How To Get Better Sleep With Doc Parsley And Chris Guerriero

Chris Guerriero:
Over the past 20 years or so, I’ve built nearly a dozen businesses, four of which are eight figure companies. I’ve traveled around the globe dozens of times I’ve sat in on literally hundreds of boardroom meetings. One of the questions I get asked all the time, is how do I stay “on my game” with so many ventures, so many things in my head when so many other entrepreneurs struggle to scale one company during that same time frame. And I always tell people, pretty much the exact same thing. It’s because I stay inside of my box right inside of that box on my org chart. I don’t play outside of my core competencies. But I think the real answer is because I’ve always studied how to optimize cognitive performance. And I’m really fortunate, I think, to have so many friends who are specialists in brain performance or personal performance or hormone optimization. But when you really talk with them, the foundation, I mean, when you really dig into everything that they’re saying, and when you when you’re when you’re not in talking about their studies, but when you’re out to dinner with them, and they’re just relaxed, what really comes out is they’re the foundation of everything seems to be sleep. So when I first learned that, I really put a lot of study into sleep and how to improve the quality of sleep and how to how to improve the quantity that I sleep that I got, as well as what I did during the day to allow my body, my brain kind of the time that it needed to relax, because I don’t always get the right amount of sleep. And I do that, so that when the time comes for me to be on my game, you know, in the fire in the grind, to make a split second decisions that we need to make every single day to scale companies. I couldn’t do it even when most executives kind of are hitting plateaus. And what I found was, even when you speak to these, I guess sleep experts or I don’t know there’s I’m sure there’s a formal term for it. But sleep experts, what you’re doing is you’re talking to somebody who’s a researcher, and kind of improving upon what they’ve read in books. And that’s like, I guess, when you’re trying to build a body, and you go out there and you read a magazine article, and you don’t really understand the truth about personalizing a diet and a workout program to you. Or like when you’re trying to build a business. And you go out there and you read a book or two, and you don’t really understand what’s really happening behind the scenes. And there’s hundreds of these sleep experts out there who have a wonderful understanding of a handful of scientific experiments, right. But there’s very few people that I found that walk the face of this planet, who have an in depth knowledge of how to sleep in order to improve brain performance, both as a person and also as an executive. And the one guy that I have found that I truly trust beyond a shadow of a doubt with all this is doc parsley, because he’s not just an MD, but he was he’s a former navy seal. And then as a seal He also served as the underground medical officer at the Naval Special Warfare group one and now he’s got an executive health program, who that’s focused on helping high growth entrepreneurs and high level executives just like you and I talked to my their sleep to boost brain function to reduce mental fogginess to live in an amazingly healthy, happy life. So I’m really looking forward to digging into the essence of sleep today during this episode, because I know that whatever we go over today is going to have a profound impact during this next hour on whoever hears it. So this is fun. And Doc, I want to welcome you on and I’m going to start with a question that I asked you even before we started recording, how’d you sleep last night?

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
I slept fantastic. I slept, I slept the best I possibly could. Let’s put it that way.

Chris Guerriero:
So I guess we can’t we can’t beat that. Hey, so Dude, you and I have known each other for, I don’t know, over a year now.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Right,

Chris Guerriero:
And, and always so grateful for your viewpoint on sleep and personal performance. Because it doesn’t just come from this real world application that I was just talking about, you know, from the seals, and in dealing with executives and dealing with sports teams. But more than that, kind of because you and I are executives, we both have companies, we will have teams will have families, we will have a social life. And so I kind of feel like we probably have similar lives. And many have the exact same challenges that might keep us awake. Right. So I was talking with you a little bit before we started recording. And I said we sent out the survey. And I did I sent out a survey to all of our viewers and also to the guys on my board of directors. And we got back a ton of questions. And we put them into four quadrants. So I’m hoping that we could cover I hope we have enough time to go through all four of these quadrants. The first one was the problems associated with not getting enough sleep, but I don’t want to stay there like I want to I want to go through the problems. So that it’s really evident from an executive standpoint, where we stand mentally if we lose an hour or two of sleep. I want to go to the next quadrant then about what’s the right amount of sleep for me, and then how do I get better sleep and Last, what do I do if on those nights that I really just can’t get enough sleep? Right? I’m right. There’s not enough time. It’s too much on my mind. I’m in a busy hotel room that’s noisy, whatever the hell it is. Right? Oh, I’ve got them all. I don’t know, it looks like a blank piece of paper on the video.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Yeah, I’d first like to point out that four quadrants is redundant. So

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Chris Guerriero:
Well, yeah, so I’m sure that that stuff, but it’s but it’s the way my brain was working as I go through all of those questions that came in. So I appreciate you pointing all that out. But,

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
you know, I gotta measure the Chris, what up? What else are we going to do?

Chris Guerriero:
Alright, so you’d said to me one time and I wrote this down. Decision Making ability, right, which is where the prefrontal cortex,

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Prefrontal cortex, the area behind your forehead above your eyes on that front bit,

Chris Guerriero:
Right. And so decision making and executive function, you said, you said something about, if you miss an hour of sleep, you feel a little bit drained, maybe, or you feel maybe a little bit off your game, you miss an hour sleep two nights in a row, maybe the same thing three nights in a row, maybe the same thing. But after that, you don’t realize that you’re underperforming anymore. So if you have missed a little bit of sleep consistently, like somebody like myself, I know you and your past also, we’ve been through one 510 years, where we were just busting our ass growing companies, or we were traveling around the globe, or we were doing stuff and, and we had that consistency of not doing it. But we didn’t realize we were underperforming.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Right Yeah. I mean, the self awareness component is huge. There, there decades of sleep deprivation study just started kind of at the beginning of sleep medicine, which isn’t very old field, it’s about, you know, 70 years old, about 70 years of doing research on sleep. What it means. I mean, just think about it. 75 years ago, nobody had any idea what happened when you slept. You just like, yeah, you closed your eyes, you went to sleep, and you woke up and nobody knew what was going on. So they just started doing this research. And one of the things that they did really early on is they wanted to see like, what is the actual detriment to your performance when you don’t get enough sleep? And what can we compare it to. And they chose intoxication. So they compared it to being drinking. So, you know, take one drink and compare it to somebody who doesn’t, you know, who’s sleep deprived, whatever amount of time. And over the years, it’s panned out to be really consistent over decades, all the research comes back right around the same thing. You know, it sort of at the end of our day, we’re kind of getting to this slightly inebriated state. If you’re up, if you’re up for 18 hours, you’re performing your performances on par with somebody who has like a 0.5 blood alcohol level. And then if you stay up for 24 hours, you’re kind of like, get around that that illegal or legal limit, whatever you want to call it, of the 0.8 to maybe 0.1. And then if you stay up for two days in a row, it’s like you’re, you know, an alcoholic, just like completely. 0.3 bloods, all of a sudden, you just, you’re a mess. But the interesting thing is you don’t know like, you don’t recognize it, you don’t know, yet. So when you don’t recognize it, your, your performance is bad. So one of the things that is beginning is they first what they did is they sleep adapted people. And so they took people and put them in a dark, cold dark room for 12 hours a day, 14 hours a day and just said, you know, lay here and sleep or don’t sleep, whatever. But you only get to come out of that out of the room 10 hours a day, right? And they would people would the average person would sleep 12 hours a day for, you know, weeks. And over the course of weeks, it would whittle down to where everybody was sleeping eight hours a day, eight and a half hours a day kind of ride around there. And that happened consistently. Every time they did this study, I’m going to give people all the sleep they want. They and they end up getting around eight and a half hours a day. And that’s where that number really comes from. And then they would test them what you’re what you’re talking about at the beginning of this question. They would test them on anything like they teach them a new skill, or they test them on something they already skilled on, and just see what their performance is like. And then the next night, they only got six hours of sleep instead of the eight they needed. And then they would go test them in the morning. And they do worse. And they would ask them how they thought they did. And I said I did worse. I was tired. I didn’t feel very good. I did poorly. And it only takes about three days to your point three to four days of doing it. And by the fourth day, they’re like I think I did as well as I’ve ever done. I totally adapted to this. I feel fine. I’m sure I did as good as I’ve ever done. And they’re like, no, you’re here’s the graph, you’re still getting worse. And they would argue with the inch. Literally they argued with the researchers it’s well documented many times they would argue with them. But then that got correlated to the more important question because people are People are like, well, I don’t stay up for 24 hours or I don’t like pride myself a big blocks. So he’s like, okay, just take away one hour? Well, actually, it was. I’ll tell you about two hours. So six hours, which is what the average American sleeps right now, right? Six hours a night for 11 nights in a row, you perform exactly like somebody who hasn’t slept for 24 hours, 22 nights in a row of six hours a night, which is really common, that’s the average people are sleeping. You perform as though you haven’t slept for two days. Which is like drunk, drunk. So your executive function, your ability to reason your ability to project out and make good decisions, you know, solve problems. Everybody thinks as they get older, like, I just can’t, I’m getting older, I can’t think I can’t remember why I walked in the room, I can’t do mental math anymore. 90% of it is probably sleep deprivation, chronic sleep deprivation.

Chris Guerriero:
A so if you don’t mind, I’m going to I’m going to jump in and ask you to go back one second. So let’s just say, if we were to choose an amount of time, we were, say maybe eight and a half hours or so. And I know very well, that depending on the amount of stress you have in your life, depending on the amount of you know, your diet, and everything else will dictate whether it’s seven and a half, eight, eight and a half, nine hours, whatever it is, but let’s just choose one eight and a half hours. What if you’re in bed for that amount of time? Yet you you’re up two or three times during the night? But how does that affect our we net or we subtract we obviously subtracting them at a time. So I may be in bed for eight hours, but only sleeping? Six and a half hours.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Right yeah, So with, with my clients, I usually shoot for time in bed. So if I can get somebody to stay in bed for eight and a half hours, I consider that a win. So that would be a successful night asleep. But the, to answer your question, there, there are several. I mean, I could I could think of four or five things off the top of my head that I would track through the night if I were going to say this is what this is where the benefit of the sleep is coming from this pathway like this is the thing that you’re doing. One of those one of those things is simply lowering stress hormones. Most people have heard of the fight or flight pathway, or fight or flight event, reflex response, whatever you wanna call it. And that is essentially maximum stress hormones, something happens it’s a threat to your life, or to your well being a significant threat to your well being or somebody that you care love about. And every resource, your body has an every resource in your brain, focus on that, and only that matters, and you kind of become superhuman and become stronger, faster reflexes get better, more endurance pain threshold changes, like you, you kind of become the strongest, most capable version of you. Why don’t we run around like that all the time. Because you’re consuming your body like you, you become catabolic, you’re using your body as a fuel source, you’re using stuff that’s meant, you know, it’s like blowing all of your savings all at once, right? Like every, every asset, every financial asset you have, you’re liquidating for like this moment, because if you don’t get away from the lion or tiger, it doesn’t matter if you can fight off infection or reproduce or, you know, repair your damaged tendons or whatever, right. And so when you sleep, the exact so that by catabolic, I mean that you’re using your body as a fuel source, you’re breaking down, if you stayed in fight or flight, and you were catabolic with super high stress hormones, you’d probably kill you in about, you know, a week like it would, you would just consume all your resources in and it would kill you. So the exact opposite of that. It would be completely incapable body that can’t fight off anything and can’t get away from anything but is maximally anabolic, it’s growing, it’s getting better, it’s repairing, it’s fixing everything. Well that’s what sleep is that’s deep sleep. So one of the pathways that we’re doing is just lowering stress hormones. So if you are if you get in bed and you sleep, your intention is to sleep great and a half hours and you sleep for six and a half out of that. But the rest of the time you’re in bed, you’re not worried you’re not stressing out over stuff you’re like doing meditation or breath work or progressive muscle relaxation or just whatever it is. Your keeping your stress hormones low and then when you fall back asleep, you’re falling into a deeper level of sleep because slightly elevated just slightly elevated stress hormones, decrease the quality of your sleep. So a lot of people tell you to get out of bed if you can’t go back to sleep. We could go we can get into that sort of the utility stuff. And whatever quadrant that’s supposed to be and but the you know that the point of being one of the points of being in bed is to keep Guess what minds low. So you’re, you’re doing much better that way than getting out of bed simply because you feel like you can’t sleep and allowing your brain to start waking up and allowing your stress hormones to start increasing and becoming more catabolic. Because basically, if you don’t get enough sleep tomorrow, so comes the whole point of sleeping tonight is to prepare you for tomorrow. You don’t get enough sleep tomorrow. So comes you stuff to do tomorrow, well, if you didn’t repair, if you didn’t put the resources away, how are you going to get through tomorrow, you’re gonna do it with stress hormones, you’re gonna elevate your stress hormones, and then when you have elevated stress hormones, it’s going to break you down faster, you’re going to have a harder time sleeping, you have a hard time sleeping, you get poor sleep, you’re gonna have higher stress hormones.

Chris Guerriero:
Hey, so that was fascinating. And it, it answers a lot of my personal questions about what you do during that, during that 30 minutes or 60 minutes that you wake up in the middle of the night. And you’re kind of like basically, staring off into the ceiling, writing figure out what to think about in order to go back to sleep. But so what to think about is to anything that just or the absence of thought is probably the best to keep your stress hormones down to just kind of relax, right body and mind. Rather, you’re even if you’re not getting 100% of the benefit, you’re getting at least 20 or 30, or 40, or 50% of the benefits.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
So if you told me, if you gave me the option of getting six and a half hours of sleep, and then just running about my day, or you said you can have six and a half hours of sleep in two hours of meditation, it’s much better. Yeah, I should be kind of a no brainer.

Speaker 01 :
So let’s backtrack and say, I want to go back to before you got to that point. And we were talking about performance during the day. Because I’ve got a lot of obviously we’ve got a lot of people on our team who come in, and they may not have a great day, a great night, or they may go out and celebrate because they had such a great day that the day before. Right?. And so they don’t sleep again that night. And they come in and they live on coffee. And they still believe that they perform as well. So performance wise, caffeine may keep me people moving. I think that decision making capabilities that they have is still diminished. But I mean, this is more of a question that misstatements And then how and then and then assuming that the drinking of coffee stops early enough that they could still get some kind of sleep at night? What kind of damage are we doing by going through that cycle?

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Yeah, well, I mean, that that’s, that’s hard to quantify. But I can I can talk about the process.

Chris Guerriero:
And by the way, I don’t mean to interrupt you. But I think I think one of the things that I’m hoping you touch on is the hormonal damage that is being done by the caffeine or whatever they’re taking to stay awake. That then will affect the entire body in mind over the course of 24 hours, right? Because we need whatever amount of time to work, whatever amount of time to sleep in order to repair so that we could go back to work and continue to live our lives, right. But hormones, being not optimized, because of the way we affect ourselves during that 24 hours really has a big impact on everything.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Right, So the effect of coffee is kind of twofold. It’s more than that the two major. So I’ll every cell in our body uses an energy source called ATP adenosine triphosphate. adenosine is the backbone molecule. And it has three phosphate groups on it. And every time you take out phosphate, it’s a big energy burst in your saga. So use that as a fuel source and then we have to reproduce ATP. And, and that’s what our that’s what our food and nutrients essentially refers to reproduce ATP. But when you break down ATP to ADP would do two and then a MP is one. So ATP to ADP to a MP and then it’s just a it’s just adenosine. Now when adenosine is floating around in your brain, your brain registers that as there’s a there’s a deficiency in energy, right? Because we have a bunch of adenosine, we don’t have enough ATP, we just have this background molecule we need to be making more ATP. And that’s going to happen at the highest level while we’re asleep. So adenosine floating around your brain makes you feel sleepy. And like almost everything in your body, like any kind of chemical that’s going to affect your cell is going to bind to a receptor right? So dancing floating around, it’s going to bind to a receptor, it’s going to pull it into the cell that’s going to do it does. So coffee, caffeine just binds that receptor and it blocks it. It doesn’t do anything about it adenosine. adenosine keeps building up, but it just it just occupies the receptor. So adenosine can’t bind the receptor. And so your brain doesn’t realize that you’re tired, and that makes you feel less tired, doesn’t do anything about how tired you actually are. It doesn’t do anything about the energy that you actually have now The other thing that does is it stimulates, as you alluded to stimulates the adrenal hormones. And most of the time, we’re talking about stress, we talked about cortisol, which is a major, which is a major stress hormone. It’s actually a very positive hormone. But in excess, it’s, it’s damaging. But also epinephrine and nor epinephrine. epinephrine is essentially adrenalin primarily affects your, your body below the neck, below the brain. nor epinephrine is essentially adrenaline for the brain. So you’re kind of putting adrenaline into your brain and causing things to rev up, which is actually causing an increase in energy consumption, right, because you’re sort of ramping up the energy, you’re pouring nitrous into your engine. Yeah, like going faster, but you’re burning stuff up. So when you when, so what if you burn the midnight oil, you wake up really early, and you’re using that to compensate. You’re using caffeine to compensate. Keep in mind that you’re still running in a deficit. And you’re and anytime you’re running in a deficit, you’re building up more waste products. And then the brain one of the big things that we build up are these, these protein structures like beta amyloid, and tau proteins, which are associated with dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, all these, you know, not Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. And so when those when those build up, they don’t get, they don’t get broken back down. As far as, as far as science has shown, like, there’s some suggestion that maybe there’s a few things that you could do. But there would be like interventions, like something that a doctor could do to you, that could decrease the amount of proteins in your those proteins. But by and large, it looks like they’re kind of permanent. So if you think about it is just like every time you damage your brain, you’re just leaving a little bit of like a tiny scar, like a pinpoint scar in your brain. And you just keep adding those up, you know, eventually, it’s a death of 1000 cuts, like you’re damaging yourself. You know, there is a way that this body’s designed to operate on the planet, it evolved in this planet over, you know, hundreds of 1000s of years to be on this planet in a certain way, do certain things be awake at a certain time, be asleep at a certain time eat certain things move a certain way. And the closer you can approximate that one would think that’s the best this body can do on this planet. And so we there’s all sorts of compensatory things we can do. And I don’t, I don’t suggest for a minute that anybody can live like our ancestors did, like that’s not realistic, you know, but that would be ideal, right? The ideal would be here. And then there’s reality, because there’s limitations. And then in between those two, that’s where we, you know, we use mitigation, and that’s where we supplement, you know, whether it’s supplementing with nutritional supplements, or gadgets, or behavioral modification, or, you know, tracking data, like whatever we’re doing, but we try to close that gap. And that’s, you know, that’s what I do in my practice is try to close that gap and, and all aspects of your life because we can’t really live in ideal life. And then I also just kind of, I kind of believe that the prey to distribution is so ubiquitous, because it should be ubiquitous, and it’s the way the world works. And so I really, I really have everybody in every area, just, you know, go for being a perfect 80% of the time, and then just realize that 20% of the times that you go to the answer to your last question in there 20% of time, you’re just not going to get it together, like life’s not going to work out the way and you’re going to, you want it to and you’re going to sleep four or five hours a night for a few nights in a row. But the more the more the, the more the more of your total time in life that you’re optimized, the more resilient you are to being able to be outside of your out of the optimal.

Chris Guerriero:
Hey, you said you were talking about toxins, and then you went into it, which I thought was an amazing analogy, death by 1000 cuts right inside of your brain, the toxins that you’re talking about, does that have to do with? And I’m going to get this wrong, but what was it called? The, the, when your brain washes itself? Is it the glymphatic? system?

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Yeah. Glymphatic, Yeah, so what one of the things that happens when you go to sleep, there’s a there are neurons in your brain that are kind of like the star shaped somewhat rigid neurons. And they they’re, they kind of hold the structure of the brain together. And when you first go into sleep, and there’s deep sleep, and REM sleep, and we can talk about other cycles if you want to. But the those cells that hold the structure, they shrink, they can tract by about 30% and then that allows the cerebral spinal fluid to flow in areas where it was maybe blocked off before and that flushes out a lot of your that’s how you flush out your toxin. So when your first sleep cycle is primarily deep sleep, and a tiny bit of REM sleep. And that deep sleep is very, like that’s very physiologically restorative. So that’s when you’re getting rid of waste products. You know, flushing out a bunch of waste products in your brain but also from your body because you know, a cell is just a miniature version of you, it takes in food, it does work and it excretes waste. So every cell is producing waste and you have to be able to get it all out of your body and our blood flow does it our lymphatics do it obviously our urine urinary and GI tract like those all do it. But you know, there’s the gunplay addiction, the brain that does kind of the same thing. So the faster you think about it, like garbage piling up, the faster you faster, you pull that away, not only do you get rid of the stink faster, but there’s not as much residual crud leftover, right? So it’s like it, like the longer it sits around, the more damaging it is because it is a toxin like it is interfering with how that cell is working. And it could be aging, that cell sort of prematurely.

Chris Guerriero:
And those toxins could be caused by if the if I’m correct stresses, right, things like that, during the course of the day.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Yeah, they’re caused simply by being alive, right, by being awake, you know, when, when you’re using anything in your body, you know, the more you use your brain, the more toxins you’re going to build up in your brain, because the higher the energy consumption in the brain, and essentially, the more food you eat, the more waste you produce, your cells are the same way. So if you’re in a high metabolic state, whether that’s because you’re stressed out, you’re on a bunch of stimulants, you’re sleep deprived, and you’re just running high on

Chris Guerriero:
Coffee or taking other stimulants could increase the amount of talk right in your brain, And then is there other any other ways to get to put yourself into that state where you’re going to addict system is actually, you know, doing that pulsing that flushes,

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
As far as far as I know, that’s the only time it’s happening is during deep sleep. Now deep sleep is, in stages, three and four are considered theta and delta, if you’re really good at meditating, people can get into theta. I don’t know they, I guess maybe if you like really gurus can get into delta. But mainly it’s people can get into theta. As far as I know, there’s there hasn’t been any research to say like, you know, when you’re in theta, are you if you’re in theta, and you’re awake, right? Because essentially, meditation means your body’s asleep, but your brains awake. Right. So are you get Are you getting rid of that? I don’t I don’t know the answer to that. But it wouldn’t be a reasonable, it wouldn’t be an unreasonable assumption to think that it could be helpful.

Chris Guerriero:
Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, but I’m not I’m not a yogi, like to the point where I could get there, clearly. So I was looking for a hack. I was hoping for a little hack. You’re like, well, I feel heavy.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Have you ever? I mean, have you ever used any of the audio? guidance weights? Absolutely. Like to die on a beach? Like, those have been proven to be able to put you in theta? I know that at least holosync? Was, you’re familiar with them? Right? Yeah. So I know his was validated to actually get people into a theta brainwave state. And I, I would assume they are there are others. But that’s the only one I know for sure.

Chris Guerriero:
That’s awesome. Hey, So one thing before we move off of, you know, the problems with not getting enough sleep, because I think this is going to be profound. We’ve talked a lot about, you know, the toxins, we talked a lot about the fact that your performance is so poor, and you don’t even realize it if you’re just lack lacking a little bit of sleep. I have a, I have a CFO inside of one of our companies. And he’s wonderful. He’s great guys, a good friend. He’s been with us for, I don’t know, 1213 years. And we always have a conversation about health, because he is an overweight guy, and he understands it. And he’s always trying to find a way to improve his health to get better, do better with his diet do better with his exercise constantly. It’s like a it’s like a roller coaster. And we were sitting down to have dinner maybe a year ago. And he finally began to stabilize his weight and feel much healthier about his body. And the conversation was this and you’d be proud of me. Because this was shortly after you and I met and I happened I don’t know if I was talking about you. Or if I was just talking about some something that you and I were talking about. But the change that I had suggested that made a difference was his sleep because the dude never slept. And he had this theory, and I hate this theory and I’m sorry to even verbalize this. He had a theory that if he had a glass of wine with dinner and help them sleep at nighttime, but his sleep was so poor, it was it was shitty. So the guy is now he’s got a handle on his weight. It’s not perfect, but he’s got his handle on his weight. So I know that there are studies that have been done that prove that if you’re lacking in sleep, your body is like 40 or 50, or whatever, percent less effective at burning fat? And I don’t I didn’t hear that from you. But I know that.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Yeah, I mean it. When I was talking about that sleep adaptation where they test like they had people say for a long time, and then they tested them didn’t matter if it was cognitive or physical, right, the performance sucked, like so you lose, you lose strength, you lose endurance, you lose cognitive ability, by not sleeping. The mechanisms by which you lose them are sort of complex, but one of the most obvious things is what you’re talking about really is anabolic activity. So anabolic meaning you’re taking small things and making big things out of them catabolic, you’re taking big things and breaking them down. So like eating eating steak, and that converting to muscle made taken amino acids and building more muscle in your body. That’s anabolic, using your muscle as a as a fuel source for amino acids, because you’re, you know, starving or, you know, under stress is nutritionally deprived, that’s catabolic. So the anabolic hormones most people think of as like anabolic steroids, like things like testosterone and growth hormone. These things make you stronger, make you more powerful, that increase your muscle size, they’re anabolic, they’re causing growth. And about, I don’t know exactly what the number is, which somewhere between 90 to 95% of all anabolic hormones are secreted during deep sleep. So when you aren’t sleeping well, or if you aren’t sleeping enough, and in the weird that kind of an interesting thing is if you stay up really late, and you sleep deprive yourself that waste, you go to bed at 2am. And then you get up at, you know, whatever eight or something, you’re getting your six hours that way versus going to bed early and waking up super early. If you go if you if you lose, if you stay up late, you lose more deep sleep, if you if you go to bed early, but get up super early, you lose more REM sleep, REM sleeps, primarily restoring the brain and cognition, emotions, things like that.

Chris Guerriero:
And can you can you repeat that those if you go to if you go to bed, right

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
So just think about that just break the night in half. So the first four hours of sleep is deep sleep, and the second four hours is REM sleep. REM sleep is really about cognition, forming new memories, making durable memories, categorizing emotional events. That’s brain kind of restoration and organization. Deep Sleep is the super anabolic period at the beginning. It’s like that’s when we’re flushing out the waste products. That’s when we’re replenishing nutritional stores. And we’re we’re setting what you’re alluding to, we’re setting up what’s called fuel partitioning. So when I eat food, you know, if you break it down into the macros, like what is my body going to do with every with every, you know, fat molecule that I eat? What is it going to do with every carbohydrate? What you’re gonna do with it every amino acid protein structure, like where does it go? And what does my body do to it that’s dictated the night before. So the night before things like ghrelin sensitivity and leptin sensitivity, right? So my body fat, secretes a hormone called leptin to tells my brain how much fat I have. Now, if leptin is super high all the time, if any hormones super high, my brain will quit responding to it, it’ll become desensitized to it, and then it sets it causes my leptin levels to need to be higher before my brain is going to start changing fuel partitioning to where I’m not adding more fat. So you’re, it’s really just a desensitization to this regulating hormone that should be saying, Oh, we don’t need any more body fat. And then it kind of like it just becomes more and more dull blunted system so that you can hold more and more fat over the course of your life before your brain tries to change fuel partitioning. And then girl and set your hunger. So when you’re sleep deprived, you will crave more food, right? Your leptin sensitivity is low. So it’s just like insulin sensitivity, just like diabetes. With insulin is the same process going on your body’s telling your brain we have lots of fat, your brains not picking up on it. So you crave fat, and you crave carbohydrates because that’s where energy comes from. And if your brains tired, then you want to blunt that off. And that’s my theory is that that’s where coffee and donuts come from. It’s like it’s filling all those needs, right? These are all like these are all the major deficiencies you’re waking up with, like oh, put a ton of sugar in there, a ton of fat in there and block it with a block that fatigue with caffeine.

Chris Guerriero:
That’s crazy. So that’s crazy. So insightful. As I’m going to break it down to just, there’s so much in there. I’m going to break it down and just repeat one thing. The first. The first and I know this is inaccurate, but the way you blocked it down with the first four out Right, or body repair, basically, the second four hours or so. And obviously, it’s not four hours, it’s your up and down like this.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
It’s gradually shifting that way, like when you first go to sleep is like 80% deep sleep, when you the last hour before you wake up like a REM, and it’s like it’s gradually transitioning that way over the night right now.

Chris Guerriero:
And I was talking to somebody a long time ago about this. And they said something about, you know, back in caveman days, the, the analogy that they used was that the reason why your body or your brain is set up like that is because if you only repaired physically, that you only got a few hours of sleep, and then the saber toothed Tiger came after you, you’d still you’d be physically prepared enough to get the hell up and run away.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Right, Because when you’re in fight or flight, your brains useless anyway. So like, if you can, if you can restore the body like that’s, that’s the better thing to do and reaction, and what and what your body and what your buddy was doing with a wine. Again, one of the big problems with sleep is that there’s a poor subjective experience of it that I mean, honestly, if you sleep really well, you don’t have any idea how well you slept, right? Because there should be no memory of sleep. If you slept really well, like you turned off all awareness, and then all of a sudden, you are aware again. So how well did you sleep? What happens with what happens with alcohol, alcohol is a toxin, right. And as it gets broken down, it becomes a different toxin, it has to all sort of be cleared, it elevates your stress hormones, and it elevates it. And it elevates your stress hormones, and it elevates inflammation. And it elevates your heart rate because of the stress hormones. And it’s kind of making you more awake. But it’s a sedative, so you feel like you slept better, but you actually like if we do a sleep study on you, you do you did worse. And alcohol really diminishes deep sleep. So we when you go to sleep slightly intoxicated, you can lose up to 40% of deep sleep, which means you’re going to wake up with about 40% a deficiency and testosterone 40% deficiency and growth hormone. Even if you slept eight hours. And if you if you just deprive yourself of a couple of hours of sleep, you still wake up with a hormone deficiency. So if you’re getting short sleep, and you’re doing that, you’re I mean, you’re waking up sort of like a diabetic, with low anabolic hormones and a dysfunctioning brain. And then if you use sleep drugs that interferes with REM sleep, mainly, you’ll lose, you could lose up to 80% of your REM sleep by using sleep drugs, but you also lose about 20% deep and then alcohol is the opposite. If you’re drunk when you go to sleep, you lose about 80% of your deep sleep and 20% of your REM sleep.

Chris Guerriero:
Okay, so

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
A lot of people use alcohol and take sleep drugs. Exactly. And now I do I’ve done sleep study on them. And they have zero deep sleep and zero REM sleep, they will have a sleep study that comes back 99% stage two sleep, which is the transitional phase in between those two.

Chris Guerriero:
So when we’re talking about being an alpha in business, or an alpha in life, right, because we are family, men we are we are businessmen we have we have all these different components to our life. We’re looking at sleep improving brain function, body function and sexual function. Without good sleep, we lose all three of those to some degree, depending on how much we’re losing.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
I mean, I also I mean, I know this is it may not be obvious that there’s a part of brain function but your emotional stability and your ability to communicate. Those are both super like those are impacted with a single a single hour of short sleep so just one night you sleep great every night and then one night you sleep seven instead of eight hours. It’s measurable the next day your that your emotional stability, your ability to recognize other people’s emotions when you’re talking to them. Your ability to communicate your verbal fluency and your attention your ability to understand what other people are saying. It’s measurably impacted by one missing one hour of sleep.

Chris Guerriero:
In your emotions and that’s by the way the excuse that I use anytime I’m sitting in front of a movie with a friend and it’s really sad and I tear up I didn’t get a sleep last night. I don’t usually do this
Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
It’s true though. Like when I’m when I’m a little sleep deprived I’m definitely more emotionally drained much more likely to cry it like get teared up or something. Yeah.

Chris Guerriero:
So you so I keep I should be writing notes more notes because I you’re saying things that I want to come back to a lot of things you said something about taking sleep aids and which I’m totally against I think I told you a while back. I tried Ambien one time because I was I was going back and forth on somebody 24 hour flights, you know, to Asia to, to New Zealand, to Australia to all these different places all around the globe. And a good friend of mine who was who was a who’s a doctor said, you know, you should just in case because you’re going to land tomorrow or in a couple of days, you’re going to land, you’re going to be on stage that day, you want to make sure you get a good night’s sleep. Why don’t you try this on the plane I did. That was the one and only time I ever got jetlag. It’s hit me up, never take it ever again. However, I do take something every night. And I’m not trying to pitch your product, although I’m happy to do it, because I love your product. I do take sleep remedy like you what I love and I and this is going to turn into sounding like a commercial and I’m using it as an educational tool. we’re nowhere near done with the content yet, but your you went out there and worked with seals for so many different years, in order to try to put together the little nutrients here and here and here and the right amounts. And you told me that you had these guys, and these ladies taking handfuls of supplements basically, to offset all these little things, including PTSD, but certainly not only PTSD, but the small amount of sleep that these people were getting. And then they had to be on fire like, like, the seals came to you and said, I need these people to be on their game basically. Right, But they’re not sleeping. So they’re not on their game, I need you to you know, figure this shit out. And you did and then you put the stuff together. And now you have sleep remedy which I take on a regular not on a regular basis, but when I need it, right it and it is a combination of a lot of different things. So how does how does a natural supplement like that? compete? Does that help me repair? Does that help get into that frame without the negative effects of like an Ambien or something like that.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Right, so, so the intention of what I believe to be is actually lower, but very low reversed of that what happened is guys came to me and they were complaining about their performance issues, and they didn’t know why they weren’t performing well. Neither did I. I mean, as a Western trained medical physician I could recognize diseases and treat diseases but they didn’t have a disease they just weren’t performing as well as they thought they should wanted to. And it took me a lot of interviews with a lot of people before it kind of stood out in my mind that they were all taking Ambien. And I was like, I wonder if that’s important. And I didn’t know anything about sleep like zero I got, I had no idea what happened when you slept, and I was still at the mindset that there was a luxury and you could, that’s the first thing you get rid of when you’re new time crunch like just get rid of, like, I’ll get up early infinitude or stay up late and finish or whatever. So when I started doing research and teaching myself about sleep like doing a whole new world, a whole new world and unfortunately I was a doctor for kind of a celebrity organization and I could call up anybody out there read their book or watch their TED talk and say, Hey, can I, can I consult with you kind of come train with you whatever and so I got to learn a lot, really, really quickly, ramp up my knowledge base, but all I really did with my product if you think about the way the way we’re designed to sleep, like every mammal on this planet uses the sun as its cues when be asleep and when to be awake. And for us when the blue light goes away, that’s the trigger for our brain to say oh it’s time to start getting ready to sleep well that process when we study hunter gatherers today which still exist in pretty large numbers are surprising to me how many 1000s of people have never been exposed to electricity and still build their own shelters and Hunter on animals and they’ve got young random roots and tubers and stuff they can find these people still exist and we studied their sleep habits. And if you’ve ever gone camping, you’ll recognize this and yourself if you go camping without electricity. It takes about three hours, to feel sleepy after the sun goes down. And the Buddha just an ideal world again that was the example with our ancestors like you live, ideally, that’s what we would do, but because there’s a cascade of changes those cascades of changes takes hours so the first thing that happened is, melatonin and people know melatonin helps you sleep, not is not true at all melatonin initiates the cascade of events that lead to feeling sleepy. If any of those Cascades are broken, meaning there’s a nutritional deficiency there there’s a region of your brain that is overstimulated or kind of miss wired and it doesn’t work like melatonin won’t do anything for you. So all I did was my product say okay, well, what’s building up in the brain. Why is it building up what’s building up and so what happens when melatonin starts initiating everything, it’s changing all sorts of regions of your brain, it’s getting rid of what we call weight promoting neurotransmitters, things like histamine that’s why anti histamines help you go to sleep. It’s getting rid of epinephrine, norepinephrine which you’re right stimulants and it’s changing your brain’s chemistry, it’s what’s calling depolarizing yourselves with a neuropeptide called GABA gamma amino butyric acid is just abbreviated capital G a BA, that goes across your entire neocortex and the neocortex is what you think of when you see a picture of a human brain that wrinkly other side, like that’s the neocortex. That’s what makes us the smartest animal on the planet, the prefrontal cortex of that bit makes us the smartest, but all of that is essentially sensory motor like everything you see that’s all sensory motor is processing our visions processing our hearings processing, her sense of touch and is processing our interaction with the world like how we’re interacting with our senses. So Gabba depolarizes ourselves and it makes it harder for the cells to fire so when you think about it. All the being asleep really means is it a lack of being awake, so your eyes still work, you’re still working. No, he’s still working, your sense of touch to words your muscles like everything still works. Just, it gets community gets pushed down so that your brain isn’t wasting energy there it’s what your, your, what you’re putting our energy towards re restoring your new branding and getting prepared for tomorrow. And so all I did with mine is go okay, well, we don’t want to just give people melatonin because if you give people melatonin and you don’t I forgiven him on not for too much and if you give them too much then that same downregulation of receptor things happen, they become desensitized to it just like we’re talking about with leptin, because Melatonin is a hormone and then your brain quits responding to it and then what you’re taking isn’t enough and then what you produce isn’t enough. Just give them a dusting of melatonin, but then you, you support the melatonin production pathway so that they can keep making their own melatonin throughout the night. Melatonin is important for all eight hours. And so that, that pathway, people know like to tryptophan Turkey coma right so drifter Dan McCann’s five hydroxy tryptophan, five hydroxyl tryptophan, with the help of vitamin d3 and magnesium, then becomes serotonin. Serotonin then we come to melatonin. So you have your melatonin production pathway supported some gaba there to help slow down everything and then my, my new formulation I added Phosphatidylserine in there, which is a peptide did help, that will decrease the amount of cortisol your body produces that’s helping them stress, just because most people are stressed, but that’s all it was. So the seals really helped me figure out what quantities and ratios, because that just wasn’t out there. You can find studies of each one of those individually but how do they work together, we didn’t know I was having them go all over house creation, because this is before it before Amazon they’re having to go to three or four different stores to buy capsules and this powders and that liquids in this like really been haranguing me to make a product is how was the only reason I even have that product, because I was wanting to get them off my back so the guy, you know, the entrepreneur thought, like, I’ll just start that out real quick, and then put some money there it’ll be automated in a year, I won’t give it a second thought to be some passive cash flow and yeah that was six years ago.

Chris Guerriero:
Yeah, I love it, and we’re very grateful that you went through all that trouble with that, because it’s helping me as an executive now. And if anybody wants to saw I’m not, I’m not, I know that you didn’t you didn’t necessarily come here to Pitch Anything. They should go to Doc parser.com They should check that out, they should go to Doc parsley.com forward slash stress, because there is a great free PDF that you give away that actually helps people to stay asleep and get to sleep. Right, But So what did I want to go with that. What was the next question. Darn it. I had something really really good so let’s go into how do I get a really good night’s sleep, because I’ve got a, I had a buddy, still do. But he doesn’t do this any longer. A couple of years ago we went away on a trip together with a bunch of other friends of ours, and we were talking about sleep and he goes I’m gonna I’m bout ready to take something to go to sleep. And so he was gonna leave, where everybody else was go take this thing and go to sleep, and I’m like well what the heck are you taking. I thought he was gonna say, you know, like, like a sleeping pill, he was not taking melatonin. And I said, Oh, that’s interesting, you know, you take that you don’t take that every single night he goes, I’ve been taking it every single night for over a year, I get the best sleep of my life. And I said well how much do you take, he goes anywhere from 10 to 30 milligrams I said wait a second, you realize, are you talking about 30 Are you talking about point three, because often he goes oh no it’s 10. I They’re 10 milligrams, tablets, and I take 123 I’m going to take three tonight because I want to be on my game when we were going out tomorrow, like Wow, holy crap dude. Like that is that’s, that’s horrible now from what you’re telling me, not only is that horrible, but it’s also desensitizing everything so, so it’s a strong possibility that if he were still doing that he wouldn’t be getting nearly the amount of facts, as he was before.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Right, well not only would he have to escalate his dose, but the more important thing is that if he your body’s a smart machine and if it’s using a receptor for, if there’s a hormone floating around that you need to receptor for your body it’s going to produce those receptors in the quantity that needs to that’s a protein structure it takes up cellular energy to make and maintain so that’s work to be done and if, if you have a million times more hormones, than you need, then how many receptors or you only need a couple of receptors to down regulate receptors. And now you take away that and all he has is his brains normal production. It won’t be anywhere close because he’ll have so few receptors it’d be as though he has, you know, a 90% deficiency in melatonin production because he doesn’t have any receptors to bind it up, you know, and people say oh I feel great when I take this overdose of any hormone. No kidding. I mean, if you took a gram of testosterone every day you would feel really virile and strong every day for quite a while until you died a couple of your heart. Your heart exploded in me or your we get you stroked out or whatever but you would feel amazing, because you’re going super physiologic yourself. So it’s always a bad, it’s always a bad idea to do that, and it’s most likely although it’s really hard to prove because you would have to actually drill holes in people’s brains in sample. It’s most likely true that you’re producing way less melatonin if you take too much melatonin. From the time the sun goes down until the time you wake up in the morning, your brain is going to produce about five micrograms. Not even milligram’s like five micrograms of melatonin. So if you’re taking 30 milligram’s, whatever that is that 600 times what you need.

Chris Guerriero:
So let’s not stay too much too I think everybody who’s listening to this understands that that that’s a, that’s a bad idea. But what so what about GABA so you’re talking about gamma amino butyric acid, right Yes, It does that does that, then cause that the D regulation or desensitization.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
If you go supervision physiological and so the sleeping drugs and the benzodiazepines are things like Xanax and Valium, those were kind of the first sleeping drug, and then Ambien when Esther came afterwards. But what these things are is are Gabba analogues, so it goes back to the same concept we’ve talked about two other times now is the receptor, right so when Yabba binds the GABA receptor, it gets pulled into the cell and it has an effect, We’ll say if one has one gather back which we said is decreasing the resting potential of that neuron and making it harder for that neuron to fire. Well, pharmaceutical industry, you know their game is, we’ll find like the most important mechanism, and then we’ll make that mechanism more powerful and then we’ll get the effect we won’t have any like test kind of how they do with any drug. Save antibiotics, I guess. So, when away, what happened is they came up with benzos, bind GABA receptors, get pulled into the cell and have an effect of 100. And then those turned out to be really addictive and suppress respiration, people died a lot on overdose. They became too dangerous, so they said well let’s come up with something cleaner, and then they found a different analogue to GABA that binds receptors and has an effect of 1000, but it doesn’t have the respiratory suppression and it doesn’t have the same addictive potential so it’s safer drug, but it does exactly what we’re talking about anything else. You now, have such a powerful effect that you have so much of this drug floating around, he’s down regulating receptors, how you get rid of those drugs, the amount of gaba that your brain produces is going to be completely insufficient, because you’re only getting one effect anyway, and you’re if you have 1000 times the effect, then you’re going to down regulate your receptors to 1000 times or 900 times and now you get rid of that drug, your normal Gabba production is now, not even close to what you need.

Chris Guerriero:
That’s, you know, when I was in college, a long time ago. I almost I almost feel like I shouldn’t admit this, when I was in college, a long time ago, there was something that was sold in the health food stores, was not illegal sold and health was

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
DHB,

Chris Guerriero:
Which I bought one time.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
That was awesome.

Chris Guerriero:
That was what I loved that stuff was the most amazing thing in the world. Back then I understand that there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of health ramifications to it, it is illegal also however back then ghb was a massive. It’s a sleep aid. Right. It’s also it also helped to put you into an anabolic state, really, really helpful. I took it because I was working out a tremendous amount at the time when I was in college, and it helped me to recover significantly faster to work out better the next day and help me sleep so I was on my game for my exams. Right. Yeah, funny that you knew exactly what I was saying..

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
That that’s that stuff was great, it really was I mean, it puts you into almost 100% deep sleep, you know, the research shows now, and the more interesting thing about it is not only has that been removed from the cellphone market but that is actually the most illegal substance on in America, a PhD PHP is a bag that is poured out of the podcast, like it would be good, it was totally legal adhere to it, people start using it for daybreak and that’s why they outlawed it just really spun out of control. I don’t know social tensions are really high whenever, they’re the final case that offended whatever Congressman led to actually somebody taking action on it. They basically like if you’re found with that stuff you would be better off being found with meth or heroin or anything else like that, that’s considered, because you can’t buy it anywhere. That means somebody is producing it illegally they’ve even like outlawed every kind of ingredient, they can think of that you would use for it. And it’s like really tricky to make chemistry wise and so they gave. It’s like I can’t even I can’t even get it as a doctor, right, there’s certain sleep research, sleep specialist researchers who can get like my new quantities of it for lab rats and stuff like that but it’s like an impossible product to get anymore. But yeah bodybuilders used it to great effect because you can work out really hard. I’d take this stuff and take a really, you know, take a two hour nap. There was like 100% Deep sleep so a tiny wouldn’t deep sleep is anabolic so you go into like the super anabolic phase and you’d start repairing everything you just did the gym and, and you feel great because you got that great restorative sleep and or you take it at night just to get more deep sleep, but that was one of those days are gone unfortunately those days are gone.

Chris Guerriero:
Yeah but you know what with anything good. Unfortunately, I mean, I don’t believe that there were, I don’t, you would know better than I, and we don’t have to spend too much time on this but there wasn’t much negative impact and human body. However, shitheads went out there, got it and use it for the wrong thing.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Ruined it for everybody. Yeah, it’s the same, it’s the same thing with hormone replacement therapy right like why, why is testosterone, the only hormone everybody freaks out about, like, I can write like I can replace people’s thyroid hormone nobody cares, I can release insulin into diabetic nobody cares, like, you know, I replace estrogen and no menopausal woman nobody cares but put testosterone in somebody’s like, you’re, you’re dancing with the devil all the sudden,

Chris Guerriero:
Because baseball players used to cheat homerun thing really like that.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Yeah. Like, that’s, that’s why, that’s why it’s taboo has nothing to do a science, there’s a lot of politics and medicine.

Chris Guerriero:
That is, It is unfortunate. So, so let’s go into how do I get. So I don’t want to, I don’t want to end without getting into some of these other questions. How do I get better sleep. And then, what if I can’t, like what if, what if I can’t get enough sleep during the night. Is there anything that I could do during the day to augment the benefits that I would have gotten a good night’s sleep,

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Can augment the benefits but you can mitigate the detriments

Chris Guerriero:
Okay, huge.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Okay, so how do you get good sleep. The PDF you alluded to, is really important. It would take me an hour to cover that concept. So I just recommend anybody download that, that’s the second most important thing.

Chris Guerriero:
Let’s give the URL again It’s Doc parsley.com forward slash stress right?

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Right in so the most important concept is to realize its sleep is amazingly important and you should prioritize it until you’ve gotten yourself there. Nothing I tell you is probably going to be that effective. Once you get yourself there. You’re here if you’re intelligent enough to be in your group and be out this call, I get you, you can figure it out. It basically goes like this, we, we talked about like how, how do the human species, developed asleep. It’s blue light, probably because the sky is blue that makes most sense to me that the nerve cells in your eyes that are sensing the blue light have nothing to do with vision, they just say blue lights gone let’s trigger the sleep response makes sense we’re very visually dominated animal, we’re kind of we’re really crappy predators without tools and weapons anyway. So, we’re when we’re at, when we’re at our most vulnerable time of day, that’s when we’re going to stay out of stay out of the world and climb in our cave and try to protect ourselves. So blue light goes away melatonin increases, lots of changes in our brain happened. One of the things that happens is gaba As I said, slows down the neocortex, makes us less interactive with our environment, you feel this when you’re camping or something right like you’re sitting around a campfire and your world really shrinks in right start paying away less attention everything else. You can kind of feel like that, you know that warm is setting in on your like your world getting smaller and simpler thoughts being less complex moving less being serious today. And then of course we evolved on a planet where the sun warms it so once the sun went down the temperature got cooler, our body temperature what got cooler. And so the three things that, that really lead to us going to sleep is the release of melatonin which has is purely driven by blue light. Slowing down ever near cortex which has to do with not being not paying attention to the external world, but also not being in an overly stimulated external world, right, and then a lower body temperature.

Chris Guerriero:
So so that’s the second one, the day would be darker, and less stimulation with less TVs or less, whatever?

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Right. I’m just about to get that so. So in our, in our adult lives, and, and you can get a really good idea of how you prepare so how you should prepare yourself to go to sleep by thinking about how you prepare a three or four year old kid to go to sleep. It’s really the same process. It’s the same thing you’re doing. But for us it’s like our gate decreased the light in your eyes, decreased the blue light specifically, and that’s one of those things where we can do mitigation, Like it’s one of the things that we can talk about that gap where we can use tools and gimmicks like we can use things on our computer that is decreasing the blue light, we’re getting we have light bulbs in our house that decrease blue light, we can wear glasses that will block blue light. So there’s things that we can do that’s not quite ideal we’re not going to turn off the electricity in our house when the sun goes down. So, we can still kind of dance around that we can we can mitigate get it. So, decreasing blue light. There’s a million ways to do that. Go on, go get your Google on and just figure that out, decreasing stimulation is self evident, but you have to figure out how that works for you. So, if you are if you are going to work on a really important work project, and then try to go to bed at 10pm and get up at 6am Is your goal, right, you don’t work on your computer, till 959 and then go get bed and expect to fall asleep. You have to settle your brain out just like you settled down a three and four year old, you don’t you don’t let him bang trucks, right up until the time you put the bed. So you’ve, you start decreasing, and you know if you’re going to watch television, you’re going to block the blue light while you’re watching television, don’t watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you know watch something sort of soothing and relaxing and decrease the stimulation don’t have a lot of loud noises don’t have obviously a lot of bright lights don’t have like flashing lights don’t be exercising, don’t be doing a bunch of stuff to get yourself excited, don’t be thinking about super stressful things that’s decreasing your interaction with the rest of the world, and then the body temperature, set your thermostat low take a shower like you only have to take a cold shower you just take a shower that lowers your body temperature, the bass we give kids that’s lowering their body temperature because nobody gives their kid and 99 degree bath right their government 85 degree bath. So, dropping your body temperature a little bit. And those three things are sleep hygiene, that’s how you get good sleep. As far as behavioral the cognition that the emotional component of that. How do you decrease your racing brain How do you stop from, how do you stop yourself from thinking about all the things you have to do tomorrow and all the things, all the threats that are after you. That’s what the PDF is about, and there’s a bit of a process to sort of setting yourself up for that and making some list, but I’ll leave it with that it’s like basically you make the make those eight and a half hours that you’re going to be in bed, those are those are sacred hours. Nothing else occurs in that, that’s why I tell people not to get out of bed and go read a book or not to get out of bed and go do stretching or dreaming, I’d say, lay in bed meditate, relax, do breath work whatever because those are sacred hours where you’re just trying to slow down your brain, you’re giving your body the best operative, the most opportunity to repair itself restore itself and get ready for tomorrow. And if that’s some meditation some sleep. That’s fine. And over the course of your life it’s going to vary, you might get eight and a half hours of sleep, you might end up meditating, six, you might end up meditating, a couple of hours out of that night broken up into pieces. But if you aren’t looking at your clock and you aren’t worried about your list and you’re worried about what time you have to get up and you’re just using those sacred hours to restore replenish yourself. You’ll be better off, No matter how much sleep you’re getting it by making those hours, committed hours to getting ready for tomorrow. And then as far as mitigating against not getting any of that stuff. The number one tool for that is sleep. So get naps, even if it’s like a 510 minute nap if you can get an app at anytime during the day, you know, stimulants and moderation. One of the big problems with caffeine is that if you, if you look at the dose response curve of caffeine and human about 200 milligram’s is, is the peak, and that’s not true for everybody I think that’s probably the max peak of what’s effective and then after that you actually start getting a decrease of attention and a decrease of energy to decrease focus. And if you look at like a whenever they, I don’t know how Starbucks breaks their drinks out but you know cop, if you look at these coffee shops. I know Starbucks specifically because I’ve read their menu one time. They have some of their large drinks have 600 milligram’s of caffeine and so what happens is like as you’re drinking out you’re feeling better and better for the first couple of 100 milligram’s, and then once you go past that you’re getting a crash and what do you think I need another coffee. I just like, you know, it’s a good business model for them but it’s terrible health model for us. Nicotine helps but I wouldn’t recommend smoking but you can use nicotine meds nicotine gum. You know about 16 milligram’s of caffeine and about 2 milligram’s of nicotine, every, like, three hours three to four hours. That’s kind of the ideal to kind of keep you going, meditation, if you can even, like if you can’t take naps but you can push back through your desk and close your eyes and do breath work for three or four minutes, it’ll decrease stress hormones that work if you aren’t into meditation and mindfulness and breath work and all of their other stuff. You think that’s all airy fufu ridiculous stuff. You can decrease stress hormones, just by simply making yourself more present now this most simplistic thing I do with my clients as I say, I just want you to do everything with your left hand for the next couple of days, you know, just by focusing on how am I going to do this with my left hand whenever uncoordinated brings you into the now reduces stress hormones. Another thing is if you are sleep deprived, I recommend not working out. You can do movement you can do activity but don’t do anything, stressful, is going to be counterproductive you haven’t restored, we haven’t repaired from yesterday. Adding damage tonight. Now even if you quit today, that means tonight, even if you get eight hours of sleep is not going to be enough. So you can you can walk like you know, I tell people park. Park, a couple of blocks from your office and walk ins and use the stairs and just simple stuff like that. Wash your, you know, dedicated washroom car mow your own lawn but don’t go across debt or something. It’s going to be counterproductive. And then you can you can you can use these wearable devices to like kind of help yourself monitor how much sleep you’re getting and one of the most powerful metrics that people can get right now is heart rate variability. We probably don’t have time for me to explain that but that’s a good that’s a good gauge for how balanced your autonomic nervous system is how much stress hormones, you’re likely to be producing. And if you’re, if your heart rate variability is way out of whack, then you definitely shouldn’t be exercising it most of the software for those types of things will tell you, don’t exercise or take it easy today. And then of course, doing everything else, the best you can, right. So, I always say, I used to say there four pillars of health sleep, exercise, nutrition, and that mindfulness stress control essentially stress mitigation. Change that thing now sleep is the foundation for all of that because it really doesn’t matter how well you do the other ones if you aren’t sleeping well. Like, you can’t get you can’t be optimal and that’s what I’m always shooting for is optimizing people, But if we’re just looking at mitigating damage. You know, the better your nutrition is, the more the more resilient, you’re going to be to sleep deprivation, the better you’re going to be able to tolerate anything, the better your it, the better sort of designed your exercise activity is to sort of the better, the better your physiologic strength is, the more you’ll be able to tolerate, you know, being out of kilter for a while, and then the better you are controlling your stress. In general, when you don’t, when you have a couple of more nights of sleep, against the prayer distributions the 8020 rule like if you’re really good 80% of the time, then you’re more resilient to that 20% of the time when things don’t go well, but those are about the only mitigating tools, like that there are the other. The only other thing I’ll tell people is that the faster you can pay that deficit back, the less impact it has. If you think about everybody’s talking about what the death of 1000 cuts are building up these toxins in your brain. Well there’s toxin they’re sitting around being damaging so the faster you the sooner you flush those out the less damage they’re going to do. So, if you have an opportunity to read, give me a replenish or regained that sleep that deprive yet, the amount of sleep you deprive yourself of as soon as you can do that to less long term damage that’s going to be. And unfortunately it looks, it looks like you can’t ever sort of replant or repair that 100% It’s like, it’s like getting a really bad injury, you can go back to full function but there’s going to be scars right there. As you get older you might notice some deficits later. And that’s kind of the same thing when you deprive yourself to sleep you are damaging your brain and you’re damaging other functions in your body, endocrine organs and responses to integran organs and stuff like that. And there’s probably some residual damage, no matter what you do, but the faster you can repair it, the more completely, you will repair it.

Chris Guerriero:
Yeah, that’s this is, you know I geek out on this stuff so I am literally taking notes and absorbing every single piece of this and looking forward to tonight sleep. Maybe I can, you know, maybe, that whatever time I wake up during.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
I’m gonna put that on my resume, did I make Chris excited about sleep on a Friday night. First, that’s a hard to believe statement right.

Chris Guerriero:
That is, But you know It is great to be able to have the tools to understand where what is doing damage, you know, not just lack of sleep, but also the things that we’re doing during the day and also the things that we’re doing to attempt to sleep better. Right, attempt to stay up more which are doing damage. It’s great to know. You know how to set yourself up for a winning night’s sleep right doing the, the three or four things that you were talking about as far as sleep hygiene goes. And then what in my particular case, what I take most personally from this which you know, because you and I talk almost every week, is, is what to do during the night, to, to, to go back to sleep. If right up with something on my mind, rich in my situation really is just being grateful, you know, clearing my mind, but then just being grateful of that silence, and that time that I’ve got so that I am, as relaxed as possible during that time so that even if I’m not fully asleep at least I’m getting as much of the benefits of sleep or rest, as I possibly can.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Right, Yeah I mean if you think about it you’re. It really should be the easiest sales job in the world to convince people to sleep, it should be like, it’s easy to be as easy as selling sex right yeah like it feels good and it’s really good for you right, it’s, if you think of this, when you’re in your bed is like when I’m in my bed, a lot of entrepreneurs think Well, here’s a big non productive time for me. Right. I’m going in here where I’m not gonna get anything done actually is the most productive time of your life right like this is actually the best thing you can do for yourself to have longevity in the game and be able to think clearly and perform well, you lose efficiency by being sleep deprived you make poor decisions when you’re sleep deprived, and you’re going to die and you’re going to get dizzy sooner you’re going to die earlier you’re not going to have as many years in the game, and

Chris Guerriero:
You’re not going to be happy when you aren’t living,

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
You’re not going to be happy when you are there, And if you think about it, just let if you, if you could just convince yourself that every minute that you’re laying in that bed is restoring you to some level, and making you better at anything you care about and everything you care about. Then if you can get at peace with that and feel that that’s kind of the whole point of that PDF, like that PDF is that whole program the optimal state of that as you get to this Zen state like when I get in bed until my alarm clock goes off in the morning. That’s 100% restorative that’s 100% for me to make me better and happier smarter, better looking and all that other stuff.

Chris Guerriero:
Yeah Dude, I am so grateful that you took the time I know that you have a really busy day and a busy, busy weekend. So I appreciate you pulling away, and spend the time with us over here, this was outstanding. Thank you so much for delivering so much on sleep for everybody, this is, this is a huge audience of executives right these are people who I believe it’s very closing near and dear to my heart because my friends are all executives basically.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Right, right.

Chris Guerriero:
So, so like you and I, you know, I think that understanding how to make a few little tweaks and how we sleep, gives us the ability to perform better, as executives as family people as just human beings, everything, like so, so I’m pretty grateful,

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
You know the worst sales pitch ever that good sleep improves everything, like the worst thing you can say, like it’s good for everything.

Chris Guerriero:
One pill and everything can be like gets a lot better, right, that pill takes eight hours. Okay.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Pill takes eight hours to get full effects.

Chris Guerriero:
Any, is there anything that you would like to end with, because I just super grateful about that.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
Yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t go into the detail usually to just because I, I feel like this audience probably is more savvy and more proactive but with that, when I said earlier that the most important thing that people can do is convince themselves how important sleep is guy, I’m not convinced that, you know, an hour long podcast with me is going to do that for you so I recommend everybody go to like a scholarly site like something like PubMed or Google Scholar or something like that, put it in sleep, and anything you care about, and read that until you’re panicking about needing sleep, and it’s easy to do literally anything you care about sleep, and that thing you care about and just read articles read your journal publications and just drink, okay. There’s a ton of evidence that I care about this thing and me not sleeping is impacting my ability to get that thing or enjoy that thing maintain.

Chris Guerriero:
Are you saying tonight, right before I go to sleep. That’s what I should be doing.

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
No, not tonight. You can do that in the middle of the day, and then start working on your sleep plan with the PDF.

Chris Guerriero:
I got. Thank you so very much again It’s Doc parsley.com anything you ever want to know about sleep he’s got an amazing podcast, you’re also pretty much everywhere online and if anybody Google’s doc parsley or Kirk parsley, you come up all over the place for sleep you’ve been on, you’ve been on TED talks you’ve been in magazines, you’ve been on just about every giant podcast out there, so they can find you. Dr Oz was we’ve been all over the,

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
We haven’t made it until you’re on Dr. Oz…

Chris Guerriero:
Thank you again doc

Doc Parsley (Dr Kirk Parsley):
My pleasure.