Dr. Michael Breus - Unlocking the Secrets to Restorative Sleep

 Dr. Breus provides a deep dive into the critical importance of sleep, the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation on physical and cognitive health, and most importantly, how we can improve our sleep quality.

Ever wondered how caffeine impacts your sleep or how to deal with an annoying bed partner? Dr. Breus has got you covered! He guides us through effective strategies to reduce caffeine intake and how to have those challenging conversations with bed partners.  Discover how to pick the perfect mattress, the role of daily exercise and hydration in enhancing deep sleep, and the best timing for intimacy based on your chronotype - Are you a Bear, Lion, Wolf, or Dolphin? Dr. Breus helps us identify our chronotype and how to leverage it to optimize our daily activities. This episode is a treasure trove of practical advice for anyone seeking to optimize their sleep and make informed health choices. Tune in and transform your nights... and your days.

You can find Dr. Breus at:
Website - https://sleepdoctor.com/ 
 All Social Media - The Sleep Doctor
Book - "The Power of When"
https://www.amazon.com/Power-When-Discover-Chronotype-Lunch/dp/0316391263
Take the Chronotype Quiz - https://sleepdoctor.com/sleep-quizzes/chronotype-quiz/

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Note: By listening to this podcast, you agree not to use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others, including but not limited to patients that you are treating. Consult your own physician for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Under no circumstances shall Marla Miller, Open-Minded Healing Podcast, any guests or contributors to the podcast, be responsible for damages arising from use of the podcast.

Transcript

Marla Miller: 0:35

Welcome back to Open Minded Healing. My guest today is Dr Michael Bruce, and we're going to be talking about sleep, so we'll be discussing maybe some biohacking you can do to get the best sleep and why you should want to get the best sleep, and then we'll get into what a chronotype is. So do you want to start off by explaining what your mission is and then where your expertise comes from when it comes to sleep?

Dr. Michael Breus: 1:05

So I have a PhD in clinical psychology and I'm medically board certified in clinical sleep disorders. So some people out there are saying, wait, you just said he's clinical psychologist, which is a PhD. Then he said he was medical. Is he an MD? Is he a PhD? So I took the medical boards without going to medical school and passed. I'm one of 168 people in the world that have ever done it in sleep. So not general medicine, but in sleep.

Dr. Michael Breus: 1:31

I've spent the last 24 years of my career specifically in sleep. I've never had any other careers. It's always been sleep focused and as a clinical psychologist part of the reason why I decided to go into sleep one I did a during my residency. I did a six month specialization and then I did a fellowship afterwards to gain all the excess knowledge that you needed to kind of treat sleep patients. But here's the thing I'm a clinical psychologist. Right, it can take weeks, months, even years to see any type of gains from a depression, patient and anxiety, patient phobia, all these different things. With sleep it happens like that. It's unbelievable.

Dr. Michael Breus: 2:14

I find myself that I get so much enjoyment and pleasure because I can identify something quickly that a lot of people don't know what to look for. I can give people some very simple, straightforward things to start out, get a little bit more complicated and 65, 75% of the time, solve their problems, sometimes even more, and it's super rewarding. When you change your sleep, you change your life. I tell people that all the time, and it's really true. It took a lot to get here in terms of my academic study and my experience and working with patients and things like that, but now that I'm here, it's a lot of fun. I really enjoy working with patients and people are really suffering with all of the chaos and all of the stress and all of the things that are going.

Dr. Michael Breus: 2:57

On News flash, there's a lot of people who ain't sleeping so well. This happened during 9-11. In my practice, I got flooded with insomnia patients during that period of time, and so everybody out there has got some stress, and so how we handle that stress and how we prepare for sleep will ensure whether we're going to get a good night or whether we're going to get a bad night, and, to be fair, those accumulate over time. People tell me all the time oh, I get crappy sleep during the week. So I'm just going to catch up on the weekend News flash. It doesn't work that way. It does not work that way. So you got to get good sleep almost every night.

Dr. Michael Breus: 3:36

And people are going to be thinking well, I haven't gotten good sleep in 20 years, dr Broussides, do I even need to continue listening to the podcast? Yes, you do, and let me tell you why. Because you can change at any point in time. You can make your sleep better at any point in time. So you asked me what my mission was. My mission I've never been one of those people who's going to over promise and under deliver. I like to under promise and over deliver, and so the goal for my website, the sleepdoctorcom, is to get people a better night's rest. It's not going to be perfect. It's not going to be perfect every time, but I'm going to teach you how to move towards that goal of a better night of sleep, because everybody out there, I feel confident in saying, could use a better night of rest.

Marla Miller: 4:23

Yeah, I totally agree. I've had times where I did not get a good night of sleep.

Dr. Michael Breus: 4:29

That was mainly when I.

Marla Miller: 4:30

I mean, that was mainly for me. It was when I had children.

Dr. Michael Breus: 4:34

It's tough on sleep.

Marla Miller: 4:35

Yeah, so I saw what it did to my mood, and you just have no bandwidth for a lot of things if you are working on no sleep. So, in addition to that, though, there are people that regularly do not sleep well, and what would you say it affects the most regarding their health.

Dr. Michael Breus: 4:56

Well, so let me give you a couple of statistics. So roughly 33, 0% of the United States, that's about 100 million people, are suffering from some form of insomnia at any given time, with 10% of those people being chronic. So about 35 to 40 million people every night are not sleeping well at all, if at all. And so the question becomes how does that have an effect on the next day? Right so? Number one lots of those people over capinate, and so they just start chugging the coffee in the hopes that they're going to have just enough energy to make it through their day, to then collapse into their bed at night. Right Again, bad idea.

Dr. Michael Breus: 5:38

What we see the sleep deprivation having an effect on is three separate areas it affects you physically, it affects you cognitively and it affects you emotionally, right? So, physically, we see reaction time come down. So, for example, if you drive a forklift, if you drive a vehicle to work which most people do you should not be doing that. When you are sleep deprived, your reaction time slows dramatically. For men, we know testosterone dumps when you have bad sleep. We know that lots of women talk about issues with their menstrual cycles when they don't sleep well.

Dr. Michael Breus: 6:11

Sleep affects every organ system and every disease state. Literally everything you do. You do better with a good night's sleep. Cognitively, it makes you believe it or not, make more risky decisions when you're sleep deprived. Right, because you don't calculate all the risks. This is the reason why in the casinos in Las Vegas there are no clocks. There's no, there are no windows. They keep you going forever. Right, because they want you to make bad, risky decisions, because we know sleep deprivation leads to those.

Dr. Michael Breus: 6:43

Finally, mood. Let me tell you something. How many of you out there you don't have to raise your hand or anything, but how many of you out there have ever gotten into a fight with your partner or spouse because you were too sleepy to deal? Right, happens every single day. Right, how many of you have not gotten along well with somebody at work because you had a crappy night of sleep the night before? So sleep really does do a number on us. I would argue there are probably only two more biological functions that are more important than sleep, and that would be hydration and breathing. That's about it.

Marla Miller: 7:20

Yeah, that's incredible to think about that and to think about how many people that you stated suffer from a lack of sleep. Aw, awful, yeah, a lot of people running around out there hyped up on coffee and energy drinks.

Dr. Michael Breus: 7:34

Oh yeah, and people don't even realize that, as an example, those energy drinks are cumulative, right? So I had a patient who came to me and he had a Red Bull in the morning. Two hours later he had an amp I think it was called and then two hours later he had a monster. Right, like, come on, this is ridiculous. Right, like you have to start looking at your behaviors and understanding. And then he shows up and you know, in my office he's like hey doctor can't sleep. No joke, you can't sleep. You've got more caffeine in your system in a given day than an elephant should have. Right.

Dr. Michael Breus: 8:08

And by the way, elephants don't like caffeine. No animals like caffeine, except for humans, which is oh, that is interesting.

Marla Miller: 8:15

So are there particular sort of biohacks that people in general can do, and then maybe we can get more specific, like people that have a problem with snoring or things like?

Dr. Michael Breus: 8:26

that. So let's break it down to categories so we know where people kind of fit and then we can give each person type of protocol, right, good? So I believe that there are sleep disorders and then what I call disordered sleep. Okay so, sleep disorders, apnea, narcolepsy, restless leg syndrome, official insomnia I want to be clear those are sleep disorders. There's probably about five to six thousand sleep doctors in the United States currently. All of them know how to treat most of those, except for insomnia. There's a smaller niche of doctors who kind of specialize more in insomnia, but as a general guideline sleep disorders you can talk to your general practitioner and you can say I think I have a sleep problem and they can send you to a sleep specialist.

Dr. Michael Breus: 9:12

Every single hospital I believe every major hospital, like over a 100-bed hospital in the United States has a sleep lab. By the way, due to COVID, we now have portable sleep lab testing. That's possible. So, as an example, you could go onto my website, thesleepdoctorcom, if you suspected that you had sleep apnea. You can order a sleep apnea test. You just click on it. I think it's like I don't know how much it is like less than 200 bucks. You can then make an appointment online. You talk to a doctor, then the doctor will send you a sleep test to your home. You don't even have to go out of your house anymore to do this oftentimes, and then they send the data back. Sometimes you just throw the device away, believe it or not. They have a recycling program and all that which is kind of cool. But then you get your data back and all of a sudden you never had to leave your house. That's great. It's great. So I want people to know that medicine has progressed, especially in the sleep arena, specifically due to COVID, because we couldn't have people sleeping in the same bed every night, different people sleeping in the same bed because of COVID. So you know, progress was made from that kind of situation. That's on the sleep disorder side of things.

Dr. Michael Breus: 10:18

What a lot of listeners are probably out there and saying is well, I don't think I have apnea or my partner snores or I wish I could improve the quality of my sleep. That is really more of a disordered sleep universe and that's where I play the most. So at the sleepdoctorcom we have lots and lots of articles for people who have questions, interest answers and things like that. But let's break it down for people, because we've learned some things over the years about basically some types of sleepers. Ok, so, number one, we have the person who has the annoying bed partner. Ok, so that annoying bed partner can come in many different shapes and forms Snoring, moving around, likes the television on, likes it too hot or too cold, likes a firm bed, things of that nature Right.

Dr. Michael Breus: 11:04

And so when it's your bed partner that's disrupting your sleep, there's a bunch of different things that you can actually think about and do. One is sit down and have a conversation with your bed partner, right. Hey, look, I understand. This is how you fall asleep. This is preventing me from falling asleep. We need to figure out a compromise, so I'll tell you a personal one in my house.

Dr. Michael Breus: 11:24

Ok, so my wife falls asleep with the television on every single night. Ok, I'm the sleep doctor. Ok, this isn't good for business, right. When your wife is falling asleep with the TV on every single night, right, yeah. And so I studied her to determine why she does this. So it turns out she's got what we call monkey mind, right? So when she gets in bed and she turns off the light, a million different things flood into her brain, and so she watches TV to distract her and then her eyes get so heavy that she just falls asleep. Yeah, she doesn't even actually watch it. Most of the time her eyes are closed and she's just listening to it, like kind of out of what I call the corner of her ear type of thing, right, so? So I talked to my son, who's a technology kid, and I was like, how do we work on this? And he's like dad, there's a timer in almost every single television made today. When he went in, I mean I don't know how to do those things, and he went in and showed me how the timer set. And so now we set the timer and she falls asleep. I'm more of a wolf, you know will explain what those chronotypes are in a minute but I'm more of a night person, what I call a wolf, and so I go to bed after my wife and so she falls asleep and the TV turns off and I can go in, fall asleep and everybody's happy understanding what's going on, and then figuring out the compromise.

Dr. Michael Breus: 12:35

Now there's also another option separate bedrooms. Now a lot of people will turn to me and they're like dude, no way, we'll never be intimate again, right, that's the big concern. I want to be super duper clear about this. The strength of your relationship has nothing to do with where you sleep. Okay, because a lot of people will say it's not just intimacy, but if I'm not sleeping with my partner, why am I married? Or like I might as well just be single? No, there's a lot more advantages to being married or with somebody than just sleeping next to them, and it doesn't have to be a permanent situation, even by the week. So what I have some patients do is I say okay, you go into the guest room, mr Snorer, four nights a week, monday through Thursday, and then Friday, saturday, sunday. You come back into the bedroom. We have time to spend together, however we choose to do so, and that way we both get decent sleep during the week and then we get to hang out on the weekend. So those are the types of things that people can be creative with and start to understand how to improve that sleep quality. So bed partner is definitely one issue.

Dr. Michael Breus: 13:40

Another issue is caffeine. I don't know how to get around it, other than to say people drink too much damn coffee and have too many energy drinks, like we were just talking about a second ago, and all of this stuff. So let me break down some of the caffeine science for you so that people really understand this. So caffeine has a half life. Now, a half life is the time that it takes for the substance to be absorbed, metabolized and then distributed out of your body. That's the half life of a drug. Caffeine's half life, depending upon how fast of a metabolizer you are, is somewhere between six and eight hours Hours.

Dr. Michael Breus: 14:19

So if you have a cup of coffee at two o'clock in the afternoon, at 10 o'clock at night, 50 percent of that caffeine is still in your system, even if you don't feel it. Okay, even if you don't feel it. So caffeine turns out to be a really big issue within the world of sleep because of the length of time that it stays in the system. Now here's another statistic that was even worse one, which is the quarter life of caffeine. So when 25 percent is left in your system, that's 12 hours. So if you have a cup of coffee at noon, at midnight, 25 percent of that cup is still wandering around your brain. So what I like to do when I look at caffeine and, by the way, I want to be super clear nobody listening to this podcast should go cold turkey off of caffeine unless you only drink one cup a day. Okay, because I had two patients end up in the ER because they went cold turkey off of caffeine. One of them had seizures and one of them couldn't stop puking.

Marla Miller: 15:24

Why is that?

Dr. Michael Breus: 15:25

Why is that? One guy was a two and a half pot a day coffee drinker one of the pots a day. The other one was one of those energy drink drinkers and they had really violent reactions to coming off of all those chemicals and crap that's in those. Some of them are OK, but most of them are not great. So when you look at caffeine you want to be strategic about it. So let's say that you're a coffee drinker and you drink maybe three coffees in a day, no-transcript. Okay, do that for about a week or two. Then make the second one decaf. Then make the first one half decaf, half regular, then go to total decaf. Then get rid of that third cup. Replace it with water, right, or tea that's decaffeinated. If you want something to drink, I get it okay, but at the end of the day, the caffeine consistency across the day has a dramatic, dramatic effect on your sleep at night, even when you're not feeling it. So looking at your caffeine consumption is certainly something that's going to be equally as important.

Dr. Michael Breus: 16:28

The third category is alcohol. So alcohol is the number one sleep aid in the world. More people drink themselves to sleep than anything else done. And I want to be clear Wow, there's a really big difference between going to sleep and passing out. Yeah, okay, and most people pass out and that's not good. So when you're looking at alcohol, the way alcohol works, the hack and, by the way, at the end of this whole thing, I'm going to give people five hacks in each one of these areas that'll solve this problem.

Dr. Michael Breus: 17:03

So, when you look at alcohol, the amount and how close to lights out is the thing that determines its effect on your sleep. So what you want to do is you want to drink earlier in the day and you want to limit your drinking to probably around two drinks, because when you get over two drinks, your brain spikes something called cortisol and that's an energy hormone, and that's not good for when you're trying to go to bed. So alcohol turns out to be a pretty big thing. And, by the way, when I was talking about the bed partner, I also think we need to include environment in that whole situation.

Dr. Michael Breus: 17:36

If you have a mattress that's 10, 15 years old, you're probably not getting the best sleep. I mean especially if your body's changed, if you've gained weight, if you've lost weight, if you've gotten somebody who's now a bed partner. Now there's less room in the bed. There's a whole host of reasons why people should be getting new mattresses. What I tell people all the time is I kind of wish there was like a, you know, during Thanksgiving, when they had those turkey timers that just pop on the bird when it's in the oven.

Dr. Michael Breus: 18:01

Like you know it's ready. I wish they did that for mattresses. Yeah, we're not be great to know like, oh, my mattress is done Go need to go get another one. Right, like that would be ideal, but they don't really do that, and so what I tell people is I say, if you wake up from sleep stiff and sore, more than two days a week, you probably need to do that.

Marla Miller: 18:23

Is it usually because it's not firm enough?

Dr. Michael Breus: 18:25

Exactly so, one of the things that we know about mattresses. So, just so that everybody knows, on my website we do mattress reviews, so you don't have to. So we've got over 150 mattress reviews. We've discovered what's the best one for back pain, what's the best one for side sleepers, you know what's the best one for people who are maybe a little bit bigger than other people, that kind of stuff. So we've got all these different things on there so people can go check them out.

Dr. Michael Breus: 18:48

But, as a general guideline, people need firmer bed, not rock hard. Okay, I want to be super clear about that. You don't want something that's like cement. But at the same time, a medium firm to a firm is most likely, especially as you get older, where you're going to be moving in terms of getting a mattress. And then I think the final thing is looking to improve sleep quality.

Dr. Michael Breus: 19:11

The easiest way to do that is usually exercise, daily exercise. Now, look, you don't have to run a marathon. I'm talking about 15, 20 minutes of cardio a day. That could be going for a walk, it could be taking your dog for a long walk, or going to the mall, or parking your car far away at work and getting your steps in type of thing, but do yourself the favor of exercising, because the data is incredibly consistent that the more people regularly exercise, the more it improves their deep sleep, which is their physically restorative sleep, which is what we are all kind of gunning for. Besides the mentally restorative sleep, the physical is really important. So doing daily exercise is important and along with that, it's critical critical, believe it or not for sleep to be well hydrated. A lot of people don't know this, but they walk around in a semi-dehydrated state and what they don't realize is that hydration actually has dramatic effects on your ability to get into the deeper forms of sleep.

Marla Miller: 20:09

We'll have a question about that. So when is the best time to drink? Because I tend to drink before bed, but then you're up in the middle of the night. That's right.

Dr. Michael Breus: 20:17

So I get this question all the time. It's a great question, and so what ends up happening is somebody creates something that says, oh, I have to drink a certain amount per day, whatever it happens to be. By the way, eight glasses is a myth, but let's just use it as an example. Somebody says I have to drink eight glasses of water in a day. It's nine o'clock at night. There are only five glasses in. What do they do? They start slugging water in the evenings to try to catch up. That's not how it works. It's really more of a consistent push throughout the day or load up in the morning.

Dr. Michael Breus: 20:49

Your hydration will absolutely serve you well, assuming that you don't do anything that causes you to become dehydrated, like go for a marathon or something like that. You can free load or front load water pretty easily, and so what I do is I get one of these big ones. This is a one and a half liter. I try to make sure I do one a day and I try to make sure it's done, if I can, before, like one o'clock. That way I'm urinating throughout the day. It doesn't disrupt me at night. I know I'm hydrated and I actually do it post-workout. I have 15 ounces right when I wake up, and then I do one of these post-workout and it works out really well.

Marla Miller: 21:25

Okay, that's good to know.

Dr. Michael Breus: 21:27

So I have a five step program. Can I give it to you? Yes, I really want to hear that. So, based on all the things that we've been talking about, step number one is you want to wake up at the same time every day, including the weekends, folks. I know that's bad news for people who wake up at 6.30 during the week, who don't want to wake up at 6.30 on Saturday and Sunday, but there's biological reasons why you want to do this. Okay, let me explain.

Dr. Michael Breus: 21:56

So when you wake up in the morning and sunlight hits your eyeballs, you have certain cells in your eyeballs called melanopsin cells and they send a signal to your brain to turn off the melatonin faucet in your head. Remember, melatonin is kind of that key that starts the engine for sleep. You need other things, but if you ain't got melatonin, you ain't sleeping and sunlight blocks melatonin. Now, that's important for the morning time. But something else occurs that people haven't really thought about, which is your brain then sets a timer for 14 hours later to start melatonin again. So if we do the math, let's say you're waking up at 6 AM, that means at 8 PM your brain is going to start kicking off melatonin. Takes an hour and a half for it to reach appropriate levels. You'll start to get tired-ish around 9.30, 10 o'clock, fall asleep around 10, 10.30, which is kind of people's average bedtimes right Now. Let's say that you woke up at eight in the morning. Okay, 14 hours later is 10, which means your melatonin is not going to get up to speed until 11.30, which means you're not going to get tired until midnight over, maybe even later.

Dr. Michael Breus: 23:04

So Saturday night you're up late. Sunday night you're up late. This is why Monday sucks. Okay, because your body has shipped it. Now it wants to go right. If you stay up late on Friday, sleep in on Saturday. Stay up late on Saturday, sleep in on Sunday. What do you think your brain wants to do in the morning on Monday? Wants to stay up late and wants to sleep in. Right. It only takes one or two days of shifting your schedule to completely throw you off, and that makes the week miserable, right?

Dr. Michael Breus: 23:32

So step number one is to wake up at the same time every single day, if you can. You want to do it based on something called your chronotype. So a chronotype is a genetic predisposition for a particular sleep schedule. One non-scientific term is whether or not you're an early bird or a night owl. Okay. So for folks out there, some of you may have been called early birds or night owls before, but there's more science now than there was before. It turns out there aren't two categories, there are four. Now I renamed the categories and so if you go to chronoquizcom and we'll put all these websites in the show notes, then you can, in literally three minutes, at zero cost, I will tell you exactly when you're supposed to go to bed, when you're supposed to wake up.

Dr. Michael Breus: 24:22

I also give you a few hints on using caffeine and when to use alcohol appropriately so that it doesn't have a big effect on your sleep. So step number one is to wake up every day based on your chronotype. Step number two is to stop caffeine by 2 pm. So remember we talked about this before if you stop by 2, then by 10, at least half of it's out of your system. Once you get down to stopping it by 2, then you move it to 12, then you move it to 10 am. Okay, but you got to start somewhere. So step number two is to stop caffeine by 2 pm. Step number three has to do with alcohol. You want to again limit yourself to two drinks and stop drinking three hours before it lights out. So if you're going to bed at 11, you probably need to stop drinking around eight in order for it not to have a major effect on your ability to get into deep sleep and get good, high quality, refreshing sleep. So step number three is wait three hours after alcohol.

Dr. Michael Breus: 25:19

Step number four has to do with exercise. I'm a big fan and, like we were talking about before, it's a great way to improve your quality. But you don't want to exercise too close to bedtime because for some people not everyone, but for some people when you raise that core body temperature, it makes it really difficult for them to fall asleep Because, remember, your core body temperature drops as you're falling asleep and so by artificially raising it, with exercise at nine o'clock at night and you're going to bed at 10.30, it's probably not the best idea for you. So what I oftentimes recommend for people is, if you can, step number four is to complete your exercise four hours before it lights out.

Dr. Michael Breus: 25:57

Step number five is a morning routine. It's very simple, but everybody should have some form of a morning routine. It shouldn't just be drag your butt out of bed, slap the snooze four times and hopefully make it into the closet to find some clothing. This is what I want you to do. I call it the three 15s. When you wake up, you swing your legs over to the side of the bed, put your feet on the floor and sit up straight and take 15 deep breaths. This is merely to bring you present. This is to get your respiratory system up and going, but it's really just help open your eyes and give yourself some morning energy.

Dr. Michael Breus: 26:33

Step number two 15 ounces of water. As I said before, sleep is a dehydrated event, so we want to get people hydrated. Then, 15 minutes believe it or not of sunshine Go outside If you can. If you're in a part of the country that's not too cold, go outside. Direct sunlight is better than sunlight by the window. But if that's all you got, use that. 15 minutes of sunshine is the exact amount of time most people require to make vitamin D, which is a circadian pacemaker and helps you with your sleep. But in addition to that, that 15 minutes of sunlight turns off that melatonin faucet and helps you get rid of brain fog.

Marla Miller: 27:09

Very interesting. I did take that quiz, the chronotype quiz. Yeah, what are you? I'm a bear.

Dr. Michael Breus: 27:17

Oh, I wish I was a bear.

Marla Miller: 27:20

What is the best time to sleep for the bear? Do you know off hand?

Dr. Michael Breus: 27:26

First of all, let's talk about what the chronotypes are, so that people can know, and then I'm happy to dive into the bears. We know, like I said before, that they're early birds and night owls. I'm not a bird, I'm a mammal. I wanted to rename the categories. Early bird becomes a lion. People in the middle which we used to call hummingbirds, which I have no idea why we called them hummingbirds. It makes no sense to me, but we did. Those are called bears. People who are night owls we call them wolves. Then I added a new category.

Dr. Michael Breus: 27:59

What I'm famous for, or known for in the scientific world is, I believe, that there are four chronotypes, not three. The fourth one is one of somebody who has super-duper irregular sleep patterns, lots and lots of insomnia, lots of anxiety, things of that nature. I call them dolphins. If you go to ChronoQuiz, you will, within anywhere from 10 to 30 questions, figure out very quickly exactly which one of these four chronotypes you are. By the way, we've had almost 3 million people take the quiz, so we've got lots of great information about it for people to learn and understand from. It gives you all this great information.

Dr. Michael Breus: 28:40

Bears are interesting and I'll tell you why. They make up 50, 50% of the population. Let me take a step back and give people more of a cultural or historical reference to these ideas, back in caveman days, when there was a village around a cave and everybody was kind of huddling there. Here's how it worked. The lions were the hunters. They were the group that went out early in the morning before dawn, got the kill, brought the meat back to the village. The bears were the people who ran the village. They get up at 8 o'clock in the morning when the sun rises. They go to bed when the sun sets. They're the largest group, so they take care of the village. Then you got to have a security force that's up at night protecting the village. Those are the night owls, who I call wolves. I want to be very, very clear. These distinctions have been around for centuries.

Dr. Michael Breus: 29:33

The biggest new thing is the addition of insomnia and how all of that has kind of progressed. Bears make up 50% of the population, which is kind of cool when you think about it, because everything works better for a bear. All the schedules were like the nine to five schedules perfect for a bear. I'm a wolf. If I had my druthers I would get up at 8 o'clock almost every day in the mornings and I'd go to bed later and later and later. That's because I'm a wolf, or at least I used to be a wolf. That's the other thing. That's interesting it changes over time. I'm 55 years old. I'll be 56 coming up next year.

Dr. Michael Breus: 30:11

My chronotype is changing. It's kind of interesting. You ever notice when you ask your parents or your grandparents, hey, let's go for dinner, they say, okay, let's meet at 5 o'clock or 4.30 for dinner. You're like what is wrong with you, grandma? It's because their circadian rhythms are going backwards. They're becoming lions, they're becoming early birds. There is something that happens where we go through most of the chronotypes throughout our lifetimes at different points in time. The quiz is a great way to identify. Okay, what stage of life am I in now? You're in a bear stage. I used to be in a wolf stage. How is that having an effect on my hormones? How can I time the activities that I want to do when my hormones that I need are at their highest peak? Naturally, that's how it works. I've discovered the best time of day to have sex. Eat a cheeseburger, ask your boss for a raise, go to bed, drink a cup of coffee, tell a joke. It's unbelievable how much data there is out there. Other scientists do work on chronotypes.

Marla Miller: 31:12

You just listed all those different activities. It's a different time of day for each specific activity, for each chronotype.

Dr. Michael Breus: 31:18

Yeah, exactly. So the one that people ask me the most about is usually sex, so let's talk about that. So a lot of people say, well, what's the best time to have sex? Well, number one, you got two chronotypes you're dealing with here, right? So for me, what was nice with my wife is when we met and I didn't know anything about chronotypes at the time I'd say hey, what time do you want to go out? Say I'll pick me up at eight, I'll pick her up at eight. We go dinner at 8.30, 8.30 to 9.30, we'd maybe go to the movies from 9.30 to 11.30, then we go out for a drink or dessert. Afterwards. We get home at one o'clock, two o'clock in the morning. That was normal for us because we're both night owls.

Dr. Michael Breus: 31:56

That worked out. Yeah Right, and we had no idea. We were both what I call a wolf and we like to sleep in on Saturday mornings, the whole thing right. So back in my younger days that was easy, and so now it's nice because we do still have very similar chronotypes. But what do you do if you're married to somebody, or you're intimate with somebody, that they're a lion early and you're a wolf? You know how does something like this work? So we ran the data and what we did in the book is I actually have a matrix.

Dr. Michael Breus: 32:26

So what we've discovered is that early evening and early morning times turn out to be the best times for sex, depending upon what your chronotype is. So let me give you some general examples. So, as an example, you need five hormones to successfully have sex. You need estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, cortisol and adrenaline. All need to be elevated, and melatonin, the sleep hormone, needs to be low. Okay, when we did the survey, we discovered that 90 something percent of people, if they're going to be intimate, they're usually intimate in the evenings, right before bed, somewhere around between the 10 and 10.30 mark. Okay, what do you think your hormone profile looks like at 1030? Melatonin is high and all the stimulating hormones are low. So that's hint number one as to when is a good time to perform. Hit number two is if you happen to be intimate with somebody who identifies as male or is born with a penis, guess what? What happens in the morning? Most of those people wake up with an erection in the morning. If that is not mother nature telling you when to use that thing, I don't know what is Okay.

Dr. Michael Breus: 33:36

So then we did a survey and we started to ask people hey, can you do us a favor? We're recommending that you be intimate in the morning, based on this chronotypical schedule. You know, give us some feedback. And here's what we discovered Connection was better. Emotional connection was better. Also, physical performance, specifically for men, was better. So men have a greater likelihood of achieving an erection, of achieving orgasm, all of the things that men have issues with as they get older, in the morning times versus the evening times, which we found that particularly fascinating.

Dr. Michael Breus: 34:08

So when you're starting to think about these things, you know there's a lot of different ways you can look at it. Also, in the book I created a matrix for lesbian couples and for gay couples, because the hormone profiles are different If it's two men versus two women. We wanted to understand that as well. So there are differences, and it's quite fun, once you get the prescription, as it were, of the time, to be intimate, to try it out. But there is one thing that people usually say to me. They're like Well, michael, if I wake up in the morning, I got morning breath. Like what do I do about that? I'm like do yourself a favor, run into the bathroom, swish a little mouthwash, then jump back in bed with your partner, have a little fun before you go to work. Trust me, it's fun. It'll change your mood all day long. I can assure you of that. Right, and so all of those things are things that you can use to biohack yourself in order to be in a good mood, have the energy or whatever it is you want to do.

Marla Miller: 35:03

So regarding the sex question, then you're saying all the chronotypes. It's basically better in the morning.

Dr. Michael Breus: 35:09

At specific times in the morning. So, as an example, if you're a lion, you're probably going to be better off having sex even earlier, like at 6am, versus a bear who might be good at 7, versus a wolf who might be good at 7.30, 8 o'clock, right? So it's everybody's going to should try a morning time and an early evening time somewhere between about five and seven o'clock. That's when people still have enough physical energy and emotional energy to stay somewhat connected. But usually once you get past like six o'clock, seven o'clock, people are exhausted. You know they don't have much left, and so that's what ends up happening to a lot of their sex lives.

Marla Miller: 35:46

That's so interesting. And also you're saying the emotional connection is stronger when they're doing it at those times, the early morning or the early evening.

Dr. Michael Breus: 35:56

Very interesting, based on their chronotype, because we know their hormones are up, we know that they're more attentive, we know they have more focus, more attention, things like that.

Marla Miller: 36:03

Yeah, which book of yours talks about the different activities? So not just sex, but the best time to exercise, or the best time yeah?

Dr. Michael Breus: 36:11

yeah, yeah. So I think the book that I always tell people they can start out with is called the Power of when W-H-E-N. It's available on Amazon. You can I think you can get it on my website. All that kind of good stuff. Check it out. It's awesome. I love it. It's been a great book. We've sold I don't know 150,000 copies, so there's lots of people out there who were really into it and checking it out. I'd say start there. That's probably the book that people would enjoy the most. And then the next book is called Energize and it helps you use chronotypes to create a program for all day energy without caffeine, without stimulants, without any of that stuff, just by movement and getting good sleep.

Marla Miller: 36:52

I did see where you said, based on the chronotype, that you found the night owls. So the wolves, I guess, tended to be the creative ones. I was thinking I'm definitely more of a creative than analytical, I think.

Dr. Michael Breus: 37:06

Yep, and that's what we've discovered. It's kind of interesting. So if you look at lions, as a general rule these are the early, early people. They're kind of militant in their thinking, right, so they make a list every day. They go from step one to step two, to step three, to step four, right, they're very focused and rigid in that thought process. They're usually really into biohacking. They're running at five o'clock in the morning. They're, you know, doing all that kind of stuff, right? Whereas a wolf it's a very different person, right, very different person. These are my creatives, these are my artists, my actors, my poets, my authors.

Dr. Michael Breus: 37:41

Think about when you're most creative. Is it at 9 am? Almost never, right? It's always in the evening, after you've been influenced by something throughout the day and you've gotten some idea in your head and it's been floating around and all of a sudden it's starting to form and you're like, oh, I want to do this or I want to do that. That's how creatives work. And so I believe that creatives I would say most creatives fall into that wolf kind of category, and then very few would fall into that lion up at dawn and still being a creative person. I'm not saying it's impossible, but as general guidelines. That's what we see.

Marla Miller: 38:15

Okay, so I'm a bear. When I did photography, I was doing a lot of editing late at night, like a loose track of time, and it'd be midnight, so that's kind of interesting, even though I typically I like to get my 10 hours of sleep Well, depending when it 10 hours of sleep. Yeah, I heard someone say once they're like you need more sleep than most. Back that up for a second.

Dr. Michael Breus: 38:38

Why do you get 10 hours of sleep?

Marla Miller: 38:40

I don't know, just naturally, if I go to bed and it doesn't matter what time I go to bed Like if I went to bed at 6, it'd be 10 hours If I go to bed at 10 at night, then I sleep 10 hours. I don't know, how do you feel when you wake up?

Dr. Michael Breus: 38:54

I feel good. So here's why I'm asking so many questions. So when somebody turns to me and anybody tells me that they need more than 9, 9 and a half hours of sleep, big red flags go off for me because I'm concerned about the quality of the sleep you're getting.

Marla Miller: 39:10

I will say, too, I dream a lot and I have very detailed dreams Interesting, and sometimes they're kind of scary or I don't know if I'm working through stuff or what it is. But yeah, they're very detailed though. Does that have any effect?

Dr. Michael Breus: 39:27

It wouldn't make you have to sleep longer. But anybody that tells me that they need 10 hours, no matter what, I'd stick them in the lab and I want to try to figure out why. Because most you would be such an outlier for most other people I would say look, it's probably worth it. Next time you're at your doctor's office say hey, by the way, I interviewed this sleep guy and I sleep for 10 hours a night and he said that was kind of long. What do you think? He'll probably say yeah, it might not be a bad idea if you'd have a sleep study done and just make sure that you're getting enough quality sleep.

Dr. Michael Breus: 39:58

Because it just doesn't make sense why your body would need 10 hours unless, unbeknownst to me, there's some medical condition that you have. You're on certain medications that could cause. No, you're not going to get into your personal medical situation, but I'm just saying there's very few reasons why somebody's body would require 10 hours of sleep a night. I'm not saying it's not normal. You could be perfectly normal and just require 10 hours, but that's rare.

Marla Miller: 40:20

Oh yeah, it's interesting. No, I have no medication, no, nothing like that, and I feel like I've always been like that, I mean as long as I can remember.

Dr. Michael Breus: 40:28

You could just be what's called a long sleeper. There are some people that just need 10 hours. It's rare. It's about a quarter of a percent of the population, but if you think about that, a quarter of a percent of the population is almost a million people.

Marla Miller: 40:43

Yeah, right. Well, maybe I'll try one of those tests that you can get in the mail.

Dr. Michael Breus: 40:47

Definitely I would be fascinated to see what came back. But yeah, people who sleep that long, usually we think, okay, I wonder if it's good quality sleep. Yeah, but it's a simple test, you can figure it out pretty quick.

Marla Miller: 40:59

Yeah, because I have no trouble falling asleep, or if I wake up, I can go right back to sleep. Perfect.

Dr. Michael Breus: 41:03

Yeah, that's great.

Marla Miller: 41:05

All right, I'll let you know, I'll let you know, let me know.

Dr. Michael Breus: 41:07

I can't wait to find out.

Marla Miller: 41:10

So do you have any other hack or something people should be aware of?

Dr. Michael Breus: 41:14

when it comes to sleep, we haven't talked about yet Well, I think my favorite sleep hack of all times I call the napalate. So what you do here is you take a cup of black drip coffee one cup, which has the most caffeine in it, by the way, black drip coffee has more caffeine than espresso, than cappuccino, than any of that stuff about 100 milligrams, but three ice cubes in it. Merely to cool it down. You pop it back, drink the whole thing as fast as you can, immediately close your eyes and take it 25 minutes now, okay. So the way this works is you get sleepier and sleepier and sleepier throughout the day, based on the buildup of a neurosubstrate called adenosine.

Dr. Michael Breus: 41:58

Okay, when you look at adenosine and you look at caffeine, they're almost identical molecules. They're actually off by one molecule. Okay, so what ends up happening is this buildup of adenosine occurs, making you feel sleepy. So when you drink the caffeine, it's kind of wading in the wings. Right as you fall asleep, you burn through that adenosine. The caffeine fits perfectly into that receptor site. You're good for four hours guaranteed. I've never had it not work.

Marla Miller: 42:26

So you're saying do this when you're feeling exhausted during the day.

Dr. Michael Breus: 42:31

Yeah. So if you get less than five hours of sleep, then at 1pm doing a napalate perfect idea Takes you 25 minutes and you'll be shocked at how well you kind of spring back from that. Like I'm not saying to do a napalate every day Okay, I want to be clear about that that's not a good idea. But as a general guideline, my favorite hack is this one, which is where it's been tough. You've been traveling, Maybe you're living in a van and you know your B, taking a 25 minute caffeine nap, or what I call a napalate, can really save the day.

Marla Miller: 43:07

Okay, well, that's a quick fix. Probably much better than going and getting one of those monster drinks.

Dr. Michael Breus: 43:13

I would imagine Much better, yeah, much healthier.

Marla Miller: 43:17

Yeah Well, and I also read something you wrote about another sort of hack for sleep, which was the banana in the hot water.

Dr. Michael Breus: 43:27

Oh, you want to know about banana tea.

Marla Miller: 43:29

Yeah, I thought that was interesting.

Dr. Michael Breus: 43:32

Yeah, so I would argue there are two real vitamins and minerals that people are majorly deficient in that affects sleep. One is magnesium, the other is vitamin D.

Marla Miller: 43:44

Yeah.

Dr. Michael Breus: 43:45

Okay. Now, one of the things that people don't realize is with magnesium is your body doesn't make it, you have to eat it. And our soil has been so over tilled over years that the magnesium isn't actually coming up through the root stocks anymore and getting into the leafy greens. So you could eat a bushel of kale and you still might not get enough magnesium. So here's what's interesting Bananas are what we call nature sleeping pill. They're loaded with magnesium, but here's the crazy part is the peel has three times the amount of magnesium as the fruit itself. So here's the hack Go into the store, go to like a whole foods and get an organic banana, chop off the tip, chop off the stem, cut it in half, leave the peel on it.

Dr. Michael Breus: 44:30

So to be clear, all I've asked you to do is cut off the top, cut off the bottom, cut it in half. Still banana. Still got the skin on it. Drop it into about two cups, three cups of boiling water, and boil it for approximately four to five minutes or until the banana turns brown. Pull it off the flame, let it sit till it cools off and then put it into a cup and it's just basically banana water. It's loaded with magnesium. I use it as a substitute for tea in the evening time and, by the way, you can make this at the beginning of the week. Keep it in the fridge and just pour it into a cup and heat it up if you want or have it cool. I have one mom. She makes popsicles out of it and gives it to her kids.

Marla Miller: 45:12

Oh interesting. Pretty awesome. So, how does it taste?

Dr. Michael Breus: 45:16

As my daughter likes to say, very banana-y.

Marla Miller: 45:22

Well, that's probably not bad yeah it's actually quite delicious.

Dr. Michael Breus: 45:24

You could put a little bit of honey, a little bit of cinnamon in it to taste, but yeah, absolutely. Well, that's a simple hack there For a simple hack. Now, to be fair, if you're diabetic, you don't want to have banana water before bed because it's got such high sugar then there is a tea that will do the same thing. It's called Guava Leaf Tea G-U-A-V-A leaf tea.

Marla Miller: 45:48

Oh good, yeah, there's a lot of people, well as you've said, that struggle with sleep. Just in general, a busy mind is all it takes to not get the sleep.

Dr. Michael Breus: 45:58

Yeah, that's all it takes. And that causes anxiety, which raises your heart rate, which makes it hard to fall asleep.

Marla Miller: 46:04

Yeah, when you try too hard to ignore all the thoughts, then it becomes worse.

Dr. Michael Breus: 46:10

I tell people all the time sleep is a lot like love. The less you look for it, the more it shows up.

Marla Miller: 46:15

Very good, I was thinking one last thing about your wife. If someone goes to bed and they like the TV on, they have those headsets where they can hear the TV, but you don't hear it.

Dr. Michael Breus: 46:28

Guess what I'm getting for my anniversary next week. Ha, ha ha ha, it's already on order. Actually, what we're getting is they make pillow speakers that are Bluetooth-enabled. I can put them in pillow so she can hear it, and I don't have to hear it, isn't?

Marla Miller: 46:42

that cool, yeah Well, one thing we didn't touch upon was the phones.

Dr. Michael Breus: 46:48

Yeah, let's talk about phones for just a quick second. Yeah, so here's the deal Don't look at your phone, don't look at it at night, don't look at it in the middle of the night and, by the way, this is the worst excuse I've ever heard. People say well, I use my phone as my alarm clock to wake me up, so I have to have it near my head. That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. Go to Walmart for less than $5. You can buy yourself an alarm clock. You can put it right on the side of your bed and you don't have to look at your phone. Because here's what happens Is you open up your phone and then you see there's been three texts from somebody and you immediately push on it and the second your finger hits that button, you're engaged.

Dr. Michael Breus: 47:28

The level of brain power that's required increases. That's not what sleep is about. Sleep is about reducing brain power for recovery, not increasing brain power for intellect conversation. Blah, blah, blah. So, once again, having this near your bed is a stupid idea. Now you're going to say to me well, but there's some sleep apps and there's some meditation things that could be really cool from my phone. I'm a big fan of many of those.

Dr. Michael Breus: 47:57

Do yourself a favor If you're just dying to do one of those and you've got headphones to do it so you don't disrupt your partner. Here's the simple trick charge your phone on your partner's nightstand and have your partner charge their phone on your nightstand. That way, if you do wake up in the middle light and look, text isn't going to be for you so you don't have to answer it. Put it back down. I personally prefer across the room. I don't mind if you're going to use this as an alarm to put it across the room, but I don't like any form of disruption of phones at night. It's about engagement. So, at the end of the day, if you're trying to get your high score on Candy Crush while you're trying to fall asleep, you ain't trying to fall asleep, right?

Marla Miller: 48:40

Yeah, because you're engaging that beta brainwave right Rather than the sleep like theta or delta. Well, where can people find you and more information and find your books?

Dr. Michael Breus: 48:51

Absolutely so. I'm very easy to find. My website is sleepdoctorcom or thesleepdoctorcom. We have them both, so I'm super easy to find it. Type it into Google. I pop right up on social media. My name is TheSleepDoctor and I'm on Facebook. I'm on Twitter, I'm on TikTok, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on did I miss one? Instagram? We're on all of them and we put different information out on different ones based on who's on which social site. So if you want to learn something, my goal has always been to just give people more and more information so that they can make informed decisions about their health and their sleep, and so check me out on social.

Dr. Michael Breus: 49:32

If you want to buy a book, I recommend the power of when. Out of my four books, I think it's the one that people could really use as kind of like a secret handbook to crack the code on productivity and things like that. So I think people would really enjoy that. And then, if you can take the ChronoQuiz ChronoQuizcom I think you will really get a lot out of it in terms of just understanding about what your chronotype is and all the different things that you can do better if you knew that.

Marla Miller: 50:01

That's great. One last thing I forgot to ask was about a pillow.

Dr. Michael Breus: 50:05

So pillows are top. I actually did a pillow review on the website because, I mean, I got to be honest with you there's like a million gazillion pillows out there. So what I do when I'm looking for a pillow for myself or I'm helping a client is I ask myself three questions. So question number one squishy or firm? Some people like to squish their pillows up, some people like a big block of cheese. Right, it's one over the two.

Dr. Michael Breus: 50:31

The next question what position do you start sleeping in? Okay, if you're a side sleeper, you need to make up for the space between your ear and the outside of your shoulder, so you might need a thicker pillow. But if you're a back sleeper, if you have that thick of pillow it's gonna push your chin down into your neck and make it hard to breathe. So understanding what position you start out in is good. And then the final question is do you have any neck or upper shoulder pain? Because if you do, before you get a pillow you want to have that checked out, because in some cases you could get the wrong kind of pillow and can make the situation worse, not better.

Marla Miller: 51:06

Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for coming on here today. It was a really fun conversation and something that can benefit everyone. Everyone has to sleep and get the best night of sleep they can for optimal health.

Dr. Michael Breus: 51:21

Well, that's what we want. We want to try to get as many people to get as good night as humanly possible. And remember I want everybody out there to remember nobody's perfect at sleep Nobody. Okay, I'm the sleep doctor. I definitely have occasional bad nights when things are stressing me out, or maybe I had caffeine late in the day or I went out with friends or things like that. But it's really about thinking about your sleep from right when you get up until you go to bed and trying to do things that are very sleep positive throughout that daytime so that you can have a successful sleep at night. It's like training before a race and then running the race each night, if that makes any sense.

Marla Miller: 51:59

It does. Thank you again, thank you.