The Woman Who Helps NBA Stars To Sleep: Stop Having Showers Just Before Bed! Dr Cheri Mah

I was 86% correct on accurately predicting when an NBA team will be at highest risk of losing strictly based on the sleep oh gosh yes and just 15 or 30 minutes can make a difference so let's dive into just some very practical strategies to get the best sleep possible Dr sharim ma is a renowned sleep doctor and performance expert whose sleep optimization research has enhanced the careers of CEOs as well as athletes in the NFL MLB and Formula 1 and has provided lifechanging expertise to companies like under aror and Google for my Elite athletes that

I work with sufficient sleep it's a game Cher for example we saw 12% faster Reaction Time a 9% Improvement in free throws and a 4% increase in Faster Sprint time and when you experience what it feels like to be well rested you never want to go back getting insufficient sleep and it doesn't have to be these big jumps I'd love to dig into that okay so i' have a shower then I get straight into bed after is that good or bad tweak the timing of your shower and your hot bath to just an hour or

two before bed it's hard to grasp how much of a difference this can make in your life what about sex does it have an impact on your sleep okay so is there anything that I can eat before bed that won't disrupt my sleep but will get rid of The Hunger there's a pre-sleep meal for example cereal and milk cereal and the reason why is because and then I read this fascinating word nappuccino yes this is a useful tool if you're a working professional and you need a little boost and alertness and performance what you do

is the DI of AO raffle is about to close anyone that subscribes to the DI ofo before we hit 7 million subscribers which is probably going to be in a couple of days time you will be included in the raffle and on the day we hit 7 million subscribers we are giving away a lot of money can't buy prizes to all of you so hit the Subscribe button get in before 7 million and I'll announce the prizes and the winners in the comments below when we hit 7 million subscribers [Music] Dr M what is it

you do and why is it so important in your mind that you do it great question so I am a sleep physician um but I spend a lot of my time and career trying to educate and and advocate for people to prioritize sleep right this fascinating process that each of us does every single night and arguably is about a third of our lives but many individuals don't do this very well or they you know sacrifice it and overlook this area I very much believe if you don't sleep your best you will not be your best

or counter to that is if you your if your sleep is best you'll be at your best and what that means if I unpack that a little bit more is we often are sacrificing our sleep we're underslept we often don't have good quality sleep it we're very reactive to our sleep at night time and it's the last thing that we think of at the end of the day when we wrap everything up um and that's arguably not going to put ourselves up to be the best we can be in the following day right and for

my Elite athletes that I work with when you actually get sufficient sleep you have practices that you plan into your day and you actually are more proactive with that it can be a game Cher and for them when it comes to performance on the field that can be the difference of a 9% Improvement in free throw shots it can mean reacting 12% faster and so until you experience that it sometimes is hard to grasp how much of a difference this can make in your life but it is one of the foundations that will impact everything

about how you function your mood how you feel and ultimately perform the following day if I could offer you or yes you specifically see if I could offer you something that's free and healthy and safe that's going to help you think more clearly make better decisions be in a better mood be more productive and efficient would you want it of course how much exactly and so it's really a decision of whether you want to invest uh your time to be able to be more proactive with this particular area of your life to get the benefits

that come down the road with it who do you work with give me a sort of broad spectrum of the individuals organizations that you've worked with on sleep and why have they come to you I've had an opportunity to work with a number of professional sports teams and athletes as well as organizations over the years to try and apply the science into practice to help them improve their sleep their scheduling and their travel so for example I've been with the San Francisco Giants in Major League Baseball I've worked with um NBA teams like the Golden

State Warriors uh NFL teams like the Philadelphia Eagles I won a Super Bowl ring in 2017 with them to um other sports organizations like Nike and under arour and ESPN to try and show how you can predict when NBA teams will lose strictly based on the schedule and insufficient sleep opportunities um to individual athletes who recognize you know hey this is an area that I am not optimizing and I know this can be such a valuable asset to extend my career to prevent injuries down the road and to help me be at my best do

you ever work with CEOs I do I do work with Executives and seite um um Executives to try and help them be their best because they too are high performers right their performance outcomes are maybe a little bit different than pro athletes where we're quantifying on field performance and looking at their swim times and what they're doing when it comes to the you know onc court or on field um performance outcomes but for these Executives they arguably are also making incredibly important decisions they have to still react when they're under pressure and they have to

make good judgment calls and so many of the things that I coach and and try to recommend to my lead athletes are very much applicable to the SE Suite executive or even just the working professional that's really what what I found so fascinating about your research and your work is that although there's a focus on athletes as someone who is also traveling is also very very busy also um struggles with sleep sometimes because I'm I have to perform late at night whether that's on stage or with meetings or whatever it might be I resonated with

so much of it and I also train in the gym pretty much every day if I can um and I've also noticed a correlation between things like injury in the gym based on how I'm sleeping in my quote unquote sleep de but I but I I want to confront two things the first thing I want to confront is the misconceptions around sleep that you encounter over and over again what are the like big overarching misconceptions that stand in the way of people believing in and implementing the advice that you give them I'll start with just

this badge of honor that I really believe still persists in society where you should get only four or five hours of sleep and should be able to perform at your best and I think the tides are turning and I do think that that is changing over the last several years where there are more vocal Advocates of um you know Elite athletes like the Tom Brady who you know say everything is around performance enhancement I going need to go to to bed early so that I can wake up early and to be ready to go for

the day to you know the Simone bios who says I need to get 8 hours of sleep and so I think that that is a badge of honor that is now shifting and now it's going to become well if you're not getting your 8 n 10 hours of sleep right then you're actually at a decrement to yourself and you're actually not going to set yourself up to be the best that you could possibly be whether you're on the field as a pro athlete or whether you're leading an organization or trying to go after whatever ever

it is that matters to you right and and I think that's going to continue to shift but I'm excited about it because that's one thing until you experience that that difference and that life transformation of what it feels like to be well rested then it can be a game changer you never want to go back to it again when you're getting insufficient sleep are there any misconceptions around how to sleep in sleep hygiene and um I know the quantities of sleep weeny that also seem to stand in people's way of them getting a great night's

sleep yeah so I think that there is a misconception that everyone needs a certain amount of sleep there's individual variability so the the recommendation from the American Academy of sleep medicine and the Sleep research Society so two of our national organizations here in the US recommend minimally 7 hours of sleep but that's the lower threshold you might actually need 8 hours or 9 hours or more to feel well rested right I I personally feel terrible on seven hours and I much more need the eight to nine hours and there's those in that individual differences so

you need to find what you feel well rested you're able to function well at a high level during the day and that will then be your individual requirement so I think there's this misperception that everyone needs a certain amount but you need to find what works for you and it's all about small changes so if you're not at 7 hours I think you shared sometimes you're you're you're under that oh yeah sometimes yeah you know it's about F 15 or 30 minutes more can make a difference refence so if you're getting 6 hours then I'm

going to recommend getting 15 minutes or 30 minutes more every day for this one week and then get 15 or 30 minutes more next week so that you're building from say 6 hours of sleep to 6 and a half hours and you may not think that that's that much but we can all do 15 minutes more right we're less scrolling or doing what we're wrapping up our day but those 15 minutes add up where that's a difference of like an a student to a b student or 11 minutes more sleep is the difference of a

b student to a c student in one of these studies really exactly and then over the course of a week 15 minutes will be almost 2 hours more sleep than if you didn't what was the study so this was a study done um in high school students but looking at the difference of how much they're sleeping versus their correlation to to grades and so that 15minute difference was shown to be that A to B student 11 minutes from that B to C student oh gosh yes so it doesn't have to be these big jumps but

small changes over time will will add up the the study I have in front of me here which I've printed out um also highlights the importance of sleep for everybody but also specifically in this case for athletes can you walk me through this study and what you found in this particular study on the adult male basketball players yes and how you conducted the study so in the study we looked at the men's basketball team and we really tried to examine if we extended their sleep over 5 to S weeks encouraging them to get 9 or

10 hours of sleep every single night to B pay back what we call an accumulated sleep debt would we see any impact on performance outcome specifically would we see an impact on reaction time their fatigue levels and would we see an impact on their onc Court performance specifically free throw shots three-point shots Sprint time and these are measures that we would do after every regular practice and over the course of those 5 to 7 weeks we demonstrated that we saw a 9% Improvement in free throws a 9% Improvement in three-point shots we saw a 12%

faster reaction time and a 4% increase in uh faster Sprint time and so these were the quantification which was novel at the time was what was quite fascinating because it wasn't that 1% that I think many Elite athletes are trying to find every small way to adjust their training to get that 1% better better because in Elite Sport that 1% can be the difference right of being at the top versus not but this was arguably 9% or even double digits for Reaction Time depending on the outcome and so we've expanded that looking at other sports

as well but this was one of the first ones to show that it really potentially could have a significant impact on performance outcome for these athletes how much did they sleep more per night to get those results yeah so they did so we did quantify objectively through a uh what's called actigraphy it looks like a wearable nowadays um and then compar that also with what they thought they were getting and so we did extend their sleep um uh substantially over I believe an hour and a half uh compared to what they were getting prior to

the study because getting 9% more free throws or three-point shots or 12% better reaction time is quite frankly for some teams the difference between like winning a championship and not yeah because I think about the Premier League often which is it's soccer I guess football um often time there's been leagues within my lifetime there's been years in my lifetime where both teams have um tied with the same amount of points and one is one just on the amount of goals they've scored they've just scored a couple more goals so after 38 games they both have

the exact same points and the winner is just the person that scored like a couple more goals but even you think of reaction times you think of goalkeepers in in soccer their whole game is reaction time so if you can increase your reaction time by 12% it's really really staggering you can be a game changer and I think that's what has been so fascinating with some of the athletes or organizations and teams I've worked with who have made it to the most important games and those championships because the hope is that you've invested not just

the night before that championship game but you've invested an entire season even starting in the off season on cultivating better habits to give yourself that foundation and be able to leverage these strategies that the other team is not because we know that it significantly can impact not just the individual level on performance outcome but organizations as a whole and I think one example of that is um I partnered with ESPN to do what was called the NBA schedule alert project where they ask can you predict Dr ma when NBA teams are going to be at

risk of losing games strictly based on the schedule so not factoring in strength of team but based simply on their schedule where they're traveling to how many times are crossing these various factors does it affect organizations as a whole and teams and their game outcomes as you mentioned and over three seasons I was 76 to 86% correct on accurately predicting when an NBA team will be at highest risk of losing strictly based on the schedule so in the spirit of the project we didn't factor in strength of team but to me that was staggering because

there's many other factors that maybe are not always considered to be as clearly important about you know this travel schedule up front but hey maybe these factors really do play and influence um game outcomes in this way and that's not the only thing that has obviously shown that organizations and teams as a as a whole will have differences performance outcome there's other studies like the Monday Night Football study that showed if you simply bet on a West Coast team when they play an East Coast West Coast matchup during night games over 25 seasons you'd beat

the Las Vegas point spread 68% of the time and so if you're able to predict with with greater accuracy then obviously there is potentially some gambling outcomes that could work in your favor here but really being able to show that you would be able to benefit and predict better than what the spread will be between the the two teams over is that because the West sorry the West Coast team has gone which who's who's traveled it doesn't matter it simply matters that the West Coast team is playing the east Coast team during night games so

this can happen on the west coast it can happen on the East Coast the reason why is because performance is enhanced in the late afternoon to evening around 4: to 8:00 in both scenarios the body clock of the West Coast team because they typically go out just the day before the game it feels like they're on the west coast okay right so when you're a West Coast team and you stay there and the East Coast team comes out the East Coast is three hours later so what is a seven o'clock game on a West Coast

feels like a 10 o'clock game for a East Coast team got you same thing applies when the West Coast team goes east coast even if it's a 7:00 game there yeah the West Coast feels like it's a 4:00 body clock yes and so that special window of around 4: to 8:00 p.m. when world records are broken and performance in a 24-hour day is is optimal and that is leveraged then over those 25 Seasons that the West Coast will have more favorable outcome overall got you so in this study you did in 2011 that was published

in 2011 one of the things I read as well is that players who had slept more in your study sprinted faster I mean quite quite dramatically faster as well I I think from 16.2 seconds at the start of the study versus 15.5 seconds at the end yes over what distance was that yes so that was from the Baseline to half court to Baseline to full court and back so we chose a very standardized sprinting uh sprinting drill that they are familiar with that we could replicate after every regular practice as you imagine not everyone on

the team was participating on in this study and so they did this after every regular practice and that ended up being a 4% difference in Sprint time that is pretty crazy do do do professional teams know this do athletes know this are they aware of this or is this something that's fairly new some are aware and I think the momentum is shifting towards more athletes more teams recognizing that this is an untapped competitive advantage that this is an area that they may or may not have implemented specific strategies or education or or planning for when

they travel but I think the more Forward Thinking organizations teams and athletes are starting to pick this up and starting to recognize that they can use this as a weapon right as a performance-enhancing drug if you may because it is safe it's healthy it's effective and we know that it will be one of the only things that can give you these performance benefits um and and those are the ones that are trying to Leverage The Science into application for optimizing yeah their sleep at nighttime have you seen athletes individual athletes change and save their careers

when I say change I mean change the trajectory of their career or save their careers because they focused on their sleep and can you give me some examples of that yes Golden State Warriors Andre Iguodala he's someone who I worked closely with he came to the Warriors back in around 2014 he was already an Allstar he was 28 at the time knew that his career was going to probably be sunsetting at some future time but wanted to extend it as long as possible but he knew he wasn't doing sleep best as possible he was very

open about sharing how he would stay up till the we hours in the morning playing video games would sleep for a few hours go to practice play for a few hours come home and take a 2 to three hour power nap and that was his routine for for 10 years um and he said you know how do I improve how I approach my sleep I know that this is important as an athlete to who wants to play in the league as long as possible so I had the opportunity to work with him over several months

to help him recraft how he approached to sleep including a windown routine thought about some of his nutritional choices tried to shorten his naps time them closer to game time to give him the Boost and alertness and performance be able to manage a racing mind and be able to have just a more proactive approach to his sleep in a really neat way The Following Season the Warriors went to the championship for the first time in many years they won he came back with the finals MVP he subsequently has won three more championships with them so

four in total and extended his career for 10 years when we made these changes there was a quantification of the performance enhancement so a third party Quantified as he went from under seven to seven and a half to more than eight hours he had a two-fold increase in his threo percentage he had a 88.9% increase in his free throw shots which very interestingly is the exact same 9% that I showed in my man's basketball study that had the same 9% Improvement in free throws he had a 29% Improvement in his points per minute a 45%

decrease in his fowls and so you know these numbers are pretty staggering again for someone who's already at the highest level as an Allstar and it's not to take anything away from Andre but he has been very vocal about the difference this made as he changed these habits it he says it changed everything for him and I think that that's you know a very inspiring story of what it can mean to extend your career and be able to almost tap into this additional performance capacity that I think even he was surprised about that he for

the first time was able to improve beyond what he already thought was his best and I think that's what's so inspiring because this is something that's accessible to all of us to be able to tap into that little bit more so not only did he win the most valuable player award but his three-point conversion went up 218% yes so during the time that I had worked with him his three-o percentage went up twofold during that time it begs the question what did you do to him and you know you named a couple of things there

but I'd love to dig into some of those key points sure um where you started with him the specific sort of implement things that you implemented into his um sleep hygiene and so that if I am him the day that you met him when he was taking those naps and staying up late which I often do to be fair um where would you start with me and where did you start with him okay so let's dive into is just some very practical strategies that I started to challenge him with which was we'll start with his

sleep environment we want to make your sleep environment like a cave really dark quiet cool and comfortable dark cave so dark blackout curtains eye mask are some of the easiest tools that you can grab but are incredibly helpful and great investment to be able to use that both at home and then when you travel so that if you're in a non-ideal environment like a hotel room you have for example an IM mask that can help dampen out the the light uh making it quiet so earplugs uh also a white noise machine I'm a huge fan

of even a small travel white noise so that you can actually mask over external noises that you may or not be able to control I'm someone that tells myself that I sleep with something playing for I grew up with a radio in my room so when I'm as an adult now I'm always looking to play something as I fall asleep is that going to hurt my Sleep Quality I would say if you're accustomed to this would say that's fine to continue to do so I am not a fan of having the TV on and having

the bright light exposed um to you in that hour before bedtime because it also can just be very psychologically stimulating but if like you said it's a radio or it's a podcast that you feel is helping you relax then I'm a fan of it do you think Daria will help people relax it might it might help you at least think about your sleep a bit more and challenge you to do maybe one one change tonight we consider that to be a scientific endorsement of of the podcast um okay so I've got sound down you are

a fan of the white white noise machines I am because sometimes there's external noises like a garbage truck or construction that you're not always able to control so if you can at least mask over it temporarily that can sometimes be helpful to keep individuals more asleep during the night time and there's even some now that are adaptive so if the door slams then the volume temporarily increases and then will decrease so there's almost these smart white noise machine that are that are coming out on the market so that's from a noise standpoint and earplugs are

going to be helpful if you're traveling when you're at home you can obviously use those to dampen down any external noise from a from a temperature standpoint you want it to be cool I think this is an area that a lot of people can benefit from because they often sleep in much warmer temperatures than what we know is probably more conducive to sleep which is cooler 60 to 67° has been shown to help individuals stay asleep and fall asleep that may be frigidly cold for some but you have to find the temperature that's right for

you I would say decrease your temperature by say one degree or two degrees every couple of days and then you can find the temperature that works well for you and there's even technology now where there's mattress covers that can help you regulate temperature from much cooler to warmer so if there's differences in bed Partners that's a way that you can actually accommodate both of their preferences so that's about 16 to 20° C what about when I shower or I bath because often I go and have a shower then I get straight into bed after yes

is that good or bad I would encourage you to shift that timing a little bit earlier into the night so an hour and a half before you are planning to go to bed I would shift your shower because when you are taking a hot bath or hot shower it increases your core temperature but when you fall asleep your core temperature drops so you don't want that competing signal to be right before bedtime but if you back that shower up an hour and a half that should be sufficient time that we think potentially there's an augmentation

of helping that drop in temperature and some smaller Studies have shown that that can help decrease the time to fall asleep and also enhance deep sleep which has implications for Muscle Recovery regeneration and you get more of that in the earlier part of your night so it's an easy fix uh just to tweak the timing of your shower in your hot bath to be just an hour or two before bedtime not right before bed so it's a strategy too if you have difficulties winding down and relaxing to implement that hot shower hot bath earlier in

the evening one of the problems I also have when I sleep sometimes is I I hear people say you got to you can't eat like 3 or 4 hours before bed however I sometimes you know I sometimes get home at 10:00 p.m. and I get home hungry as hell at 10 p.m. and then sometimes if I order food for for example it might come at like 11:00 okay which means I end up eating at 11:00 and then I really see it in my sleep schools um I think as well that I'm someone that tends to

fall asleep later again this might just be me telling BS to myself but that's what tends to happen and I know I'm not supposed to eat before bed but I'm so hungry so is there anything that I can eat before bed that won't disrupt my sleep but will get rid of The Hunger yes the preference is not to have a huge meal right before bed that's fried fatty um you know really heavy sitting in your stomach that hour right before bedtime um so if you're able to time that and be strategic then that's obviously the

preference but I'm okay with you having a pre-sleep snack a lot of times for my athletes that means we'll go for something like 50% of a complex carb and like 50% of a lean protein so for example cereal and milk is an easy one cereal yes cereal and milk of course we want something that's whole grain uh and not you know necessarily A sugary you know cereal but Cal and milk is an easy one that's many people have access to or cottage cheese and fruit or 100% holy crackers and peanut butter and the reason why

is because I don't want you waking up in the middle of the night being hungry or even trying to fall asleep and you feel like you're hungry but we want something that's slow digesting through the night because ideally you're going to be sleeping S 8 nine hours during the night uh and we want it to be able to get you to the morning time and then you will fuel when you wake up so a pre-sleep snack can can be a great strategy if you're coming home late and you want to obviously be able to fuel

before bed or if you have a really early dinner and you're hungry before bedtime yeah that happens sometimes as well sometimes I'll eat dinner at about 5:00 p.m. Y and then I get to about 10 11:00 p.m. I'm still awake and I'm starving okay so what's a pre-sleep snack that you think you can grab for some nuts okay yeah does that work yeah yeah nuts have protein in them um yeah you can grab a a good nut mix maybe you can partner that also with like some yogurt too raspberries raspberries yeah fruit yeah and some

yeah a a protein and carbon there and those are good good pre-sleep snack what's the if I wanted to destroy my sleep what would you recommend I eat right before bed what would you recommend I I yeah consume right before bed it can be if you just want to destroy your entirely okay so we're going to have the the night cap of having a couple of drinks right before bed okay so some alcohol yeah we'll have some alcohol on board we'll we'll throw in some caffeine too to to really get you to stay awake in

the next couple of hours we add a really heavy meal that's Fried Tomato based um fatty sitting in your stomach right before bed and you say tomato based yeah sometimes individuals will have acid reflux with tomato based products and so if that's something that is is yeah is that something that you experience then you generally want to avoid some of the Tomato based products that can aggravate some of the acid reflux so some fried food with some ketchup yes okay so alcohol caffeine and some fried food with some ketchup I think that would really work

to your disadvantage during the nighttime any sugar yes sugary carbs are tends to be some of the preferences when you're particularly also sleep deprived so people will choose more carb heavy foods and foods that have um less fiber and more more sugar why fats is it that if I eat those Foods before bed it impacts my sleep what what what's going on I don't think we have a great understanding of that I think the field of sleep and nutrition is definitely growing and I think down the road in the next five or 10 years we

hopefully we'll have more answers to that but it's a fast area that we do start to understand what we eat can affect our sleep so for example the stages of our sleep or how we sleep during the night time some of the smaller studies shown what you eat can then affect having more Awakenings during the nighttime um and affecting the quality of your sleep but I think many of them are still at the infancy because that's certainly something I can attest to I I talked about one time many months ago I think it was last

year actually when I I was staying in a hotel here in LA and I had a cookie before bed because it was cuz I'm bloody you know I blame the hotel I don't really blame the hotel I take full responsibility it was in the mini bar and I hadn't eaten all day I'd came back I'd been working all day and when I'm when when I'm when I've been working a lot I'm much more likely to reach for something bad and I had this cookie and honestly I woke up the next morning 8 hours later feeling

like I hadn't slept at all I just felt so tired and I know it was that Bloody cookie cuz I looked at my um my whoop hashad hash investor and I could see that my heart rate throughout the night was really high like atypically high my heart rate throughout the night will usually just be this nice flat I don't know 50 55 beats per minute and when I'd had that cookie it it started and pretty much stayed for the first 3 or 4 hours about 75 beats so it was like my body was was still

on it was like I was walking MH um and so I've always just had this idea that when I if you eat something like that right before bed like puts your body under a lot of strain like metabolic strain then it's kind of like your body doesn't fall asleep and my REM sleep's always attacked as well if I if I if I were to eat something like that yeah it's it's very fascinating I think we're starting to understand the connection of what we eat how our gut is responding to that and then how that potentially

can affect your sleep and then ultimately your daytime functioning the next day but we do recognize from sleep deprivation studies uh that individuals will make different nutritional choices and grab for the cookies and the ice cream and some of those other snacks later at night than they would if they were well rested that's a real horrible Paradox isn't it it is do you know what I mean like if you're tired then you're going to eat bad things right before bed which is going to make you sleep worse and make you tired which is going to

mean you eat bad things before bed is vicious cycle it is and unfortunately that could potentially lead to potential weight gain and other Downstream consequences so just one other reason why obviously making sure you're having sufficient sleep but also having good practices and your approach to sleep is also um a priority so you're asking what else did we do with Andre but in that ways of preparing to sleep you know we addressed does he have a windown routine so we implemented one where he would read before bed to actually relax and prepare his brain and

body to sleep for the night managing a racing mind can be incredibly common for not just the elate athlete but for for all of us and so even before he did that reading we'd actually have him stretch and process his thoughts outside of bed and that set him up with a two-part system so that he could actually be strategic about preparing to sleep for the night a lot of people can relate to this managing a racing mind athletes um performers creatives um so if I've got a racing mind I think as well I think I

tend to feel like I have my best ideas just before I'm about to get in bed what would you recommend someone do if they have a racing mind again incredibly common to have racing thoughts thinking through the day needing to process your thoughts about how to prepare for tomorrow so what I'd recommend is spending 10 minutes processing your thoughts outside of bed in dim light every single night so that can mean I would recommend you could do stretching H you could do deep breathing exercises to activate your parasympathetic system and dampen down your sympathetic system

that's what I recommend for a lot of my athletes if that's not your thing I recommend journaling getting your thoughts down onto paper uh or writing a to-do list those are easy ones that all of us can do for even if you start with 5 minutes today so I'm going to stretch um I've read I read something I think it was whoops data they released at the end of the year where they because there's an activity log in whoop where you basically say what you're doing and I'm going to butcher this but I think the

stats said that reading before bed improved your sleep by about 5% across everyone that was using ROP which makes sense because you're going to be away from Light I guess and you're also going to be calming your you called it your parasympathetic nervous system yes the parasympathetic nervous system what do I need to know about that in the context of sleep that's just the system that helps you relax and wind down the it is in balance with the sympathetic system which you may have heard is the fight or flight system that gets you going that's

where your heartbe heartbeat will be much more rapid your breathing can be much more rapid when you need to go that's when I'm overthinking yes but you want to dampen that down and you want to get your parasympathetic atic system activated so you can help actually relax physiologically your body and also your brain so that you're in a better state to sleep at night right it's easier to slowly pump your brakes and then try to sleep versus if you were going 60 M an hour on a freeway and then suddenly slamming on the brakes and

just jumping into bed so you actually have a process to slow yourself down your brain and body it will help prepare you to actually get better sleep during the night time just want to close off on Andrew then is there anything else you did with him to yes there's please do give me there's more that we've done with Andre but this is to give you some highlights so you know approaches to his sleep were having that way to process his thoughts being able to wind down before bed and relax improving his sleep environment so that

it was as I mentioned dark and cool I believe his was around 67 degrees it was quiet um we tried to we took out technology from his bedroom so he didn't have that exposure prior to bed we looked at cutting down some of his power naps that were several hours long to shorten them to 20 to 30 minutes and time it much closer to game time so we would get that boost as you would go into evening games um and we looked at some of his nutritional choices but this is the highlight of of some

of the ways that we were strategic about his approach to sleep and while we're also extending his sleep from that under 7 to 7 and 1 12 to 8 hours because we knew he had an accumulated sleep debt that had been built from not getting sufficient sleep probably for many months to years prior to this and so as we've shared some of the performance outcomes were astonishing and he's been very vocal about sharing his sleep story and he's not the only one um if I could share another story about another athlete where you've asked what

has saved someone's career so with Andre I think he saw this performance enhancement that he could tap into that was that was um previously he didn't know almost existed right but then there's other athletes where I think having sleep as a foundation almost save their career one example is Ryan Jensen so Ryan Jensen was cut from the Ravens and put on the practice squad and during this time as the story goes his father said you know what's happening you're not yourself you like made your mom cry the other day you know there there's something that's

going on and he eventually was tested for sleep apnea which is a very very common sleep disorder where your Airway has some partial or full collapse during the air during the night and so can have very fragmented sleep through the night and he was eventually tested diagnosed and then put on treatment through what's called a CPAP or continuous positive airway pressure so it's a it's a mask that provides air to keep the airway open so then you actually can have Consolidated sleep during the nighttime and in a very neat way four years later Ryan Jensen

comes back signs a $42 million contract as one of the highest paid centers in the NFL and then 3 years later in 2021 wins the Super Bowl with Tom Brady on the Bucks I see this as the success story of Saving his career and he's been vocal about how much of a difference it made from literally almost the end of his career happening to now being able to succeed at the highest level and also of course being healthier and being able to have um more success on the field than he probably imagined for himself and

better relationships presumably he's not made his mother cry I'm quite curious about that why is it that when we haven't slept we're more likely to make people cry because we are our emotions are not regulated well when we're short on sleep we are more irritable we are more grouchy we respond more with our emo being able to um why we respond with our emotions yeah what's going on in the body is it like a different part of my brain is it my hormones is it something else it's probably a combination of both right we know

that um our emotional regulation is not the same if we're well rested versus if we're asleep deprived and so we rely more on our innate response which may not necessarily be that which is strategic for what we should be responding with if we were tempered and had a better rest under our belt um so we ask cognitively there's a an implication of which part of your brain you're going to be using but then also you are just not in a state in which you are going to be able to respond in the way that you

would otherwise is it the amydala that's the emotional center that is one that's where like fear is very much um and emotions and and um yeah the amydala is where like fear and emotions are are often centered because I've started when I started learning more about sleep and the impact it has on my emotions I could see a huge VAR in how um how I make my decisions but also how like short I can be yeah if I haven't slept yeah and so on the days now where I haven't slept I literally have a conversation

with myself and tell myself that I'm going to be in my M mdala today so to try not to make any decisions try not to talk to many people because there's a risk that I might just be I might be too short in how I consider things and how I respond and I really want to stay away from that but I've seen such a huge huge variant and I've also heard of other like famous CEOs and stuff like that talk about how they they focus so much on their sleep I can't was reading something the

other day and it was I think it was it was Jeff Bezos do you know what I'm gonna say I don't but Jeff Bezos is someone who has been an advocate about sleep and vocal that he needs eight hours every night yes the quote that I heard him say or someone told me that he said was I think it might have been Ariana Huffington actually he said that his job as a CEO is to make decisions and he says he doesn't have to make that many decisions a year he only makes a couple of big

decisions a year every day he's probably just making two or three big decisions so if his job is to make decisions then his job is also to sleep because the variance I see in even my own decision- making when I'm slept and underslept is just unbelievably staggering as someone that sits here for seven eight hours a day sometimes having conversations you wouldn't believe the difference when my brain and my mouth are like connected because I've slept it's like a different human being it's a different podcast host um have you got data to support this this

impact on cognitive performance yes so you definitely make better decisions when you're well rested you're less likely to make cognitive errors you have better judgment when you're well rested and you're going to react faster so in the situations where you need to make big decisions whether it's on the field and you need to react because you're running a pass whe whether you are Jeff Bezos and you're running a company and you need to make critical decisions um under under sometimes you know acute stressors or you are someone who just is trying to be your best

we know that the cognitive domain very much is influenced by getting sufficient sleep and some of the I would say you know large um very very public disasters have happened as a result of what we know is sleep loss um where people have made poor decisions or decisions that have led to unfortunate disaster so for example the Challenger disaster with a space shuttle that exploded um and as a result there's investigations of why did this happen and the final report does suggest that insufficient sleep for some of those key decision makers around being able to

launch or not was attributed to fatigue and insufficient sleep so being able to make good Dame time decisions had this disastrous effect ultimately on the Challenger explosion or are you aware of any studies that have measured cognitive performance on and sleep yes so my studies as well as many of my other colleagues particularly look at reaction time because we know reaction time is um very finely or is very sensitive to sleep loss and I'm starting to find it also is sensitive to extension of sleep so the other half of the story when you pay back

sleep sleep debt we see that benefit on on uh reaction time but uh reaction time and looking at aspects of you know how quickly you're able to respond or if you're having errors when you're responding and you're not supposed to be responding cognitively those are um tests that are typically used in a lot of sleep studies because we know is quite sensitive can you give me an example of a study that will convince me that um if I sleep more my cognitive performance will improve one of the studies I mentioned before even 15 15 minutes

more sleep was that difference of that a student to the B student there's another study I often cite where if you look at the difference of someone who gets 9 hours of sleep for a full week the reaction time stays very consistent great you want to react appropriately you want to not make cognitive errors or lapses in judgment and that will be consistent over the week if you're someone who's getting seven hours of sleep you see a slowing of that reaction time and then a leveling off if you are getting 5 hours of sleep you

see an even sharper decline in being able to react fast and then you see a leveling off if you're getting three hours of sleep every night you're just going to tank that reaction time and be slower at the same time you have more lapses in judgment and not able to respond appropriately but the the thing about this study that I find so fascinating is when we know that there's this deficit when you're going to react slower in the seven and the 5our group there's this leveling off so people say oh can I get used to

getting insufficiency sleep in some sense there was this stabilizing of it but the reality is you're not at your best right we know what your reaction time could be if you were getting that 9 hours and if we even gave you three nights of what we call recovery sleep so we said okay now we get let's say 8 hours in bed for the next 3 days you're going to feel better and you'll probably feel more refreshed but those reaction times for the 7 hours and the 5 hours and the 3H hour group didn't go back

to the Baseline so it takes more than one night night or one weekend of that recovery sleep to get you back to your Baseline and so that's the bottom line that I tried to show my athletes is that you can pay back sleep debt but it often can take more than just one day or one weekend of quality sleep how long does it take so my Studies have suggested multiple weeks uh will really be beneficial to paying back more of your sleep debt than just a night or two nights of sleep the biggest bankr tends

to be in the first week or two but obviously this depends on how much more you're actually getting how you're timing that in your night but the bottom line is that if you can invest maybe a week or maybe if you have a vacation coming up and you do two weeks that's going to be U the biggest impact on paying back your sleep debt and if you say hey that sounds like a long time Dr ma well even potentially like 5 days is one of my preliminary studies had suggested in professional baseball players even if

it's 5 days of getting one additional hour of sleep that was shown to potential that was shown to improve cognitive reaction time and also processing speed in the athletes that actually got one additional hour so if you got six hours you went to seven if you got seven hours you went to eight hours versus the athletes that just continue to get their normal sleep interesting I I guess I've got to understand what this concept or this idea of sleep Deb is because I I want to make sure I'm super clear on what it is and

isn't cuz when you say the word debt I assume it's kind of like I I owe the Sleep bank manager a couple of hours um but but I I've kind of gone back on forward on this idea of sleep debt I think some people have told me that it's real some people have told me that it's not real um and I don't know where where I should stand on it so if I if I haven't so for example I flew into La first couple of nights my sleep wasn't great am I still but I had

good sleep last night am I still paying for it now the way I explain the concept of sleep dead is that your body requires a certain amount every single night again we talked but individual variability but let's just say you need 8 hours every night and conceptually if you don't meet that 8 hours then you build up a debt so if you're only getting six hours a night you now have two hours of debt built up if you go Monday to Friday that's 5 days now you have 10 hours built up right two hours every

night becomes 10 hours and if you then sleep in on a Saturday and you get let's just say 10 hours of sleep you've paid back two of those hours but you still have eight hours left to go and my buddy knows yes so conceptually that's the idea of accumulating sleep debt I do stand in the camp that believes that that does accumulate over time we do think that you can pay back some of that debt on the short term right so what you lost like you said this past day or this past week maybe this

past month you should pay that back with getting extra sleep or we call Sleep extension we don't think that you can Surplus and Bank more and that you can pull from that in the future but we re recognize that if you've got insufficient sleep that if you extend it over a couple of days maybe a couple weeks then you will see benefits in your reaction time in your fatigue levels in your performance outcomes and so we do recommend that as a tool especially if you know that you're going to have a day where you're going

to have sleep loss so it's a strategy for example if you know okay in a week I'm going to have a project and I'm not going to be getting enough sleep that night night then what you can do in the days leading up to it is getting sufficient sleep but arguably even more so that we know when it gets to that project the decrements that you'll experience tend to be less robust than if you went into it with just say that was 5 hours so what evidence do you have that sleep debt is a real

thing what's the first thing that comes to mind so my my what I've dedicated my career to is trying to understand how to pay back sleep debt with sleep extension interventions so what that means is typically I'm working with a number of Collegiate athletes where many of them are not getting what they need because when we start these studies many of them have high fatigue levels they are reacting slowly we often see lapses in their um their judgment and their ability to ultimately perform and function which is what they consider their Baseline but then when

we actually challenge them by paying back some of that debt by getting additional hours when we monitor the the differences that can make over multiple weeks that's where we see there's Improvement in the reaction time their fatigue levels drop their performance on the field improves and so we recognize what has changed in this is trying to pay back some of that accumulated debt when the rest of their training has been held consistent where we've been trying to maintain the rest of their their training which is key which is the key point because in my mind

I go well maybe if you've got the athlete to sleep well on that first night then when they've showed up to training they've trained a little bit harder they've built their muscles a little bit more they've had better recovery in their muscles so then the next day the same thing happens because they've slept so it's actually just that they're training better which is causing them to improve their that's fair we we've tried to hold their training to be consistent and choosing periods where their training isn't going to vary significantly as well as you can almost

make the argument too that sometimes as the season goes on athletes get more fatigued more tired and that can be actually a decrement to how they'll perform so when we see the benefits come down the road as the season potentially gets even longer that at least is some suggestion that the intervention of sleep while we also have the measures of how much more they were getting actually were at least associated with these performance outcomes because REM one of the key things about REM sleep which is the sort of final stage of sleep is that it

helps with Muscle Recovery uh deep sleep is actually deep sleep is where we uh deep sleep is where it's implied that there's more R Muscle Recovery regeneration because there's the biggest pulse of growth hormone during your deep sleep so to back up a bit you have light stages of sleep then you have deep stages of sleep and then you have that rapid eye movement sleep or when you dream that is tends to be more associated with consolidation of learning in memory and skill consolidation so you go through these Cycles during the night time about 90

to 120 minutes but the proportion changes through the night the beginning of the night you get more of that deep sleep and then in the early morning hours is when you get more of that REM sleep so you might have woken up in an earlier morning and had the recall of these vivid dreams it's because you often will be waking up from the that REM sleep yes that happened last night actually CU I woke up suspiciously early for me so I woke up at about 5 or 6:00 and I was just kind of dipping in

and out of Dreams MH and were very vivid dreams that I can still remember now yeah um so the muscle memory element of all of this what is muscle memory and how is that sort of implicated with sleep so muscle memory there's different types of memory and you need sleep think of sleep as hitting that save button right you need to sleep after you have learned new information learned a new skill so that you can consolidate those those uh those memories and be able to retrieve it later so I always use an analogy of hitting

that save button after you learn new material or learn a new skill set you need to go home and sleep so that it goes into long-term storage and that you can retrieve that the following day and subsequently without that sleep we know that that groundwork for that new skill or that new memory is not going to be as strong and so in the context of students who are trying to study for a test or an athlete that's trying to remember the Playbook you want to space those intervals that you're learning that material and have sleep

that follows so that you strengthen those connections and also you mentioned when you were talking about one of your athletes encouraging them to nap before a game yes um I I read this fascinating word in the research that I was doing on your work I think it's napino yes what's a napino the nappuccino so this is a useful tool if you're trying to have a temporary boost and aler and performance so the nappuccino you go and take your favorite caffeinated beverage the caffeine will start to kick in in about 15 minutes and you go and

then take your 20 to 30 minute power nap so if you're able to fall asleep within that 5 to 10 minutes while the caffeine will start to come on board then when you wake up after 20 to 30 minutes then bam both the caffeine will have kicked in and the power naap will have kicked in and there's research to show that that's more effective for alertness and performance Improvement for a couple of hours than if you only did the caffeine alone or only did the power nap alone so the nappuccino is is a useful tool

for some who who utilize caffeine and you can partner that together with a short 20 to 30 minute nap so if I wanted to take a nap now I have an espresso and then go and have my nap exactly yes the cettas you do need to fall asleep within about 10 minutes or else the caffeine will start to come on board but if if you do this in the late morning or early afternoon it can be a helpful tool so that you have a boost in your alertness for a couple of hours and I grew

up thinking that naps didn't work because the minute I learned about sleep and these sleep cycles and that it takes I don't know 45 60 Minutes whatever it is to get into late stage sleep like the Rems sleep the deep sleep I thought what's the point taking a 15 20 minute nap if I'm not going to get into deep or REM sleep so there's benefit of just that 15minute nap you mentioned you want to stay in lighter stages of sleep cuz there's benefits of lighter stages of sleep and that can give you that alertness and

performance boost even when you're in lighter stages of sleep you actually don't want to go into deeper stages of sleep because when you take the longer naps as I think you you might have shared you you've taken the 2-hour nap the three p you wake up and you're much more sluggish much more groggy that's not a good state for you to go out and then do you know work after that or it's not the state that you want to be if you're a a basketball player and have to go and play a game but those

deeper stages you come out of what we call Sleep inertia with that sluggishness and so it can also affect your sleep at night and make it harder to sleep subsequently so you actually want to stay in those lighter stages of sleep and keep those naps very short so what's the maximum length that a nap should be I like 30 minutes okay yes so you can time that by setting an alarm if it takes you 5 or 10 minutes to fall asleep you can plan for that as well and the setting alarm to wake yourself up

30 minutes later I think it's a great strategy when again you don't get sufficient sleep at night or you had poor sleep leading into that night and you need a little bit of a boost later in the day what do you think of the snooze button the snooze button I'm not a huge fan of the snooze um I fully understand why people love to hit the snooze and then go back to bed uh and if you're someone who does that one of my suggestions is just to cut down so that you only hit the snooze

once 5 minutes later start your day the reason why is because it helps to maximize your rem or your dreaming sleep in those early morning hours if you can actually sleep Consolidated all the way until the time you have to wake up so for example if you're someone who hits the snooze button five times every five minutes for a half hour it means that you're having very interrupted sleep for the last half hour of your night versus if you just let yourself sleep Consolidated all the way through and then maybe hit the snooze button just

one time and then got yourself up to start your day it means you would have given yourself another 25 minutes of Consolidated sleep likely that dreaming REM sleep that's so important for learning and memory and so that is one just easy adjustment that you can make in terms of your morning approach to maximizing what you get during the night so what's the what's the value in consolidating it versus just having fragmented sleep yeah so then if you're getting a lot of that REM sleep in those early morning hours and you're snoozing you're going to be

waking up and coming out of that REM sleep so you likely are changing the stages of sleep you would be getting in those early hours so you would then be awake and then probably going into lighter stages of sleep awake lighter stages of sleep than necessarily having a solid REM period all the way until you wake up what's the cost of that so learning a memory and consolidation is definitely one area that we recognize is associated with that REM sleep and so you want as we talked about it changes through the night you want to

have as much as possible but you part have to have just the duration so when you get the most of it in the morning hours if you cut that short and either wake up earlier or you're snoozing and you're interrupting it you're not going to maximize the value you get of the hours in rem okay so I just want to make sure that I those 25 minutes I give them to REM sleep versus just giving them to little fragmented light sleep exactly so I'm better off just putting my alarm to the time that I actually

have to get out of bed exactly just to maximize the amount of R sleep that I get to consolidate my memories are you a snoozer no not really okay well I mean we will have our moments but not really I can't remember the last time I pressed pressed the snooze button but the thing that I do and I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not is because I have told myself and I say told myself because I'm quite conscious of the BS that I believe about myself but um I've told myself that

I'm like an alow chronotype or something which by the way I don't even know if it's true and I don't know if chronotypes are true um and I typically work quite late and I love working late I get better ideas late I do my writing pretty late at night as well and so what I've done in my life is I've basically made sure that I don't have any meetings or any engagements before 11:00 so even like this podcast today started at 11:00 yes um basically nothing in my life starts till 11:00 for that very reason

just to because if I do end up staying up a little bit late I want to be able to kind of sleep through without having to set an alarm and just wake up naturally what do you think of that is that suboptimal no I think it's a great strategy so there are chronotypes where you've mentioned you're more of an evening owl you go to bed later you like to wake up later as a natural predilection is is that real or I just myself this is justifying myself no there is a natural tendency for some to

feel like they are evening owls and there's others who feel like they do much better in the morning so they go to bed earlier they wake up earlier they're more productive in the morning those are are morning Larks and then there is a group that's somewhere in the middle that don't strongly lean one way or another but really what you're doing is you're you're making your sleep work to your your chronotype and to your advantage where you do feel like you're more productive in the evenings and then you want to be able to maximize your

sleep waking up without an alarm and starting your day later I think that's like a great strategy because a lot of people aren't able to have that flexibility and so Society often will force particularly the night owls onto an earlier schedule where you have to wake up whether to go to work or other obligations or kids earlier Point yeah and and then you're cutting your sleep short like you mentioned like with school and then we're getting these um and then you're on a schedule that doesn't work synergistically with what your chronotype is they should do

some studies on kids in school and like Disobedience and ability to pay attention and do homework in grades because honestly I was so useless in school and I really I really think of it now I'm not entirely sure here because I got diagnosed with ADHD when I was like 30 years old so part of me thinks I've just got like a very active brain and part part of having an active brain meant that late at night I was Finding ways to stimulate it by playing Video Games Etc so that might just be the reason but

the other reason might be that I'm an Al chronotype and I found it really hard to get up at like 7:30 to get to go to school by sort of 8:30ish and so I would miss school I would show up knacked I would sleep in lessons um and I feel like school just starts way too early for kids it's a ongoing uh it's an ongoing problem and actually in a very interesting way there has been a change to school start times particularly in California um this this year was the first year that school start start

times for high schools and for middle schools was shifted much later because there are studies to show that our when our students are better rested they have higher attendance rates their GPA and grades are much higher there's less mental health issues um there's less car accidents and so this these Studies have um been over the last decade and longer in which they have built evidence to help make decisions to start school time later um and that is in California been enacted this year and some other states are starting to follow suit but to your point

what makes it challenging is that at the age of high school many of those body clocks are shifted and so students St want to an adolescence go to bed later and wake up later naturally that's just how our sleep changes through the life cycle but when they stay up late and then we cut their sleep short by forcing them to get up really early for school now they have insufficient sleep and that builds like a sleep debt and so they're not setting themselves up for success in school for learning and memory so that's where again

there's more evidence of if we can shift the school start time get these students to have a little bit more sleep they ultimately are better prepared for school come to school have less uh car accidents and are just healthier students do you think there's anything parents need to know about sleep when it as it relates to their children and sleep hygiene with their children I think it's important for parents to start at the early early years of instilling good sleep habits a good sleep routine and giving their their children the tools and skills to be

able to make sure that it's a priority as they go through early childhood into adolescence and hopefully then sets themselves up for making sure it's a priority for their adult life um I'm a young parent myself I just had uh my first son and so um I recognize and can empathize with the TR the struggles of getting sufficient sleep when they're very young but then trying to instill how they can approach their sleep from early age I think would be incredibly helpful to also just change culturally how we think about sleep because so many of

us now have never learned about sleep for or what we should do until you're an adult but if we can make that change earlier on I think we're going to have healthier kids better families um who are better rested and and also just this generation where we recognize this is so important that we shouldn't sacrifice it because we're doing ourselves a disservice to letting us be the best that we can possibly be how old is your son 11 months 11 months so how are you sleeping oh I transparently am quite tired okay I I as

a yeah new Young mom also um I don't have the ideal sleep that I know I would love um it's a for a short time but I'm trying to be strategic of the things that I can do with some of the tools that we've talked about trying to leverage power naps um when for example I do have to still wake up during the night time to tend to him um and you know the early morning starts are not always consistent so my sleep schedule is not always consistent so you know going back to those three

buckets we talked about earlier like if I don't get the full duration that I want then how do I maximize the quality right I've optimized my sleep environment I try to have a process to wind down at nighttime um or the timing you know is and the sleep schedule is another area that you can still work on when for example you may not be getting the duration um so these are strategies that I try to employ when I know that I um also am a work in progress and trying to get the best sleep possible

Once Upon a Time if you had a business idea it was exceptionally difficult to get going but now in the age of Shopify it is exceptionally easy as many of you will know Shopify are a sponsor of this podcast if you don't know Shopify it's an exceptionally simple web platform for anybody that's got an idea that wants to transact on a global scale so things like these conversation cards which we sell we've sold using Shopify and it only took us a couple of clicks to get going so why did we choose Shopify for a number

of reasons but I think one of the big ones which goes and appreciated is their checkout system converts 36% better compared to other platforms and here's what I'm going to do to remove the cost for you if you go to shopify.com Bartlet you'll be able to try Shopify for $1 a month I've seen Shopify completely change people's lives and for many of you I think it could change yours what are the other examples of sort of case studies that you're you're most proud of or that were most pivotal in shaping your thinking about sleep I

mentioned the Philadelphia Eagles back in 2017 and tried to help them educate their players about sleep how to have a more strategic approach to their wind down routine to thinking about how they're integrating sleep into their training practices and thinking about ultimately how they travel and and having for example strategies to minimize jet lag when you're Crossing time zones and having to play in different locations than the give me some of those then so some the tips you'd give me someone that travels a lot yeah um pre- during and post travel yeah what should I

be thinking about before I travel while I'm traveling and after I I land yes so have a a game plan for every trip I think most people have no strategies in place when they travel they just get onto an airplane get to a new location and try to adjust when they get there that is not really a great strategy you want to have at least a pre-flight strategy inflight strategy and post-flight strategies because that will set yourself up better to minimize jet lag also travel fatigue and ultimately then be able to acclimate faster if you're

Crossing multiple time zones before pre-flight try not to panic pack I know all of us do do Panic packing right before bed right before we're getting on a flight um so you want to try and be strategic and pack early you want to get at least why do I want to not panic pack because most people will Panic pack the night before they they have a flight and then they'll cut their sleep short so they'll get only say 5 hours of sleep because they're staying up late trying to pack everything and get ready for that

early morning flight or for the next day well I I pack the morning of travel so okay but I'm I'm out here in La for I'm out here for 2 weeks and I packed a carryon carryon suitcase okay cuz I so look at what I'm wearing I wear just the same outfit every day so I have like the same outfit um but I pack literally an hour before I go to the airport okay okay so but you're right it does cut my sleep because I could have been in bed whether it's beginning of the day

or the end of the day if it's affecting then the duration of your sleep I would recommend trying to a little more strategic and do it a day before two days before don't pan it pack number two try to get at least those seven hours if not your your amount of sleep that makes you feel like you're functioning and Performing well um at least a day if not two days if you get insufficient sleep before you get onto an airplane jet lag will be worse and that travel fatigue can feel much more robust and you're

more likely to have the quas on in the airport which is going to destroy the whole thing for for you so those are things that you can do before flight depending on where you're going you can actually start to adjust your body clock before you even get onto the airplane so let's just take a 3-hour time difference here in the US if you're in the west coast and you're going to the east coast three time zones you can actually start to go to bed a half hour early wake up a half hour early do that

for two or 3 days and and get sunlight in the morning because that sunlight reinforces to your brain to start to shift that body clock so if you can do that a day before 2 days before maybe 3 days before when you actually get to the new location you don't have to shift your body clock three time zones you've already shifted it one time zone or two time zones because the rule of thumb is for every time zone you cross it takes about a day to re acclimate even if you feel better after the first

day usually jetti feels the worst in that first day when you arrive um but physiologically you haven't really adjusted fully even if it's over you know a couple of days so that's the rule of thumb so those are some things pre-flight you can do when you're in Flight you want to hydrate throughout the flight because dehydration can worsen jet lag you want to think about getting onto the new time zone schedule so again depending on which direction you're flying and how many times when you're Crossing you want to start to synchronize perhaps like when you're

actually sleeping or some of your meal times so that you're getting onto that schedule and then you partner that with for example building a travel sleep kit I'm a huge fan of investing in sleep tools that will help you sleep when you need to in non- ideal situations whether you're on the plane and now trying to take a nap or shift your sleep schedule then you actually have an eye mask and ear plugs you have noise cancelling headphones you have your own travel pillow you have the tools with you to S drugs sorry sleeping medication

okay so some uh medications can be helpful like melatonin particularly if you're trying to advance your clock has um evidence that it can help shift that a little bit more quickly when you're trying to advance your clock earlier would you recommend it to athletes um it I would say if it's something that you've used before and you know that you don't experience some of the side effects it could be a useful tool so melatonin while it's one of the most commonly used supplements and sleep aids there are still side effects that to be wary of

so specifically for athletes too you can feel more groggy and sluggish when you wake up from it um it's not regulated by the the FDA here in the US and so you don't always know what's actually in those supplements so for my lead athletes they use what's called NSF Sports certified versions um they're just there's more um regulation around them but in for the for the you know everyday person you know there's a study where they looked at the amount of melatone that was actually in a variety of these supplements and it was a wide

range from over 400% of what was on the label to obviously sub you know you know uh under 100% of what they actually indicated so there's a wide range of what's actually going to be in the supplement but it can help particularly when you're on travel with um re acclimating my team here we most of them use a certain app when we travel and it just tells you basically you say where you're going and then it'll tell you what time to eat what time not to eat Etc so you can get aligned with that with

your destinations like circadian rhythm I guess so we'll link below one of the apps that our team use we're not affiliated with them in any way but we're flying out here I know will and my team sent me a screenshot and said Steve this is what time you need to be eating and everything cuz we're going to La so it's been super helpful for all of us I I'll link that below because I know some people are going to be wondering what apps they should be using so we're in the flight we've got our postt

trvel flight kit with the ey masks and all those kinds of things in we've got our app is we're hydrated um noise cancelling headphones is there anything else we need to be thinking about while we're traveling when you're traveling so on a plane on a plane so we talked about hydration minim caffeine or eliminating entirely is straty inad of having on board because that can also potentially worsen um jet lag and or make it more difficult to sleep when you're actually trying to when you arrive and again seeking light that is the most powerful signal

to your brain to help shift your body clock also bringing sunglasses so that you actually avoid sunlight at certain times because your body can respond differently depending again on your home location and how many time zones youve crossed so there's certain times that these apps can be helpful that will likely tell you you don't want to get sunlight during these hours and so you want to be strategic about that and just make sure you have sunglasses so that you can still go about your day but trying to minimize that sun exposure um getting well rested

and getting sufficient sleep even if it might be a little bit more fragmented than usual just giving yourself at least a day to acclimate so that I would recommend not scheduling your most important meetings right when you get in or in that first day for athletes they don't want to do maximal exercise because there's a risk that that jetl could increase injury in that acute period so you want your body clock to be able to readjust and then using caffeine and power nap strategically so for example our afternoon 1 to 4:00 is typically when we

have this dip in our alertness now when you get to a new time zone that can occur at a different time point in the day but strategically then you can use CA and and uh Power naaps to be able to help you through those lulls when you're in that new time zone what about sex sleep and sex in bed and that is it because I think so many people actually make the mistake of being in bed and being on their computer on their phone doing other work while they're awake and that actually helps strengthen that

connection that when you're in bed you're awake and your brain will start to associate that so sleep and sex are all that you want in bed everything else should be outside so when we talked about that wind down routine or that racing mind all that should happen outside of bed because you want to actually tease apart that Association that your brain is making of being awake in bed and that will be one small adjustment that's helpful to to get better rest at night but will will sex improve or hurt my sleep I'm thinking you know

CU I'm really trying to get out like should you be in bed with someone does it does it improve your sleep to sleep with someone and does sex have an impact on your sleep cuz I you know speaking from personal experience I think that if I have sex before bed I sleep better I don't think that there's great literature on sleep and sex out there but um I will say that there has been um there's definitely an impact potentially of a bed partner sleeping with you in bed because their movements can affect your sleep if

they snore that can very much affect your waking up during the night time um and then you know with sex I think that that is something anecdotally some people will definitely say it helps them to be able to consolidate their sleep and they feel like the quality is better um but I don't think there's a lot of great studies that are are being funded for research right now what is the most popular question you typically get asked about sleep from people most popular question is napping which we've discussed keep them short 20 to 30 minutes

I I get asked a fair amount about can you oversleep so no we don't think you really you should you can overs sleep when some people say they get say 9 hours or 10 hours and feel much more groggy it's because often they've shifted their sleep schedule or they have an accumulated debt that say built up and then they're finally allowing their body to relax and so now that they're they're they don't have the mask of stimulating activities from their day or their work that can read I read I didn't read a study one of

my podcast guests told me that there is a harm to oversleeping but I think from what I managed to ascertain the studies they were citing just proved that people who sleep for like 10 or 11 hours typically have a higher risk of um disease and mental health but then it's hard to establish cause and effect because if you're in bed for 11 hours maybe you're a depressed and B one would assume you're exercising and moving a little bit less so you probably got a lot of like cardiovascular issues yes so there are studies of looking

at the more extremes of Less hours of sleep and then even more hours of sleep like the 10 hours and obviously there can be other comorbid conditions uh that go along with individuals like who sleep much longer you mentioned you can sleep much longer because of depression or other um chronic health issues and so um that's a different context of thinking about oversleeping I think in the question I typically get is oh I slept one night of 10 hours and I feel worse so I'm never going to do that again and that's actually not true

right I think we want to have just more consistent hours that are timed so you're not having a shift in the bedtime and wake Time by like three hours later um because that could be why you're having that grogginess when you wake up not because you got the 10 hours but because you're waking up up now at 11:00 a.m. instead of your typical you know 8:00 a.m. wake up time um you could be more dehydrated because of that longer time um snoring is one that I get asked a fair amount about is you know is

it completely benign and I would say if you're snoring you should go talk with your primary care doctor and you should potentially ask about getting a sleep study there is Sleep Disorders like obstructive sleep apnea we mentioned before that's incredibly common and that's when that Airway has partial or full collapse and can lead to very fragmented sleep so you can wake up not refresh because you really didn't get quality sleep during the night time and snoring I think in our society has become just an accepted Norm that can happen as you get older but that

is not always the case that it is uh a benign a benign symptom and so um making sure that you talk to your primary care doctor and potentially get a sleep study I think is incredibly important is sleep apnea the the most common um disease disorder you see yes yes it isapa can be incredibly common I believe it's about 26% of people of people in the ages of 30 to 70 and so that as you imagine that's like one in four individuals but many individuals don't actually get tested or diagnosed and then treated until they're

way into their adulthood or even pasted into their 6070s so with asleep apnea often times people will not wake up refreshed they will often feel tired in the daytime they may have a lot of caffeine or have to rely on power knops to keep their alertness up a lot of individuals will have early morning Awakenings so in those 3 4 5:00 in the morning they'll wake up and not realize why they're waking up frequently snoring can be very common if you've ever had a bed partner or a roommate and they've ever noted that you stop

breathing or pause breathing or gasp and choke those are very suggestive that you might have sleep apnea um and again it is incredibly common but very manageable so something that I would highly recommend if you your bed partner your your roommate snore just uh suggest to have um I would suggest they go see their primary care doctor and typically is it people that are slightly overweight that are more likely and susceptible to having sleep apnea yes yes a lot of individuals who are overweight or obese um will be more at risk for Sleep back as

you imagine the collapse of the airway typically is here around the neck and so more weight um typically is is not helpful for for apne but you can also be a very fit healthy young individual so I work with Elite athletes and I have a number of my professional athletes who again are young healthy males but their Anatomy is just more susceptible for this condition what are the um the big rebuttal you get the big excuses that you hear from people I don't have enough time yeah I don't have enough time to sleep okay I

don't have enough time to sleep and what do you think of that one uh I don't think that that's true I think we we all are going to make sacrifices and priorities in our day and I think if you are saying you don't have enough time I think there's ways to be strategic about how you manage your time in the day I think we all have five minutes to implement a windown routine we can all do that at the very least I think all of us can um optim ize our environment I think we all

can invest in some sleep tools I think we can make better choices about how you go about your day so you set yourself up better for sleep so I think that those are just small adjustments but will be huge in terms of what that will mean at night um I hear that you know I will sleep you know I'll sleep in the offseason right now in season is when I want to focus on being my best but really I think that's the a backwards way of thinking about it if you're thinking about optimizing your sleep

when it gets to the season or the postseason when some of the most important games come down the line you're just playing catchup because if you have a sleep that built up and you're just trying to maintain that through the season you actually are at a deficit versus the other guy or growl on the team who has paid that back in the off seon now you have given yourself you know zero sleep debt you're at your best and now you're just trying to maintain that through the season what about injury what if I if I'm

an athlete and I'm underslept are there any studies that suggest I'm more prone to injury there are a few studies that do suggest getting insufficient sleep so under 6 hours there's been more fatigue related injuries in adolescent athletes there's also a study that has looked at under eight hours of sleep still has a increased risk around 1.7 fold higher of inj fold 170% yes yeah of higher risk of injury when you're getting under 8 hours of sleep versus those that got more than 8 hours of sleep and so I think it's unclear exactly why you're

specifically more at risk for injury but I tried to take a look at the biomechanical changes of what happens when athletes are not getting sufficient sleep in one of my early studies um that has explored the biomechanical changes and what we showed is that when you're not getting sufficient sleep for multiple days you have more more variability in your biomechanics yeah so you're moving differently so you're not actually selecting probably your preferred coordination strategy so for example I had them doing a vertical jump and if you're well rested you likely should be able to do

that very consistently as an elite athlete but when you're not well rested it's much more variable so they're moving differently and that may put people at risk for injury they like Landing differently a little bit jumping yeah how their knees their hips um are coordinated together differs and so that may put you at risk for injury down the road but more to come hopefully on that front there's just not that many studies that currently exist I've noticed something recently because recently I've had to get up quite early on a few occas so when I say

early I mean I've had to go get wake up at 4:00 a.m. because I've got a flight at 6:00 a.m. and really interestingly if I so say if I go in bed at like 11:00 p.m. at night and I and I have to wake up at say 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. when I wake up at 3:00 or 4 a.m. I'm really hungry but if I wake up at 8:00 a.m. M I'm not hungry well you are starting your day much earlier so your body clock is starting at a much earlier time than you typically would

versus 8:00 so you almost have what we call socially jetlagged yourself right where you didn't get on an airplane yet but you literally shifted your whole sleep schedule to be an earlier wakeup time and so you can feel some of the symptoms of jet lag where you can have and you can have stomach GI upset you can feel more fatigued you can have those symptoms as if you gotone onto a new time zone and flew there but you hadn't yet if it it almost feels dare I say like hormonal like it because I was trying

to understand what hunger is and hunger is essentially a bunch of hormones isn't it so yes you have certain hormones that regulate your appetite so leptin and gin are two hormones that impact your appetite um gin makes you more hungry leptin feels more satiated if you don't get sufficient sleep these levels can be imbalanced and so that's where people tend to as we've talked about gra gravitate towards you know carb and unhealthy Foods in the later evening time um but also when these are not well balanced that can also lead to weight gain or situations

where you're not able to potentially um regulate your weight appropriately and so when I have individuals who are wondering about not making weight goals I ask them about their sleep and they don't recognize that sometimes being able to address how they sleep will actually help them to get to the weight management goals that they're really striving for Jack what about you we've talked about sleep before how how are you sleeping at the moment I've got pretty good at my sleep but waking up in the middle of the night you spoke about it in terms of

like sleep happena but it feels like it should be normal to wake up so Awakenings actually can be very normal this is a very common question I get asked is you know should I never wake up at night and that's actually not true so you shouldn't necessarily hit your head on the pillow and then you're out for the full night and then never have an Awakening if you wake up you go to the bathroom one time you come back fall asleep in the 5 to 10 minutes great that's actually very normal um so you can

have Awakenings that happen at even in the early morning hours and that can be just a typical part of your sleep cycle because it can be as your transitioning between these sleep stages that you'll have these Awakenings sometimes you'll consciously know that you're awake and other times you will unconsciously awaken um and so something like a wereable might actually show you that you have these Awakenings during the night time that you don't recall um but when it becomes very frequent then you have these Awakenings and over multiple weeks or it makes it more difficult and

challenging than to function in the daytime that's when we get more concerned about Awakenings because there's a number of ways reasons why you can awaken at nighttime um to name a few it could be environmental factors that affect your sleep it could be that you had alcohol you know that right before bedtime maybe there's caffeine that's causing you to be awake there's also just stress or if you just have a racing mind that potentially could cause those Awakenings a bed partner is something that is a common culprit um or underlying sleep apnea that can happen

and so there's early Awakenings that need to be investigated with your doctor how much does um alcohol impact my sleep in percentage times I I don't know the specific statistics of how that's going to impact um the the duration but I will say that when we look at the studies of moderate to high consumption of alcohol that very much has a association with more fragmented sleep more Awakenings during the night time and so the quality of your sleep is significantly impaired so if you're trying to um have an important meeting the following day an important

game or you're just trying to be able to be your best that following day at least try to minimize or eliminate the alcohol or in the sleep in the sleep docks world we say drink when you wake up we'd rather you have that alcohol in the morning or the or the early afternoon not not necessarily right before bed and so um yeah that's that's one of the strategies is to eliminate the alcohol right before sleeping Dr M we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest

not knowing who they're going to leave it for and the question that has been left for you is if you could go back and fix your worst mistake but it would change everything afterwards with no guarantees would you do it no I would not do it I think we make mistakes in life and we learn from them and we adapt and we it can set us off in a different direction but that ultimately is going to influence who we become who we interact with how we build a life forward and I wouldn't change my life

life if I could go back and it could would set me on a completely different trajectory could you think of a worst mistake when I said that did one come to mind or was that a category of there wasn't I maybe I haven't spent a lot of time to try and dive into some of my worst mistakes I definitely have made mistakes along the way and uh obviously would have done some things differently in my personal or professional life but I do think that that is what has made me who I am today right I

think I have tried to learn from those mistakes try not to make them again um and try to figure out how to adapt from there but that has I think set me on a path that uh is where I am today so I wouldn't I wouldn't change that it's so interesting the subject of sleep for me because I I was part of the like burnout Brigade The like badge of honor burnout Brigade for a long period of time and I I definitely thought in my early career when I started my first business around 18 19

20 21 up until probably about I'm going to say up until about 26 I thought that me not sleeping was something to show off and I thought that I was more impressive if I communicated to people how little I slept and how much I was able to accomplish in spite of that I think actually the greatest en enabler to my productivity is like being really obsessive about my sleep and having that rule that I said where nothing in my life unless there's a something that's immovable is booked before 11 o00 and I really hope other

people um after listening to you after going through your work which is all available online really prioritize their sleep because as you've shown through your research and the studies the the impact the very real impact on our lives is so profound maybe one shift in your mindset too that I encourage you but everyone that's listening as well is the way I frame it to athletes is it's a small tweak but if you think about sleep is not the end of today it's the beginning of tomorrow what you do to prepare what you do to try

and get the the duration that you're striving for and how you set yourself up will affect everything about how you function how you interact with individuals and ultimately perform tomorrow if you're willing to do everything it takes for you to be your best sleep has to be foundational in every day and if you're willing to put in that time and that effort you'll reap the benefits that come down the line and it can be completely lifechanging but you have to give yourself that Grace and that patience to be able to make these small adjustments but

as some of my athletes have shown it can be a GameChanger for them it can completely change the trajectory of their career and even life once they actually get quality sleep under their belt and so I challenge everyone to make small adjustments starting tonight and reach out if you have questions but where do we find you uh you can reach me at um Instagram Twitter or x uh Facebook um LinkedIn at Dr Sherry ma d r c h r i Mah or you can find me my website is Dr sherim ma.com thank you so much

I I know that there's a lot of different individuals from various sports teams that listen because I speak to them I was speaking to um some of the guys at Manchester United um two weeks ago in a hotel about from the well-being team about these subjects and the sort of um interconnected subjects of sleep and well-being generally but also I've spoken to people at Chelsea Football Club that listen to the podcast about these themes so I'm I'm convinced there's going to be a lot of athletes and aspiring athletes and just people like me who are

going to benefit profoundly from the work that you do and the research that you've you've done that really shines the light on the importance of sleep which is often misunderstood and is seen as a negotiable part of our lives so thank you so much for the work that you do and I'm very excited to see um where your research and where your studies take you because it will be pioneering research No Doubt thank you so much thanks for having me it's been a pleasure perfect Ted has quite frankly taken the nation by storm a small

green energy drink that you've probably seen popping up through a Tesco or to a waitrose they've grown by almost 10,000% in a very short period of time because people are sick and tired of the typical unhealthy energy drinks and they've been looking for an alternative perfect Ted is the drink that I drink as I'm sat here doing the podcast because it gives me increased focus it doesn't give me crashes which sometimes might happen if I'm having a three four five six hour conversation with someone on the podcast and it tastes amazing it's exactly what I've

been looking for in terms of energy that's why I'm an investor and that's why they sponsor this podcast and for a limited time perfect Ted have given di of CEO listeners only a huge 40% off if you use the code diary 40 at checkout don't tell anybody about this and you can only get this online for limited time so make sure you don't miss out [Music] [Music]