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AGEIST
Dr. Nicole Moyen on The Body Clock We Ignore
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For a generation raised to admire endurance, Dr. Nicole Moyen makes the case for sleep as a daily form of biological respect. In this conversation, she and David look at why body clocks become more important with age, why sleep regularity may matter more than people think, and why the 3 a.m. wakeup has become such a familiar midlife complaint. Nicole explains the science behind core temperature, deep sleep, REM, light sleep, glucose regulation, hot flashes, sleep apnea, and cardiovascular recovery, including Eight Sleep’s research on temperature regulation for peri- and postmenopausal women. The episode gives listeners a practical framework for thinking about the bedroom as an environment that can either support recovery or work against it.
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Eight Sleep: Our favorite sleep brand helps you rest cooler, deeper, and more consistently by automatically adjusting your bed temperature throughout the night. Improve your recovery, energy, and mornings by visiting eightsleep.com/ageist.
Key Moments
“So I would say this is like the forgotten biological lever or key to good quality sleep.”
“And we saw that just sleeping on the pod with active temperature regulation throughout the night reduced hot flashes by 56 % on average.”
“Well, your body is essentially paralyzed. Your muscles are paralyzed during REM sleep. And your temperature regulation is also impaired during REM sleep.”
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Click Here for the full interview transcript.
Welcome to the Ages Podcast. This is episode 287. I'm David Stewart. This week we're talking about something that seems simple until you start to understand the biology of it. Sleep. Not sleep as in I should probably get more of it, which of course most of us should, but sleep as a primary operating system for health, sleep as recovery, sleep as cardiovascular repair, sleep as hormone regulation, sleep as one of the places where aging either gets some support or it gets a fair bit harder. My guest today is Dr. Nicole Moyen. Nicole is the senior director of science and clinical research at 8Sleep. Before that, she worked with companies like Fitbit and Whoop, so she has been right in the middle of this shift from guessing how we feel to actually measure what's going on in the body. Nicole has a PhD in physiology and has spent more than a decade studying thermoregulation, exercise, cardiovascular physiology, circadian rhythms, and wearable technology. At EightSleep, she leads the team that validates the science behind the product temperature, sleep stages, algorithms, jet lags, hot flashes, cardiovascular recovery, all of it. What I really like about this conversation is Nicole doesn't frame sleep as some vague wellness idea. She's looking at the mechanics. What happens when the body cools? What actually goes on there? What happens when it does not? And why do we wake up at 3 a.m.? I mean, don't we all like at one point just like wake up at 3 o'clock? Why is that? Why does sleep get more fragmented in our 50s and 60s? And why, especially for women going through perimenopause and menopause, has the science been so late to catch up? And what does temperature regulation have to do with that? Now, we've got this thing called the Super Age Games coming up in November. And for those of you training for the games or just preparing to live a healthier, better, longer life, which is one of the reasons we're doing the games, is sleep. You've got to be sleeping. You got to get your sleep game dialed in because none of that other stuff is going to work. So I, you know, I've sort of come around on this. I used to think it was really about movement, or maybe the key factor was eating. What's our nutrition? But I have come to realize that it all sits upon sleep and how fundamental sleep is and how important it is that we all understand how to sleep properly, whether you're training for the superage games or, you know, you just want to be a better version of yourself. Here are a few moments from the conversation.
SPEAKER_00There's recent data from the UK Biobank in the past year that came out showing that sleep regularity, going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time, and by the same time, we say within 30 minutes, roughly an hour even is okay. But trying to keep that sleep regularity is actually more important at staving off chronic disease than total sleep time. We're finding so many ways to predict future disease through people's sleep signatures.
SPEAKER_01Unpack that. That's tell me about that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So like there's certain, there's certain things that we can see in people's sleep signature. That's not just like how much REM sleep, how much deep sleep do you get, how much total sleep, but it's more like what's the quality of this kind of sleep? How consistently long is like there's something called REM behavior disorder, and that's linked to Parkinson's disease long-term, not always, you know, related, but there are like really strong correlations between people who present that and long-term neurological issues.
SPEAKER_03Now, I love her practicality of sleep advice. It's easy to talk about longevity in some big, expensive, complicated ways. And sometimes those things matter. But here we're talking about the room, the bed, the timing of temperature, the rhythm of the body through the night. At its core, sleep is a very basic human experience. I would hazard to say it is the fundamental human experience that everything else relies upon. We all know what a bad night's sleep feels like. And strange thing is, how many of us accept it as just normal? We're just tired all the time. We wake up tired, we're underrecovered, we're hungry in weird ways. We want to eat food that's not good for us. We're less patient, we're less sharp. And then we call that aging. Well, it could just be bad sleep. Dr. Nicole makes a strong case that some of what we think is aging may actually be poor recovery repeated time over time. So this is cumulative. Get better sleep. Before we get to Nicole, one quick favor. If you enjoyed the Ages podcast, please take a moment and give us a five-star review. It really does help more people find these conversations, and we appreciate it. And since we're talking about recovery performance and what the body can do to support it properly, I want to again mention the Super Age Games coming to New York City on November 7th. This is the first ever longevity competition. And it's a challenge. It's really a challenge for you about you. And it's very much about the agest idea, not trying to be who we were at 25, but becoming the best, most capable version of who we are now. It's about durability of capacity over time. We're really big on that. How you can become a better version of yourself for as long as possible. Learn more at games.superage.com. Okay, let's give Dr. Nicole Moyen a call right now.
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SPEAKER_03Nicole Moyen, I'm so happy to have you here. We're going to talk about sleep. And sleep, in my view, there are a lot of things that contribute to health and happiness and longevity, you know, what you eat, how you exercise, you have friends. But in my view, nothing works unless you're sleeping. So sleep to me is the most fundamental thing that we need to get right. And you're an expert on this. So we're going to dive right into this. Let's talk about temperature and sleep. What do we know about this?
SPEAKER_00Sure, happy to. So I would say this is like the forgotten biological lever or key to good quality sleep. A lot of people don't think about temperature. They might think about temperature when they wake up too hot or too cold, but they don't think about it as this is how I need to, I need to optimize my body temperature or I need to optimize my room temperature for good quality sleep. So just at a high level, generally, temperature drives so many key functions in our body, right? We need to be at, if we get too hot, we die. If we get too cold, we die. There's an optimal functioning or optimal range for every single thing that happens in our body. Changes in hormones, changes in your metabolism all work optimally within a certain temperature range. Your body is the same when it comes to sleep. So we need this sort of like U-shape of our core temperature, our deep internal temperature when we sleep. And we need this drop in core temperature, which helps us fall asleep. But then in the first half of the night is when we get all of our deep sleep. And this is when our core temperature is lowest and it's dropping throughout the night. And then it starts to rise halfway through the night until we wake up. And then our core temperature continues to increase throughout the day. It's highest around 6 or 3 to 6 p.m., depends on the person. And then it starts to decrease again. So this is our circadian rhythm. And during that second half of the night, when your core temperature starts to increase, that's when you get most of your REM sleep. But it's also when you're more likely to wake up. So this is typically when people complain about being too hot, too cold, et cetera. And the analogy I like to make to this is during REM sleep or any sort of dream you've had where you're like being chased and you're trying to get away, but you feel so slow. Like, have you had that dream where you're just like, I'm feeling like I'm running in molasses and why am I so slow? And it's kind of terrifying. And in real life, you're like, I'm not this slow. I don't know what's going on. Well, your body is essentially paralyzed, your muscles are paralyzed during REM sleep, and your temperature regulation is also impaired during REM sleep. And so this is typically during that second half of the night why you tend to wake up more often too hot, too cold. So if you remember anything, it's that U-shape, deep sleep in the first half of the night as our core temperature is dropping, and then REM sleep as our core temperature is increasing.
SPEAKER_03Did I hear you say correctly? Your temperature regulation is impaired during REM sleep?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So it responds more slowly. So your core, your your body basically we have like a certain point where our body says, oh, we need to start sweating, we're getting too hot. And oh, we need to like constrict our vessels, we're getting too cold or shiver. And those systems allow us to get to higher core temperatures before this sweating kicks in, essentially. Whereas in deep sleep, it start, you start sweating sooner. So you'll get rid of your heat more easily.
SPEAKER_03And I I I just I want to ask you some specifics here. So before we came on, you said people would swallow this like thermometer, essentially. Like thing. Temperature, it's a temperature sensor. And when you talk about core temperature rising and falling, like how much are we we talking here?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, it can be up to a degree Fahrenheit, sometimes more. It really depends on the person. If you're more fit, if you're very fit, well trained, highly acclimatized, like heat acclimatized, you're gonna have a lower resting core body temperature. And then because you typically exercise during the day, it's gonna get higher, right? At the at the peak when you exercise. So we see a larger range between the high point and low point and really fit people. If you're less fit or if you have other issues, we tend to see much narrower range of temperature throughout the day.
SPEAKER_03So interesting. Okay. So we got this deep sleep going on, right? And this is a good thing. So why do we want deep, like what goes on here?
SPEAKER_00All kinds of things. We have our muscle repair recovery. This is when our growth hormone is highest. This is also sort of our lymphatic clearance time where we're removing any of sort of the toxic things in your brain that we need to remove that would contribute to cognitive decline. So this is really a restorative phase. It's also when our metabolism's lowest during the night, which is a good thing. It allows your body to just slow down, rest, digest. We tend to see our lowest heart rates during this time of the night as well.
SPEAKER_03What happens as you get older with these, do these sleep cycles change with age?
SPEAKER_00Yes. So we do see generally, I mean, it's sort of conflicted in the literature, but from what we see and from what a lot of people see in these long, in these wearable studies where people are longitudinally wearing these devices that are tracking their sleep stages, we do see decreases in deep sleep. We see decreases in total sleep time as well. And this is just true with aging. We tend to see less deep sleep. We also see people shift earlier circadian rhythm, meaning they tend to go to bed earlier, wake up earlier in the morning. So even if they might used to be a later night person, they their body just tends to shift earlier in time. They wake up at 5 a.m., for example, even if they used to wake up at 7. So we tend to see these shifts with aging.
SPEAKER_03So deep sleep, good, cleans the brain, right? Yep. Good for long-term brain health. But can we put a number on this? Like how much deep sleep do I want to be? Assuming so I worse, I've I've worn the same sleep tracker for like five years. So my a I'm I'm a I'm a huge sleeper, Nicole. Oh my god. That's great. I my average sleep for the last five years is eight hours and thirty-five minutes.
SPEAKER_00Wow, that's amazing.
SPEAKER_03But it's it's not it's kind of amazingly bad. Like if you think like if that was seven hours and 35 minutes, that's an extra hour times five years. That is that's still a long time. I wish I could do that, but I can't. I just sleep a lot. So so but how much people talk about uh total sleep, but from what I what I'm hearing from you is we have these sort of two parts of the sleep that are very important. There's deep and and then there's rem. And I guess we'll get to the rem, but so how much like how much deep before I my brain is not getting cleaned out?
SPEAKER_00So that's a good question. I don't know if there's like a set amount, I would have to look at that more, but generally it's recommended 15 to 20 percent of your night should be deep sleep. Of course, there's gonna be a certain limit on that, right? And it's also gonna be relative to the timing at which you go to bed. So we tend to get more deep sleep before midnight.
SPEAKER_03Oh, wait, I want to stop you. So yeah, is this, but if my bedtime, say I'm somebody who goes to sleep at midnight and I wake up at eight, and if I shift my clock and I go to sleep at 10 and get up at 6, 5, but the same amount of sleep, yeah, is there something magical about the midnight time?
SPEAKER_00So, so typically that's your your core body temperature is gonna be dropping, right? So if you depends. If you're like typically a late night person, right? And that's your normal rhythm, then you should be getting the amount of deep sleep that you would normally get. But let's say you're normally an earlier 10 p.m. bedtime, and now you go to sleep at midnight, but you still get your eight hours of sleep, you're likely gonna miss most of your deep sleep. And that's simply because your core body temperature was already starting to drop at 10. We are like this, these clocks, right? Like everything in our body is a clock. And so your body is just used to that. So it's gonna start to drop at 10. And if you wait till midnight, you're missing that window of optimal deep sleep, essentially, for your body.
SPEAKER_03And so what are the health implications of me doing that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's a lot of different, there's a lot of different health implications of low total amount of sleep, but then also like less than seven hours chronically, right? And typically when people do sleep deprivation studies, they're giving them like four hours a night or less. So it's well below seven hours. It's not like, let me give you six and a half. So I think people freak out because we they tend to hear you need seven to nine hours of sleep a night. And then if people's constantly getting sick, six and a half, they're like, oh no, I'm doomed. And I would say, like, I don't know that we have the nuanced data enough to know that six and a half is far worse than seven. And some people would argue that we do, but I think genetically there's also differences in like what people need. Um, and that has been shown too. There's some people that can sleep four hours a night consistently and be totally fine. And that's a genetic variant. However, you do need deep sleep. And typically people need an hour to an hour and a half of deep sleep if you're looking at the absolute number, but it should be 15 to 20 percent of your total night.
SPEAKER_03I'm probably gonna state this wrong because I'm not a scientist. Deep sleep is sort of like the garbage truck comes in, cleans all the group out. This is great. Yes. And then REM, I'm paralyzed, but this is when my memories go from sort of short term to long term, right? Yes. And if I disrupt my REM, then I'm gonna forget what happened the day before, sort of.
SPEAKER_00I I don't know if it's that clear cut, but yes, we are processing memories. We're doing emotional processing too. There's a lot of different things that happen. And the other thing I I do want to add is that light sleep is like the forgotten sleep stage that nobody talks about, even though that makes up like 40 to 60% of your night. And it is equally important as the other two. It yeah, so it's it's it it helps you sort of solidify different tasks that you learn during the day. So let's say you're learning tennis and you're learning like a a new tennis swing and you practiced it that day, the light sleep is helping to solidify that in your memory. So, so light sleep is also very important. People just tend to focus on deep and REM sleep, and like those are the two things. And I think the wearables have, you know, sort of emphasized that too, because those are the things that you can modify and track. But yes, REM sleep is is just as important. But there's recent data from the UK Biobank in the past year that came out showing that sleep regularity, going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time, and by the same time, we say within 30 minutes, roughly, an hour even is okay. But trying to keep that sleep regularity is actually more important at staving off chronic disease than total sleep time.
SPEAKER_03I read some stat about people who are working in law enforcement or in emergency rooms or people like that. So they're constantly changing their clocks. And the long-term health implications, this is not so great.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It's identified as a carcinogen, actually, having the night the night shift work is identified as a carcinogen now. So it's acknowledged as similar to smoking, et cetera. So it is very bad for your health. It's better if you can stay on one set schedule, like your night shift all the time, seven days a week. But what happens is the people are like night shift three days and then regular schedule four days. And it's almost like you're going back and forth between two two extreme time zones constantly. And like I said, this body clock is so regular and it wants to keep everything functioning optimally on this cycle that you're just like mixing it up so much every time you're you're shifting.
SPEAKER_03I I am the poster child for like do not dysregulate your body clock. Yeah. Yeah. Like jet lag is just I I turn into a I turn into a two-year-old. I have these apps and I do all the stuff with the light. I do all this.
SPEAKER_00This is like jet lag is very, yes, detrimental. And I think that also gets harder as you age too.
SPEAKER_03Let's talk a little bit about insulin blood sugar and sleep. I'm gonna reference this a little bit because I I have a CGM in my arm right now, which is a seams glucose monitor. I'm in Utah now, and so I'm like a couple hours jet lag, it isn't that bad, but I'm at altitude, which means I'm at 7,000 feet. So there's I there's blood oxygen issues, which causes me not to sleep well. And what I've noticed is my CGM, my blood sugar is like all over the map now. And it's normally pretty pretty stable. Like it doesn't really I can eat all kinds of things, it doesn't really throw it off much, but this time, like eat a few blueberries and it's like, whoa! Like Mount Everest shows up on my CGM. So what what's going on with that with like poor poor sleep and glucose regulation?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so there are studies showing that um poor sleep, or even after just, you know, I think, I think it was like six days or something like that of poor sleep, shortened sleep, like sleep debration, like I said, four hours of sleep a night consistently for like a week will lead to worse insulin tolerance or glucose tolerance. And so that is something that we know of because your cortisol is elevated, and so that has downstream effects that basically don't allow you to handle glucose as well. And then similarly, there's been studies, or I shouldn't say similarly, but along the same lines, there have been studies of just like deep sleep deprivation itself. So reducing deep sleep, not total sleep time. And those studies have shown that there is glucose handling issues as well with deep sleep. So more recently, they're saying it's shortening the deep sleep that is specifically leading to the glucose issues with poor sleep.
SPEAKER_03So interesting. I want to talk a little bit about menopause and post-menopause and temperature regulation and the idea of being able to adjust the temperature in the evening or while sleeping for hot flashes. Tell me, how do you do that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. At Aid Sleep, we have a temperature-regulated mattress cover. It's sort of like a fitted sheet that goes over your bed that has tubes that run through it, and a hub on the side that has a water reservoir. And the water flows through the tubes, and we can heat and cool each side of the bed separately. So people who prefer different temperatures, partners, really love that we can do that separately. Um, but we ran a very large study recently in peri- and post-menopausal women, 98 of them. And we saw that we just sleeping on the pod with active temperature regulation throughout the night reduced hot flashes by 56% on average. And this is in women taking hormone replacement therapy and women who aren't taking hormone replacement therapy, similar reduction in hot flashes. Um, and so we were trying to figure out like, okay, what's what's the reason for this? Obviously, you think, okay, we're cooling people, but we wanted to understand more like what is what's happening with the cooling. So we had people wear these wireless temperature sensors, forehead, foot, and chest. And then we also had people ingest a core temperature pill, which, as I mentioned to you, travels through the GI tract until you excrete it. Um so you can also get bowel movement times in there as well. But yeah, but uh, but we can get the deep internal temperature throughout the night. So we can look at people's circadian rhythm, we can look at how much cooler they are when they sleep with the pod versus without. And so we had these women sleeping on the pod for one week versus not on the pod uh for one week, just on their own temperatures off essentially. And we we found that core temperatures were reduced by a very small amount, about 0.2 degrees Celsius, so 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit, really minor. And you might say, well, how does that make such a big difference, right? In reducing hot flashes. And it's because estrogen, estrogen is declining during menopause, which essentially changes the thermostat in your brain. So you have this sort of like, if you think of your brain, the hypothalamus in your brain, you have this thermostat. And if you think of your house, right, as it gets too hot, the air conditioning kicks on. Our air conditioning is sweating or dilating your vessels to get rid of body heat. Our heating in the body is shivering, right? When we get too cold. What happens with menopause is this like normal range that your brain thinks is fine narrows. And so now a temperature that you previously thought was fine causes you to sweat because your brain's like, ooh, that's that's outside of our range. It's too hot. We better sweat and cool ourselves down. And so our hypothesis is just even by reducing core body temperature by 0.2 degrees Celsius, we're helping keep people like within that really narrow range so that their brain isn't sending the signal, hey, we're too hot, we're too hot, cool down, sweat. So more research needed, but like these are our current findings, and we're really excited about it because. It's I mean, it's obviously helping a lot of women in this life stage to sleep better.
SPEAKER_03I find that extraordinary. Like such a small I've I've had a lot of people on come on this show and talk about menopausal temperature regulation, but no one has ever explained it as clearly as you did right there. It just the the window gets tighter, right? And exactly. And if you can keep the body within that window, everything's good.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Yep.
SPEAKER_03Wonderful. Okay. Now we're gonna talk, we're gonna talk about another like thing that bothers people.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_03The the the 3 a.m. wake up. Like, yes. Why does everybody wake up at 3 a.m.? And and then a lot of people, you know, you have trouble getting back to sleep. What's what's going on there?
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yes. So hopefully it's not due to temperature. And if it is, there's a solution for that. But in all seriousness, uh, so your cortisol, one of these hormones that sort of like helps make you alert, starts to rise after that sort of low point in core body temperature, your cortisol will start to increase, and this helps you wake up in the morning. But what we see is people who are really stressed and sort of like overextended. And we also see with perimenopause as progesterone decreases, we see that the cortisol, the gradual increase with cortisol as you wake up. So imagine around 3 a.m. the cortisol starts to increase really gradually and nicely to wake you up calmly, which is what normally happens. But with perimenopause, stress, other conditions, the cortisol just really like spikes and your body also becomes more sensitive to it. And so that sort of wakes you up in the middle of the night, and you're like, I'm wide awake, but I still feel very tired because I didn't sleep. And my mind is now racing. And so, yes, the best way to go back to sleep, I don't have the best solution. I don't know, I don't have a silver bullet. I can give you all the advice that's typically recommended. It's like, if you can't fall back asleep after 20 minutes, get out of bed, go do something boring, like fold laundry, read a boring book, et cetera. But what you don't want to do is keep laying in bed and thinking, because then now your brain associates bed with I think about work when I'm laying in bed, or I think about yeah, all these things while I'm laying in bed.
SPEAKER_03This is a little off topic, but I I recall I had someone tell me about like in the Middle Ages, they were diurnal sleepers.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_03You know about this?
SPEAKER_00Yes. Uh-huh. Tell me for people that don't know about our arms. Yeah, I've seen some articles on it, but like not like scientific articles, but I have seen articles on it where they're like, oh yeah, they used to get up. They would like go to each other's houses or like have a meal and hang out for a couple hours and then go back to sleep. Yeah. Yeah. And uh there's still some people that do that, like called bimodal sleep. And basically, like they have two sleep sessions that are separated by, you know, hour, two hours, maybe three. And if that works for you, great. I think that most people with the advent of technology and like industrialization, we just aren't able to do that anymore because everyone's like up and at them going to their job from nine to five or whatever it may be. But yes, that that did used to be the case.
SPEAKER_03Like we're going from this very high-tech solution to, you know, the Middle Ages with torches and stuff.
SPEAKER_00I know. I know. Um that's all their social time right there, you know, the middle of the night.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I I feel where I was reading about this, but it was like it was the norm. Like you would like there wasn't any light, so you would like, you know, you go to sleep at like six o'clock, and then I don't know, like midnight, you wake up and like stuff goes on for a couple hours, and then you go back for round two.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, they also used to like work longer in the summers and then shorter in the winters, too, right? To match the sunlight and everything. So yeah, maybe, maybe we're missing some things, some things that we are naturally meant to do.
SPEAKER_03You know, I gotta say, Nicole, there were a lot of downsides to the Middle Ages, and I'm I'm really I'm I'm happier now. I I don't I don't think I've got I agree.
SPEAKER_00I agree.
SPEAKER_03Um so people people love swallowing pills, right? Because it it's just everybody wants like a pill for a salute, because it's the world, the easiest thing, right? But talk to me about sleep with the sort of uh how should we say the environmental inputs. So that's light, sound temperature versus the 10 milligram, you know, melatonin gummy or something.
SPEAKER_00Right. Any supplement that people feel is helping them is great. But I think with supplements, they tend to be habit forming, right? Where even if it's not decided it's addictive, there's a there's a piece of it of like, oh, if I don't take this, I might not sleep well. And so that's why we tend to recommend like try to change things in your environment first that are less habit-forming in a sense. Although you could argue having a dark room can be very habit forming, um, right? A quiet dark room. So there's there's something to that too. You could play devil's advocate there. But generally, um, we want the room dark and even light as small as a night light, which you might think is good, can disrupt your sleep. There's studies showing that. The sound is really interesting. Um, when you look into the research on like noise and sound levels that are optimal, and a lot of people use white noise, actually, your your body and your brain become used to or accustomed to whatever the noise level is. So if you think about people who like live in New York City who are very used to like the honking and this and that all through the night, right? When you first move there or first go there, it might be kind of jarring if you're not used to that. But then eventually you get used to it and you sleep through it. Same thing with a white noise machine if you're used to that and you go to not having one, it feels way too quiet. But if you're used to complete quiet and you introduce a noise machine, it's like, whoa, this is too loud. I can't sleep. So your body becomes accustomed to it. Of course, keep it within safe sound levels, right? Below 80 decibels, et cetera. So that's sound and light. And then we also want to keep it cool, like people say cool and dark. Oh, we talked about light, but yeah, that's the main thing, keeping it cool. But then again, we want it to warm the second half of the night when we're getting more REM sleep. Um so that's the tricky piece.
SPEAKER_03Yes, I tell people about sleep like novelty is great during the daytime. At nighttime, you do not want novelty. You want everything to say.
SPEAKER_00Yes, exactly. Exactly.
SPEAKER_03Tell me what, like you've but you're you're a sleep scientist, you study sleep. What's what's like really come out to you that's really surprising?
SPEAKER_00I think the really interesting, I don't know if it's surprising, but it's just I find it really interesting. I think we're we're finding so many ways to predict future disease through people's sleep signatures. Right.
SPEAKER_01Unpack that. That's tell me about that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so like there's certain there's certain things that we can see in people's sleep signature. That's not just like how much REM sleep, how much deep sleep do you get, how much total sleep, but it's more like what's the quality of this kind of sleep? How consistently long is like there's something called REM behavior disorder, and that's linked to Parkinson's disease long-term, not always, you know, related, but there are like really strong correlations between people who present that and long-term neurological issues. So we're starting to see more and more that the way that you sleep, even from just one night, um, machine learning scientists, and we actually have one in-house who just authored this amazing paper this past year. Um, but he basically used data from one night of sleep to predict a variety of different different diseases.
SPEAKER_03And are we thinking that this is poor sleep causal of disease, or this is a diagnostic tool for something that could be going on?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. This is the point, right? Chicken or the egg, right? So is it like is it that that disease causes this certain sleep signature, right? Or is it like you can detect it in someone's sleep before they're even diagnosed? And I think it's both ways, right? So we know certain diseases change your sleep, but we also can see certain things before people are diagnosed with it. So I think it can be like an early indicator of something being off.
SPEAKER_02Um talk to me a little bit about apnea.
SPEAKER_03Because I think again, I'm not a doctor, don't listen to me about medical advice, but um apnea to me seems like a really serious, like possibly fatal condition. Yes. I don't I think that some people are just they don't take it that seriously.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. And for those that don't know what sleep apnea is, it's it's essentially essentially a partial breathing or complete stop in breathing during the night. And this can happen repeatedly to people throughout the night, which means you're not getting oxygen to your blood, and therefore you're not getting oxygen to your brain. So you can have a lot of negative downstream effects, like you're talking about, right? One, you get really poor quality sleep, which then leads to poor glucose handling, metabolic issues, right? So a lot of times sleep apnea also we see like metabolic syndrome linked to it or cardiovascular disease, because every time you stop breathing, it's also putting a lot of strain on your heart as well. Um, so we see a lot of these, like we call them comorbid, comorbidities or two diseases intertwined together. But sleep apnea is not often diagnosed. So I believe it's around 6% of the population is actually diagnosed, but they estimate up to 20% can have might have sleep apnea. So a lot of people are underdiagnosed. There's some simple surveys online that you can do called the stop bang, where it's basically asking you like, has your partner how do you stop breathing during the night? Do you wake up feeling tired, groggy despite getting eight hours of sleep? Things like this. And so you can sort of, if you are positive on that survey, you could then go see a physician who would prescribe a sleep test to you. But there are a lot of like wearables and like we are also working on sleep apnea and a solution to detect sleep apnea through the bed without you having to wear anything. And there are wearables like Apple Watch Samsung that already screen for sleep apnea, um, basically saying, like, hey, you should talk to a doctor or you shouldn't.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I I had a a colleague who actually I died cardiac arrest in his sleep and he had apnea and didn't was not treating it. And whenever I hear this from somebody, they're i uh it's like, you know, it's a serious thing. You want to look at this.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yes. And and I think a lot of people don't w like to wear the CPAP, the um the big, you know, face mask or nose mask on your on your face every night. But that's essentially helping keep your airways open so you can can breathe more easily.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, I can understand not wanting to wear that, but at the other hand, I like to stay alive, so that's I'm big on that.
SPEAKER_00Totally.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_00And that that is something too that increases um the prevalence of it increases quite a lot with menopause, um, as estrogen is very, very protective. And so as estrogen declines with menopause, we see an increase in sleep apnea, we see an increase in cardiovascular disease, all kinds of diseases become more prevalent in women. So that is something to be aware of if you're a woman going through menopause, that the risk of sleep apnea does increase.
SPEAKER_03Um talk to me. So this sort of links to my my next question around sleep temperature and cardiovascular strain. What are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so we consistently see that uh as we cool in the first half of the night or just sleeping on the pod in general, improves cardiovascular recovery. So we see a lower resting heart rate and an increased HRV, which are positive changes. So we see that pretty consistently in like every study we run with pod, no pod to pod. It's like everybody, no matter what age, no matter male, female, like we see that improvement in cardiovascular recovery. A large part of this is the cooling during the first half of the night. And like I said, getting that like increased parasympathetic tone or that rest and digest system activity is higher during deep sleep and cooling promotes that activity. If you are seeing an increased heart rate, I mean, there's many things that can cause that, like late-night meals, drinking alcohol, et cetera. But it could also be that your room's too hot. Um, so we do see like if the room is too hot, your heart rate's gonna be higher, your HRV will be lower. So your cardiovascular system is sensitive to temperature.
SPEAKER_03Is there anything you want to tell our people the before we leave? And I I I also I want to thank you for your time. I know you're you're a very busy person, and it's wonderful to have you on here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's been really fun.
SPEAKER_03What would you what would you like to tell people before you leave?
SPEAKER_00Oh I'm curious what their questions are, but I guess I I I guess I would leave people with one main thing is don't forget the importance of temperature during sleep. Um and and keeping that regular sleep schedule is is so crucial, not only to support the body clock and the temperature regulation itself, but um that could be the crux of a lot of your of a lot of your sleep issues.
SPEAKER_03I I think that the people talk about the advantages of good sleep. You know, your your brain works better, you feel happier, the people around you are gonna they're gonna be happier because you're not grouchy. But the somebody I I had one of um one of your fellow sleep scientists on, and she was explaining to me how like sleep is this social thing. Like if you're not sleeping well, you you become very antisocial. But the the downstream effects of not sleeping, your your inability to you know regulate your glucose, as you were saying, like metabolic syndrome, there's all of these studies that I've read about how there's something like 60% of the American population doesn't sleep enough.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_03And then like you know, you look at the intersection of of that and metabolic syndrome or obesity, that's like, well, these things seem to be correlated here. It's just 100%.
SPEAKER_00And it used to be a badge of honor, right, to like not sleep much. And that was just, I think 10 years ago, even people would boast about, oh, I I only needed four hours of sleep. Like I'm this amazing person who works all the time, or just like is out, work, whatever you're doing. But yeah, and now it's the opposite. It's like cool if you get more good quality sleep.
SPEAKER_03Because I need to sleep so much, it's just like I'm the guy who it's like, you know, it's like nine o'clock, I need to go now. I'm going to bed. And they would just look at me like, what is wrong with you? But maybe maybe my friends are just used to me, or it's become much more culturally acceptable for me to say, no, I I I I go I go to bed now. I need to go to sleep.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I'm with you on that. I'm more of a morning person. So whenever people are like, let's meet at eight, I'm like, I'm like winding down at eight. Do you want to meet me at six for a coffee? And they're like, no, that's that sounds terrible. And I'm like, we're just on different schedules, you know, but yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I mean, it's it's nice. It's um seeing how the culture has moved uh from, you know, like I'm I'm quite old. So I remember, you know, some of my first jobs, like everybody, you know, smoking four packs of cigarettes was like sort of like not weird, and two martinis at lunch and like all this, you know, there were no seat belts, it was just like cra I like I look at it now, it's like you people are insane.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_03It's a lot better now.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, yeah. And that's that I think that's true for sleep. I think like it's I mean, the sleep research has been around for 50, 60 years, but I think we're still at the very beginning of like what we don't know about sleep, right? And I think even more is gonna come out. Now there's all this resurgence on sleep and focus on it. And I think the research is only just gonna explode in the next few, I mean, even next 10 years. And I think we're gonna uncover so much more that we we don't even know right now.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I look forward to that. More sleeping.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Nicole, it it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. I'm a fan of your product. The pod works really great. Great technology. And, you know, for those of us out there who are rigid in our need for sleep, your your product is great. Sleep aid's a wonderful thing. So thank you. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for the research you're doing, and thanking thank you for helping us all sleep more and sleep better.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for having me. It's been really fun.
SPEAKER_03My pleasure. That was Dr. Nicole Moyen from Aidsleep. We must remember sleep is not one thing. It's more than a number of hours in bed. It's temperature, it's timing, it's rhythm, it's hormones, it's cardiovascular load, and it's recovery. As I've mentioned many times, I always pay a lot of attention to my sleep. And honestly, it's pretty validating talking with sleep experts and have so many of the practices I engage in reinforced by their science. I'm excited to see what discoveries will come up in the years ahead. I think sleep is, as Nicole pointed out, it's one of those things that's it's so fundamental, but we don't really know that much about it. The point about temperature, I thought it was I thought that was so interesting. The body wants that drop in internal temperature as we go to sleep, and then a gradual rise as we wake up. So as she described, this kind of U-shape through the night. And that's not something most of us are thinking about when we go to bed. Mostly think about, well, am I tired? Is the room cold enough? But the body seems to be much more dynamic than that. I also appreciated Nicole's perspective on women's sleep health, menopause, perimenopause, hormonal transitions, hot flashes, HRV, recovery, you know, these aren't side issues. They are central to health span. And the research seems to finally be getting to treat them just that way. If we are asking more from our bodies to train, to build muscles, to stay sharp, to compete, to be useful, to be present, then recovery is really not an option. It is a crucial piece in the machinery that lets all the other pieces work. You want to be a whole human, you got to get some good sleep. That's it for this week. Stay strong, stay vibrant. We'll see you next time.