You’re Probably Sleeping Wrong | Full Episode

Sleep is something we all do every night… but how many of us actually understand what’s happening while we’re asleep?

In this episode, I sit down with brain health expert Dr. Wes Center to talk about what the brain is actually doing while we sleep, why dreams happen, why some people wake up exhausted after eight hours, and what “sleep debt” really means.

We also get into some topics that I think are going to surprise a lot of people, like why Dr. Wes isn’t a fan of taking melatonin by itself (especially for kids), what your phone is doing to your sleep, why exercise changes how much sleep you need, and why your brain is actually busier while you’re asleep than when you’re awake.

There were a bunch of moments in this conversation where I found myself stopping and thinking, “Wait… I had no idea.” If you’ve ever struggled with sleep, felt tired all the time, or just wanted to understand your brain a little better, I think you’ll really enjoy this one.

Sleep might be the most underrated tool we have for our health, and after this conversation, I don’t think I’ll look at it the same way again.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome back to the SolX Podcast, the show where we talk AO scan, frequencies, woo-woo, and all the weird wellness stuff in between. If you're not always sure where the science ends and the woo-woo begins, this is the place you want to be.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Yeah, so I actually did some Freudian research when I was a doctoral student. And um, he wrote a book called The Interpretation of Dreams. And he he had all these archetypal things that he would apply to it. And there are actually some people in the psychology world, in the psychoanalytical world, whose entire practice is predicated on interpreting people's dreams. And apparently some people are pretty, you know, really good at it. So I wouldn't claim any specialty there. But um so from a neurobiological perspective, what the brain is doing when you're dreaming is it's trying to make sense of things that it did, that it encountered, you know, recently, but generally in in that day. So many times we'll dream about things that happen, but they'll be bizarre because you know the brain's trying to figure out what to do with it and it's kind of playing with things. It's kind of like think of it like a two-year-old playing with his food. It's kind of what your brain is doing with things during the day. Sometimes it's trying to make sense of things too. It's like there were things that it encountered during the day that were unevaluated, and so the brain is trying to incorporate that into your overall life experience by trying to make sense of it. And then there's other times when it just appears to be on LSD, you know, it's just doing just bizarre stuff, and you have no idea. Where the heck did that come from? Um, and then in in in it's not unusual to have uh repetitive dreams. There are dreams that everybody has across cultures, so almost all cultures have a falling or flying dream. Those are considered related, you know, and those tend to be repetitive. Almost all cultures have a violent end to me dream, you know, where you're either a car wreck or some other violent thing happens. Almost all of us have those. Um, there are also um very spiritual experiences that people will report having in dreams, you know, they dreamed that they were in heaven or conversely in hell. And you know, there's those are also common. One really common one is being naked in public. There's one that's unique to the West, and that is um uh going across the stage at graduation only to find out that you're missing a class. That's a really common one that uh that people report. So yeah, dreams, you know, dreams are normative. So most people dream. Um, not everybody dreams in color. Uh a lot of people dream in black and white. Uh some people put significance on dreaming in color, like they always dream in black and white, but oh, tonight I dreamed in color. That's weird. So yeah, uh, there are some people who don't remember their dreams. There's others. Uh my spouse can go into great gory detail about her dreams. And uh, I've had to listen sometime for a long time. She used to wake up sometimes after having a dream about me and hold me responsible for what happened in the dream and not talk to me for kind of saying, What did I do? Well, I had a dream last night. Wait a second, you're gonna beat me up for your dream? How's that a thing? So, yeah, so dreams can be really powerful too. Uh, dreams can also bring to the conscious things that have been suppressed at the paraliminal or subliminal level, so they can bring the conscious. Yeah, so sometimes there are uh emotions or circumstances that uh rec that occur in a dream that mirror or reflect an event that happened in the real world that we didn't think we were reacting very strongly to, but it turns out that we were. Um dreams only happen in the lighter stages of sleep. So in deeper levels of sleep, you don't dream. So you don't dream in stage three or four, but you can dream in one and two. So uh during rapid eye movement generally, so that light stage, and it's why we can be awakened from dreams easily. So we can have a startling dream and it it'll actually wake us up, and it's because we're in that lower stage. So uh fun, fun little factoid. So melatonin helps us to modulate sleep. So melatonin is a is a uh neurohormone that does about 200 different things in the body, only really one related to sleep, but it modulates us going in and out of the different cycles of sleep. And uh generally we're in stage four very briefly. We don't stay there for very long. Uh, but we we like to rack up as much stage four as we can get during the night, because that's when the most rest, the deep rest, the deep recovery, the you know, the deep memory consolidation happens in those deeper levels of sleep. And there are many people who never get to four, you know, because of poor sleep hygiene and stuff like that. But um so melatonin is modulates those. And so if we if we mess with melatonin through taking oral melatonin, can actually mess with the modulation so that we don't actually get to those deeper levels of sleep. So a lot of people thinking I'm taking melatonin to help me sleep. If you're taking it by yourself, you're pretty much gonna wreck your sleep eventually. And you may make wreck it sooner than later. So I'm an anti-melatonin guy. Uh, but if you do take melatonin, make sure you're taking it with at least your two or three other supplements to help sleep, like 5 HTP or GABA or L-theanine or uh glycine, you know, something else, don't just take it by itself.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

I like you say that uh it even with kids, it should not be. Especially with children, you had a strong stance that children should absolutely not.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

No, it it is a drug. Melatonin is a drug, it's a hormone drug. You shouldn't be giving children hormones, so don't give them melatonin. I've lectured many psychiatrists on the child abuse that they're you know, that they're perpetrating by giving, you know, seven, eight, nine, ten milligrams of melatonin to children. It's terrible. It's terrible. There are better ways to get at that. And you know, just because a kid's not sleeping doesn't mean he's not making melatonin. Melatonin, so you essential essential amino acids are things you have to eat. Yeah, if they're essential, you have to eat them. So uh tryptophan is the essential amino acid that's in the monoamine chain that results in both serotonin and melatonin. So tryptophan gets converted into a another in your body, into another substance called 5-hydroxytryptophan, 5-HTP. You can actually make it synthesize it in your body, or you can take it as a supplement. It's a precursor to 5-HT, which is serotonin. 5-HT and serotonin, same thing. But then serotonin plus the cofactor SAME, a form of methionine, uh, becomes melatonin. So whenever you give somebody melatonin, you're screwing up that chain. Leave it alone. So um give the precursors, but don't give melatonin. So if you need to get more tryptophan of the diet or get some 5 H2P, or get, you know, or get some SAME, but don't give melatonin, especially to children. Again, it's a hormone, it's not a neurotransmitter. So give stuff further up in the chain, but don't give that all the way at the bottom. I know people have been taking melatonin for years and then they quit taking it and they can't sleep, but they take more of it and they can't sleep either. So, you know, they've wrecked that that conversion chain by long-term use. And the brain goes, Well, if you're gonna take it, I don't need to make it anymore. It's a form of learned helplessness.

SPEAKER_02 8:12

Well, awesome. That's that's cool.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

It's probably not awesome. There's probably people going in. Oh, pretty ticked off about it. Yeah, they're pretty ticked off, or or they're mad at me for bringing it up. But it's okay. You can't hit me with rotten fruit where I'm sitting.

SPEAKER_02 8:24

So you're pretty safe in this uh environment right now. We're back again. We figured that uh we'd give sleep its own episode if if you haven't uh sort of um figured on and figured it out that we're talking about sleep. We had uh Dr. West Center on talking about brain health in a previous episode. And maybe do you mind just kind of letting the audience know who you are if this is the first time they're seeing you?

SPEAKER_01 8:47

Yeah, so I'm a psychophysiologist, a licensed professional counselor. I'm trained as a psychologist in the neuroside of things. Um I have um brain health and wellness clinic. I also have a traditional uh brain health clinic that's not on the wellness side, but does uh clinical interventions, neurofeedback, biofeedback. We do TMS in our office. We're talking about medical, medical grade TMS, not you know, home use TMS device, but the one Tesla units. We do uh infrared, near infrared, transcranial, alternating current, direct current stimulation, random noise stimulation, pink noise, white noise, all that different stuff that we introduce to the brain. Working mainly with traumatic brain injury, ADHD, neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, other forms of dementia, and then garden variety, depression, anxiety. We do have a particular focus on combat veterans because I am one and I'm a retired Marine. So I like to work with my own guys. So we do a lot of pro bono work with the veteran community. And then um, and then we have uh my son runs another one of our companies doing um the important sales of neurofeedback, biofeedback hardware and software to make it more affordable for clinics. So we we we source low, low-cost, affordable solutions for folks so they can get into the business. And so he he runs that for me. And then uh yeah, and then the wellness side of things, we do hyperbaric, we have data chamber, we got uh ion rain, we've got the AO scan and the full complement of things we can do with AO. Uh, and then we got a few things that uh are kind of on the on the experimental investigational side that we don't really talk about a lot. So, but yeah, and we we got a busy clinic. I've been in clinical practice almost since I retired. I did a brief five-year stint working in psychiatric hospitals while I was getting all my certifications and finishing up my my uh my education after I retired from the military. And then uh yeah, I've been on this search for the perfect brain health intervention uh solution since. Haven't found it yet. But uh every time we add something, we get a little better at what we do. And we do a lot of teaching. We've started, uh we've taught over 300 clinicians all over North America, Asia, and Europe. And we've helped start probably a hundred, hundred and something clinics now who to teach them and train them and mentor them to do what we do. Uh, two big ones in Bucharest, one in Taipei, one in Suzhou, one in Shanghai, that I'm most proud of because we've been able to take what we do here in North America and apply it to different cultures and see them get the same results, which is not only gratifying, but uh it's really infused a lot of life so that I think I'm good for another 10 years maybe to do this. It's just so much fun. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:54

Wow. Thank you so much. Well, let's uh I was talking to you about uh the movie Freaky Friday. I think there's been three or four, maybe made. This one's the first one with uh Jamie Lee Curtis and uh Lindsay Lohan. If anyone's seen that, but they kept asking this lady who had written a book on senescence, uh, why are we so tired? So now I want to ask you that question. I don't know if we got a great answer from the movie, other than obsessing over, you know, menial or trivial tasks in so many of them. But as it has to do with sleep, you know, if I get eight hours of sleep a day, why do I still feel tired? What could be the culprit there?

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Yeah, so that's that wired but tired thing. So essentially the brain needs the opportunity to shift down from states of arousal to get to where it needs to be to rest. So, first of all, if the brain doesn't think it's safe, then it ain't happening. And so um it's primary, your brain's primary responsibility is don't die, don't die, don't die. I've laughed about that. That your brain is singing all day along, don't die, don't die, don't die, don't die, don't die, don't die. And so you're the biggest obstacle to that is you. I mean, so your brain's trying to keep Big Dubby from killing himself. And so um it it so survival is that primary thing. Well, if if you're getting close to bedtime and you've been filling your brain with, you know, that um whatever was on the news tonight, you know, the latest gore and terror thing and the world's coming to an end and we're all gonna burn up and be ascender, all that stuff, and and you've hyped yourself up again. Well, you've wrecked your brain's natural tendency to downshift to allow you go to sleep. And so people many times confuse sleep with quality sleep. They're not the same thing. You know, you can be asleep, but not be getting restful sleep. Um many of us have kids that, you know, you put them to bed and and you come to get them up the next morning and they're the same place they were when you, you know, read them their bedtime story and did their bedtime prayers with them. They're still in the same place. And then you got other kids who look like a tornado hit their bed, and you know, they their head is at the foot of the bed and their feet are all akimbo, and it's like, but the kid looks like you know, they were past dead out all night. So um, the one thing kids do better than adults generally is wind down. They do generally a better job of downshifting to go to sleep. And so my deal is watch a baby going to sleep. So after they've done those, that first initial resist the sleep, then they finally calm down. So the first thing you notice about an infant when they're sleeping is breathing. You'll notice that their whole body moves as they're breathing. So they're breathing diaphragmatically. So us as adults, we tend to get in this bad habit of chest wall muscle breathing. So women do it because of restricted clothing. So they are actually wearing clothing that's binding. And that's why the first thing when my wife and all my daughters hit the house, their bra goes, sometimes when they're on the way home in the car, because it's constricting their breathing. And so, in order for them to get a full breath in, they've got to get that, you know, that barbaric trap off of them. And so then they can breathe more normally. And I know that sounds like a joke. It is not a joke. Uh, we've had we've had many patients who would get into panic. And the first thing we tell them up, hey, just reach out, reach out there and let that go. And immediately they're able to take a full breath in. And so you need to be able to do the same thing when you're sleeping. You need to be able to take a full breath in. So we recommend that people do square breathing, which is take a deep breath in for all fill your lung volume up, usually for you know, 15, 20 seconds, hold it for 15 to 20 seconds, then take 15 to 20 seconds, 30 seconds to let it out, and then hold it again, and then do your next breath in. So it's some people call it seal breathing because the seals and other special forces use that as a breathing technique. Um, but if you'll do that for two minutes before going to bed, you'll go to sleep much more quickly because you're telling your body that you're downshifting. But you got to get rid of those things that interfere with the shift down. The evening news will do it. What passes for you know nighttime comedy now is mostly political outrage. That's not gonna help you go to sleep. Um so you know, getting rid of the mind porn that you that comes through your cell phone, smart devices, or the television is is essential. And then, you know, getting rid of LED lights and fluorescent lights and going to incandescent and getting rid of the blue light on your smart devices, and then get rid of your smart devices within about an hour of the time you want to go to bed. Don't use your smart device as an alarm clock. Go to Walmart or Target and buy a $10 alarm clock. Don't use your smart device for that. Matter of fact, the best thing to do with a smart device is to turn it off, all the way off, power it all the way down, and then plug it into you know a receptacle or a power, you know, recharge station in a common area of the house, not in the bedroom. And again, you should get rid of everything in your bedroom that hinders sleep or sex. If it doesn't involve sex, and if it does involve sleep, it doesn't belong in the bedroom. And so that includes pets, children, and things like that. Make the room as cold as you can stand it and can afford it. You know, somewhere between 57 and 65 degrees. I think the research says that 65 degrees is optimal for most people. Some people it needs to be a little lower. Um get rid of all sources of light, make it as absolutely dark as you can. If you got a ceiling fan on, you should wear a mask because even with your eyes closed, when those blades are chopping the light up, you can see it. I mean, if you close your eyes and stick it up right now and move it in front, you can see it. So your brain's gonna process that as motion, and so your visual cortex isn't gonna go offline. That part of your brain's not gonna go to sleep. So you've got to make sure that you know do that. So normally we close our eyes to go to sleep. That tells your brain that the visual cortex, the back third of your brain, isn't necessarily it isn't needed to work anymore, so we can start to go to sleep. Your frontal lobes are your thinker, decider, planner, make you know, your inhibitor when you close your eyes and tell it, okay, I don't need to think anymore. I need to go to sleep. But a lot of people have chatty brain because they're thinking about too much. And chatty brain keeps both the frontal and occipital lobes going. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:05

Okay. Well, I'm trying to figure out where to go now. Yeah, I mean fun stuff. Well, I I wanted to let's shift into what's the brain doing when you're asleep. You know, I I feel like there's the stages of sleep, the ri the all the cycles I hear that uh, you know, and maybe this could start to get into like some of the misconceptions where your brain fills up with this fluid throughout the day. It gets all dirty and used and whatever. I mean, this is definitely the the Jake explanation, not clinical or a lot of knowledge. And then you've got to go to sleep to drain that fluid so you can kind of clean the brain.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

I maybe like sort of one of the fluids in the brain does only drain when you're laying down, not necessarily asleep, but laying down. And that's the lymphatic system. So the brain's lymphatic system is called the glymphatic system because it's isolated from the rest of the brain's, you know, lymph drainage system. So, yes, that one, that fluid that does have garbage in it can can drain only when you're laying down. But your cerebral spinal fluid and your blood are being exchanged all day long. So the cerebral spinal fluid is what uh is inside that sac that protects the spinal cord and the brain. Um, and so the brain is actually floating in that fluid, that cerebral spinal fluid. But CSF and blood both turn over throughout the day. But GLENF does not drain unless.

SPEAKER_02 20:39

So even if you're laying down during the day. Yeah. Then you're then the pathways open up and it can start to do that draining process.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

Yeah, the reason why it doesn't drain is because the musculature of your neck that clamps down to prevent it from draining. It also prevents your blood from draining from your head. I mean the carotids are pumping it up, the ascending and the descending ones are bringing it down, but gravity can't take hold and just have it all rushed to your feet. So uh it tightens up on it to make it difficult to drain so that it stays, you know, it stays up there. So yeah, but that mechanism also prevents the glimpse from draining unless you're laying down.

SPEAKER_02 21:16

Okay, so we've got uh some of that draining going on. And uh what what else is your brain doing than when you're asleep?

SPEAKER_01 21:24

It's busier when you're asleep than when you're awake. Um, the metabolism increases. So my deal is that hey, the reason why you can sleep with your head outside the covers, but you got to be buried under those 10 blankets when you got the thermostat set at 65 is because your head actually increases in temperature by one to two degrees because its metabolic activity increases when you're asleep. Because it's doing filing, repair work, you know, it's doing stuff that it couldn't do because it was too busy with the don't die, don't die thing, right? So it's now can divert resources because you're out of the picture now. You're, you're, you're asleep. You're not conscious. So now it can work. And so that's what's happening. It's consolidating memories. It's taking the stuff that was in volatile memory in the hippocampus and it's farming it out to the cortex. Uh, the thalamus and the hippocampus and the sensory integration protect uh cortex are doing handshakes to figure out, you know, what we learn today. Same thing for the frontal lobes. Things are getting moved into long-term storage in the temporal lobes. So about the only thing that's really offline, offline is the occipital lobe, except for repair work.

unknown 22:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:35

And so then how does bad sleep or no sleep then start to affect those things? Do you not consolidate memory? Do you not receive the necessary repairs? Correct. So then you're saying that no sleep or bad sleep has serious health implications for terrible health implications.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

And we're in the middle of a sleep epidemic. Arianne Huffington wrote a book about this sleep epidemic that we have in our country. It's it's a really it's well-researched and well-written book uh about you know our problems as a country with sleep. And the solutions that are in there are pretty good too. But her warnings about what's going to happen, you know, uh we need to pay attention. Uh we've got to get sleep under control. And so I it was 20 years ago, was in clinical practice, unheard of to see a kid with uh sleep issues or with type 2 diabetes. Um we just we never saw it. And now 60% of the kids in elementary school in certain parts of the country, to include the part I live in in Texas, can be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and obesity. That's nuts. That's nuts. And it's just happened like overnight, it seems. And of course, gradually it's been coming on with industrialized foods and and sugary drinks and you know, the less access to high quality, nutrient-dense foods, a decrease in exercise. You know, so there's there's there's there's reasons in retrospect why it's happening, but they're not good ones. Um, but yeah, all the things you mentioned, you're not your memory is gonna get worse, you're gonna be more irritable um because of the accumulation of neuro neurotoxin, brain toxins from metabolic activity that didn't get cleared out of your body because you're you're not sleeping well enough. The microglia can't come out and clean up beta amyloids. So uh poor sleep in the 30s and 40s can be predictive of Alzheimer's, uh, you know, in the 50s and 60s, early onset Alzheimer's, um, and other neurodegenerative disorders that come about. There's the brain plaque theory is really coming under a lot of scrutiny because some of the research that was done early on with beta amyloids turns out the research was faked. So they're having to retract some of it, but some of it is still valid. And so we do need to get the brain poo out, and the way to do that is to sleep better.

SPEAKER_02 24:57

So you say uh the brain's job throughout the day, don't die, don't die, dummy.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 25:02

And and we got to do our best to you know help the brain out.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 25:05

Why that a thought came to my head, why when we're driving and we get a little drowsy, why do we fall asleep then?

SPEAKER_01 25:13

Yeah, so it's usually through monotony. You know, we there's no novelty to driving, you know, it's it's a rote kind of a thing. So there's this thing called rope, road hypnosis. Some people call it road hypnagogia. And so a hypnagogic state is a state of reverie when we are uh awake, but we're not very alert, and there may be background memory scanning or daydreaming going on. Have you ever done a long road trip and not remembered long segments of it? Like, yeah, yeah, well, that's hypnagogic reverie. You're in your and and by the way, we can actually respond to changes like all the taillights in front of us turn red. We can react appropriately, cortisol comes online, DHEA comes online, the distress hormones, and we can react appropriately.

SPEAKER_02 26:04

But still kind of not yeah, but not be totally weird.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:08

I I've uh I've even uh my commute to and from work is sometimes like whoa, I'll I'll like park in my driveway or my garage. I'll be like, how did I get here? Exactly. You know, I know I was safe, I'm pretty sure, right? But holy moly.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

Right. So that's your brain is doing the don't die, don't die functions. You know, it's it's alert and it's responding appropriately to changes in road conditions and drivers and traffic and lights and all that stuff. You didn't run any lights, you know. Hopefully, you're didn't hit anybody. Yeah, it didn't hit anybody, you know, no drag marks in the driveway. Yeah. Looking underneath to see if there's anything under there. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, but it's called hypnagogia or our hypnagogic reverie, but road hypnosis, and it it's common. Everybody experiences who's driven a long way, you know, it's a typical thing. So, um, and that's just our brain, you know, doing things while we're very disinterested in what we're doing.

SPEAKER_02 27:09

And then that can slip into us like drowsing, like falling, falling asleep. At the extreme, yes. Okay, at the extreme.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

But that's that's more a fatigue thing. Okay. Yeah. That's more fatigue than a focus thing.

SPEAKER_02 27:21

And why whenever I drive to I mean we're in uh Orm, Utah right now. So whenever I drive to Salt Lake, which is about a 45 minute drive, like I've got to start popping the sunflower seeds in. Is there any science to that?

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Yeah, it's a it's a hand-to-mouth thing. So it's a it's a mechanistic thing, but it's also giving you something mechanically to do. I mean, you're focusing on it. You're moving the sunflower seed with your tongue so that you can bite it at just the right angle that it gets seed out and then spin out the yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 27:50

That's the only thing that'll work. I can't chew ice and chew ice won't do nothing. Only chewing gum doesn't do anything for me. It's only the sunflower seed.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

Yeah, this is I'm gonna use a very technical term. Are you ready for this? It's a world.

SPEAKER_02 28:01

We already had hypnagogia. Hypnagogic reverie, yeah. Hypnagogia.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

Yeah, yeah. This is a whatever floats your boat thing. Yeah. So if the sunflower feeds or whatever, seeds are what floats your boat, then yeah, do the sunflower seed. So yeah, it's what it really is, whatever works for you. And that's what I meant when I was talking about supplements before, you know, about melatonin stuff. Like everybody has a sleep cocktail that's gonna work for them that may not work for anybody else. And it may not work for you every time. It may give you what you need this time, which is it's why I like more things in a sleep supplement than just melatonin. And I actually prefer the sleep supplements to have no melatonin in them. And if you just gotta put something in there, do it at the microgram level, not the milligram level. And so, like 10 MCGs, not 10 milligrams, right? So, and um, and the liquids are better than the you know, the solid pillar capsules, right, that have a fixed dose in them. The liquid ones you can you can measure better, so you can actually do less. So, yeah, but and then again, for no more than five consecutive days. Hey, here's a here's the thing that'll bake your noodle. So, all of the sleep meds that the FDA has approved for sleep, so Somnote, Ambien, Lunesta, they were brought to market with clinical trials of no more than five consecutive days of use and no more than 90 days of prescription use. I know people have been taking those things for years, and it's completely off label. It was never designed to do that. And, you know, uh I had a a uh an attorney friend who shall remain nameless for the story I'm gonna tell, down in Houston, who was arrested at three o'clock in the morning for power washing his house. And he was on ambient. So he was he was essentially sleepwalking, and he wouldn't have been arrested if he hadn't been naked.

SPEAKER_02 30:14

Okay, I was waiting for the threshold of what he got arrested for because I didn't think washing your car was an arrestable. It was power washing. Oh, his house. His house. At three in the morning in his house. Okay, his house.

SPEAKER_01 30:26

I think I tried to make that make sense, but I think all of us have heard of stories about people, you know, having an ambient kind of out-of-body experience. But yeah, it it it causes, you know, this kind of uh um sonambulism. So you're bringing the words. Ambulism ambulate to walk. That's sonambulism is sleepwalking. Wow, okay.

SPEAKER_02 30:52

A heck of a way to say sleepwalking.

SPEAKER_01 30:54

Well, you know, we gotta make ourselves sound like we know something. So we you know put these technical terms to everything. So yeah, so it's a real thing. And people, you know, ambient is notorious for that. Uh so yeah. So um, but there's tons of people who have been taking those things for much, much, much, much longer than the FDA ever approved them to be used for. But because physicians are allowed to prescribe things off label, that includes not only prescribing things that they have a reasonable that will help somebody with a condition that the FDA didn't approve it for use for, as long as they have some rationale for doing that, they can do it. They can also go for longer and higher doses than were recommended when the FDA originally approved them for. So, you know, when you're on long-term ambient or anxiolytic, the use of anti-anxiety drugs like Librium Valium, Xanax, Adiban, those things, those are off label if you're taking them for much longer than six months. Yeah. Goodness. Yep, yeah. Not a fan of all that stuff. There are times when it's appropriate. If it's going to keep you from killing yourself or somebody else, by all means. If you've gone for, you know, seven or eight days without any sleep, by all means. Uh, other than that, you really should be cautious. And I always tell people this is just good info for any medication. When a physician approaches you with a script, say, I need to understand what is this gonna do for me? What are the therapeutic benefits? And then what is this gonna be doing to me? What are the side effects of this? How long am I gonna be on this? And what's your plan for me coming off of it? And that's really two separate questions. So when are when are we gonna be stopping this thing? And what are you gonna do to help me come off of this responsibly in a way that doesn't provoke, you know, some sort of withdrawal kind of things. And not all drugs have a withdrawal potential, some don't have any at all, but some have quite a bit. And the physicians know this, and so if they're gonna give you a prescription to take, they should also give you a prescription of when we're gonna when this is gonna be over with. And then if they all, if if if you get the answer, you know, well, you're just gonna be on this indefinitely, then you need to take a time out to think about whether this is something that you really want to do and maybe ask for a second opinion. Definitely talk it over with friends and loved ones, you know, who may have had a similar experience of that medication, but and that goes for everything, whether it's a psychiatric medication, which kind of falls more in my field, or whether it's, you know, a statin drug. You you need to ask, you know. So yeah. And I think people get too passive, they get you know, you know a little bit of that M deity complex that you know you're talking to a godlike figure, and they, you know, they put on their pants one leg at a time just like you. So and it should be a collaborative working relationship. And believe it or not, a lot of physicians actually appreciate that. And so don't assume that your doctor doesn't want to work with you. Go with a, you know, write down your questions before you sit in the room with them. And, you know, if it's a situation where you think you're gonna come out of there with a prescription, go into it armed with the questions that you want to get answered and make sure you don't leave the room till you get them answered.

SPEAKER_02 34:30

Love that. Okay, do you want to do another segment of trend or truth or stump the stump the chump. Stump the what?

SPEAKER_01 34:38

Let's just stump the chump.

SPEAKER_02 34:40

I do need to come up with better uh things to try to stump you with. These are more just like, hey, do you think this is true or false?

SPEAKER_01 34:45

You know, you're talking to a former, well, a retired Marine, so you can call me a chump if you want to. I've been called worse.

SPEAKER_02 34:52

Well, okay, let's let's do this. Umlight first thing in the morning improves sleep.

SPEAKER_01 34:58

Yes. Sunlight throughout the day. So you you want to get um morning sun and late afternoon evening sun because your body makes vitamin D, the hormone, from sunlight. And so you need on average a total of 30 to 40 minutes of sun exposure on your upper arm, shoulders, neck, and face. Um, and morning sun is better than midday sun because of UV. So, and uh UV is harder on you the higher in altitude you are, uh, and the closer you are to water or snow because of reflection. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 35:35

So, yeah. Uh, not your phone though. No, you you you wouldn't say that a big bright light close to your face does the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

So think of your phone as a handheld slot machine. And it's the reason why slot machines are addictive is for variable ratio level of reward and variable interval level of reward. So there's a variable, it's not a predictable interval. Not every time do you pull the handle, do you get a reward? And the ratio of reward, the amount of pulls to the reward it provides, varies. So varies from slot machine to slot machine. You could sit there and feed that thing all day long and get nothing, or you could feed it once and hit jackpot. Well, that's what causes people to doom scroll. You know, they keep scrolling until something hits their reward center and it gives them a big dump of dopamine, and then he and the next thing they know, they've been on it for two hours. So we would recommend, I say we, like I got a mouse in my pocket. My colleagues and I would recommend that you not pick up your cell phone until after you've completed your morning routine, so your self-care routine, including eating, and you've gotten to where you're going. So we're gonna go to school, go to work, whatever, then only as it relates to the activity that you're at that place for. And then again, not until you get home. And then whenever you're greeting other members of the household, it needs to be put away so you can talk to them about their day. And of course, that means they need to put theirs away so they can talk to you about their day. And uh, we recommend things like having an IT box or a cell phone box that everything goes into. No cell phones allowed at the dinner table, you know, because it destroys eating as well as anything that can happen in terms of relationships at the dinner table, and then not during homework time for kiddos, and then uh not in the hour before bedtime. And we recommend that for your children, especially, that they get no more than an hour at most of un you know, unrestricted or free, you know, cell phone usage. And at any time you ask for it, they need to hand it over so that you can see what they've been doing. So uh they they can't lock their phones. They you don't have an access code to so yeah, it's accountability.

SPEAKER_02 38:10

And then uh let's talk about uh sleep debt. So I can make up for lost sleep, I can uh exercise four hours a day and then sleep for only four. Well, what's that trade-off look like? I know there's a exercise sleep trade-off.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Well, let's talk about the principle of sleep debt to begin with. Okay. So our sleep requirement is based on a seven-day circadian cycle. So circa around dum the day, circadian are those rhythms that occur throughout the day. Ultridian are those that happen several times a day. So eating, peeing, pooping, those are ultridian rhythms. Sleeping is a circadian rhythm. So you have a seven-day circadian cycle for sleep. So your sleep burden is spread out across those seven days. And so it essentially is uh the reset is your rest day, which is why it's important to have at least one rest day in your seven-day cycle, because that tells the body and the brain, okay, we can reestablish the sleep debt. So you need a minimum as an adult. We're not talking about children, adults, and adults I'm defining as people who are 27 to 30 years old or older. I am not calling a college-age student an adult because neurologically, neurodevelopmentally, they're not. Now they're not gonna like to hear that, but that's just the truth of it. They're not finished with neurological development. They'll still very much, in many instances, an adolescent until the mid-20s. Okay, so so we're just talking about those folks, all right? Those folks that are over that firmly into adulthood. Your sleep, your weekly sleep burden is 49 hours. So you gotta get 49 hours a week. You've got flexibility in how you get it. I do not recommend that you ever do five hours in a night. But there are maybe some reasons if you're a shift worker, maybe that that's all you can get. But then that means you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to get your sleep burden, you know, caught up on other days. Now, most people need eight hours of sleep a night, which of course is gonna be 56 hours instead of 49, right? And so in order to do that, you're you're going to need to exercise at least you know 40 minutes to an hour a day to be able to do with less sleep. But the the trade-off ends at an hour. So if you did four hours of sleep, you're not going to get four hours reduced off your sleep total and sleep for four hours. That ain't how it works. You can exercise for two hours and you get an hour off. You can exercise for four hours and you get an hour off, or you can exercise for 40 minutes and get an hour off. So it's probably best to do the 40 minutes and not overdo it. There doesn't seem to be much of a difference between Pilates, you know, groundwork yoga, hot yoga, you know, cardio, um, intense weight training. This is really interval training, doesn't seem to be any difference. I know that as you age, cardio becomes less of a thing, and core and weights are more important. Um certainly by the time you're my age, so I'm at 65, cardio doesn't really need to be a big part of my exercise. I play hockey, so I get playing a cardio, but I just that doesn't need to be, you know, it needs to be more core work, ad work. And and the reason is to make you more resilient to falls. Yeah. Yeah, because the thing that kills you once you reach a certain age, even if you're even if you're fit, is you know, broken bones.

SPEAKER_02 42:29

So the mortality rate goes up. Oh, infinitely.

SPEAKER_01 42:31

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, everybody's got a shelf life, right? I mean, you're not nobody survives life, but the older you get, the more susceptible you are to, you know, more uh fatal events. So, you know, but that just makes sense, right? So my grandmother's a hundred and something years old. She's she's closer to some fatal event than she's ever been. But she's got 105 years behind her now, or whatever it is. Yeah, we don't actually know.

SPEAKER_02 43:01

Can you uh explain then what the exercise is doing for the body to allow one less hour of sleep? So it goes back to something.

SPEAKER_01 43:12

No, it goes back to something we talked about earlier. The drainage and clean out system is mainly through the blood. So mainly through the blood that's coursing, pumping through our veins. Because it's oxygenated as it gets to the brain, then it carries back carbon dioxide, which is the toxin, to the lungs to be expired, you know, so we can breathe it out. It's also to haul in garbage, too. So your blood is a primary transport system for getting junk out and for getting oxygen and nutrients up. And so it's like a delivery vehicle that brings good stuff on the way up and it carries the garbage. So it's both a delivery truck and a garbage truck. So on the way up, it's it's delivering, and on the way back, it's garbage. And so anything that we can end. Do to increase the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood, which is why red light therapy is so good. And improve the um the viscosity of the blood, which is hydration is so important. Um that's a good thing. Well, exercise does both those. It increases the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood. It also increases cerebral blood flow and oxygenation through oxygen perfusion through the bloodstream. So it just makes blood more perfuse. It perfuses through the cortex more with exercise. So, yeah, there's there's a mechanical reason why it can decrease your burden because you've made the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood during the waking day higher. So you're already moving out more junk because you're increasing through your blood flow and oxygenation. So there's less to move out when you're asleep. But only about an hour less. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 45:00

Just about an hour, huh? How did how did that come to be like a kind of an established status quo?

SPEAKER_01 45:06

Oh, you know, those guys that we like to keep in the labs in dark rooms with slide rules and you know, vials and pencils and stuff. And yeah, those are the guys that figured that stuff out. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah, the researchers. Actually, uh, if you really want to know, the number one source for sleep information about circadian rhythm comes from the United States Navy. And I'll let you guess what branch of the Navy they've done all the research with.

SPEAKER_02 45:41

Well, I'm not sure what branches of the Navy are available for discussion.

SPEAKER_01 45:45

Okay, aviation, submarine warfare, anti-ship warfare.

SPEAKER_02 45:53

For some reason I want to guess submarine because they're always in the dark.

SPEAKER_01 45:56

Exactly right. So they've no way, really. They've actually studied the first studies of circadian rhythm go back to before World War II. And so the biggest body of knowledge on sleep, sleep deprivation, and the effects of circadian rhythm cues based on light, the United States Navy has. And the second biggest body of it comes out of Russia. Yeah, the Russians have done more psychophysiological research than anybody. Oh, cool. Kind of barbaric how they do it, but they've done more. Yeah, they don't have the same, they don't have the same view of uh the rights of human subjects in in clinical trials that we do. Sad. Yeah. The Germans did quite a bit of it themselves during World War II. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:44

Hey, another uh trend or truth. Yeah, alcohol is conducive and helpful to fall asleep.

SPEAKER_01 46:53

So yeah, so alcohol is disinhibitory, so it uh disinhibits the brain. So for a person who um may be uh um emotionally overwrought or can't slow down their thinking, that it will remove that temporarily while alcohol is active in the bloodstream, but you won't get restful sleep because your brain is having to detoxify from alcohol. So alcohol is an ester of sugar. So that's how we make alcohol. Is it it it uh uh a yeast or or mold converts sugar into ethanol? And because ethanol is made from sugar, the brain lets it come come through the blood-brain barrier scot-free. So it crosses very easily, as they say, like a hot knife through butter. It goes right straight through. Whereas other things get stopped and never get through, alcohol goes straight through, and then it begins to affect um the receptors in the brain in such a way that we become intoxicated. But ethanol is a toxin, and so the brain is gonna put a priority on detoxifying that chemical, and um and so is the liver. So the liver can detoxify about an ounce of alcohol an hour. So if you drink more than an ounce in an hour, then it's gonna park it in your bloodstream, and you know, that's where we start to get the blood alcohol levels, you know. So your body can handle and and metabolize an ounce of alcohol an hour, but you you can certainly easily override that. And and most people who drink do that, they override it. One standard drink of alcohol per day is considered problem level or dependence-level drinking, just one. And there's one ounce of alcohol in a shot of whiskey, there's one ounce ounce of alcohol in an eight-ounce glass of wine, and one ounce of alcohol in a 12-ounce beer. So that's considered a standard drink. Um, more than three standard drinks for a woman or five standard drinks a week for a man is considered problematic drinking.

SPEAKER_02 49:20

So it doesn't seem like that much.

SPEAKER_01 49:23

It isn't. It really isn't, but it is a problem. It's it's really hard on the liver. Um, and that's why you see people with fatty liver, you know, just from what most people consider social levels of drinking. So yeah, alcohols generally no bueno.

SPEAKER_02 49:40

And then you've talked a lot about too, is is having a certain amount of time before going to sleep uh on having your last meal.

unknown 49:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:50

Would you say is a good time?

SPEAKER_03 49:52

Three hours.

SPEAKER_02 49:53

And is it a meal meal, or can I have my meal at eight and then can I have a handful of MMs at 9.30 and I'm okay? So it's just it's just a big hearty meal, or is it any food consumption at all?

SPEAKER_01 50:06

No, no, no. It's just, it's just you don't want to put a lot, you shouldn't put a lot of food in the evening meal anyway, because your your peristalsis, which is the movement of food through the the you know, the pipes. Uh, I won't use a technical term for you. So that as it moves from the stomach through the rest of the plumbing, you got 27 feet of small intestine, six feet or more of colon. And so um, some people have a torturous colon that's twice as long, but most people have about six feet of colon. So 27 and six, that's what it's got to move through before you know you've got to eliminate it through stool. So um it slows down a lot at night. Well, when it slows down, more absorption can take place. So you really want to eat your smallest meal at night and your biggest meal for breakfast. If you'll fuel up for the day and then burn it, then you know, they eat like a king at breakfast, like a prince at lunch, and like a pauper at dinner. You know, that's the old saw. So yeah, but you can have a square of dark chocolate. Uh, it redor it releases endorphins and kefflins. It can be dark chocolate, 70% cacao or higher, is also a natural anti-cancer drug, mildly stimulating. But your brain actually needs to be stimulated to go to sleep. It needs to be, you know, think of a gear shifter. You got to push down on the uh uh the clutch to put it into the next gear. And so that dark chocolate, but no more than an ounce. I mean, you don't want to do a chocolate bar, but you can do an ounce of it.

SPEAKER_02 51:45

And it's always an ounce with you an ounce of alcohol, an ounce of chocolate.

SPEAKER_01 51:49

It's not with me, it's just how the science breaks out, you know? I didn't invent this stuff.

SPEAKER_02 51:54

It's all you. You're you're telling us all the rules.

SPEAKER_01 51:56

Uh yeah, I've never had an original thought in my life. It's yeah, it's just what the resources.

SPEAKER_02 52:01

Okay. If I wake up in the night in the night, yeah, something's wrong.

SPEAKER_01 52:07

No.

SPEAKER_02 52:08

Why? Why why? Well, if the house is on fire, yeah. But yeah. Nothing's wrong with you. No. Does it mess with your cycles? Does it mess with your sleep debt?

SPEAKER_01 52:17

No. But what you do after you wake up can. Okay. So if you wake up in the middle of the night, so it depends why you woke up to begin with. If it's a bad dream, just wake up, realize you had a bad dream, close your eyes, go back to sleep.

SPEAKER_02 52:32

Okay, very easy to say. If you wake sometimes, well, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:37

It's like, what is it that Yoda said, there is no try, there is only do? Yeah, just do it. Yeah. Don't don't make it a thing. Just do it. Fair enough. Uh fair enough. If you if you wake up thinking about things that are really troubling you, problem, and you and you think in your brain is, you know, chatty brain is trying to solve problem. Keep something beside your nightstand that you can write in and write it down real quickly. You know, maybe use one of those book lights so that you're not waking your sleeping partner up with, you know, a bright light. Because that's not right. Just because you wake up didn't even mean you need to wake them up. Um there's a story that goes along with that, but I won't tell it here. I'll tell you later. Uh write it down and and say, I'll deal with this tomorrow when when it's appropriate, but don't deal with it then. If you wake up because your bladder's full, well, don't pee the bed. Get up and go to the potty and then go back to sleep. But don't go to the refrigerator for a snack. You know, if you need a if you need to drink some water, drink room temperature water. Don't go to the fridge and get cold water, you know, get room temperature water and then, you know, go back to bed. If if it's a kid, you know, and you you wake up and you find that one of your kiddos has gotten up and gotten to bed with you, then get up, get them up, and either carry them to bed or have them walk to their own bed, but get them out of bed and get them in. Because you, again, co-sleeping with children is deleterious to sleep. That's another word for saying it's terrible.

SPEAKER_02 54:11

So that's uh kind of how uh can you talk about how then bad sleep can uh an affect a child's developing brain? And you say a child is anywhere from you know an infant to that 20 mid-20s range, right? What does it do to a developing brain?

SPEAKER_01 54:25

So it inhibits the things that happen during sleep. So if you're not sleeping, the things are supposed to happen during sleep aren't happening. So tracks not developing. We've already talked about it. New neurons, new connections between neurons, you know, it gets it gets stifled, doesn't get arrested, but it does, it does get interfered with. Um the uh consolidation of memories, you know. Again, a lot of what gets called ADHD, this kid can't remember anything. I just taught that it's because they're they're sleep deprived. They get terrible, you know, sleep, fix the sleep, most of ADHD goes away, which means it never was ADHD. It means the kid was sleep deprived or a poor quality sleep. And the other thing is find out why the kid's not sleeping. What are they doing that's wrecking with their sleep? Um, I can remember one time hearing something coming from one of the kids' bedroom at night when they should have been asleep, and go in there and said child had their, you know, their night light on, and they were reading books at like two in the morning. And as happy as I was to see my child reading at two in the morning, not so happy. And so it's like you have to explain to him, like, I'm so proud of you for your reading, but reading needs to happen. But dad, this book is so I just couldn't wait. I needed to finish it. And I said, Well, if it'll help you, I will take it so that you can't have access to it. So you can blame me that you didn't finish the book. But we're turning out the light and going to bed there, partner. So yeah, and and kids will do things to wreck their sleep too. Um children should not be allowed to have smart devices in the room or TVs either. They just should not be. Again, sleeping and sex are the only thing supposed to happen in a bedroom. And for a kid, the only thing supposed to be happening is sleeping. So you need to create a sleep-friendly room. Uh, there are some homes that have multiple kiddos that have a kid's bedroom where all the kids go to sleep. They have their rooms for dressing and keeping their things in, but they have a sleep room. So um it may have a uh a brown noise or a green noise generator in it, completely dark, no ceiling fans, kept cool. And the kids can feel like they got the safety and security of numbers, uh, but they're not bothering mom and dad, you know.

SPEAKER_02 56:58

What does the noise do?

SPEAKER_01 57:00

You said oh yeah, so brown noise and the brown noise and green noise are forms of uh carrier signals that actually um encourage the brain to pace down. White noise it masks other sounds. So, like if you get noisy air conditioner or if you've got, you know, some bedrooms just happen to be on the same wall as the uh compressor, condenser, you know, when they kick on, you can hear them. And so a white noise generator will mask that sound. Um, but really white noise isn't conducive to sleep, really. It's good for masking, but it isn't good for sleeping. But green noise, you know, brown noise, um, not red noise, um, um, not blue noise, though those those are stimulating. So yeah. There's a whole lot, there's a whole science behind that.

SPEAKER_02 57:59

Okay, so what's the the biggest sleep myth that you hear all the time?

SPEAKER_01 58:06

Well, the one of the common ones I hear in my office, we see some peak performers who are coming in to get the competitive edge. And uh some, you know, military guys, athletes. We've worked with professional athletes before. Um, my son has worked with a lot of people in the television and movie industry before. And so they're looking for a competitive edge. And then those guys are the ones most likely to say, I only need five hours of sleep a night. And it's like, oh no, BS on that. You do too. You just think you don't because you've conditioned yourself to not sleep. But you're gonna shorten your career and you're you're gonna start having, you know, bleed over effects into your work life because you're not gonna be able to remember your lines, or you're gonna have decreased, you know, successful at-bats, you know, at the plate, or you know, we work with hockey players, you know, you're you're gonna get lit up on the on the blue line because you're not paying attention, you know. So you need seven to eight hours of sleep. Even high performance athletes need seven, eight hours of sleep. Now, there are some people like um Thomas Edison very rarely slept for more than three or four hours straight. But he napped all throughout the waking day. So he'd go take a one-hour power nap and then come back at it. And so, but that's a rare bird that can be disciplined enough to you know to do that. Most of us just have the discipline for it. So yeah. And if you said, what's the best gift that I can give myself in 2026? It's consistent sleep. You know, we found that people who had as a goal during treatment to lose weight, those who got seven to eight hours sleep met their weight loss goals, and those who got less than seven hours of sleep gained weight. Let that one sink in.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:06

Why is that? What what does that have to do with weight gain or weight loss?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:08

So your brain consumes about 20% of your body's available calorie burden. So it's three pounds, like I'm 165 pounds. So only three pounds of my 165 pounds is brain. So the other 162 pounds consumes the other, you know, 70 to 80 percent of the glucose that I intake. But the brain, that three pounds, consumes a disproportionate amount of the energy.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:39

That's greedy.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:41

Yeah, yeah. It's a resource pig. It consumes 20% of the resting state oxygen as well. It consumes most of the neurotransmitters. Although your gut uses more serotonin than your brain does. So if you think about it, it's a resource pig. It it consumes a disproportionate, but it it can go, well, I do more than all the other stuff. I do all the stuff I do and I tell everything else to do what it does too. So give me a break. You know, but when you're not getting sleep, all of that, remember I said your temperature goes up because your brain is metabolizing more when you're asleep than when you're awake? Well, you're taking away three hours of metabolic activity that would be increased because you're awake when you should be asleep. And that's we think that's the reason why people gain weight when they're only sleeping five hours. So for those of you out there who may have weight loss as a goal, or you have clients who have weight loss as a goal, uh, tell them not to be the least bit um apologetic for wanting to get seven to eight hours of sleep, and to you know, remove any impediment to sleep that and that impediment could be a thing or it could be a who, you know? So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:57

Okay, what uh if someone changes one thing about sleep tonight, tonight, right after, you know, when it wherever they are, whenever they're listening to this episode, if it's during the day, or hey, if this if they're listening to this right now at 11 30 p.m., what what what do they ought to do?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:17

Well, most of the most of the people in the field of sleep hygiene, there's actually a field of psychology that's all they do is sleep hygiene. They they would be clamoring for me to say at this moment, put away your smart devices an hour or more before bedtime. That's what they'd say. That's not what I'm gonna say, because I already said that. So the thing I'm gonna say is um make sure that when you have decided that you're going to bed, you say I'm gonna go to bed at 10 tonight, that you do that, but that you do that in a way that doesn't treat sleep like a light switch. I'm not gonna switch off at 10. I'm gonna dial it down starting at nine so that by 10 o'clock, I'm ready to go to sleep. But if you treat it like a switch, you can get in that bed at 10, but you ain't going to sleep at 10. Because your brain has still got to transition down to where it's safe for it to sleep, which means you're not thinking anymore, you're not moving anymore, you know, you're not doing that any other thing, you know, to get in the way of that. And for, you know, adults, um remember the bedrooms are two things. So if you're gonna do that other thing than sleep, make sure that you are giving you and your partner the adequate time before going to bed to set the stage so that's the thing that's going to happen. And uh and then, you know, the men are gonna go to sleep more quickly than the women are, but you know, that and that's a neurochemical thing. Um and but then you've you've created the environment where that's part of your sleep routine. And then, of course, as as somebody who very early in their career did a lot of sex therapy with clients, I would say that um make sure that your playtime is also scheduled throughout the rest of the waking day so that it doesn't become associated with sleep, that it becomes an activity that can be enjoyed, you know, at any time during the waking day, which is another reason to have a dedicated time and place for your kids to be so that we can have mom and dad time, you know, apart from children. And so, and that becomes, I mean, we had we we had kids spread out over the course of 10 years. And so, you know, we had kids in the home for a long time, so it felt like forever, for a long time, and so we had to, you know, be more mindful and planful, but you can make it happen. And and um you just don't want to make sure that you want to make sure that in cognitively that you don't pair sex and sleep. It they don't have to coincide, and um, you know, and that we don't need to do that to be able to sleep either.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:22

We don't we don't want to just conditioning the brain because then it it just ties the both things together. It becomes habitual, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:30

Right, exactly. And we don't want to habituate it that way. We want sleep to be about sleep and we want sex to be about the relationship. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:39

All right, Wes. So tonight, then my goal, yeah. If I'm going to bed at 11 or 12, right? Oh man. I need to get consistent. Okay, whatever time that might be, an hour ahead of time, my phone goes away and I start to uh I start to uh wind down. So I run in a journal, read a book, talk to your wife, do not watch TV.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:03

Talk to your wife, just have a conversation with your brother.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:06

All right, you know, that's the goal tonight, then.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:09

Yeah. But no, I'm excited to try that. Hopefully, some of you out there can try some of these things. There's lots of things that we can do to improve our sleep hygiene. But yeah, starting with that smartphone thing, because I'm guilty myself. When I get in that bed, I just lay down, and I mean it's probably about this close to my face, and I'm watching videos and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:28

Just pick if if you've ever walked through a casino in Vegas, just walk through and see those people at the slot machines. Just picture yourself sitting in that chair instead of grabbing a handle you got yourself home. Because this is what you look like when you're on Doom Scroll on your phone. You look just like that. So let that picture resonate with you. You know, so scary. You're trying to scare us? I'm trying to scare you straight.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:58

Yes. Okay, well, thank you all for uh watching and listening, and we'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:10

That's the end of today's episode. If you liked what you heard, follow Sublex on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or X. Or you can check us out on YouTube or at SubilexGlobal.com for more education and information. We'll see you next time.