he's getting into longer and longer bouts of sleep you know four to actually last night he did almost six hours.

08:20 Oh it's awesome. So what we've been doing is like I'll take the first wake up and feeding and then she'll do the second one, and then I'll do typically the third one, which is when I would just wake up normally anyways. But based on qualitative data how I feel and quantitative looking at my whoop data I am seeing that it's actually not working out to my favor. So I'm actually getting total about the same, you know, eight hours sleep, but it's more broken up and I think it's because of my chronotype. So what I'm hearing is, I think, cause my wife, she'll stay up way longer than me.

08:49 - Michael (Guest) I'm up by like five, 30. Yeah.

08:52 - Chase (Host) We should switch those.

08:53 - Michael (Guest) Yeah, exactly, let follow your chronotype. You'll be surprised at how well it works, and it might not be perfect, like you might still need to do a little bit of the Monday, wednesday, friday thing, you know, on occasion, but between the two of you you can probably figure out a schedule that makes a little bit more sense for you. Okay, do babies have?

09:09 - Chase (Host) circadian rhythms Depends on their age, okay, or is it how we parent them that develops them?

09:15 - Michael (Guest) Both so great. This is one of the best questions I've ever been asked when it comes to circadian rhythms. All right, so when it comes to circadian rhythms, so I like where your head is at. So, interestingly, when you have a very, very young new baby, believe it or not, they enter sleep through REM and they only have two stages of sleep. It's like a REM or a non-REM. We actually call it something different, we call it something called trace alternat and there's another form of type of EEG waveform. But basically, infants, itty bitty, teeny tiny, the squishy ones, the raisins they really either are in deep REM or they're in regular old sleep, and then not until they hit like I think it's three or four months Do we start to see the formation of new and different stages of sleep in terms of the depth and being able to look at the differences of the depth.

10:03 - Chase (Host) Remember is that just because of brain development, where they're at Exactly?

10:06 - Michael (Guest) It actually doesn't get into those different waves.

10:08 So here's what ends up happening is the way we measure sleep is based on EEG brain waves, right? When you've got an itty bitty, teeny tiny, they don't have brain waves yet, or at least not the brain waves like we're used to looking at when we identify sleep. They have a different kind of brainwave, but they're going to catch up and they're going to get there. It just takes them a little while to get there. So what ends up happening is you start to see what are called sleep regressions, right? So as an example, here's what's going to happen.

10:34 - Chase (Host) I've experienced that it's horrible. It's horrible.

10:37 - Michael (Guest) Exactly so. You go through a period of time where there's brain development and then all all of a sudden it's a new kid and it's a new sleep pattern and you've got you better, get used to it because it's happened and there's no turning back, and then it gets better, better, better, and then around two years it hits you again. So there's a couple of different times where you're going to see this regression back to messed up sleep, waking up multiple times throughout the night, things of that nature. And it doesn't just have to do with brain development, it has to do with entire body development. So half the time kids are waking up because they're hungry. Right, their body is growing and they need more food, especially kids who are mostly breast milk fed, because what ends up happening is they burn through the breast milk like quick, quick, quick, faster than formula. Yes, absolutely.

11:25 - Chase (Host) Why is that?

11:26 - Michael (Guest) Because it's easier to absorb and it's easier to digest, so it rips through. It's about the most natural substance on earth for babies.

11:33 - Chase (Host) So it's just extremely bioavailable. Correct there's like hardly any digestion metabolism that actually needs to happen, right.

11:40 - Michael (Guest) And what ends up happening is is the kid burns through it because, yes, it's calorically dense and it's got some fat in it, but it's not, you know, a carbohydrate. I mean, there is carbohydrates in it, don't get me wrong, but it's not like carbohydrates, like we think of carbohydrates. So, as an example, when I've got a parent who's like, hey, I've got a 12 week old or a 16 week old or you know even, let's say, a six month old, and we're having some sleep related issues like the baby seems to be waking up after three hours and we can't settle them back down we have to give them a bottle. First thing I usually recommend is put a little cereal in the breast milk before bed and thicken it up a little bit so that the baby's got a little more substance in their stomach, we're talking golden grams.

12:17 We're talking Cheerios. We're talking there's a flaky oatmeal substance called cereal that you can find in the grocery store aisle. It's. It looks like an oatmeal, but it's hype. It's super flaky, it's very thin. Your partner, if they do the grocery shopping, we'll know exactly what I'm talking about. And you just pour a little, a teaspoon of that in with the breast milk, let it dissolve in. It just thickens it up a bit. You may even have to create a slightly larger hole in the nipple for the uh for the substance to get through. But once he gets through it fills up their belly and now they're nice and happy and then they have a tendency to sleep.

12:48 - Chase (Host) My wife is going to love me when I come home with all these new tips. Um, that's incredible. I feel like I just got a crash course in sleep health. You just condensed probably like two months of self-research into what Seven minutes here. I don't know.

12:59 - Michael (Guest) Yeah, you know, that's what I do.

13:09 - Chase (Host) Yeah, that's what I do, yeah, okay. So one other question around new parent and baby sleep health. Yeah, what is and I hate to say worst thing here, really when we're talking health, but what is the worst thing a new parent could?

13:14 - Michael (Guest) do in terms of their baby's sleep. Oh, that's easy. The worst thing that parents can do is in terms of their baby's sleep. Well, there's two things. Number one is leaving them in their own bed with them too long. A them in their own bed with them too long. A lot of parents like too long, like so, like months and months and months. So okay, so when you're talking co-sleeping, correct, right. So if it gets in there too long, that can be problematic because the baby loves it. Like why wouldn't they they get to hang out with their parents? It's warm, it smells good, there's a food source right next to them, like, if you get them too used to that, they're not going to want to leave.

13:44 - Chase (Host) So, but you're not saying co-sleeping is detrimental.

13:47 - Michael (Guest) in short bouts First 12 weeks I got no problems with co-sleeping. But what I will tell you is from a co-sleeping perspective. You want to have some type of apparatus that the child is in, like a basket, like a Moses basket or something like that. As long as there's something there, the problem is is what you don't want is you don't want the adult human to roll over on top of child. Of course, right, and that only usually happens if alcohol is involved. So parents are not to be drinking and sleeping in the same bed because they just they won't recognize waking up and they end up smothering or crushing.

14:21 Any substance really probably Fair. Any substance is probably a bad idea. The second big problem that I think a lot of parents do is they put the child down asleep. This is about the worst idea you could possibly have, because the child has no idea how to self-soothe. So here's what's interesting is there's this concept called object permanence, which is it happens at a particular time in a child's life where, when you leave the room until they understand what object permanence is, they think you've left them forever. And it's pretty scary when you're this little, you know entity and you have no idea what's going on, and so what you want to do is put them in the room awake, because if you put them down asleep and they wake up which they inevitably will do they're going to be like where's mom, where's?

15:03 dad and they're going to let loose versus oh, I've been here before, I know mom and dad are around. Or if I start crying, mom and dad can walk into the room, not touching the child, but letting the child see them there, calming the child down with their words, not their hands, and allowing the child to self-soothe themselves back to sleep. Now I want to be clear. If the child's got gastroesophageal reflux, if you've got a special needs child, if you've got a child's got a cold, got something going on, clearly pick up your kid, right. But if your kid's in great health and all they're doing is waking up and crying, you need to resist the urge to scoop them up and cuddle them until they fall asleep and then put them back down to sleep, because they never learn how to sleep. Okay, now you shouldn't allow the child to just cry and cry and cry and cry.

15:50 I'm not a big fan of the cry it out method because, quite frankly, a lot of parents don't know when to pull the plug right, and they'll just let them cry, cry, cry and also, in the kid, pukes right. Now you've got a much different problem. On your hands, right, you've got a child that's super wound up, that's probably dehydrated from the crying and the puking, right, and now you're up all night, yeah, yeah, right. So it's really about prepping before, understanding kind of the rules or guidelines and then just following a decent set of rules, but knowing when to you know, go in and help. Go in and help.

16:22 - Chase (Host) Do you and your partner fight over the thermostat every night? One of you is freezing, the other one's sweating. Getting a good night's sleep feels impossible. But what if you could both sleep at the perfect temperature without the constant thermostat wars?

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17:27 It works with any mattress designed for one sleeper or two, and their units are so discreet in size it tucks neatly underneath the bed, so you basically just set it and forget it and wake up so well rested. Also, my unit I got it on a timer and it is cooling my side of the bed down when I'm ready to go to bed and then warms up gradually in the morning to help me wake up without a blasting alarm clock. Sleepme slash ever forward. That's S-L-E-E-P. Dot me slash ever forward to save up to $315 on the ChiliPad Doc Pro. What you're talking about is like don't jump in to physically grab them, sue them. If the goal is you still want them to sleep, correct. If they're waking up and getting fussy and kind of all the things you were talking about, and like nap time is over, sleep is over, then go in, grab them, pull them do the whole thing.

18:17 - Michael (Guest) I'm talking middle of the night.

18:18 - Chase (Host) Okay, that highlights something now that we researched and it's been working really well and that's waiting to put them into, uh, the bassinet or the cradle or whatever it is. Um, new dad brain still not firing here. Uh, is in their transition, so you don't want them fully asleep, but if they're getting like sleepy and beginning to like close their eyes a little, bit as soon as they start to rub their eyes, yeah, start putting them down.

18:41 - Michael (Guest) Okay.

18:42 - Chase (Host) So when they do this, that is them basically saying I'm tired he hasn't done this quite that much but you'll figure out what his sign is like, yeah, like rub his face in his head, you'll find the sign.

18:55 - Michael (Guest) Yeah, because every kid's a little bit different. Both of my kids were eye rubbers, so we knew I have a 23 year old and a 21 year old, so I've been through this on a couple of occasions and I treat a lot of patients like this as well.

19:06 - Chase (Host) Amazing. Okay, all right, I'll get off my new parent soapbox here. No, it's good stuff. But I want to ask because sleep health is huge. Right, I think it's a big deal. It is, and this is you know, you've been talking about this for a minute 25 years Wow. I'm old brother. I'm curious in 25 years, as a personal huge sleep health advocate and professionally, what has been the biggest consistent through line that is accurate and what is one thing in sleep health that you wish would just go away by now?

19:36 - Michael (Guest) Easiest one wake up at the same time seven days a week. If all every one of your listeners did was do that, I can guarantee a 20 to 30% improvement in their overall sleep quality. Wow, let me explain. When your core at night, your core body temperature, rises, rises, rises and it gets to a point where it reaches a peak and then it drops, that drop is a signal to your brain to release melatonin and allow you to fall asleep. Okay, when you wake up in the morning time and your eyes open up, right, sunlight hits your eye and hits a very specific cell in your eye called a melanopsin cell, sends a signal to your brain to turn the melatonin faucet off in your brain, but it sets a timer for 14 hours later. This is called the melatonin phase response curve. So if you're waking, up at 6 am.

20:26 14 hours later is 8 pm, melatonin kicks off. Takes about 90 minutes for it to get up and in, so around 9.30, you start to feel a little sleepy. Get ready for bed by 10.30,. 11 o'clock you're in bed, okay, or maybe even earlier. That's at 6 am. Now you sleep in on Saturday until 8. Guess what? Melatonin doesn't kick off at 8 pm. It kicks off at 10 pm. Now it doesn't know that you're on a weekend.

20:47 - Chase (Host) It has no idea.

20:49 - Michael (Guest) It's a timer, not a clock. That's the difference. So it's a static piece of time that you now have to understand how it works in your body. So if you keep your 6 am seven days a week, your melatonin knows exactly what to do and exactly when to do it, and I've I've actually fixed more people's sleep with this one tip than any other single tip out there Period, full stop.

21:16 - Chase (Host) Man, I mean I can't disagree. I got to say probably about five years ago, right when I first moved to LA, I really just honed all in on sleep, health and prioritizing it.

21:26 - Michael (Guest) You should have called.

21:27 - Chase (Host) We're neighbors. I should have gone back to our podcast. I know, right, the thing that I did was I did that. Well, I did the same rise time and the same bedtime and after, honestly, I'd say, two weeks, my life was transformed.

21:40 - Michael (Guest) It's amazing. But a lot of people bedtime is kind of like a bag of chips. Once it's open, it's done. What do you mean Once you blow past your bedtime? Most people are like screw it, let's just watch Game of Thrones, right? They're like let's go, I'm already in. Right, I've already passed my bedtime.

21:57 I've done the deed Right I might as well just have a good time here. The the reason I focus on the morning time is because you really have total control of what time you wake up. Set an alarm, it's very simple and it pulls you out of sleep. If you're sleeping until your alarm and, by the way, by setting that morning wake-up time, you will naturally change your bedtime you know you're getting up at 6.

22:19 - Chase (Host) You're like, screw it, I'm not staying up until 1.

22:22 - Michael (Guest) Oh, yeah, it does. And now you're starting to think about your sleep more. You're starting to think about okay, I'm waking up in the morning, what time should I be thinking about going to sleep at night? And when people think about their sleep more, it's better for them. Most people never think about their sleep. They just wait until their head is bobbing in front of the television and then they walk into the bathroom, they wash their face, they brush their teeth, they get in bed and then they're wide awake and they don't know what to do. Nobody does that right. Nobody does that. So one piece of advice is wake up at the same time seven days a week. Now I'll tell you what I wish would stop. You asked what would stop. That was going to be my follow-up. Yeah, I wish that people understood what melatonin really is and understood how to utilize it. So lots of people take melatonin right.

23:08 Melatonin is a hormone. It is not an herb, it is not a mineral, it is not a vitamin. It is a hormone. Hormones affect your entire body in very unique ways, so most people don't know this.

23:17 Melatonin is by prescription only everywhere but the United States. Come on really Everywhere, but the United States. Come on really Everywhere but the United States. Okay, that's number one. I had no idea. Number two at high dosages, melatonin is a contraceptive. Yes, it is birth control, correct. Now how many pediatricians are walking around telling parents hey, your kid's not sleeping, give him some melatonin and have them fall asleep? Number one I think it's 96% of children have got four times the amount of melatonin that they really need, so right, so giving them more melatonin is not a good idea, number one. Number two you just taught your kid they need a pill to sleep. That's a really stupid, freaking idea, right? So I'm not a fan. Anybody under the age of 18 should not take melatonin full stop, unless you have a child on the spectrum. There is data to show that children who are on the autism spectrum actually require melatonin at fairly decent dosages, like 5 to 7 milligrams Require not just might be advised to supplement with, but actually require.

24:22 Well, I would say possibly require. I mean, if your child doesn't have a sleep problem, then I wouldn't institute melatonin. But if you've got a child on the spectrum that is having a sleep problem, melatonin is definitely a great place to start. But that is the only group of children where I would say that it's a good idea. Here's the crazy thing that almost nobody knows Melatonin affects the changes, the effectiveness of birth control. Well, yeah, if it's a contraceptive that you're talking about.

24:47 - Chase (Host) yeah, Right.

24:47 - Michael (Guest) So every woman who's out there on birth control who's currently taking melatonin, your birth control is far less effective.

24:55 - Chase (Host) Wake up. How many people I've never heard this. Why don't people talk about this? I've got more. Oh, I've got more data.

25:00 - Michael (Guest) Did you know that melatonin directly affects SSRIs, which are antidepressants Zoloft, paxil, effexor every single antidepressant on the marketplace is affected by melatonin. That's problematic. Did you know that diabetes medication and high blood pressure medication are all affected by melatonin? There is an interaction effect. So people just willy-nilly walk into the health food store the Whole Foods, the Lazy Acres, the Air One, whatever and they buy this melatonin off the shelf, which, by the way, is in an overdosage format.

25:34 The correct dose is somewhere between a half and one and a half milligrams. It's almost impossible to find. You go into a store and there's three milligrams, five milligrams, 10 milligrams. So I investigated that to figure out why. So it turns out that there was a guy out of MIT named Dr Workman who discovered the exact dose that you need of melatonin to get plasma concentration levels to the point where it's effective, and then he patented the dose. Oh my God. And so every company— this is the dose that's in the products, this is the dose that it should be, which is between a half and one and a half milligrams. And so every other group that decided to sell melatonin. We're going to have to pay him for his patent. So they just said screw it, we'll just double the dose. Who cares what it does to people? And that's why we have melatonin at massively high dosages out there. Now a study was done out of Canada.

26:54 - Chase (Host) This was going back eight, 10 years ago where they pulled 30 different melatonin brands off the shelf and guess what? None of them had the amount on the bottle that was in it. I would argue that there's a gazillion people out there that are taking melatonin that, a are not taking it the right way, b not taking the right dose and C it's not going to be effective for them. Where do I even begin with that? I mean? Well, one I knew that melatonin was a hormone. I think the vast majority of people do not. They have no idea. Oh, if I can go to CVS over the counter, buy it, especially in a gummy. It must be safe. It's a safe, fun little vitamin supplement thing. So one, I think the awareness that melatonin is in fact a hormone. And the second Big deal Continuously seconds that you start messing around with exogenous hormones. It has massive cascading effects, majority speaking, to what your body endogenously is going to create or stop creating, especially when it comes to melatonin it's just like testosterone.

27:31 - Michael (Guest) There's a reason that you don't go to the cvs and walk into the testosterone aisle and pull some and take it home.

27:38 - Chase (Host) La people would love that if you could um, but uh, all the gym bros out there would be into it, but especially, I think the other thing to point out about hormones melatonin is that once you start messing with one it, it messes with all the others yes, exactly, um, and you've also once again told yourself that you need a pill to sleep.

27:57 - Michael (Guest) Okay, I have been treating patients for 26 years. Are there people that need a pill to sleep? You bet there are some people that need a pill to sleep. You bet there are some people that need a pill to sleep. If you're a paranoid schizophrenic, you get your Ambien no questions asked. Okay, if you're a bipolar, you can get your sleeping pills, no problem.

28:15 There are certain situations where it makes perfect sense and, by the way, there are even situations where melatonin makes sense Jet lag Absolutely. I use melatonin for jet lag, shift work, of course we use it for there. There's even people who have melatonin deficiencies. Now here's what's interesting is, as we get older so I'm 57 years old, right around 50, 55, that's when we start to see melatonin production decline. Is that male and female? Male and female, right? And so I'm in the range where I can go get myself tested and see if I have a melatonin deficiency. It may make sense for me to personally be taking melatonin at my age. So there's really three big situations where I would say melatonin makes perfect sense, and any sleep doctor you brought through this door would say the same thing. The problem comes is when people start going outside of these parameters and using it basically as a placebo, right, because that's really what's happening. And, by the way, placebos are great, right, like placebos work 30% of the time placebos work Like.

29:16 if I could get everybody to work 30% of the time, I'd be fantastic.

29:20 - Chase (Host) But so that also makes me ask so for someone like you know, in the age range and you're talking about specifically, with you know, diagnosed mental health disorders. Sure, we're talking this is really the only appropriate time to consider melatonin.

29:33 - Michael (Guest) Well, I mean again, depending upon what their sleep issues are, and it doesn't have to be mental health issues, Like let's say they've got dementia, let's say they've got Parkinson's, like there's a whole host of different reasons why people might have varied melatonin. But at that age, right where it starts to become deficient, what I'm suggesting is, yes, you can absolutely help that deficiency and then see how the body reacts. Okay, and, by the way, that's how I do all my supplements.

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30:42 I've been loving Fatty 15. It is one teeny, tiny vegan capsule that has pretty much replaced all of my old big, bulky, stinky omega-3 fish oil supplements. It's one tiny capsule I take daily that I can actually feel the benefits of. I've been taking it for almost two years. I cannot recommend Fatty 15 enough and in fact, right now you can enhance your mood, your brain health, longevity, sleep health and save some money at the same time, because fatty 15 is continuing to be a proud partner here on the show. So if you want to learn more about why I love C15, this profound new essential fatty acid, and save some money at the same time. Go ahead and check the link in the show notes under episode resources, or head to fatty15.com slash ever forward. That's F-A-T-T-Y one. Fivecom slash ever forward to start supporting your brain and sleep from the cellular level and save 15% with code ever forward. In fact, you can save an additional 15% off of their already discounted 90-day starter kit. Live better, sleep deeper, think clearer. Fatty15.com slash ever forward.

31:53 - Michael (Guest) People come to me all the time like Michael, what's the best supplement for sleep? Like I just want to optimize my sleep, what's the one thing I should take right? So number one that's the dumbest question on earth and I get it every single day.

32:05 - Chase (Host) I'm just going to delete that question from my notes. Delete that question from your notes, right?

32:09 - Michael (Guest) So here's my theory, and I think every physician out there would agree with me on this one Do blood work first, let's see where your deficiencies are. If you're deficient in vitamin D, magnesium, iron or melatonin, let's fix that first. Once we get this unit working in terms of deficiencies, it may sleep just fine. I can assure you you don't have a deficiency in ashwagandha, okay, I can assure you Right so that. But that's what people think, right? They're like oh, screw it, I'll just take an ashwagandha, melatonin gummy and everything's great. No, you idiot, all you're doing is you're making your situation potentially worse.

32:47 - Chase (Host) But it doesn't I mean as someone who loves ashwagandha and uses it.

32:52 - Michael (Guest) I'm not saying anything against ashwagandha. It has a great calming effect. It does have a great calming effect.

32:55 - Chase (Host) It does have a great calming effect which can then help calm you down, get you to a place where you can go to sleep Right.

33:01 - Michael (Guest) But we're not messing with hormones here. But if you had a magnesium deficiency and a vitamin D deficiency and you added ashwagandha on top of that, it doesn't change your vitamin D deficiency and your magnesium deficiency, which, by the way, affects a whole shitload of other things that are going on in your body besides sleep. Yes, yeah, load of other things that are going on your body besides sleep?

33:17 - Chase (Host) Yes, yeah, I mean. Magnesium has what like 300, 300 different things. It's a catalyst for, like, we're still finding out more.

33:23 - Michael (Guest) Right, and, by the way, you have to eat your magnesium. Your body doesn't produce it and most of the food that we would go to to get magnesium from like leafy greens, like kale and stuff like that our soil has been so over tilled that the magnesium isn't coming up through the root stocks, so you could eat a fucking bushel of kale and still not get enough magnesium. So I have. Almost all of my patients are supplementing with magnesium. Almost all of my patients supplement with vitamin D because we know that they've got these deficiencies. You'd be shocked at how many people I fixed just by doing those two things.

33:54 - Chase (Host) Magnesium does wonders, as someone again who supplements nightly with magnesium.

33:59 - Michael (Guest) I do mine in the mornings. People always ask like what time do you take your magnesium? Does it make you sleepy? No, it doesn't make me sleepy.

34:05 - Chase (Host) It doesn't make me sleepy either, but I found this is how please correct me if I'm wrong, I will One kind of tell don't you worry, respect. One kind of telltale way that I feel like magnesium works better for me for improved sleep health is I actually. When I supplement magnesium, I will notice that I can recall into greater detail dreams and dream more in REM sleep. Right, so is that well?

34:33 - Michael (Guest) yes and no. So 80 percent of the time if I wake somebody up in REM sleep, they'll report a dream, but about 20% of the time if I wake somebody up in REM sleep, they'll report a dream. But about 20% of the time if I wake somebody up in any other stage of sleep, they will also report a dream. So you dream in every stage of sleep. You're just more likely to be dreaming in REM sleep. Okay, so that's number one. Now, dreams in and of themselves are a fascinating field of study. I just spent the last year becoming what's called a dream therapist. Now let me explain to you what this is, because it's not dream interpretation. I see you like interpreting our dreams like buy a lotto ticket break up with your boyfriend.

35:06 No, I am not. I am not doing any of that. What we do is we use the dream as part of the therapeutic process. So, as an example, you come to see me and you're having these dreams. I would bring you into a room with me, not too dissimilar from where we are now. I'd put you into a mild hypnotic state merely by doing some breath work just you know nostril breathing for a few minutes just to relax you and calm you down.

35:28 Before you would have arrived, I would have asked you to write down the dream in as much detail as you could possibly remember, okay. And then, with your eyes closed, in a relaxed state, I would ask you to repeat to me your dream, and when we got to the end of where you remembered, I would basically just turn to you and say push, play. What happens next? I already have you in a very suggestive state. I have you in a state where you're able to recall. Remember, dreams are 85% imagination and 15% fact, okay, most people don't know that. So how do we know that when we, when we actually pulled, when we actually have people write dream reports?

36:09 - Chase (Host) right.

36:09 - Michael (Guest) We look at that, we look at the report and he said what's real, what's not real? Again, 85% of it is imagination. So what's good about that for us is we allow the person to continue to imagine what happens. So what do I do in this particular situation? I'm a Sherpa, I'm not an interpreter. So I say let's drop into the dream together. So in her mind she has now dropped us into the dream. I'm using her as a patient. We dropped into the dream. And then I turn to her and I say well, describe to me the setting. And I'll give you an example of this patient I was working with not too long ago and she said well, we're in a jungle. I said oh, that's cool. I said are there any animals in the jungle? And she looks and she's quiet for a second and I can see her head rotating.

36:51 Literally she's scanning the jungle in her head and she said absolutely, there's a lion over there. And I said, oh my gosh. I said, well, is the lion friendly? She stops yeah, the lion is friendly. Okay, does the lion speak? Yeah, michael, the lion speaks. Can we walk over and talk to the lion? I'm just asking questions, prompting, prompting. Right Again, I don't know what the lion represents or doesn't represent. I'm here to merely have you, the dreamer, push us through the dream from the point in which you stopped, so we can figure out what's going on, because it doesn't matter what I think the dream means. It only matters what you think the dream means.

37:32 - Chase (Host) This is where everyone listening is screaming yeah, it's called Inception. I love the movie. It was great.

37:40 - Michael (Guest) So it's called Inception. I love the movie. It was great, so it's not too dissimilar. I'll tell you a separate story about Inception. That's very interesting, but let's get back to the dream that we're working with this person on. So we walk over to the lion and so I say you know, the lion talks, does the lion have a name? And she says yeah, the lion's name is Leonard. I said that's an interesting name for a lion. Why is his name Leonard? And then all of a sudden it comes out my father's name is Leonard. Now we're someplace Interesting.

38:03 - Chase (Host) And that's how it works. I've never heard of this before.

38:06 - Michael (Guest) This is amazing, very few people have heard about it. You have to get trained by like a special group of people, like it's a whole thing, but there is a well-documented way of studying and learning how to do dream therapy. I literally spent a year with a. I was in a class, we had other people and we would work with each other's dreams and we did the whole thing and it was fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Where does it?

38:28 - Chase (Host) go from there. So, like you kind of both realized, my father is the lion. So then, what she's like? Oh, I want to reach out to my father.

38:34 - Michael (Guest) Well, no. So then we started talking to the lion. And guess what? The lion had a problem with her and it kind of mimicked the relationship that she has with her father. And as she was talking with the lion, she was realizing some of the problems that she was having with her father. And when I pulled her back out of the dream and at that point when you pull somebody back out they've had quite an experience. So you again, keep them safe, keep them calm, make sure that they're all good, and then you just turn to them and say, well, what did you think? And the person now assimilates all of that imagined experience to now say what it means to them Because that's all that matters.

39:12 - Chase (Host) Wow, it's so cool dude Reminds me of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. It's very similar, Not going fully in, but dissociative therapy.

39:21 - Michael (Guest) But you don't have to use the ketamine part of it. But it's not too dissimilar from a Sherpa type of you know, you've got a guide right, not, I mean, you know, ashwagandha? No, not ashwagandha, what is it? Ayahuasca People, ayahuasca trips and things like that. It's not too dissimilar from that. However, I don't need a drug to do it. All you have to do is if I had a dream and write it down.

39:46 - Chase (Host) But here's the catch Most people are like well, I don't remember my dreams.

39:47 - Michael (Guest) So we need to fix your sleep to get them to this. Well, yes and no, I can teach you how to remember your dreams. But, to be clear, it's one of those skill sets where, once you turn it off, so what do you mean? Well, once you start remembering your dreams and I show you how to remember your dreams, then you remember all of your dreams.

40:03 - Chase (Host) Not just like I get better at remembering them, but every dream that I've had I can. I learned how to unlock it.

40:08 - Michael (Guest) No, you can't unlock past dreams. But moving forward now you start to remember all your dreams. To be clear, you don't necessarily want to remember all your dreams. There's some weird shit that goes on in your dreams that can have a pretty big effect on you during the day. Think about it whenever you've had a scary dream or a surprising dream or something like that. Or you woke up and you're like did that really happen? Like that has an effect on people. So I'm always, when I work with people, I'm like hey, if you come to me with a disturbing dream or a stress dream or a frequency dream, then let's work with it. But I'm not really big on hey, let's crack open the dream in your head and see what's going on. Unless the patient comes to me and says, hey, that's what I want to do, then I feel comfortable that I can do it in a safe environment where they don't get hurt, where there's not any major problems.

40:52 Where we do a lot of this work, believe it or not, is with nightmares and with people with PTSD. So think about PTSD for a second. Like one of the hallmark symptoms of PTSD is nightmares. So when we've got people who, for example, were in an active theater of war and they come back and their head had to be on a swivel and they had to make sure that they were alive. Those people don't fucking sleep. Okay, and there's a reason that they don't sleep is because not sleeping kept them alive and some pretty terrible things happened to them while they were over there, and so they've got these nightmares.

41:20 What we know about nightmares? Well, let me back up for a second. Dreams are emotional metabolism. Okay, dreams help you work through whatever emotions you had that day. The reason that you have a dream every single night, which most of the time you don't remember, is based on the emotions that you had during the day and being able to process them.

41:40 The reason we know this is because what nightmares are is the opposite. What nightmares are is you're having this dream and it becomes so scary and you cannot process the information. You wake up. That is officially a nightmare. You have to wake up from sleep in a panicked state or a frightened state for it to qualify as a nightmare. That's what almost everybody with PTSD has, and so what we do here's. The coolest part about the whole thing is when we have people write down their dream. At the very end. We have them change the ending. So, instead of somebody coming at you, you know they're going to kill you or stab you or whatever. You become the victor, not the victim. Oh wow, and you change the end of the dream in your writings and then we have you repeat the dream before bed and within five to seven days, you change a dream.

42:31 - Chase (Host) This is fascinating it's so cool, this is pioneering, yeah. Medicine, sleep health, mental health, emotional health it's cool shit.

42:41 - Michael (Guest) And I just spent the last year learning more about this and trying to understand how it works, because I've done traditional sleep medicine. And, by the way, just for your audience members, in case you didn't listen to episode 24, where I was before, I have a very unique background, right. So I have a PhD in clinical psychology. I am not an MD. However, I did take the medical boards without going to medical school and passed. I'm one of 168 people in the world who have ever done it. Humble brag.

43:08 - Chase (Host) We like it All right, all right.

43:10 - Michael (Guest) That's extremely impressive. Well, it's not about being impressive. It's about you understanding the context in which I'm giving you information. So I, while I'm only only a PhD in clinical psychology my goal was to understand insomnia as best I could. You can't understand insomnia if you don't understand the biology. So I was like, well, fuck it, I don't feel like going to medical school, so I'll just take their damn test and learn all the information, and then I can do it. And that's pretty much exactly what I did.

43:38 - Chase (Host) That's probably one of the most badass things I've ever heard in the healthcare system. It's like the opposite of. I know quite a few people who actually who go through med school, go through the whole process thinking that's what they want to do, only to realize how little to no impact they can have on the healthcare system and then it drives them out. Yeah, I did the opposite. I have a friend no impact I can have on the healthcare system and then it drives them out. Yeah, I did the opposite. I have a friend, literally right now she's about to graduate Stanford, med School, great school, great school, great school. She has been after med school for years and years and years, ever since I've known her, and she is not continuing because she realized how much the healthcare system is just so broken it's a mess, even with her decade plus dream of becoming a doctor. Yep, she's like this is so futile.

44:22 - Michael (Guest) So she's. I bypassed all of that. I took the shortcut.

44:25 - Chase (Host) That's incredible. I didn't know that about you. Wow, um God, the time is just flying by. This is so good. Uh, one of the question around dreams Sure, so if we don't remember our dreams or we don't think that we're dreaming, does that mean we're not getting quality sleep?

44:39 - Michael (Guest) No, and that's a common misconception. Okay, when you wake up, if you feel good, you got good sleep. Regardless if we remember a dream or not, whether you remember a dream or you don't remember a dream and, by the way, there's a little bit of leeway there Give yourself about 90 seconds to two minutes to wake up, because you know clear the cobwebs type of thing. But however you feel when you wake up is really a pretty good proxy for how well you slept. I tell people all the time you know your aura ring is not you right, you are your best doctor. You know exactly what's going on with that body better than any other human on earth. And so paying attention becomes critically important, and paying attention in a positive way, not looking for the little problems like, oh, I didn't get enough deep sleep. No, I woke up this morning. How did I feel? I felt pretty good, excellent.

45:25 - Chase (Host) You probably got good sleep. Yeah, I cannot agree more. I think, as much as I you know a lot of people we really love our wearables and our data and all this stuff and it has a place, a time and a place. But I think for most people, leaning on qualitative data meaning just how you feel in your own body, especially when it comes to sleep is the prime needle mover.

45:46 - Michael (Guest) Yeah, Sleep is a perception, Exactly, Exactly when you wake up. You how you perceive how well you slept. That's probably pretty close.

45:52 - Chase (Host) I feel like shit or do I feel arrested? Do I need to take that information and how I feel and then look at a wearable or piece of data to potentially ruin it.

45:59 - Michael (Guest) Right and or, by the way, so many people tell me that you know their wearable hijacked their day Right. I woke up this morning. I looked at my school my sleep score. It said I had a 45. I felt pretty good. Now I feel like dog shit, you know. Like that's not fun. Yeah, like that's not the way people need to do it. Again, look at your data once a week. Look at trends, look at, look at when there's a variation. Don't worry about the steady state. The steady state is good.

46:28 - Chase (Host) It's kind of like like the stock market, right? You know, if we just honed in every day looking at portfolios or like ups and downs, you would go crazy, but it's all about the trends. Exactly, it's all about that. It's not financial advice. I have like hardly anything in my portfolio. I just let other people do it.

46:40 - Michael (Guest) That's the way to do it brother.

46:42 - Chase (Host) Okay, so some other areas I know that you talk a lot about that I think are very pertinent is or are there? We go Grammar chase. So many people wake up. They go to sleep, but they wake up. They wake up in the middle of the night and they struggle to get back to sleep.

47:02 - Michael (Guest) Number one question that I get how do I get back to sleep? Number one question so I have a video on this on YouTube, so I will let people know what I'm going to describe now. They'll be able to also find it on YouTube. So if you go to my YouTube channel, which is just the sleep doctor, my most popular video, I think it's almost 5 million, 4.9 million views there we go, 4.9 million views on how to get back to sleep. So let me explain.

47:23 So, if you remember I was talking earlier, your core body temperature rises, rises, rises and hits a peak around 10, 1030 at night. Once your core body temperature drops, it's a signal to your brain to release melatonin. Melatonin is the key that starts the engine for sleep. So you're good to go. Now your core body temperature continues to drop, drop, drop. At some point in time, the internal furnace has got to kick into gear, otherwise you go hypothermic and you die.

47:45 Okay, guess what time that usually is 2 am, 3 am, exactly Between 1 and 3,. Every human on earth, every one of you guys, every one of you, wakes up sometime between 1 and 3 o'clock in the morning. Okay, but here's what happens. Most people roll over, they fart, they burp and they go back to sleep Right, but there's a group of people and this is not the case and those people are having a really rough ride Right, and this is not, again, uncommon. This is the most popular question that I get asked, so let's break it down for those folks who are stuck in the middle of the night and can't go back to sleep. Step number one don't pee. Now you might be saying to yourself wait a second.

48:27 - Chase (Host) Mike, yeah, I'm already up. Why wouldn't I? That's why.

48:30 - Michael (Guest) So I don't have to go get up again. No, so the main metric that nobody knows is, in order to enter into a state of unconsciousness, you need a heart rate of 60 or below. Okay, so what do you think happens to your heart rate when you go from a lying position to a seated position, to a standing position? You walk across the room, you're jumping up. Your heart rate is already through the roof. So if you don't actually have to pee, don't go pee. Now I want to be clear. If you think like the flood is coming, please get up, get your ass up and go to the bathroom. But here's what happens is, most 74% of people are side sleepers, and when you're a side sleeper, you have a tendency to kind of curl up almost into the fetal position Putting pressure on your bladder.

49:08 - Chase (Host) right, that's right.

49:09 - Michael (Guest) So what do you do when you wake up? If all you do is roll to your back and count to 10 and breathe, you may be very surprised that you don't need to pee. If you don't need to pee, don't get up and pee, because you're just making your life more difficult. Number two don't look at the clock. Now, here's the problem. As soon as you look at the clock, you instantly do the mental math. And now you're pissed right and your heart rate goes up. Shit, it's three o'clock in the morning. Here I am again sleep, sleep, sleep. And you try to force yourself to sleep. Chase, in the history of time, in the history of time, nobody has been able to force themselves to sleep. It just doesn't work that way. Your energy energy is not going in the right direction. When you're forcing, your energy is going up. We need you to transition your energy down. Okay, don't look at the fucking clock. If you possibly cannot look at the clock Now, here's what happens is, people say, well, I have to have my phone next to my bed in case my kid calls, and when I wake up in the middle of the night, I I just look at the phone and I don't even mean to bullshit.

50:10 Okay, here's the first thing. When's the last time your kid called in the middle of the night? Never, never. And I'm not suggesting that you put the phone in a different part of the house, I'm just saying put it across the room, stick it in your bathroom. Okay, like you, you can still hear it, I can assure you. And then you don't have that. You know that reaction where you grab it and then, all of a sudden, you've looked at the time, because once you've seen the time, you can't stop the calculation. You can't stop the calculation. Okay, so you haven't peed and you haven't looked at the clock. But to be fair, I'm not so stupid. Like everybody pees and everybody looks at the clock. So now you're back in bed. The only goal that you have is to get your heart rate down. But here's what happens. My wife calls it monkey mind. You just start thinking oh, I wonder what I'm doing tomorrow. I've got on the schedule. Oh, you know, I thought I forgot to do this today.

51:05 - Chase (Host) You don't even really try, it just kind of naturally happens Just starts going, just starts going and going and going.

51:10 - Michael (Guest) So I have a technique that works like a charm that everybody should do. It's called four, seven, eight breathing. Want to be clear, I did not come up with four, seven, eight breathing. A really smart guy named Dr Andrew Weil came up with it and he did it supposedly for the Navy SEALs. So supposedly, when Navy SEALs are shooting down range, if your heart's beating too fast you can change the trajectory of the bullet. So he had to do this four, seven, eight breathing to drop them down to a heart rate of 60 or below so they could fire in between heartbeats. 60 is our magic number, so we're happy with that.

51:40 - Chase (Host) That's the way we were. I'm former Army so we were always trained like basic rifle marksmanship.

51:44 - Michael (Guest) It's always exhale squeeze the trigger, right, yeah, exactly. But you've got to have a heart, you've got to have enough of the heartbeat. It all comes down to breathing Exactly Right, exactly right. So does sleep. It's the same thing. Now, getting people to do four, seven, eight, breathing there's a couple of different factors to talk about there. So, number one breathe in slowly for a count of four through your nose. Hold for a count of seven. Breathe out through your mouth for a count of eight. Now, I'm going to be honest with you. I couldn't do it when I first tried it.

52:15 - Chase (Host) Yeah, that's hard.

52:19 - Michael (Guest) It's hard. The holding wasn't bad, but once I felt like, oh my God, I'm going to explode. That's not slowing my heart rate down. So what I started with was I started with four, five, six breathing. So breathe in for a count of four, hold for a count of five, push for a count of six. Do that for two weeks, then move yourself to four, seven, eight breathing. So give yourself some time to get used to the process. Okay, so that's number one. Number two it takes between 15 and 20 cycles of four, seven, eight to drop your heart rate. It's not just going to happen off of two or three cycles. So how do you count? Yes, right, it became problematic for me. So I'm trying this.

52:56 I try every technique that I ask my patients to try, because sometimes I don't sleep either, right, and so here's what I discovered is, if I make a light fist and keep it down by my sides, when I do one cycle, I stick out a finger. Then I do another cycle, I stick it. By the time I'm I've done 10 cycles. Then I walk myself backwards. I never make it back to 20. Wow, interesting. And I fall back asleep. And here's the best part. Here's the best part You're counting, so you can't think, turns off the monkey mind. It does. Yeah, so you're doing a hack, you're doing a double, you're distracting your brain and you're doing something to lower your heart rate, both at the same time. This is incredibly powerful and, by the way, it's not called ambient, it's called four, seven, eight breathing.

53:39 - Chase (Host) Good old breath work does wonders for so many things.

53:41 - Michael (Guest) So let's say you've. You've not gone to the bathroom. You did look at the clock. Now you're doing your four, seven, eight, breathing. You've gone through your 20 cycles. You're still not asleep. What do you do?

53:52 Well, you have to assess yourself at this point and decide am I getting pissed off or am I still pretty chill? If you're getting pissed off, get out of bed Really. Yeah, absolutely, because look at the end of the day, if you're just getting angry with yourself, you're certainly not going to let your heart rate go down. However, what I want you to do is I want you to have a spot in the house that's already designated for this particular issue. You've got a chair, you've got a lamp next to it, you've got a book there waiting for you in case this happens. So you get out of your bed, you go right to your spot, you relax, you read, caught quietly, and when your eyelids start to get heavy, now you can come back into bed or go to the guest room.

54:35 Some people find that if they just change rooms because their bed partner was snoring or there's a bulldog in the bed or what, I have two bulldogs in my bed. So that's why I say that. So, like you know again, understand where your environment will allow you to go. Right, okay, I left, I came back, I did my four, seven, eight again, michael, and I'm still not sleeping. What do I do? So there's something called non-sleep deep rest. That's also known as yoga nidra. Okay, so lying in a in a corpse pose in bed while it's quiet and dark, it turns out it's rejuvenative. It's not as good as sleep, but you do that for an hour. It's worth like 20 minutes of sleep. Is this something about the position of the hands.

55:16 I don't know if it's the position of the hands. I think you can put your hands down by your sides, but I've always, I've always done it like this.

55:21 - Chase (Host) For those not watching the video kind of bringing your arms up across your chest like crisscross? Yeah.

55:25 - Michael (Guest) It's called a corpse pose, right, but like, that's what I usually tell my patients to do. And, again, if you can just sit there and relax, the natural sleep process will take over and allow you to fall back asleep Right Now. The final step in this entire process is called acceptance. Okay, to be clear, you've been here before. You were probably here last night and your head didn't fucking pop off and the world didn't come to an end, right? But we can't process it. Don't think that in the moment. But you can over time, is, you can remind yourself over time. Oh, I'm here again. I was. I was listening to chase and that weird sleep guy and he said you know what, if you just chill and relax, you're probably doing yourself some good. And so, as, as you do that and as you accept it, it becomes less important. And as it becomes less important, your heart rate goes down. Your heart rate goes down. It's all about your heart rate, right? I went to a uh uh event, uh, last week where I was speaking.

56:28 - Chase (Host) Uh, and there was another speaker there. His name is Brian Johnson. Yeah, the nitric oxide guy.

56:31 - Michael (Guest) No, no, no, no, the the the crazy, wild, wild, wild, wild hacker crazy guy Right, the don't die guy guy right, and so brian got up there, um interesting fellow. I've met him a few times, uh, and he's my biggest cheerleader because all he says is sleep is the most important thing you can possibly do. Right, and, by the way, he's kind of right, you know he does things a little bit differently, though, like he like well, he looks at sleep from a very different angle than necessarily, I do.

56:58 so he talks a lot about finding a nighttime routine and finding a bedtime. He doesn't really ever mention, hey, what happens if you have a sleep disorder, right? So let's double tap on that for a half a second. If any of your listeners out there or viewers out there think, hey, I could have a sleep disorder, here's the good news it's super easy to get tested and it's super cheap. Now, before COVID, we used to send people to laboratories. You'd have 27 electrodes on your head. You'd be there all night. It was a weird environment.

57:25 - Chase (Host) I've done that before it's a really unpleasant experience.

57:31 - Michael (Guest) It's not painful per se, but it's weird. Now it's all done with a ring or it's done with a device that attaches to your wrist. That's full nighttime polysomnography. I can send a sleep study to your home. So the way we do it on my website, the sleepdoctorcom, is if you want a sleep study, you push a button, you go to a calendar, you select a time, you meet with one of our doctors We've got doctors who are board certified in all 50 states and they assess you and then, if you need it, they push a button and guess what?

58:00 A sleep study comes to your house within 24 to 48 hours. You wear it and the data jumps to your phone ports, to the cloud. You, 24 hours after the study, you're meeting with your doctor again from your home or from your phone if you want and getting the results and getting your treatment and moving forward. So all of this is to say like we've been talking about a lot of different aspects of sleep, but, to be clear, if you think you have a sleep disorder, now is the time to get it tested. It's very and, by the way, this whole process 200 bucks.

58:32 - Chase (Host) That's incredible 200 bucks and from the comfort of your own home, yeah.

58:35 - Michael (Guest) And, by the way, insurance might even cover that. Yeah, hsa FSA maybe, for sure HSA FSA. But even some insurances are accepting this now, because what we've done is the technology has shrunk the time right and now we can score it quicker and we can deliver information faster. So since COVID, there's no excuse not to get us. I mean, it's 200 bucks, I get it. $200 is a decent amount of money. But if you want to figure out one of the main pillars of your health, I suggest you get a sleep study.

59:04 - Chase (Host) Yeah, I mean what's that worth to you over time? What's $200 now versus how much time potentially resources, money are you losing?

59:10 - Michael (Guest) Dude, $200 is your bar tab on Friday night.

59:14 - Chase (Host) Which we won't even I'm not gonna have time to get into, like the whole aspect of alcohol and sleep. Let's just, you know, wrap it up and just say, if you drink alcohol, your sleep, specifically your deep sleep, your stage, three, four sleep, which is called Delta sleep.

59:39 - Michael (Guest) This is your physical restoration sleep. It basically annihilates that, Okay. Also, during that particular period of time, something called the glymphatic system kicks in. This is like a waste management system for the brain. It removes proteins that you don't want collecting in there. Alcohol suspends that system. Okay. So, and by the way, before you fall asleep, alcohol is metabolized. One drink takes about one hour. Once you fall asleep, that number turns into about two and a half to three hours. Two and a half to three X Right.

01:00:08 So, not that you would admit to this, but maybe back in the day, did you ever get so hammered one night that you woke up drunk? I have Right, yes, right, yes. That's because you go to bed. It's two o'clock in the morning. You've had way too much to drink. Your body can't metabolize it. You wake up, you're still drunk. So again, there's a big difference between going to sleep and passing out right. So if you wanted to enjoy a glass of wine with your meal, but you don't want to destroy your sleep, how do you do it? It's easy do it earlier in the day.

01:00:40 - Chase (Host) Yes, I am promoting day drinking here okay, right not really, but kind of sort of right as you get older man, if you're going to drink honestly, day drinking becomes your new friend, absolutely well, number one your body doesn't create something called alcohol dehydrogenase.

01:00:56 - Michael (Guest) So you get a better buzz, longer, because your body isn't creating the enzyme. And, by the way, it's cheaper because you don't need as much alcohol. But what I tell people to do is let's say it's 630 and you're sitting down for dinner, or seven o'clock and you're sitting down for dinner. Have your glass of wine right, then have a glass of water. Then have your second glass of wine Maybe you're halfway through your meal. Then have a glass of water. Now stop, you've put enough water in your system where we're going to start flushing it through. You're still going to feel pretty good enjoying your wine. Now you should have three hours before lights out, so one hour for each alcoholic beverage, plus one extra hour just to give yourself a little bit of leeway. So if you're done by 730 and you're not going to bed until 1030, you're fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now to be clear if you didn't have any alcohol, would you sleep better? Of course you would, but if you want to have a glass of red wine with dinner, I don't think I give a shit.

01:01:49 - Chase (Host) Yeah, I'm with you. That's been another great hack. I've noticed, personally speaking, ways that I have found to improve my sleep and, honestly, body composition, weight management, digestion just me personally, again, qualitatively, how I feel, especially after waking up, is in. You could call it intermittent fasting. I don't really abide by that, but like increasing the window of my last meal time to bedtime Um, if I can cut off eating by 8 PM of the latest, I'm in a much better place. And if I'm going to have alcohol, a beer, by 8 pm of the latest, I'm in a much better place. And if I'm going to have alcohol, a beer, a glass of wine with a meal, I'll have it before dinner or, like you know, up to eating with it or drinking with it, which is smart, and then cut it off even sooner by like 6.37.

01:02:25 - Michael (Guest) Yeah, and this is one of the points that Brian Johnson was making that I agreed with, which I thought was really funny and interesting. So what he does, he stops eating at 11 am. Yeah, he gets it all in the front end of the day way early, right, and then he has nothing in his stomach. And what he said when I was talking with him afterwards and he's actually said this publicly is he said moving his food timing to 11 am had the largest effect on his sleep than anything else did, and sleep is, in his mind, the most important thing for longevity. I agree, um, but it's.

01:02:57 But here's where it's all about heart rate. So when you eat too close to bedtime, what happens? Your heart has to increase in order to move all this stuff through your metabolism and through your system. And guess what? It takes a while. Depending upon what you eat, it can take hours and hours and hours. So what a lot of people again don't think about is what do you have for dinner? Yeah, there are definitely sleep-friendly foods for dinner and there are definitely sleep-non-friendly foods for dinner. Right, like you really don't want to have a massive carbohydrate load before bed, it's very difficult for your body to get through it, your heart rate is going to be high, you're going to get poor quality sleep on top of all of it and, by the way, you don't have any chance to burn it off. So it's going to fat. So it's really not helping you out. To begin with, right, pasta is great for lunch, and don't get me wrong Every time I've been to Italy, all I do is eat the pasta there.

01:03:48 But the pasta there, I think, is a little bit different than the pasta here.

01:03:50 - Chase (Host) It's very different. I never feel the same way eating pasta Me either, meal after meal after meal, when.

01:03:54 - Michael (Guest) I'm in Europe. You can eat almost anything. The food here sucks. Amen, brother. That has a massive problem when it comes to sleep and people don't even understand, like they don't even think. Well, how could your food have an effect on your sleep? I'm here to tell you it does for sure.

01:04:10 - Chase (Host) Do not disagree in any capacity. That could be a whole nother episode.

01:04:15 - Michael (Guest) It might be better if you had me back a little closer than 20 something years.

01:04:20 - Chase (Host) I already, because I know we're coming up on time here shortly. I'm getting to maybe a quarter of these questions, because this is so fascinating, so absolutely We'd love to have you back again. I do want to get to specifically where I think we are with. You know, a lot of access to actual tools, products, services and information about them. I believe that our awareness of tools and sleep health has radically improved over the last few years, and so I want to really highlight, as we get towards the end here, what I'm going to call some common nightstand sleep tools or bedroom sleep tools that I think a lot of us have or are beginning to implement.

01:04:54 - Michael (Guest) I'll give you the thumbs up or the thumbs down.

01:04:55 - Chase (Host) Let's do it, so yeah kind of maybe like a rapid fire style. Sure let's go In terms of how directly do you think these positively influence our sleep health, generally speaking, blackout eye mask.

01:05:07 - Michael (Guest) So I'm a huge fan of eye masks. I really enjoy them. I use one personally, and I especially use it when I travel. The big part of problem with travel is you just never know what the light source is gonna be. You never know what's gonna happen. So I actually bring earplugs and eye masks with me when I travel. And my wife sleeps with the television on and we have two bulldogs, one of them whom snores, so I sleep with an eye mask on at home.

01:05:27 - Chase (Host) Well, that brings me to another option, or another item is earplugs.

01:05:31 - Michael (Guest) So I'm a fan of earplugs if you can sleep with them. Some people, just if they're side sleepers, they can't sleep with them. I don't have a problem with earplugs in general. However, you want to get them noise level rated at 32 or below. If it's above 32, you can't hear the smoke alarm. That's wow.

01:05:50 - Chase (Host) I wasn't even sure where you're going to go with that.

01:05:51 - Michael (Guest) I know you weren't that's why, when I said it, I was looking at you and you were like what?

01:05:55 - Chase (Host) So actually, to sidetrack my own story here, one of the only things I haven't done you know a tool to improve my sleep health or try are use earplugs and I actually I have some coming that I'm testing out as a potential partnership. Total honesty, but I'm actually I want to look up and see. I'm going to link this brand in the show notes for you guys below to check out, but I think what were you saying? That needs to be a certain frequency.

01:06:19 - Michael (Guest) They need to be a noise level rated N L R 32 or below.

01:06:25 - Chase (Host) And anyone's a 27 says 27 decibels SNR of noise reduction. Perfect, okay, perfect.

01:06:30 - Michael (Guest) Right, so that you just don't want it to be greater than 32, because then you cannot hear the smoke alarm and that becomes problematic.

01:06:36 - Chase (Host) Yeah, you'll have a great night's sleep. It'll be your forever sleep the dirt nap, yeah, so kind of on that cusp blackout curtains.

01:06:43 - Michael (Guest) So I like blackout curtains. However, the room's so damn dark in the morning it's hard for me to wake up. That's my struggle, yep, so I? There are actually companies now that make these specialized curtains that have little motors on them and they can run by your Alexa, so you can say, alexa, open my curtains and it'll open them up, or even like time, and they can be timed and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I just. I just found a brand called U Blockout, like the letter U and then block out, and I'm testing those now. Okay, Interesting.

01:07:12 - Chase (Host) So a blackout curtain is great to help you fall asleep, but you're missing that morning. Okay, Um, something that I've sworn by for the last two years mouth tape.

01:07:27 - Michael (Guest) So pros and cons of mouth tape. So I'm, I'm, I'm going to get on my on my soapbox on mouth tape for just a half a second. So everybody out there, here's the reason why most people need mouth tape is congestion. So what happens is you get nasal congestion. 94% of people, when they fall asleep, their mouth will close immediately, and they'll it'll stay closed, but if you have nasal congestion, your mouth drops wide open.

01:07:44 Here's the problem with breathing air through your mouth. It's like putting leaded gas in the car. There's no filter. It doesn't warm it. Your nose has little hairs called cilia, which pulls out particulates. It moistens the air. It warms the air. It makes it much easier for your lungs to take it in and to utilize the componentry in it, versus this, basically raw air that comes through your mouth. So you should keep your mouth shut.

01:08:08 Here's the problem with mouth tape Is it masks sleep apnea, so what? I tell every single one of my patients in every podcast that I'm on, because everybody asks about it. Don't use mouth tape unless you've done a sleep study, if you don't know, if you have mild sleep apnea and you don't know it, and that's the reason that you're breathing through your mouth and all you're doing is taping your mouth. Your apnea is just going to get worse and you're going to have more complications from it over the course of time and eventually it'll get so bad that it'll you'll pop the tape off in the middle of the night trying to breathe. All I'm saying is go get one of our $200 tests to figure out if you've got sleep apnea or not. If you don't, tape to your heart's content.

01:08:53 However, most people do it wrong. Most people use a horizontal piece. That's stupid. It's a small vertical piece. It goes straight down through the middle. And, by the way, you don't have to buy some fancy schmancy brand. If you go to CVS, go into the first aid section. Look for something called 3M micropore tape. That's the. We use it in surgery. It's like a skin tape. We just use it to pull the skin to the side to be able to open up. You know if you're doing sutures or something like that. So it's really quite simple. Also, I'll be honest with you. There's there are some brands out there that are I've got terrible names for their mouth tape. There's a grand hostage tape I call it all the time.

01:09:29 - Chase (Host) I think that's the worst name.

01:09:30 - Michael (Guest) I can't think of a of a bigger insult to the people who are currently still being held as hostages than a brand doing something like this. I think it's an incredible poor taste. I think it's very insensitive. Um, and, by the way, it's not like that brand does anything.

01:09:50 - Chase (Host) Super fantastic, uh, yeah, I don't use that brand, not for that title, but I do think it's a horrible name personally, it's an awful name, okay great, so let's move on to a couple other things. Noise machine white noise machine, brown noise machine I love noise machines.

01:10:04 - Michael (Guest) However, if you get too used to them, you better make sure you can take that thing with you whenever you want, especially with kids. So a lot of parents they'll take a sound machine and they'll put it into their room because they're rummaging around the house and they don't want to wake the baby. Bad idea Wake the baby. What we used to do is when the baby was taking a nap, we would vacuum in the baby's room while the baby was not. You want your kid to be able to sleep through the noise.

01:10:28 - Chase (Host) Yeah, dean, he's. The louder it is, the better. Right, it's perfect.

01:10:40 - Michael (Guest) That's exactly what you want Now.

01:10:41 - Chase (Host) can noise machines be helpful? Of course they can Look.

01:10:42 - Michael (Guest) My wife falls asleep with the television on every single night and I'm the fucking sleep doctor. Okay, there's a big screen TV this big in my, in my bedroom. It's on all night long. Okay, so I'll tell you the story. So when my wife and I were dating, which was 27 years ago, she said you know if you're amazing by the way, congratulations, that's a great yeah.

01:10:55 - Chase (Host) Seven years ago she said you know if you're amazing, by the way, congratulations, thanks.

01:10:57 - Michael (Guest) Great, yeah, great history, yeah. And so, uh, she said you know, if you ever, if we ever, have a sleepover, I need to let you know that I fall asleep with the TV on. I said, don't you worry about that, I'm going to become a sleep doctor. I pulled the TV out and she said, michael, if you'd ever like to get in that bed again, I suggest you put the TV. I put the TV right back in and I decided to study her and what I discovered was that she's not even watching, she's just listening out of what I call the corner of her ear, and it's always an episode of Seinfeld or you know something. Friends background, yeah, but it's enough of a distraction for her, for monkey mind.

01:11:35 So I use four, seven, eight, breathing. That's what helps me. She likes the television on. That's what helps her. Like, it doesn't bother me If it, if it kept me up and bothered me, we'd have an issue right. But it doesn't. I mean again, I've been married to her for 27 years, like I've been doing this for 20. It does. It just doesn't get to me at that point. Now I also want to talk about another area that's important, which is there are a lot of patients who they can't sleep in the same room with their partner, and I want to be very, very clear here on the pod, that's okay. The strength of your relationship has nothing to do with where you sleep.

01:12:12 - Chase (Host) It doesn't like you know, sleeping with your partner. You know you get the oxytocin, the serotonin. You get that kind of like bonding.

01:12:16 - Michael (Guest) You can have all of that on a schedule whenever you want it, in fact. But who wants to schedule cuddles If you can't sleep at night? You want to schedule cuddles because you have no interest in cuddling. If you ain't sleeping at night, touche, you're pissed off and you're not doing well right night. You're pissed off and you're not doing well Right. I'd rather you sleep Monday through Thursday in the guest room and then Friday, saturday and Sunday have intimacy with your partner and then go back and guess what? Everybody's happy, everybody gets their cuddles, everybody gets their intimacy and everybody gets their sleep Interesting.

01:12:51 - Chase (Host) Interesting so many great hacks here Um.

01:12:53 - Michael (Guest) I got a new book out. We should talk about that.

01:12:55 - Chase (Host) Yeah, sleep, drink, breathe. Excuse me. Yes, sleep, drink, breathe. I do want to have one more question about these tools, and then we'll get into that. You bet Smart beds? Yes, smart devices. I have a chili pad on my mattress A mattress topper Love chili pad.

01:13:11 - Michael (Guest) They're great.

01:13:19 - Chase (Host) I swear by it, especially if you like to sleep warmer or colder than your partner, you can absolutely segment it. Uh, or things like you know eight sleep mattress, these smart mattresses that are coming out that can measure biomarkers and things like that, but also like control the temperature.

01:13:24 - Michael (Guest) Yes. So those are two different animals, so let's talk about them in two different ways. There's the temperature modulation and then there's the sleep tracker of it all. Okay. So temperature modulation love it. Especially for my menopausal female patients. There is nothing better than being able to give them a cool bed on which to sleep. So eight sleep chili pad there's several of them out there.

01:13:48 I like some better than others. I'll be honest with you. Most of them are kind of expensive. So I've come up with a hack. So if you think that temperature might be a thing for you, here's an easy way to figure it out without spending thousands of dollars. First go out and buy two you know 12 or 14 ounce water bottle, just regular water bottles. Stick them in the freezer and freeze them. Then put them into a tube sock and put one on either side of your hip. Oh, I'm gonna sleep. You have your own personal air conditioner and you will figure if you sleep well by doing that. Then you know that temperature is one of your things Amazing. And then you can decide do I want to just keep doing the frozen water bottle thing or do I want to buy a piece of equipment that makes my bed cooler Because, again, they're expensive, but I think they're kind of cool Literally. Now here's the issue is many of these products claim to be able to measure your sleep.

01:14:35 Yeah, right Like measure HRV track sleep and all this HRV they can probably do a decent job of, but actually getting into the phases of sleep, it would be almost impossible for them to have any real level of good accuracy at this point. And again, I can tell you that most of the sleep trackers out there, the technology is not where we would want it to be. They're not medical devices, for sure. So we have to really think through the data that we receive from them. But on the temperature side of things, I think the temperature side is pretty cool and I would recommend that people, if they're interested, try the frozen bottle technique and then you can start to look around to see what works.

01:15:11 - Chase (Host) That's a great hack. I've never thought about that. You know, taking, like you know, ice packs or something exactly putting in your bed, I will say personally, besides committing to the same sleep time and wake time, a blackout eye mask, for me personally, mouth tape, uh, also getting a chili pad, that cooling topper yeah, it's hard for me to kind of say top four, but those four things all like kind of equally matter to me. Profound, profound difference in temperature, profound difference in sleep quality, just amazing.

01:15:38 - Michael (Guest) It's remarkable.

01:15:39 - Chase (Host) It's incredible, Especially again if you have a partner like my.

01:15:42 - Michael (Guest) I'm always burning up hot, my wife is always cold, so we got one is just very characteristic of male, female, not all, but we hear that. We hear this a lot and some of it has to do with body fat percentage Right, and so a lot of guys have got a little bit more body fat on them so they're a little bit warmer. A lot of women don't have as much body fat on them, so they're a little bit cooler.

01:16:04 - Chase (Host) I'm not cracking on you, I'm not cracking on you in particular. New dad's got me a little fluffy. I'm not going to lie, so okay. So I want to wrap things up and get to our before our last question. You have an amazing new book out. I do. You do talk so much about these sleep tools and habits and awareness, but also two other key areas that I think a lot of people don't always think to incorporate.

01:16:26 - Michael (Guest) Yes, so shine a light on the book and the workforce please. So the book is called Sleep, drink, breathe. Wellness is Too Fucking Complicated because it is.

01:16:40 Which I love, that you brought the F-bomb in the book title. That's incredible. Well, I didn't get to, let me tell you. I've been trying to get the subtitle changed. They're giving me a really hard time about it, but here's the deal. Is I so?

01:16:46 A good friend of mine his name is Joe Polish, and Joe wrote this book called Life Gives to the Giver, and there was a. There was a chapter in there where he talks about these things called dominoes. And so what is a domino? A domino is a skill that you acquire that, once you acquire it, knocks down several other skills that make them unlocks. That's the word you were using earlier.

01:17:05 I like that word unlocks and so I was reading it and I was like I wonder what the dominoes of wellness would be right. And so then I started to think well, what, what are the things in wellness that you can't live long without? So air, clearly, one of them the world's record, by the way, for holding your breath is 24 minutes. It's held by one of those deep dive. Yeah, guys, yeah, I don't know what that's called Free diving. Free diving, yes, yeah, and he had. He trained for two years and he had to fill his lungs with like a special kind of oxygen in order to do it um kate winslet, by the way when she was filming avatar, she was able to hold her breath for six and a half minutes titanic no for avatar.

01:17:47 Kate winslet's in avatar. I think she's in one of them. Was it kate winslet? Maybe I'm thinking the wrong zoe saldania, maybe it's zoe saldania, whoever it was one of the wrong actress, zoe Saldana, maybe it's Zoe Saldana, whoever it was one of the female actresses?

01:17:57 - Chase (Host) Oh, because the second one's all in water.

01:17:58 - Michael (Guest) Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, whoever that was I thought it was Kate Winslet, but I could be wrong Whoever that actress is, she can hold her breath for six and a half minutes with training. Wow, so it's not an impossibility. So air was one thing, but then I started to think well, what else could there be? Well, you can only go about two days without water, so hydration has to be one of them. And then I started thinking, well, how long can you go without food? You can go without food almost 30 days, pretty easily. How long can you go without exercise? Well, shit, some people have a lifetime without exercise. So diet and nutrition are probably not in my upper DNA of wellness, right? What was kind of left? Well, my area of expertise, sleep. You can go about five days without sleep, but you will lose your mind, like you will start seeing shit. You don't know who you are, it's a mess and what's.

01:18:45 - Chase (Host) I've heard the record. I think, or anymore, I think, it's 11 days. Anybody who goes more than I think, seven days or nine days without sleeping, everyone dies.

01:18:54 - Michael (Guest) No nine days without sleeping. Everyone dies. No, so, so that's not true. No, that's not true. So the record, I believe, is held by a guy named Rudy Gardner and it was 11 days, but he w it was caffeine assisted, so he was drinking Coca-Cola's and playing pinball. This was in the seventies. So this is what he did, like I mean, you know, you look back and get his work over his records. That's where it was, um, so I was looking at hydration, I was looking at breathing, I was looking at hydration and I was looking at sleep, because I said these are the three things that your body's got to do.

01:19:21 So then I started getting on podcasts, you know, promoting my book, and people are like well, why did you write a book about that? Those are the three things that our body does naturally, michael, right, and so my answer is very simple we don't do them correctly. If we did them correctly, I wouldn't have to write a fucking book about it. Right, like, at the end of the day, people don't even know how to breathe and people don't even understand that breath work can turn on your sympathetic nervous system and or turn on your parasympathetic nervous system very, very easily. You said you were in the military, right, they teach you breathing to bring you up and breathing to bring you down Absolutely. And it works well, right, it works very, very well. So that's the breathing part of the book.

01:20:00 Hydration got really interesting for me because I was like I've kind of I mean, I've been a runner for most of my life, I've worked out for most of my life I've always felt like I'm pretty good on hydration. I always look at the color of my pee, which, by the way, is one of the easiest ways to figure out if you're hydrated or not. It should be clear to very, very light yellow, um, but clear and copious, yes. But one thing I learned was a sip don't gulp. So let me explain.

01:20:25 So when you wake up in the morning, um, and you go out into the kitchen, there's like the square by the sink it's called a sponge, right. But it's hard as a rock and you can probably bang nails with that thing, right. And if you open up the faucet all the way like gulping water, what happens? The water hits, it splashes off. But if you open it up halfway and it hits it, a couple of drops seep in and it starts to expand. And now you have a useful tool. You are that sponge brother. Okay, sip, don't gulp. This happens all the time at the gym, right? So I'm at the gym and the person's got their water bottle and they've jammed it under their thing and it gets halfway up and then they, and then they put it back in and I'm the asshole that turns them and it's like sip, don't gulp. And they're like I'm just trying to get it in me.

01:21:09 Yeah, yeah, and it's like it's going through you. Why Absorption rate? If I stick this entire thing of water in me, I can't absorb the whole thing. It takes time. Everything takes time. We're in a society that is moving so fast all the time and all we really need to do is slow down a little bit. And so, sip, don't gulp.

01:21:36 - Chase (Host) You're blowing my mind and radically changing my morning routine. For years, the first thing I do when I wake up I go pound water, don't like pound water, yep.

01:21:45 - Michael (Guest) So what I would rather you do when you wake up in the morning is sit on the edge of your bed, take 15 deep breaths, okay, then I want you to grab 15 ounces of water. Then I want you to walk outside, sit in a. I want you to walk outside, sit in a chair, get 15 minutes of sunshine and during that 15 minutes, you get one ounce per minute.

01:22:04 - Chase (Host) Wow, wow that's how you do it. I'm so curious, I'm gonna try this, try it, and I'm so curious to see the difference, because I love it. I'm one of those guys I'm always thirsty, I'm always thirsty, I'm always drinking water. I'm at the point now where I don't know if it's just like a habit that I've ingrained to always be drinking water because I'm very active and always hot. But like, is it an electrolyte thing? Is it a hydration thing? Is it a gulping thing? Apparently, right.

01:22:25 - Michael (Guest) So look at the color of your pee. And some people do overhydrate Like that that people can do. Some people get so locked and loaded on hydration that they're like shit. I better just keep getting the water.

01:22:36 - Chase (Host) So I take creatine, but taking five grams creatine every day for probably like 15 years, I'm always like.

01:22:40 - Michael (Guest) that's why you're very conscious, that's why you're always thirsty Damn.

01:22:45 - Chase (Host) Uh. Okay, I have to wrap up. I have to be conscious of your time.

01:22:48 - Michael (Guest) What are you talking about? We could talk for another three hours.

01:22:50 - Chase (Host) I've got my family's in town. I got to go meet him for lunch. But, um and uh, I miss him. But um, this has been so incredible. I seriously have dozens half my questions that we didn't get to. You got to come back on the show. This has been so profound and just so helpful. Um, I have guests on that highlight unique areas of wellness, of personal, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual wellbeing, to help us move the needle, to help move forward in life, to live a life ever forward. I say okay.

01:23:20 - Michael (Guest) So if I were, ever forward.

01:23:22 - Chase (Host) That's the whole premise of the show. Also, it's a shout out to my late father uh, this was his mantra, his philosophy, amazing, up until he passed away 20 years ago. Now hard to believe, uh als, unfortunately that's a rough but um, very rough. But uh, you, he instilled in us this, this way of of living and thinking and viewing the world.

01:23:39 So I bring that couple to. You know people like yourself here on the show. That's amazing. So if I were to ask you, dr Michael Bruce, what does ever forward mean to you? How do you live a life ever forward?

01:23:51 - Michael (Guest) Oh, that's a great question. I wasn't expecting it. How do I live a life ever?

01:23:54 - Chase (Host) I didn't ask it back in 2017. I didn't, I didn't bring it to the show. I don't think I would have remembered anyway.

01:23:59 - Michael (Guest) So how do you live a life ever forward? I think the way you live a life ever forward is slowly not quickly.

01:24:10 I think you gotta you've gotta enjoy the ride right Like it. Just don't be in such a hurry. Right Like sleep, find your time for sleep, find your time for family, find your time for hobbies, find your time for career. Right, but there's room for it, all you know. Just move forward slower, not faster. I feel like the world is moving so fast and we're missing. The speed of communication is so quick that it would be great, because it all it does is amp people up and make them anxious and make them nervous. And so slow down, you'll be surprised and, and I would also say, get back to the basics. Could not agree more Sleeping drinking and breathing.

01:24:52 - Chase (Host) I'm going to have all of your work, your book, your links, your, everything. Our episode 24 link down in the video description and show notes for everybody that when we we jumped into uh your you know previous book, the power of when correct, talking about chronotypes and learning about you know the type of uh chronotype you have and best practices for sleep and your circadian rhythm and all of that. It's also an amazing episode, even though it's eight years old and I probably was using my microphone wrong.

01:25:16 - Michael (Guest) I was very new to podcasting back in the day. But, we had fun.

01:25:20 - Chase (Host) It's so good, so good to have you back, and if there's one place they can go to connect with you now, where can they go?

01:25:26 - Michael (Guest) So if they're looking for information about me, I have the same moniker everywhere you go, so it's the Sleep Doctor on every social channel. Specifically, my YouTube channel has been one I've been paying a lot of attention to for the last year, so we've got almost 800 videos, including shorts, up on my video.

01:25:45 - Chase (Host) And I see creeping up to almost 200,000 subscribers. Yeah, we're right around, we're almost reaching the 200,000 subscribers.

01:25:51 - Michael (Guest) We hit a hundred thousand last January. So, um, we, we're. We're moving quick, which is great. I'm excited about it. So that's a fun area where you can learn a lot for me. But if you wanted to learn about the sleep test, if you go to the sleepdoctorcom forward, slash Dr Mike, you will go right to a page that just talks all about the sleep testing that I was mentioning before. The $200 test that's really really cheap. That I really would like everybody to get.

01:26:14 - Chase (Host) Not for me but for them Absolutely. As someone who thinks that he gets good sleep maybe right now, as a new dad, it's not the best time but someone who has optimized and prioritized sleep for the past five years. I have never done a sleep test during that time. I did one years ago when I got out of the military. I thought I had sleep apnea. Yeah, came back negative. But yeah, I'm going to check it out.

01:26:33 - Michael (Guest) Yeah, absolutely, and after you check it out, I'll come back and we'll talk about it on the show. Yes, yes, yes, All right guys check him out.

01:26:38 - Chase (Host) His work is incredible and he'll be back again soon. Absolutely yeah. For more information on everything you just heard, make sure to check this episode show notes or head to ever forward radiocom.