What's up, guys! I have talked at length about the importance of sleep to achieve not only your health goals but your life and career goals as well. So now I've compiled some of the world's top health experts to share their strategies for getting a **good night's sleep**. I promise you if you give these tips a shot, you're guaranteed to improve the quality of your sleep, which is going to improve the quality of your life.
Tip 1: Your Evening Routine Starts in the Morning
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee shares why your evening routine starts in the morning. **Sleep**, okay, I think this is arguably the most undervalued pillar of health, okay? Because in 2018, if you're not prioritizing sleep, you're probably not getting enough. It's just infinite distractions, right? We all know that feeling where we're still sat up late watching more and more content. And again, a lot of great content out there, but it could be having a consequence.
So I can tell you that the majority of people who are having sleep problems are doing something in their everyday lifestyle that they do not realize is impacting their ability to sleep at night. Okay? So my top two tips would be a **no-tech 90**: try and have 90 minutes before bed with no tech, right? But the counterintuitive one is get outside in the morning, right? A lot of people don't realize that these daily rhythms are set by light. Right? You, in order to **sleep at night**, okay, you need a differential between your maximum light exposure and your minimum light exposure. So a dark room, right, has something called zero lux in it. Lux is a unit of light. If you go outside on a sunny day for about 20 minutes, you get about 30,000 lux. Brilliant. So that's a really big differential. If you go outside on a cloudy day, you're getting about 10,000, 15,000 lux, right? If you go into a brightly lit office, a modern brightly lit office, you're getting about 500, maybe 1,000 lux maximum, right? So everyone's thinking about what they do before they go to bed in the evening. But a life-changing tip—and this has transformed the lives of so many of my patients—is **get outside in the morning** for half an hour. Even that will help you sleep in the evening.
Okay, what if I live somewhere super cold and that sounds like a pain? Is sitting next to a window going to work? No, you've got to get outside, okay? And I go through there—there's so many ways you can do this. You know, in the UK, in January, it's not that easy to want to go outside. It's dark, it's often dark till 8 a.m. It gets dark again at 3:30 p.m., okay? I will sometimes put my fleece on, right? And I'll sit outside and have my coffee in the morning outside just so I get that light exposure because it's that fundamental to how we are as human beings. We need natural light.
Tip 2: Why You Should Workout in the Morning
Sean Stevenson shares why your exercise routine may be hindering your sleep and what you can do about it. I like to start with the low-hanging fruit first, um, and something really, really fascinating is just simply changing or embracing the time of day that you exercise can improve your **sleep quality**. Appalachian State University did a really cool study and they wanted to see what time of day exercising at various times of day, how does it impact your sleep quality? And so they had the study participants to exercise exclusively at 7 a.m. and another phase exclusively at 1 p.m. in the afternoon, another phase exclusively at 7 p.m. in the evening. They compiled all the data and at the end of the study they found that **morning exercisers spend more time in the deepest, most anabolic stages of sleep**, so they're producing more human growth hormone. They have more efficient sleep cycles, what we've been talking about. They also tend to sleep longer, and this is the one that kind of can get glanced past: on average, they had about a 25% greater drop in blood pressure at night. So what's up with that? That's correlated with a deactivation of your sympathetic fight-or-flight nervous system, right? So you're actually able to shift gears, get to that parasympathetic, rest and digest, calming down by getting some exercise in in the morning.
And so how do we employ this though? That's the question because some people just like, you know, I can't exercise in the morning. And there's also people who exercise in the morning who might have terrible sleep and it's because this is not like the magic bullet. This is a thing to stack in your condition. If you're doing this and then messing up the one I'm gonna talk about next, you're probably not gonna have the best sleep. So here's how to employ this: just five minutes. And I tested this. Each morning, I do this, five minutes of exercise. You know, it might be just jumping on a rebounder, you know, a little mini trampoline for five minutes, go for a quick power walk, uh, do some Tabata, which is just four minutes, and a little mobility work. And I guess most people don't know what Tabata is. High-intensity interval training, basically is 20 seconds of exercise followed by 10 seconds of rest, repeated over and over again for four minutes. And in his clinical studies, this was found to outperform, you know, traditional cardio, like the kind of moderate intensity, 45 minutes of exercise in four minutes, wow! The change in your cardiovascular benefits, body composition, and also changing your mitochondria as well. This is why it works: it does something called a **cortisol reset**.
All right, we talked about cortisol, but again it's a good thing if it's in the right time and the right amount. Clinically, I would call these people "tired and wired" that would come in. I'm looking at the hormone panels, and the cortisol will be really low in the morning and high at night. Thus they have sleep problems. So you naturally, if your heart—if your cortisol was on a natural hormone rhythm, it would be elevated at its peak in the morning, right around 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., and then gradually decline as the day goes. Does that have to do with what time you wake up? Sort of. I mean, the cortisol will kind of tend to nudge you out of sleep, but also we'll tend to notice that as the day, as it, your sleep goes on, it becomes lighter and lighter anyways, right? This is when you tend to remember your dreams like at the, at the end of the sleep. And so getting this little boost, like helping your body to propel and get your cortisol up via exercise helps to reset that rhythm and get you back on track. So that's why it works. So that's number one low-hanging fruit. Just get in five minutes of exercise, start in the morning no matter what. Just five minutes is all you need. It's gonna help to create this snowball effect of good things for you. You know, five minutes. If this is the time you do go to the gym and do your full workout, so be it, all good. But everybody who's not already doing that, just get that five minutes in.
Tip 3: How to Make Sleep a Priority
Harpreet Rai shares how to prioritize sleep even in a very distracted world. Going back to that first year in investment banking and thinking about the modern context when we're not getting sleep, I know that while I'm a huge proponent of sleep, there have been times where my Oura Ring has told me off for not getting enough sleep, sure. Um, and I'll say that 20% of the time, I'm knowingly reducing my amount of sleep. And how do you think about that as, as the CEO of a, you know, sleep betterment company? Yeah, are there times where you'll intentionally not get sleep because there's a bigger priority? Of course. Like, goals versus sleep—where do you fall on that? I think there's definitely periods that we all will have to go without getting enough sleep, right? I think that's inevitable. Um, the question is, how do we make people more aware of it and more conscious of it, right? And how do we also then, once that awareness and consciousness happens, choose to act on it? Even while on Wall Street, um, I ended up going from an investment, you know, I was at Morgan Stanley for a year, an investment banking group, I ended up going to a hedge fund for nine years and I still worked really hard there, got more sleep, luckily, but there it used to be, "Hey, I wanna work out, I wanna get fit," uh, so I'd wake up at, you know, 4:45 to be in the gym by 5:15. So I often battled, okay, you know, getting enough sleep to work out, right? And that probably actually led to a lot of injuries for me over the years. I also think it's about, you know, social activities with friends. You know, it's natural to want to spend time with people and oftentimes, you know, everyone's sort of sacrificing their schedule a little bit to do it.
I think if you have families or loved ones, that can be another area where like, "Hey, you gotta take the kids to an event or you gotta take them out to a party," and they may throw your schedule off. But the big one I do think is work. Um, I think it's there's a lot of people, you know, probably a lot of your audience, right? Even, even me, like, we want to kick butt, right? We want to get in, we want to work hard. As the CEO of a company, a sleep company, I'm like, do I want those guys sleeping an hour less and working on this to get it out on time? Or, you know, there's always a balance. And I think, you know, we're not going to be able to, I would say, change people's lives and, you know, not say prioritize those projects or not. But we want to make people more aware of it and that they can see the impact when they are choosing to do it, and then frankly, come back and recover. I'll have people now that tell me, "Hey, man, I still go on those business trips where I am back to back to back meeting," right? Nine to nine, right? "And then like, maybe I brush my teeth and maybe I don't because I'm that busy that night," right? "But then when I get back, I see, 'Hey, it takes me a week or two to get back and recover, and then I take it a little bit easier at book less meetings then,' right? I tend to try to actually get that extra hour of sleep." And I'm not saying that kind of behavior is great, but at least you become a little bit more conscious and don't try burning the candle, you know, on both ends forever, right? Um, so I think it's um, there's a lot of things that have happened that we have abundance to information, right? You know, look at, look at Google's mission statement, right? "Organize the world's information and provide access to it." Sign me up, right? I'm gonna, I want to always be learning, I want access to information. You know, Facebook, right? Like, "bring communities together, bring people together," right? There's more people that we can meet through social media, right? Follow and learn from. Sounds amazing, but I think also in those two things, right, we we are getting a little bit pulled away and it in fact is hurting our sleep, um, which eventually actually hurts our productivity in the long run.
And in what ways do you think that that kind of stuff is hurting our sleep? Is it just that we're allocating time to it or is there a whole other host of problems? I think it's a much deeper than just time. Let's take Facebook as an example. All right, let's say, you know, when we were all in high school and hung out in one friend's basement, right? Or you have a couple friends over, all right, we're hanging out, we're shooting the shit, right? We're talking about whatever we're catching up on, you know, some cute girl in math class or sports or, you know, some the New York Knicks game that just happened. But think about it this way, um, every 10 minutes the doorbell's ringing. You're hosting, you're going up and letting that person in, making sure they're comfortable, making sure that they have a drink, right? Making sure that they have a place to sit and hang out with friends, introducing other people. What if that happens every 10 minutes, not just for the first hour but for the next 12 hours, right? What happens to you, right? What happens to everyone else in the room, right? Like, it's just think about that as a human. I'd be like, "Man, you never, you never even get a chance to see how you feel. You never get a chance to really spend time with your friends, right?" You're constantly being bombarded. So I think I think that's part of it. I think the same could go true for Google. Like, I love learning, right? I would say that's like one thing I've always been passionate about and why I like doing different things. But if every 10 minutes something new pops up where like, "Hey, I was learning about this, I didn't get to go that deep and understand it and something else comes in," like, you're just getting distracted.
So I literally look at the numbers. I'm a numbers guy. You know, there's you touch your phone the average person does about 150 times a day, right? So if you're awake for 16 hours, that's about 10 times every hour. That's, you know, once every six minutes, right? So I think there's a deeper level of, "Hey, there's some satisfaction just like the buzz you get at the party when you say hello to someone that you haven't seen in a while and you're excited." But that constant bombardment, right, is is actually, you know, increasing anxiety, right? It's I don't think it's, you know, we have abundant access to information in people and I think that's great, but also let's, you know, look at some of the other numbers. Depression all-time high, suicide rates all-time high, **lack of sleep all-time high**, right? Obesity all-time high. And so I think it's not just that you're spending the time doing it. I do think it's a little bit in the way we were designed as humans that's distracted us, um, and and I think it's ultimately, you know, taking us away from our being conscious and being focused. What do you mean, really fast, what do you mean that the way that we're designed as humans is part of what distracts us? So I mean, I don't, I don't think as humans, you know, when they look at some of the network theories out there on the brain and how it compartmentalizes information, you know, really more than 50 people in your immediate circle, like that you interact with, tends to be overloading. But like, you know, you have these different groups, right? It might be immediate group family and really close friends, then maybe one degree of separation and it may be another host of work, right? But now that that has 5x, 10x, 20x, right? Um, and I think like it becomes harder for the human mind, right? And even just from a social anxiety perspective, whether you have it or not, to manage that as all these networks grow so much.
Tip 4: The Importance of Food Timing
Karl Lenoir shares why **food timing is key**. How do you protect your sleep? Well, first of all, in order to manage it, you have to measure it. Get some sort of an app. I use a product called Sleep Cycle, and if you use it with like a Fitbit, you can actually see how low your heart rate—I mean, my heart rate goes down to 40 beats per minute in in deep sleep. I mean, I, when I the first time I saw that, I was shocked. And so once you get one of these **sleep apps** and you see how you're sleeping, then you can start to do things that improve sleep. I'm a big believer in any type of blue blocking glasses late at night. **Don't eat three hours before bedtime**. That's a big one. Dr. Dale Bredesen who just did some groundbreaking studies here at UCLA and which led to the book *The End of Alzheimer's*, uh, he is, uh, responsible for telling people who have Alzheimer's disease to have a three-hour window between their last meal and when they go to bed, and that helped a lot resolving brain inflammation. Yeah, yeah, do you know the mechanism behind that? Yeah, autophagy. Explain for people what autophagy is. Okay, well, so so let me let me back up. If your body is playing host to digesting food, the factory is open. You're not sleeping well. It's busy, it's doing things, right? If the food is past the initial digestive phases and moving into the small intestine and soon the large intestine, which is what happens within that three-hour window, right, your body is now on coast. It's not working as hard, you could get into deep sleep.
In fact, if I have a meal late at night, for whatever reason, you know, I'm being sociable and I go to sleep an hour and a half, I don't get into the **deep sleep** that I normally do, and you see that because you're tracking it. In fact, my heart rate never goes down into the 40s. It stays up high all night long. It's really interesting. Well, this leads to heart attacks. You know, all the people who are not in good shape, they have big meals, they go to bed, they die in their sleep because your heart needs that rest at night. It needs to like slow the hell down, and if you have food, the factory is open, the heart is moving stuff around, it can't slow down. Um, so the other thing is that the cellular waste management system is autophagy, and this is when organelles go around the cells and clean up metabolic debris and turn them into things that can be, you know, carried out of the body. Autophagy shuts off when your body's digesting food. Autophagy is ramped up when you're fasting. Like they did a study that showed that during fasting, the autophagy in the brain starts to clean up the plaque that accumulates in some of these neurological disorders: Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
Tip 5: De-Stressing for Better Sleep
Max Lugavere shares how **de-stressing** can improve your sleep and thus change your body shape. There's a newly discovered system in our brains called the glymphatic system which when we're sleeping actually swooshes cerebrospinal fluid all throughout, essentially cleansing it of these proteins that aggregate over the course of the day. They've shown that on one night of bad sleep, there's an increased level of amyloid measurable in CSF, cerebrospinal fluid. But then also, you know, I think dietary change for most people is one of the most difficult things to do, and it's particularly difficult when we have our hormones working against us. So sleep I think is so profoundly important because it acts like a master regulator of our hormones. Um, it helps to, you know, make sure that, uh, we don't need to use our willpower very often because, you know, willpower is sort of like this muscle that we need to use in order to fight off cravings and things like that, but with good sleep our cravings diminish. I mean, they've shown that even on one night of poor sleep, you consume an excess of calories the following day, anywhere between 300 and 500 calories.
I've actually noticed, it's a little off-topic but, I once, one of the major breakups I had in my life, I I noticed that I would feel way more sensitive to it when I was underslept. You know, you become less able to contextualize emotions when, when you're underslept. On just one night of bad sleep, a metabolically healthy person will be essentially pre-diabetic the next day, temporarily. Well, yeah, you become more insulin resistant. So yeah, sleep, sleep I think is one of those things that today we romanticize being busy, um, but it's sort of like the one thing that lifts all the boats in your harbor, you know? And yet we tend to undervalue it. Um, you talked on your Instagram about you want to live for a really long time or extend your life. Forget exactly how you worded it, which got my attention. And then you said, prioritize de-stressing. Yeah, is that tied to sleep? Like, what what do you mean by that? Well, stress is an indiscriminate killer, and today, you know, so many of us, um, are losing sleep due to stress. Um, it's one of the reasons why one in six adults now is on some kind of psychiatric drug. One in six? Yeah, yeah. Is on or has used. Um, well, we're definitely self-medicating, and uh, and it's not good. I mean, chronic stress is a major, major problem. Wow, yeah. So give me some tactics. How does one de-stress?
You know, I think meditation is really important. Um, you know, I'm one of those people that, uh, I was trained to meditate. Um, I think this is really important. I think, you know, being being taught how to meditate is as important as being taught how to do yoga. You know, we don't come out of the womb knowing how to do a downward dog and to hit, you know, any of the number of yoga poses that we're taught to do with a good yoga teacher. Having a good meditation teacher is very, um, I think is critical to knowing how to de-stress. I also think, um, you know, knowing knowing what chronic stress is and knowing what it isn't, uh, is really important. You know, so in my book I differentiate between chronic stress and acute stress, which acute stress is very beneficial. It's, you know, what we do in the gym, we stress our bodies. Chronic psychological stress is really toxic. It's working under a boss that you hate. It's being stuck in a relationship that's gone sour.
By de-stressing and by, um, you know, doing physical exercise and things like that, you actually increase your resilience to stress. Cortisol sort of gets a bad rap because it's related to stress, but it's actually a really important hormone. It's the body's chief waking hormone. So for about 45 minutes after you wake up, cortisol is the highest that it's really meant to be throughout the day. It's part of the body's natural circadian hormonal ebb and flow, and in that, in that window, for about 45 minutes after you wake up, that's a great fat burning window. You've got that cortisol spike which is really working to liberate stored fats, stored sugars for use by your body as fuel. It's meant as a way of, you know, allowing fuels to become accessible so that you can use them and *carpe diem*, right? Seize the day. Within that window, it's particularly dangerous to consume breakfast in its most standard American form, which is usually rapidly digesting carbohydrates from oatmeal, granola bars, things like that, because that causes a spike in insulin. But going back to stress, this is why consuming carbs in the context of chronic stress is so bad, because you've got cortisol chronically elevated due to chronic stress and then we're continuing to keep our insulin elevated with the carbohydrates that we're consuming. So this not only helps redistribute our weight from muscle to fat, but also our our visceral fat, which is the most inflammatory kind of fat that wraps around our internal organs, actually has about four times the cortisol receptors on it. So this is actually why when you look at people that are chronically stressed out, they their bodies take on a very, uh, particular shape. It's totally different from run-of-the-mill obesity where people are just eating lots and lots of calories and not necessarily chronically stressed out. Somebody who's chronically stressed and eating lots of carbs in particular, they usually have skinny arms and skinny legs but a bulging midsection because their visceral fat is just soaking up all the excess carbs that they're eating because of the presence of chronically elevated cortisol.
Tip 6: Go Beyond Blue Light
Dave Asprey shares why **going beyond blue light** is not enough. It turns out blue blocking isn't enough to make you go to sleep. There's four kinds of light that mess with your sleep and blue blockers only get one of the four. So your melatonin will go up, but the other three are still there. So you need to block all four. That's why the sleep glasses are different than blue blocking. So you see a lot of people walking around blue blockers during the day. They got no daytime signal at all, so that's a bad thing. But if you're walking around under bright LEDs and staring your screen on full power all day, you're getting an overwhelm of daylight signal. So it's about getting it, getting it right. But for me, it's that hour before bed where you just have to nail it. And for looking younger, **red light therapy** is profound for the skin.
And what do you use for red light therapy? Is there a device? Yeah, there's a variety of devices. So you go to Upgrade Labs. We have, you know, the the many tens of thousands of dollar whole body thing. You kind of roast on it with systemic effects, including you can actually see your nitric oxide levels go up on a spit strip after you expose the red light. It has biological effects. And then at the mid-range of cost and performance, there's a company called Joovv, and they have a very, very powerful LEDs in an array. And then at the most affordable end of things is the TrueLight stuff from the company that makes the glasses. They're more affordable. They have yellow, they have the red and they have the infrared, but they're not as powerful of LEDs. So I would say you got to look at your your your price point, where you want to go, what you want to do. But it's an LED therapy kind of thing. And, you know, Joovv makes a little box you can take with you, and there's panels you can string together. The bottom line is if you're feeling weird in your stomach and you have nausea or you have a headache and you put red light on your stomach, on your head, it's shocking what happens. There's studies of putting red light in conjunction with ketosis, and they looked at somewhere in Minnesota. They looked at, say, a dozen people. They put them on a strict keto diet, they put them on red light therapy with a strict keto diet and a standard diet and red light therapy of the standard diet. And the men who were on keto plus red light therapy had a doubling of testosterone production, but keto alone and red light alone both bumped it up, but nowhere near as much. So there's synergistic effects between keto and red light, which is really cool. Is there a timing of that? Like when do you want your red light, in the morning, in the night? Um, generally you just think of sunset and sunrise. Okay, so you would do when you wake up, do before bed and during the day if you if you have time, you know, and you're looking at skin repair or something, you can do it anytime during the day, but the two peak periods are before bed and upon waking.
Tip 7: Considering Cannabis
Dr. Michael Breus shares why **cannabis is effective for sleep**. And lately, my most, my biggest interest lately has actually been about **cannabis in sleep**. I would argue that Ambien is going to have a really big competitor. It's called weed, and it's out. And it's recreational in a couple of states. I live in, you know, California. And it's very, very interesting. Do you smoke? Sure, interesting. Absolutely. What do you find that it does to your sleep? So it depends on when you smoke it, what you smoke, and how much you smoke. So it's all, there's a lot of different things out there. But I've written extensively about if you're going to use marijuana to help you sleep, what should you look for? I've also broken down the cannabinoids. So a lot of people out there talking about CBD, CBD, CBD, right? Let me be clear: you'd have to have almost 200 milligrams of CBD to have any effect on sleep. Much lower dosage to help with pain. You want CBN. Okay? CBN, which turns out to be oxidized THC, helps with sleep much more, at least that's what the data would suggest.
So how does one oxidize THC? You let weed lie around for a little while, and it's basically CBN is old weed. Now, to be fair, people are learning how to process it and make that process move quicker. But what we're starting to see is now we're starting to see cannabis like if you go into a cannabis dispensary and you say, "What have you got for sleep?" They have a section, right? Like when people my age, 50, 51 years old, are walking into a dispensary, we're not going there to get high. We're going there because we got pain, we have **sleep issues** and we want to use the medicine, right? That's where the gold is. And so when you start to really look at it like, "Let's treat it like a medicine, let's look at it in a way that can be helpful," I mean, we have an entire endocannabinoid system in our body that isn't being used except for with cannabinoids. So and also, to be fair, cannabinoids are in many other things besides marijuana, but they're really in marijuana. So why shouldn't we start to walk down that path, create that technology, and help more people? All right, so you've said that if you're gonna drink alcohol, stop three hours before bed. What's the protocol with weed? So I think it's gonna be different, and to be honest with you, I don't think I know yet. Um, it's definitely something that I'm studying and I'm learning more and more about. But I would argue that the tinctures, like the the liquid that comes in the droppers that you can do sublingually, I would say that would be a place to start. I haven't heard of that. Oh, you just drop it under your tongue? Yeah, you just take it, drop it underneath your tongue, let it sit there, 60 seconds, swallow it, close your eyes.
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