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 What is going on?
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Why is there such mortality risk caused by insufficient sleep?
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And what we know is that a lack of sleep and typically getting certainly less than six hours of sleep is associated with a higher risk
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 Welcome to the School of Greatness.
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My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
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And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
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Thanks for spending some time with me today.
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Now let the class begin.
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 Welcome to this special masterclass.
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We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today.
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It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in.
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 Yeah, so I think firstly, in response to the general question, sleep is probably the single most effective thing that you can do to reset both your brain, but also your body health, of course, as well.
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And I don't say that flippantly against the notions of diet and exercise.
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Of course, both of those are fundamentally critical.
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But if I were to take you, Lewis, and I were to deprive you of sleep for 24 hours, deprive you of food for 24 hours,
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 or deprive you of even water or exercise for 24 hours, and then I were to map the brain and body impairment that you would suffer after each one of those four, hands down by a country mile, a lack of sleep will implode your brain and body far more significantly.
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The only one I would probably lose out on is oxygen.
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 At that point I'll give it up, you know, sleep will take the silver medal, oxygen definitely gets the gold, but thereafter sleep seems to be paramount.
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Over sleep, of sleep, food and water, sleep is the most important thing.
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I would say, yeah, you know, I used to say that sleep was the third pillar of good health alongside diet and exercise, but I think the evidence has suggested that I was utterly wrong.
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 That sleep in fact is the foundation on which those two other things sit and you can do Wonderful things in those two mains don't domains, but if you're not getting sufficient sleep Those things tend to be far more futile as a consequence.
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And so what is sufficient sleep then?
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 So right now we recommend somewhere between seven to nine hours for the average adult.
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Once we know that you go below seven hours of sleep, we can start to measure objective impairments in your brain and your body.
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And in fact, the number of people who can survive on less than six hours of sleep without showing any impairment rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population is zero.
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 Without any impairment, what does that mean?
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So if I can measure lots of different operations of your brain, let's say your cognition, your attention, your learning and memory, also your moods and your emotions and your anxiety, or downstairs in the body, I can measure aspects of your cardiovascular system or your blood pressure.
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Or I could measure your immune system or your metabolic system, how it's regulating your blood sugar and your glucose.
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 I can measure this sort of pinwheel, this kaleidoscope of health metrics on Lewis Howes, and then I can see when I keep dialing you back with less and less sleep, at what point do I see at least one of those things demonstrating a breaking point?
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 And it's very rare for us to be able to find any individual who can go below six hours of sleep and not show some kind of impairment.
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And a great, even frightening demonstration of this, a study took a group of perfectly healthy individuals,
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 and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week.
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And then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight-hour night of sleep.
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And what happened?
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And there were two critical findings.
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The first was that a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity caused by that one week of short sleep.
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And that's, you know, in some ways I think about this, Lewis, because it's...
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 It's reality.
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We know that almost a third of the population is trying to survive on six hours of sleep or less.
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So it's not just, you know, total sleep deprivation, which doesn't happen very frequently.
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It's a common occurrence.
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What I found most interesting was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity.
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The other half were decreased.
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 Now, those genes that were suppressed were genes associated with your immune system.
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So you became immune-compromised or immune-deficient.
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Those genes that were increased in their activity, or what we call overexpressed, were genes associated with the promotion of tumors, genes that were associated with cardiovascular disease and stress, and genes that were associated with long-term chronic inflammation within the body.
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 And I make that point just because many people, I think, have this concern about things such as genetically modified embryos or even genetically modified food.
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But when we don't get sufficient sleep, we are unwittingly performing a genetic manipulation on ourselves.
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And if we don't let our kids get the sleep that they need, then we're inflicting a similar genetic engineering experiment on them as well.
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Wow.
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 This is crazy.
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So what if you've been sleeping less than six hours a night for years?
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What is that saying to your genes?
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And is there a way to recover the gene damage and reverse and go back to a healthy genes, healthy body, healthy life?
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 So firstly, we know that short sleep duration, so using that sweet spot, and we can speak about oversleeping or excess sleep, because I think that's an interesting part that hasn't been spoken about too much, but using that recommended CDC amount of seven to nine hours of sleep, there is a simple fact, firstly, across the lifespan, which is the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life.
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That short sleep predicts all-cause mortality.
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 But then we can dig a little bit deeper and start to sort of ask, you know, exactly what is going on?
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Why is there such mortality risk caused by insufficient sleep?
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And what we know is that a lack of sleep and typically getting certainly less than six hours of sleep is associated with a high risk of cardiovascular disease, high risk of diabetes, high risk of stroke, high risk of dementia.
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And I would love to double click on that and go into the Alzheimer's disease risk because that now evidence is very, very strong.
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 And then downstairs in the body, we know that there is links between a lack of sleep and certain forms of cancer.
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After, if I were to take you and limit you to let's say four or five hours of sleep for one week, your blood sugar levels would be so disrupted that your doctor would classify you as being pre-diabetic.
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So that's not a lifetime, that's just one week.
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And there's an even more interesting experiment that I think speaks to the subtlety of this.
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 because there is the largest sleep study that's ever been conducted and it happens actually to around 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year and it's called daylight savings time.
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Now
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 But in the spring, when we lose just one hour of sleep opportunity, firstly, what we've seen is that there seems to be a 24% increase in relative heart attack risk the next day, which stuns me.
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And what's fascinating, in the fall, in the autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, there's a 21% reduction in heart attacks.
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So it's bi-directional, and that's just one hour of sleep.
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 And you see there was some great recent data.
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You see a very similar profile Regarding that daylight savings shift for road traffic accidents on our streets heard about tragically suicide rates as well and then even more recently what we discovered is that
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 during that spring time shift when you lose an hour of sleep, the sentencing of federal judges is significantly harsher because their mood and their emotion is that much worse because of that one hour of sleep that they dole out harsher sentences.
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 So, you know, we can walk, you know, you can ask the question, what about a lifetime?
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We don't even have to ask about a lifetime of short sleep.
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We can ask about these really, you know, one week of short sleep or even one night of one hour of lost sleep.
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And I think that's how fragile our brains and our bodies are to this thing called a lack of sleep.
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 And you could then ask, well, you know, why are we so sensitive?
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Because I can go without food for 24 hours and I can go without water for 24 hours.
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You know, I'm still not too bad.
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I'm in fairly decent shape.
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Why is sleep the exception to that rule?
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And the answer seems to be this.
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 human beings are the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good reason.
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Why is that?
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And it's such a unique thing, and what that means is that Mother Nature, through the course of evolution, because no other species does this without real need for survival, and I can speak about some of the exceptions, but
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 Human beings are strange like this.
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In other words, Mother Nature hasn't have to face the challenge of coming up with a solution called sleep deprivation, because she's never faced it in the course of evolution.
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And so there is no safety net in place here.
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And that's why we think human beings implode so quickly and thoroughly, mentally, cognitively, and physically, caused by insufficient sleep.
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 And why do you think, why is the majority of people bad at getting good sleep?
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Is it we're distracted?
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Is it we think we need to be doing more?
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Is it we're stressed and worried about the past and the future?
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Is it, you know, what, we just want to work harder?
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What is the main cause of why we get poor sleep?
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It's such a fundamental question.
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And in some ways it's all of the above plus.
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 So I think the first, and I've thought about this a great deal, why are we suffering this global sleep loss epidemic that we're under right now?
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I think the first thing is that, unfortunately, sleep has an image problem.
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That, you know, the PR agent for sleep should be fired because we associate sufficient sleep with this concept of being lazy, of being slothful.
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And that's a terrible disservice to this thing called sleep.
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 And it is very different to things like diet and exercise.
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You know, I think a lot of people like to virtue signal with, you know, what they eat, and they certainly are very proud to tell you
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 You know, I work out five times a week.
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I'm in the gym at this time of morning and, you know, all of which I think are great and to be applauded and supported, but we have the very opposite.
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We have this almost, you know, well, we don't.
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Some niches of society have this sleep machismo attitude.
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You know, this kind of, you can sleep when you're dead mentality, which by the way, based on the evidence.
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 It's mortally unwise.
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Yeah, it will lead to both a shorter life and a life that is significantly less healthy.
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So I think the first thing is we need to change our cultural appreciation of sleep from something that is a waste of time to something that in fact is an incredible investment.
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It is probably the very best and the most freely available democratic and painless health insurance policy that I could ever imagine.
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 I think the next thing is the way that we work in society.
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We are working for longer hours, and before the pandemic people were commuting increasingly longer amounts of time.
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What that meant was that people were leaving the house earlier, they were arriving home later, and no one wants to shortchange time with family or Netflix or whatever is your poison.
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 And so the one thing that has become squeezed like vice grips in the middle of the night is this thing called a sufficient bout of slumber.
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But then there are plenty of people who give themselves the opportunity to get enough sleep, but they can't obtain it.
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And that is where things such as insomnia or sleep disorders, things like snoring come into play.
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 And you touch on, and I know that you've spoken and I'm so grateful for what you've done regarding discussions of mental health.
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We know that one of the principal roadblocks to getting this thing called a good night of sleep is anxiety.
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Stress, worry, anxiety, regret, all those things.
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Resentment, holding on to all that stuff.
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 It is, that is toxic to sleep.
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You're absolutely right.
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And in fact, anxiety and physiological stress is our principal model for the explanation of insomnia right now.
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It's not the only cause, but it seems to be one of the principal causes.
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 And in modern society, it's become so easy, and I'm not finger wagging, I'm just as guilty.
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We are constantly on reception, but rarely do we do reflection.
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And unfortunately, the time when most of us do reflection is when we turn off the light and our head hits the pillow.
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And that's the last time.
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 I don't know about you, Lewis, but at night in the dark, thoughts are not the same thing.
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Concerns become twice as big or 10x the size of concerns.
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I start to worry, I ruminate, I catastrophize.
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Yet in the light of day, those things seem very different.
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 so we can speak about sleep tips perhaps later on but certainly getting right with your emotions and your Anxiety is key to good sleep.
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And that's one of the things that prevents sleep I also think that there is a an issue at the public health level, you know, we've had in many first world nations wonderful government mandates regarding health regarding drink-driving regarding
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 you know, safe sex regarding drugs and alcohol and even food and even inactivity and sitting.
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When was the last time you heard of a first world nation provide a public health message and memorandum regarding sleep?
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Never.
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 And I don't remember one either.
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So from every level at, you know, at a public health, global, you know, government level down to a workplace level, you know, we lured the airport warrior who's flown through four different time zones in the past three days.
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They were on email at two and then they're back in the office at six, you know, we, so we need to.
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We celebrated those people.
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 We did, you know, and the funny thing, by the way, is that after about 20 hours of being awake straight, you are as cognitively impaired as you would be if you were legally drunk.
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Now, I would never, you know, as a CEO say, I have got this fantastic team of people, they're drunk all of the time.
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 But we do say, I've got this fantastic group of people.
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They just are at it all hours.
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They are dedicated.
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They're always working.
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They spend minimal time sleeping.
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They're just all out.
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They love this project.
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But we've got this strange mentality.
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And then I think it comes down to, even within schools, we've got this incessant model of early school start times.
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 Super early, isn't it?
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We've got to be there at 6.30 or 7 or something, right?
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6.30, 7, 7.30, and that data is actually very powerful.
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What we found is that when we delay school start times, first academic grades increase, truancy rates decrease,
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 psychological and psychiatric issues decrease, but then what we also discovered is that the life expectancy of students increased.
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And you may be thinking, well, hang on a sec, you know, how do you measure that?
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 And the leading cause of death in teenagers 16 to 18 is actually not suicide, that's second, it's road traffic accidents.
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And here sleep matters enormously.
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And I'll give you one example.
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It was in Teton County in Wyoming.
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They delayed their school start times from 7.30 in the morning to 8.55.
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 By the way, what are we doing trying to educate our children at 7.30 in the morning?
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No, I can't think.
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Yeah, I mean, I remember being in school and being every day was hard for me.
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Every day I was tired, every day I was hard to focus or I'd be irritable or wanted to like, you know, jittery or something, but it was like so hard to focus.
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And then you're at lunchtime
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 and then I eat and I'm tired again afterwards and you want me to focus and pay attention at a desk.
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It's like, that doesn't work like that for me, especially when I don't sleep or very little.
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Well, for any sort of developing brain, it doesn't work like that.
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And for some people to make a 7.30 a.m.
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start time, school buses will begin leaving at six o'clock or 5.30 in the morning.
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That means that some kids are having to wake up at five, 5.15.
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This is lunacy.
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 And what we've understood from the academic grades, and I'll come back to the car accidents in a second, when sleep is abundant, minds flourish.
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And when it's not, they don't.
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And what we've discovered with the road traffic accidents in Teton County, when they made that shift,
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 The only thing more remarkable than the extra one hour of sleep that those kids reported getting was the reduction in car crashes.
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The following year, there was a 70% drop in vehicle accidents.
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And to put that in context, you know, the advent of ABS technology, anti-lock brake systems, that dropped accident rates by 20 to 25% and it was deemed a revolution.
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 Here is the simple fact of getting enough sleep that will drop accident rates by 70%.
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So, you know, I need to get off my soapbox, but what I would say is this.
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I think if our goal as educators is to educate and not risk lives in the process, then we are failing our children in the most spectacular manner with this incessant model of early school start times.
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 Is anyone listening to this that you've been speaking about this too, and they're actually adopting this new model, whether it be work time or school time or just, you know, integrating this, do you know systems that are integrating this?
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 There have been some, and I think I've tried to do this in the education domain, I've tried to do this within medicine, because the way that we train residents is almost inhumane.
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Actually, it's not almost, it absolutely is inhumane, and the statistics there are stunning as well.
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And then I've tried to do it in the workplace too, because I do a lot of speaking events at Fortune 500 companies.
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 And at first, I think I took the wrong approach where I was really speaking a little bit more about sort of the compassionate approach, you know, why it's good and kind for people to gift them more sleep.
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Because I see sleep as a biological necessity.
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And if it's a biological necessity, then I think it's a civil necessity.
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And if it's a civil necessity, sleep is a civil right.
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 But what I would say is that that wasn't particularly well-received.
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I'd go into business companies and say, your employees, they're desperate for more sleep, they will be happier and healthier.
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Or I would speak about medicine and I would speak about what it was doing to the patients and the harm, and it would fall on deaf ears.
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What I then realized is that if you're going to change large organizations, you have to speak in their currency, which is money.
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 Yeah, and then I would describe the medical malpractice lawsuits that would come and the cost savings within medicine firstly and Then administration started to change the tune because before that, you know There was almost this old boys network in medicine where we went through residency and it's almost a hazing
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 And despite armed with incredible data to the contrary I think the mentality ten years ago when I started trying to do that was My mind's made up don't confuse me with the evidence It's because they went through that themselves and so they want to pay it back or something I think so.
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I think there was some of that I went through hell.
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So everyone else has to go through hell.
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Yeah
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 Right, it's a rite of passage, you know, if you are tough enough, you'll make it through, it's kind of like boot camp, which I don't think we need to do anymore.
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And then within business, you could describe, you know, the Rand Corporation did an independent survey a couple of years ago, and what they found was that insufficient sleep will cost most nations about 2% of their GDP of their gross domestic product.
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 So here in the U.S., that number was $411 billion of lost productivity due to insufficient sleep.
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In Japan, it was $130 billion.
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My home country, the U.K., it was over $50 billion.
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So if I could solve the sleep loss crisis within the workplace, I could almost double the budget for education in the U.S., or I could halve the health care deficit.
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 So when you speak about money, then people start to listen.
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So that's how I've tried to communicate.
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But, um, and I don't think I'm a, I don't think I'm a particularly good communicator and I've been sometimes bull in a China shop as I probably have been for the first, uh, however long we've been, uh, talking, but it's just because I'm so, you know, I'm just desperately passionate about this thing called sleep.
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And some years ago before I started trying to, I wrote a book and then I've been doing podcasts.
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 Sleep was the neglected stepsister in the health conversation of today.
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It was a second citizen.
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And I was so sad to see the disease, the sickness, the harm, the lack of productivity, the impact on education that a lack of sleep was having.
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 your thoughts about sleep and how you frame this, some of the research and the science that you've studied around this and what we should be thinking about around sleep.
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Sure.
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So sleep is the fundamental layer of mental and physical health.
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If there's one thing that we should all be doing is working toward sleeping long enough and deeply enough, 80%
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 of the time.
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I think that 80% is a good goal because things happen.
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Travel happens, kids happen, illnesses happen.
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Until you are sleeping long enough and deeply enough,
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 80% of the nights of your life, you are functioning suboptimally.
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And what's the biggest risk then if we're not getting enough sleep?
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Okay, so there are a number of risks to not getting enough sleep.
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Deficits in learning, deficits in the immune system, reduction in testosterone and estrogen in both men and women, so disruption of hormones, disruption of gut microbiome, increased cancer risk, there are a bunch of things.
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 The severity of those things depends on a lot of other things, too.
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Prior health, other health conditions, context, age, occupation.
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If you're not getting enough sleep and you're a high-rise construction worker, it's different than if you're an office worker.
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So we need to sleep enough.
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Now, what's enough sleep?
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This is an interesting question.
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Enough sleep.
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 has been argued it's six hours, other people it's seven hours, other people it's eight hours.
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It's basically waking up without an alarm clock and feeling rested.
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Insomnia is actually a medical term.
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 nowadays, and insomnia is essentially diagnosed as falling asleep during the middle of the day due to lack of sleep at nighttime.
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But many people who are having trouble sleeping at night are not falling asleep during the middle of the day.
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They're dealing with grogginess or crankiness or other effects of having fragmented sleep.
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 What are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep?
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Is it rumination?
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Is it traumas that you're holding on to?
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Is it arguments?
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Is it self-doubt or insecurities?
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Is it you nap too much?
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Is it the foods you ate too late?
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Like what would you say are the main causes?
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 of not being able to fall asleep?
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All of the above.
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But the primary one is a failure to turn off your thoughts.
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And I think that might provide a good anchor point for us to talk about some protocols.
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 Really a excellent night's sleep begins in the morning.
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I talked about this on the previous episode, so I won't go into detail, but everyone should get as much bright light in their eyes, ideally from sunlight, first thing in the morning, 10 to 30 minutes outside, depending on how bright it is.
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 Eyeglasses or contact lenses are fine.
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Don't wear sunglasses if you can do it safely.
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If you wake up before the sun rises, turn on bright lights, then go outside once the sun rises.
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If you have no access to sunlight, use a daytime simulator or similar like a ring light and get that light in your eyes.
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So that's all of that in a compact form.
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 Caffeine, you can inhibit falling asleep with caffeine.
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You have to figure out when your threshold is.
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For me, I can drink caffeine up until about three, even four o'clock in the afternoon and sleep like a baby.
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And still sleep well.
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Yes, and Matt Walker, our good friend Matt Walker, would say that my sleep isn't as good as it would be had I cut caffeine out earlier.
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By like 11 or 12.
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 Yeah, AM.
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Right, and I wanna acknowledge Matt is the Michael Jordan of sleep science, and so I'm not gonna- You're the LeBron James.
0
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Well, no, no, and in fact, thank you for the compliment, but no, I'm not.
0
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 I know a lot of the science and the protocols, but that's Matt's wheelhouse.
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And so if he says something, it's true.
0
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And if I say something and our opinions conflict, it's likely to be something that the data are still emerging or in that case, default to Matt being correct.
0
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Because I just out of due respect for his expertise.
0
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 So caffeine, you know, for some people they can have a two o'clock espresso, 2 p.m.
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espresso, some people it's 4 p.m.
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Some people can drink caffeine at 8 p.m.
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and fall asleep, but there I would say it's problematic because you're disrupting the architecture of sleep and the brainwaves associated with sleep, the chemicals and so forth.
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So get that morning light.
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 Cut your caffeine off at a time that allows you to fall asleep.
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That morning light also sets a timer on your melatonin rhythm.
0
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So you have this gland in your brain called the pineal gland.
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That pineal is the source of melatonin.
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Melatonin makes you sleepy, but it does not keep you asleep.
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Melatonin starts to rise in the late evening and continues into the night and then eventually tapers off.
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This is naturally occurring melatonin release, not supplemented melatonin release.
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 The fastest way to slam melatonin to the pavement and eliminate it in your system is to look at bright light for, I hate to tell you,
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 this, even a few seconds.
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You mean at night?
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At night is typically when melatonin rises.
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It's when it's released in the bloodstream and when it has this effect of making us sleepy.
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It does a number of other things too.
1
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You want more melatonin at night, is that right?
1
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You do.
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And if you wake up in the middle of the night or it's eight o'clock and you decide that you want to go to bed at nine or it's nine o'clock, you want to go to bed at 10 and you go into the bathroom and you flip on the bright lights,
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 your melatonin levels just got crushed down to zero.
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So having lights on is the worst thing you can do.
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Yes, and it doesn't matter if it's blue light, red light, purple light, green light, bright lights inhibit melatonin very acutely and therefore you want to avoid exposure to bright lights at night if your goal is to be asleep.
1
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 So the simple rule that governs all this stuff is when you want to be alert, get bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight.
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So that's true in the morning and throughout the day.
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And when you want to be sleepy or asleep, avoid bright light in your eyes.
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Now, many home environments don't allow you to have zero lights.
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 And that's not actually necessary.
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You can just dim the lights in the evening.
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Ideally, you also avoid overhead lights because the neurons in the eye that trigger this melatonin suppression and so forth, they reside in an area of the eye that views upper visual space.
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So you could have desk lamps and just dim those down.
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If you're gonna work on a screen, dim it way down.
1
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Will blue blockers help?
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Yes, but if the light is bright enough, you're still gonna inhibit melatonin.
1
SPEAKER_02
 So how bad is watching TV at night?
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If the TV isn't too bright and if it's farther away.
1
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Yeah, and maybe you wear blue blockers.
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I mean some people take this to the extreme, they wear sunglasses.
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I think that's a little extreme.
1
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Now candlelight and moonlight, surprisingly, doesn't seem to block melatonin.
1
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 Now, maybe a really bright moonlit night, full moon, the lunacy associated with the full moon might actually be due to a suppression of melatonin and an increase in alertness.
1
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So those are the things as it relates to light.
1
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 Then there's this issue of people who have trouble staying asleep.
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So they can fall asleep fine, but they wake up at two or three in the morning.
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I happen to do this.
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If I go to bed around 10.30, I tend to wake up around three and I use the restroom.
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Yeah, I tend to drink a lot of fluids and I have to use the restroom.
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This is true at every age.
1
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This is not just some aging related thing.
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That's fine.
1
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I just keep the lights dim and use the bathroom and then you go back to sleep.
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 Very normal, very healthy.
1
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One of the best things I ever did for my sleep was to keep my phone out of the room so that when I wake up at three in the morning, I just didn't start scrolling the newspapers is typically what I would read online.
1
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And then you're just waking up your brain, not just by the light, but by the content.
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You're activating it again as opposed to going back to sleep.
1
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Yeah, exactly.
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And sometimes there's a comment and you're like, why is this?
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Your thinking is not very good in the middle of the night.
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 The other thing is you wanna keep the room cool.
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So in order to fall asleep, your body has to undergo a drop in temperature of one to three degrees.
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There are a couple of ways to accomplish this.
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One is keeping the room cool.
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The other is to...
1
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 And that's ideal, actually, because you can put a hand or a foot out.
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We actually lose a lot of our heat through what's called our glabrous skin, so the palms of our hands and the bottoms of the feet.
1
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I always put my feet out of the sheets and just let them feel the cool air.
1
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That's right.
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And that's a great way to cool off your core body temperature.
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You're probably doing that unconsciously in your sleep as well.
1
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 If the room were too warm, the only way for you to cool off would be for you to put your hand in a bucket of cold water, and generally people don't have that accessible.
1
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And then you're gonna go pee if you're doing that too.
1
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Right, exactly.
1
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And then of course there are all these products nowadays of things that cover, that cool the bed.
1
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I'm supposed to try one of these soon.
1
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I haven't tried one yet.
1
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I tend to just keep the room cool.
1
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 What do you keep it at?
1
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I keep it around 67, 65.
1
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That's a little cooler than what I do.
1
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I put it at about 67, 68.
1
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Okay.
1
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But I tend to wake up hot in the middle of the night like throw the comforter off and go put some cold water on my face.
1
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Wow.
1
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 So don't obsess over waking up too much.
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And if you do, try and stay away from screens.
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Or if, you know, some people will read a book, dim light again.
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And then falling back asleep.
1
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Some people are waking up at two or three because they are going to bed too late, their melatonin has run out.
1
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So imagine that you're naturally somebody who should go to bed early, around nine.
1
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But we all have this ability to push,
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 forward and stay awake if we have to.
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Much easier to stay awake than to force yourself to go to sleep.
1
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Very hard to force yourself to go to sleep.
1
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So let's say your system, you start releasing melatonin around 9 p.m., but you stay up until 11.
1
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Then you get into bed, you fall asleep around 11.30, and at three in the morning you suddenly wake up.
1
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Well, that's because your melatonin tapered off and there's a wakefulness that's occurring.
1
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And so,
1
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 Ideally, you would start going to bed earlier.
1
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Now, there's a lot of discussion out there about so-called chronotypes, so night owls, morning people, people that follow a more typical schedule.
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Typical would be going to sleep somewhere between 10.30 and 11.30, waking up somewhere between 6.30 and 8.
1
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 Then there are the people that like to go to bed at 2 a.m., sleep till 10, and then there are people that like to go to bed at eight and wake up at four.
1
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Huge variation out there.
1
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It tends to change across the lifetime.
1
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Yeah, you're a season of life for years.
1
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That's right, and adolescents and teenagers tend to stay up later and want to sleep in, and there's actually some evidence that they can learn better if they are allowed to use that schedule, but most schools won't adhere to that schedule.
1
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You gotta wake up at six and go to school at eight or whatever, yeah.
1
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Once you enter adult life, you're generally somebody who's
1
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 gonna have to learn how to go to bed early and wake up early, or at least wake up early.
1
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Now, naps, you should feel comfortable, the data say, naps, you should feel comfortable napping for 90 minutes or less at any point throughout the day.
1
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 as long as it doesn't interfere with your nighttime sleep.
1
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So some people like me, I love naps, but it doesn't interfere with my nighttime sleep.
1
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It doesn't?
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Does not.
1
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So you take a 60 minute nap?
1
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Generally 20 to 45 minutes.
1
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And then you fully fall asleep or you're kind of like awake and just resting?
1
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I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime.
1
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In like a minute?
1
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I can fall asleep in a gun range, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
What?
1
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 Can you sleep sitting up too, like this?
1
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Oh yeah.
1
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Plane, anywhere.
1
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That's a gift.
1
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It is, although it could reflect that I'm pushing my system a little too hard.
1
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Oh.
1
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But it is useful at times.
1
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Incredible.
1
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It is useful.
1
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So you can fall asleep right on a plane or... Anywhere.
1
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Leaning against a... Oh my gosh.
1
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In a subway station, anywhere.
1
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 If I need sleep, I'm going down.
1
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That's incredible.
1
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Yeah.
1
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So the other thing is that during sleep, a number of things happen and we can talk about slow wave sleep and REM sleep, but one of the most important physiological functions of sleep is to clear out some of the cellular debris that accumulates throughout the day.
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The cellular debris,
1
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 creates cognitive deficits.
1
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It actually may be related to the aggregation of proteins and things that relate to dementia and Alzheimer's.
1
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It's the so-called glymphatic system.
1
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The lymphatic system is a system of moving through immune cells and clearing out of debris from the body.
1
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The glymphatic system is a kind of a
1
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 a equivalent system that exists in the brain that have also called glial cells, which are support cells, but also do many things actively.
1
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They're not just doing support.
1
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The glymphatic system is like a washout of the brain's debris.
1
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And that system seems to function best when feet are slightly elevated above the brain.
1
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There's some interesting data from University of South Carolina coming out now.
1
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 that show that if you can get your ankles elevated a little bit higher than your chin, that's great.
1
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When you're sleeping?
1
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While you're sleeping.
1
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What's it do for you?
1
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It increases the glymphatic clearance, and there's some data that it can improve function of the brain.
1
SPEAKER_00
The studies that are happening now that I'm aware of, I'm in touch with that group, are mainly geared towards people that have had head injuries, so concussion and TBI.
1
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 of various kinds, but they also are seeing interesting effects in typical folks that don't have any traumatic brain injury.
1
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So I put a pillow underneath my ankles when I fall asleep.
1
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 and to get a little bit of that elevation.
1
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And then during the day, if ever you can't get a nap or you are going to get a nap, put your ankles up on the couch and lie down on the floor.
1
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That itself can get some of the clearance of the glymphatic system.
1
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And that helps you sleep better?
1
SPEAKER_02
It helps you just clean out the system?
1
SPEAKER_00
It helps your brain function better when you wake up from sleep.
1
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Interesting.
1
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 That's what the data are starting to show.
1
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Some of the things I described, like the light viewing, is baked into the neuroscience literature, hundreds of papers, published papers.
1
SPEAKER_00
Some of the things like the glymphatic system, it's kind of cutting edge, it's on the way, but because the safety margins of raising your ankles are so large, I mean, there's nothing dangerous about that.
1
SPEAKER_02
How long do you need to do it for to get the benefits?
1
SPEAKER_00
 I think these are immediate benefits.
1
SPEAKER_02
Two minutes or ten minutes?
1
SPEAKER_00
You're doing this the whole night that you're asleep, your ankles are elevated.
1
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If you wake up and you happen to kick the pillow out, it's not the end of the world.
1
SPEAKER_00
But the idea is that you don't want to be sleeping with your head above your ankles either.
1
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There is some evidence that when people travel on planes and they're sleeping in chairs, that that's not equivalent to the kind of sleep they'd get when they're lying flat.
1
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 independent of all the other things that are happening.
1
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And we know this because there are great sleep labs at Stanford School of Medicine, at UPenn, back east and elsewhere, where people actually go into a clinic and sleep either upright or at different angles.
1
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And they're looking at all this at the level of data.
1
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so here's one for you.
1
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What's the best...
1
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 position to sleep on your back, on your side, on your stomach?
1
SPEAKER_00
Ah, great question.
1
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And it really truly depends.
1
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And it probably depends on how hot you run.
1
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So I tend to run really warm.
1
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A lot of the cooling of the body occurs from the palms and bottoms of the feet, but also from the upper back and scapulae, because we accumulate what's called brown fat there.
1
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It's not the blubbery fat that's under the skin.
1
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It's like a furnace.
1
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 Actually, you can increase the density of brown fat by going into cold water repeatedly for one to three minutes several times each week.
1
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It means your furnace actually burns hotter.
1
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It allows you to be in cold temperatures more comfortably.
1
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Some really beautiful data just published on this.
1
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So I don't like to sleep on my back because I start heating up.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's right.
1
SPEAKER_00
So I tend to sleep on my side.
1
SPEAKER_00
I sleep in that, what is that?
1
SPEAKER_00
It's like soldier position.
1
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But then again, there's some people that have shoulder issues and then they can't do that.
1
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 I'm relatively flexible through my shoulders, not super flexible, so I can do that.
1
SPEAKER_00
It really depends.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now, of course, if you're sleeping on your stomach, how do you elevate your ankles?
1
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You know, this starts becoming a little bit, you know, we are not just science experiments.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so you have to assume that you're not gonna get everything exactly right.
1
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But keeping the room cool.
1
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 Keeping the cool being under a warm enough blanket, but then extending a hand or an ankle out so that you could cool off during the middle of the night.
1
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That's going to be good.
1
SPEAKER_00
Keep the room dark, although complete pitch black doesn't seem to be as good as having a little bit of light somewhere in the room.
1
SPEAKER_00
 But you don't want a bright blue light or red light anywhere in the room that's going to wake you up.
1
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Some people like me have very thin eyelids, exceedingly thin eyelids.
1
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Some people have very thick eyelids.
1
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So some people are more bothered by a light in the room than others.
1
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It really varies.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you have to just tune things to your particular environment.
1
SPEAKER_02
I'm curious about the neuroscience before you go to sleep.
1
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How do we set our minds up to, you were saying before about a lot of people, it's hard for them to sleep because they can't shut their mind off.
1
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 Is there something we should be thinking before we shut it off to set our sleep up for success mentally and then to really build into the next day where we wake up feeling like clear-minded and without this brain fog where we have more motivation where we have more
1
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 energy and excitement towards the next day and then doing that in a pattern every night.
1
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Is there any science around that?
1
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Is it like listening to a hypnosis?
1
SPEAKER_02
That could be very helpful.
1
SPEAKER_02
Which will help you clean out whatever's going on through the day and get clear and ready for the next day but also fall asleep so you're not thinking about it.
1
SPEAKER_02
 You know, is there anything that can help you have better dreams so that you sleep better?
1
SPEAKER_02
Like what have you found there in the neuroscience?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so the So glad you asked this question.
1
SPEAKER_00
There's some really interesting data from a guy named Chuck Charles Zeisler who is at Harvard meds and beautiful studies on sleep in humans for many decades and really fantastic
1
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 physician and researcher.
1
SPEAKER_00
They observed something interesting, which is that about 90 minutes or so before your natural bedtime, there's a spike in alertness, planning, and almost anxiety that all people undergo, and it's a normal, healthy pattern.
1
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 The idea, and it's a just-so story because we don't really know, I nor Chuck Zeisler nor anyone else was consulted at the design phase as we say, but we assume this came about because prior to going to sleep we need to shore up everything for safety.
1
SPEAKER_00
 you know, lock things down, make sure everything's in its place, because we are very vulnerable in sleep.
1
SPEAKER_00
Nowadays, this might manifest as, you know, you need to go to bed at 10.30, because you have to get up at six, et cetera, and then right around 8.30 or nine, you start finding yourself running around doing various things.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Many people worry about that and they think, oh, I'm really stressed because I actually need to go to sleep and here I am wide awake.
1
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It tends to subside very quickly.
1
SPEAKER_00
So just the knowledge that that's a normal, healthy spike in alertness and activity, I think can help a number of people.
1
SPEAKER_00
I'm gonna make sure I mention that.
1
SPEAKER_00
The other thing is preparing the mind, as you said, turning thoughts off.
1
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Turning thoughts off is a skill.
1
SPEAKER_00
We've talked before, gosh, almost a year or more now,
1
SPEAKER_00
 Ago about yoga nidra.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes, which is there are many many yoga nidra scripts available on YouTube free of cost the ones I particularly like are the ones by Kamini Desai K a
1
SPEAKER_00
 M-I-N-I-D-E-S-A-I, Kamini Desai.
1
SPEAKER_00
I just really like her voice.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don't know Kamini, never met her.
1
SPEAKER_00
These are free scripts.
1
SPEAKER_00
They're Yoga Nidra scripts that last about 20 minutes.
1
SPEAKER_00
They involve some breathing, some meditation type stuff.
1
SPEAKER_00
But they teach you to turn your thoughts off, which is really wonderful.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because a lot of people, they just get stuck in this rumination.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now, is there an ideal protocol prior to sleep?
1
SPEAKER_00
 It depends because some people find they have their greatest clarity after the kids are asleep and they're sitting there.
1
SPEAKER_00
So I wouldn't say don't work or do work.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, you do wanna avoid strong stimuli before sleep.
1
SPEAKER_00
So do you really want to watch, you know, politically charged or violent movie right before sleep?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, that depends on how triggered you tend to be by politics or violence.
1
SPEAKER_00
Some people aren't triggered, other people are.
1
SPEAKER_00
But,
1
SPEAKER_00
 You know, that aside, you don't want to go to bed either too hungry or too full, because that can inhibit your sleep.
1
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A healthy meal, let's say an hour before bed.
1
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I'm talking about grains and lean meat and healthy stuff.
1
SPEAKER_02
Or if you eat pizza an hour before bed, are they both going to impact your ability to sleep better?
1
SPEAKER_02
Or is the quality of the food before you go to bed matter?
1
SPEAKER_01
 Yeah, that's a really good question.
1
SPEAKER_01
The short answer is, yeah, it does matter.
1
SPEAKER_01
So probably the two things that would have the greatest determination would be the simplicity or glycemic, the simplicity of the carbohydrates or the glycemic load, because that's going to impact the sort of glycemic roller coaster you go on at night.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then probably the amount of protein, because that has a greater contribution to what's called the thermogenic effect of food.
1
SPEAKER_01
 So the thermogenic effect is how much does your body temperature actually rise to digest the food?
1
SPEAKER_01
Um, our bodies want to be very cold at night.
1
SPEAKER_01
So anything you do that opposes that leads to lousy sleep.
1
SPEAKER_02
So what foods help you sleep better that keep you colder?
1
SPEAKER_02
What are those foods, whether it's an hour before or three hours before
1
SPEAKER_01
 Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
I honestly, it's like almost anything you're going to eat is going to come with something that's going to slightly raise your temperature.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I just generally say, try to not eat too much before bed.
1
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Um, and, and I go out of my way to avoid the two things that I think are worse.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I just say, I wouldn't have huge protein before bed and I don't want to have anything that's going to raise my blood sugar before bed.
1
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, I'd have an avocado before bed.
1
SPEAKER_01
I'd have, you know, something that's like, you know, I just generally don't eat before bed.
1
SPEAKER_02
 Does the body really reward you in terms of if you wait, or if you don't eat right before bed, is it going to sleep better, sleep deeper, be cooler, and therefore help you have more energy the next day if you don't eat before bed?
1
SPEAKER_01
 Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
And this is at least for me been most easy to exhibit.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I think many of my patients would agree, uh, during periods of fasting.
1
SPEAKER_01
So fasting is kind of a funky state because you're, you're altering so many other things in the physiology.
1
SPEAKER_01
But one of the things that happens, especially by about the second day of a water only fast, um,
1
SPEAKER_01
 is you really are seeing the impacts of what deep sleep can look like in a state that is totally absent food.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it's very interesting because you're competing with two forces, one that's keeping you awake and one that's helping you sleep a lot deeper.
1
SPEAKER_01
The one that's keeping you awake is cortisol.
1
SPEAKER_01
You have more of it.
1
SPEAKER_01
You have more stress hormones when you're fasting because that's the thing from a prehistoric standpoint that would have been going on, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
Fasting would trigger a signal that says, go get more food.
1
SPEAKER_02
 Be alert, be focused.
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SPEAKER_01
Be alert, go get food like we don't want to die.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so that's kind of keeping you awake.
1
SPEAKER_01
But the flip side of that is the total absence of nutrient is allowing you to get into this amazing sleep and your body temperature is really going down because your body's turning down its metabolism.
1
SPEAKER_01
 So I actually find fasting sleep to be some of the most amazing physiology because I'm watching this plummeting temperature, rising heart rate variability, falling heart rate, all of these really valuable things, but a little bit of rising cortisol that can lead to shorter sleep times.
1
SPEAKER_01
But I still feel quite, you know, rejuvenated by sleep.
1
SPEAKER_02
 If you're a kid and you're eating a lot of junk food, you're not sleeping.
1
SPEAKER_02
You're staying up late because you're whatever, playing video games all night, but you've got all this energy all day and you're active.
1
SPEAKER_02
Is there a negative for.
1
SPEAKER_02
In your early ages, teens, early twenties through lacking sleep, eating poorly, or is there a way to recover in your twenties from the damage you've done in a year before 20?
1
SPEAKER_01
 Yeah, that's a good question.
1
SPEAKER_01
Um, I mean, certainly you can break it down into sort of the behavioral habit side and you can talk about it through the physiologic lens.
1
SPEAKER_01
The good news is before the age of 20 or 30, we are pretty remarkably resilient.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you're an athlete, so you can relate.
1
SPEAKER_01
How old are you now, Louis?
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SPEAKER_01
You're 37.
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SPEAKER_01
 So you might not have fully appreciate, I'm 47, so I'm a full decade older than you.
1
SPEAKER_01
And when I think about 17 to 27 to 30 to 11 to 47, I can really talk about those decades through the lens of resilience.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like at 17,
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SPEAKER_01
 you could shoot me and I think I'd still get up the next day.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like you just couldn't, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
You're Superman.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
You're absolutely Superman.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I don't know, I feel like the first observation of not being Superman for me kind of kicked in about 42-ish, about five years ago, was the first time I was like,
1
SPEAKER_01
 Oh, so this is what people talk about, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
Like you can't just go out and crush it every minute of every day.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I think that's just one lens, which is through the lens of exercise, but the same is true of physiology, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
Like, or I'll give you another example.
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Many of my patients have observed this.
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SPEAKER_01
I've observed this.
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SPEAKER_01
Like I was never a big drinker in college, but certainly there were enough occasions in med school or college where I'd go out and drink
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SPEAKER_01
 far more than anyone should.
1
SPEAKER_01
And yet somehow the next day I could like get up at six in the morning and go and do whatever I need to do.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like I remember one night actually being out drinking until three in the morning.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, having so much to drink, it was ridiculous.
1
SPEAKER_01
And somehow getting up at six in that morning to do a hundred mile bike ride.
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh my gosh, man.
1
SPEAKER_01
Probably still partially drunk, but felt fine by about like two hours into the ride.
1
SPEAKER_01
 Today, if I had three glasses of wine, like the headache I'm gonna have the next day is gonna last me till the middle of the day.
1
SPEAKER_02
So- Is that because your body was able to assimilate the glucose into the muscles and it used it to its advantage then and now it's like takes over?
1
SPEAKER_01
It's a very good question.
1
SPEAKER_01
I really, I mean, I could sort of, you know, speculate on what it is, but I just think there's an over, so there's this thing called homeostasis, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
Which is one of the hallmarks of youth.
1
SPEAKER_01
 And it's one of the hallmarks of aging.
1
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, it's, it's the ability to, or it's, it's our lack of homeostasis.
1
SPEAKER_01
We lose this ability to get the body back into the zone of optimal performance.
1
SPEAKER_01
So everything about the human body is very particular.
1
SPEAKER_01
For example, take pH, which is the amount of acidity in our body.
1
SPEAKER_01
 we're so highly regulated like our body really needs to be at a pH of 7.4.
1
SPEAKER_01
So 7 would kill you and 7.6 or 7.7 would kill you.
1
SPEAKER_01
And this is a scale that goes from 0 to 14 to put that in perspective.
1
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so tiny perturbations will kill you.
1
SPEAKER_01
How good is our body at staying in that?
1
SPEAKER_01
Amazing.
1
SPEAKER_01
 temperature, right?
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SPEAKER_01
You go much below about 94, you're dead.
1
SPEAKER_01
You go much above about 104, you're dead.
1
SPEAKER_01
How good are we at staying in that range?
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I mean, good.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we generally stay within a 1.5 degree band.
1
SPEAKER_01
So this homeostasis thing is amazing.
1
SPEAKER_01
 it gets weaker and weaker as we get older.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so your ability to tolerate bad food, bad sleep, sedentary behavior, more stress, all those things, it just gets weaker and weaker and weaker.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I think it declines non-linearly.
1
SPEAKER_01
So again, what you experience as a decline between 30 and 40, it's bad.
1
SPEAKER_01
40 to 50, yeah, that's worse.
1
SPEAKER_01
50 to 60, you can fall off a cliff.
1
SPEAKER_02
Is there a way to reverse this?
1
SPEAKER_01
 I don't think we know.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think you can definitely slow the progression of it.
1
SPEAKER_01
And you know what?
1
SPEAKER_01
I would say you probably can reverse it, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
So just as you can clearly reverse diabetes, diabetes is a glucose homeostasis problem, and it's clearly reversible.
1
SPEAKER_01
So there are probably some variants of this that are harder to reverse than others.
1
SPEAKER_01
But no, I think we can reverse this process.
1
SPEAKER_01
 But it gets harder, you know, it gets harder as time goes on.
1
SPEAKER_01
It gets harder the further you are into, you know, sort of the physiologic trap.
1
SPEAKER_02
What are you doing to reverse it now that you've been experiencing this kind of not maybe a cliff, but a dip over the last five years for yourself?
1
SPEAKER_02
How are you thinking about it?
1
SPEAKER_01
 Well, I sort of had a change of heart, um, five years ago.
1
SPEAKER_01
Uh, so actually six years ago, 2014.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I sort of hung up my bike, which at that, so at that point I'd switched from swimming to cycling as sort of my main sport.
1
SPEAKER_01
Um, but I, you know, at that point, a couple of things had happened.
1
SPEAKER_01
So one, I had become very.
1
SPEAKER_01
 familiar with a lot of emerging research on excessive cardiovascular training, which again is a rich man's problem.
1
SPEAKER_02
Ultra marathons, ultra biking, ultra swimming, hiking.
1
SPEAKER_01
That's right.
1
SPEAKER_01
That's right.
1
SPEAKER_01
So again, and it's the same sort of curve, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
Where as exercise dose of exercise goes up,
1
SPEAKER_01
 Mortality comes down, but it has this little bit of a J where once you start to get into hyper amounts of exercise, especially over the age of 40, you're actually driving an increase in mortality.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now, really?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_02
Does that mean like running a marathon once a year or is it running a marathon every week?
1
SPEAKER_01
 Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Great, great point.
1
SPEAKER_01
Running a marathon once a year, probably not increasing your mortality at all.
1
SPEAKER_01
Um, but you know, running 40, 50 miles a week probably is, especially at that age.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now, again, this gets to your point about resilience.
1
SPEAKER_01
Someone in their twenties doing that.
1
SPEAKER_01
 doesn't seem to have any impact on mortality.
1
SPEAKER_01
It really only seems to be an issue if you continue.
1
SPEAKER_01
In fact, I did an interview with a cardiologist, James O'Keefe, on my podcast, who is the world's expert on this.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it was actually James's work six years ago, because I heard him speak at a conference 10 years ago.
1
SPEAKER_01
We became friends.
1
SPEAKER_01
 It's one of those things, I'm sure you've experienced this, where you hear something and you don't want it to be true, so you basically come up with all the reasons you're going to poke holes in it until you can't anymore.
1
SPEAKER_02
You find the evidence the other way, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
And eventually, it became very difficult to ignore that this hyper amount of exercise was counterproductive.
1
SPEAKER_01
So that's one piece of the change six years ago.
1
SPEAKER_02
It's probably bad that I just committed to doing the marathon next year yesterday.
1
SPEAKER_01
 That's all right, though.
1
SPEAKER_01
You'll be fine.
1
SPEAKER_01
I just think don't do one a month, you know?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then I think the second thing was I realized, like, it was sort of funny, but I realized, like, my prime was so far behind me that I needed to think about, like, what was I doing this in service of, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
And not that I needed anyone other than myself to do these things, because I'm very self-motivated.
1
SPEAKER_01
But just as a joke one day, I asked my wife,
1
SPEAKER_01
 I said, hey, do you know what my PR is for 20K?
1
SPEAKER_02
Bike, run, or swim?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, bike, on a 20K bike on the time trial.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, this is my wife.
1
SPEAKER_01
She hears me talk about this stuff all the time.
1
SPEAKER_01
I have spreadsheets and models and data.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I analyze my power data every single day.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I'm trying to break the record for San Diego.
1
SPEAKER_01
I'm really so switched on to this.
1
SPEAKER_01
She'll probably get it within a minute.
1
SPEAKER_01
She'll guess what my PR is within a minute.
1
SPEAKER_01
 She was off by 20 minutes, meaning she wasn't even in the zip code.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I was like, huh, that's funny.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like, it's like literally the most important person in my life couldn't care less about this.
1
SPEAKER_01
And what I realized was, you know, I need to start thinking about a different sport, which is the sport of longevity.
1
SPEAKER_01
So what does it mean to be a kick-ass hundred year old?
1
SPEAKER_01
 And so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction called the centenarian Olympics.
1
SPEAKER_01
So how do you train to kick ass at a hundred should you get there?
1
SPEAKER_01
And of course, everywhere along the way.
1
SPEAKER_01
 So that now dominates my landscape of training, which means I don't, you know, care about how fast I can, you know, ride a 40 kilometer time trial.
1
SPEAKER_01
Cause that doesn't quite fit into what a centenarian needs to be able to do.
1
SPEAKER_02
What is your mindset going into a.
1
SPEAKER_02
 40-mile bike then or some type of experience.
1
SPEAKER_02
Is it more the joy of it?
1
SPEAKER_01
No, my training is very specific, but now it is fundamentally organized around four pillars.
1
SPEAKER_01
The pillars being stability, strength, mitochondrial or aerobic efficiency, and anaerobic performance.
1
SPEAKER_01
Each of those then has a super layered detail
1
SPEAKER_01
 approach.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I still ride my bike four hours a week.
1
SPEAKER_01
So it's a fraction of what I used to do.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it's now very much geared to a certain energy system and a type of training.
1
SPEAKER_01
Um, what was the fourth one?
1
SPEAKER_02
Stability, strength, mitochondria, mitochondrial efficiency, or aerobic efficiency.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then the fourth and final one is anaerobic performance.
1
SPEAKER_02
So you focus on those four
2
SPEAKER_00
 metrics now on a day-to-day basis.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
Those four pillars sort of make up the training program, which is then in service of something that I invite every patient to define for themselves, which is because you will have a different set of variables for me potentially, but my Centenarian Olympics has 18 events in it.
2
SPEAKER_01
 You know, like I want to be able to pull myself out of a pool that, you know, where there's a one foot gap between the water and the curb, like lift myself up.
2
SPEAKER_01
I want to be able to hop over a three foot fence.
2
SPEAKER_01
I want to be able to walk three miles in an hour.
2
SPEAKER_01
I want to be able to carry
2
SPEAKER_01
 two 10 pound bags up four flights of stairs.
2
SPEAKER_01
I want to be able to goblet squat 30 pounds because that's about the weight of a kid.
2
SPEAKER_01
I want to be able to get up off the floor without using my hands.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I could rattle off all of my 18 things and you would say, Peter, those seem really easy and you'd be right as a 37 year old stud.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the point is, as a 30 year old, a lot of them aren't easy.
2
SPEAKER_01
 Most 60-year-olds couldn't do this if their life depended on it, and I have yet to meet but maybe one person in their 80s or 90s who can.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so that's the aspiration, is to get to that level in your 80s or 90s.
2
SPEAKER_01
How do you work that backwards to inform your training in your 60s, in your 50s, and in your 40s?
2
SPEAKER_01
And it's actually very hard.
2
SPEAKER_00
 And as I'm getting into, you know, I'm three years away from 40, what should someone in my age range be thinking about when they're, you know, I'm healthy.
2
SPEAKER_00
I feel good.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, maybe have some aches and pains here and there when I'm training hard or something, but for the most part, I feel amazing.
2
SPEAKER_00
What should I be thinking about moving forward so that I continue to feel amazing and have the ability to do these things?
2
SPEAKER_01
 So I think it's never too late to at least become familiar with what these ideas mean.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it doesn't mean that you have to go whole hog and devote yourself to this.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like I've obviously made a very conscious choice that
2
SPEAKER_01
 I don't go to swim meets.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don't go to bike races.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like I don't train for those things anymore.
2
SPEAKER_01
And a big part of that is just time.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, there are only 168 hours in a week and you know, I have a very clear set of priorities and I'm willing to set aside 10 to 12 hours a week for exercise, which by many people's standards is still quite a lot, but probably by the standards that you exercise and certainly by the standards that I used to exercise, you know, I've never exercised so little in my life.
2
SPEAKER_01
 So I have to be very efficient with every one of those minutes.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that means I'm laser focused on the four principles of that.
2
SPEAKER_01
In your case, I think it comes down to saying, okay, how much time do you want to devote to the long game?
2
SPEAKER_01
How much time do you want to devote to the short game?
2
SPEAKER_01
Another way to think about this would be investing.
2
SPEAKER_01
 If you're looking at an investment portfolio, you might say, how much do I want to put both time and money?
2
SPEAKER_01
So the actual capital I set aside, but also the amount of time I spend deliberating over it into my retirement account versus how much do I want to invest as a day trader for short term gains, um, for, you know, money that I'm going to be using in the near term.
2
SPEAKER_01
That's maybe even supplementing my income today.
2
SPEAKER_01
Mm hmm.
2
SPEAKER_01
 You could have totally different strategies for that, and that's totally fine.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I'm just in the category where I'm only thinking about long-term permanent capital.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so that's the first question is you have to decide how do you want to do that.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it might be that you say, Peter, at 37, I just want to focus on running a marathon.
2
SPEAKER_01
I've always wanted to do an Ironman, so I'm going to go and do that.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I want to climb Mount Everest, and that's going to require... You might have a whole bunch of these bucket list things.
2
SPEAKER_01
And truthfully, I would say, do them now because it's only going to get harder.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because you're not going to be able to do it later.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
 Yeah, I mean, I don't think you're going to want to do it later.
2
SPEAKER_01
So get those things out of the way.
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SPEAKER_00
I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness.
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SPEAKER_00
Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links.
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SPEAKER_00
And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel exclusively on Apple podcasts.
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SPEAKER_00
 Share this with a friend on social media, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well.
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SPEAKER_00
Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review.
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SPEAKER_00
I really love hearing feedback from you, and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward.
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SPEAKER_00
And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.
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SPEAKER_00
And now, it's time to go out there and do something great.