Episode 124: The Value of Sleep with Dr. Michael Breus

Announcer:
This is The WealthAbility® Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money, way less taxes.

Tom Wheelwright:

Welcome to the Wealth Ability Show, where we're always discovering how to make way more money andpay way less tax. Hi, this is Tom Wheelwright, your host, founder and CEO of Wealth Ability. So thequestion always is, am I trying to work more hours or get more work done? And the topic of today is howdo you get more work done by making sure you get the right amount of sleep and the right kind of sleep. And we have the expert on the subject. The sleep doctor himself is in the house, Dr. Michael Breus. Dr. Breus, so good to have you with us. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1:

Hello Tom, thanks for having me here. I'm excited to answer questions and talk about how to actuallymake more money by getting better sleep.

Speaker 2:

I like it. So it's one of the things I remember, for example, a few years ago, I had a buddy who was about15 years older than me, and we'd meet at the gym and he'd say, I say, “How do you take time out of yourbusy day for the gym?” He says, “I don't see as a time out of my day because I see it's extending my life, and I actually get more done when I work out than if I just worked more.” So just to give us an overview, how does sleep play into being more effective when you're actually working rather than just workinglonger?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So this is actually a really interesting question. And when I talk with people about sleep and howdoes sleep work, I'm a big science guy, so I'm always about evidence–based work. So where's theresearch? What does the research show? Things of that nature. Interestingly enough, sleep in theworkplace is something that has been studied quite a bit and we've got some really good data on it. So asan example, the big thing we always try to avoid is sleep deprivation. So let's define what does sleepdeprivation mean, because to be honest with you, it's different for different people.

So as an example, I go to bed around midnight. I wake up without an alarm around 6:30 every single day. So I get about six and a half hours of sleep. My wife goes to bed around 11, she wakes up around 7:30. She gets about eight and a half hours of sleep. I'm not sleep deprived. If she slept the amount of hours thatI sleep, she would be sleep deprived. So knowing and understanding what your personal level of sleepdeprivation is is very, very important to understand the context in which all of this research is done.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So how do you figure that out? How do you know? Outside of I've been dragging lately, how doyou figure out that, oh, I'm really sleep deprived?

Speaker 3:

So there's a couple of signals or signs that people don't know about that I thought I would talk to peopleabout. So number one, most people have a tendency to feel sleepy in the mid afternoon, somewherebetween 12 and one. That's pretty normal. People, that feeling should go away by about two o'clock, threeo'clock. If you're feeling tired at three or four o'clock, that's a definite sign that you have potential sleepdeprivation.

Another sign, one that many people don't know about, is if you fall asleep in under five minutes, there's ahigh likelihood that you are sleep deprived.

Speaker 2:

Oh, interesting.

Speaker 3:

Right? So the natural sleep process should take somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes for your body torelax and then fall into sleep. But if you're so worked over that you haven't had sleep in so long that whenyour head hits the pillow, boom, you're out, that is a sure sign that you're sleep deprived.

Another big sign that your sleep deprived, one that a lot of people might not realize hitting the snoozebutton. Okay?

Speaker 2:

Ah.

Speaker 3:

You're getting the right amount of sleep and you're feeling good when you wake up, you don't even thinkabout this snooze button. I would argue in many cases you don't even turn on your alarm. So for peoplewho require an alarm and hit the snooze button anytime more than one time, there's a pretty decent signthat you're sleep deprived. Make sense?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So let me ask you about that. So you talk about saving the alarm. So I am an anti alarm person. Sohow important is it to, like you say, you get up, you know when you're going to get up, you know whenyou're going to go to bed, you know when you're going to get up, and you know how much sleep becauseyou've done this for… This is your expertise obviously. But when people are costly setting their alarm, what does that tell you?

Speaker 3:

So here's one of the things that it tells me, is there's an idea out there that I've written about calledchronotypes. So this idea, and you may not have heard the term, but you've actually heard of the concept, if anybody's ever been called an early bird or a night owl, right? Turns out that inside of our genes, itactually tells us exactly when we are supposed to sleep. And it's all based on genetics. 99% of peoplehave no idea about this by the way. But if you go to my website, chronoquiz.com, you can take a quiz, ittakes two, three minutes, and it tells you exactly what time to go to bed and what time to wake up.

So I've done the science, I've done the hard work for you in most of the cases, so going to take the quizcan be very beneficial. But let's say you don't want to do that and you just want to have a generalguideline, here's what I tell people. The average sleep cycle is 90 minutes long. The average human hasfive of those. Okay? So five times 90, right? We're we're all into math here, right? Five times 90 is 450minutes divided by 60 is seven and a half hours. So number one, eight hours is a myth. We just did themath and the math doesn't even work.

So I want to be very clear. Everybody needs their own amount of sleep. But let's take this number ofseven and a half hours. Everybody seems to have what I call a socially determined wake up time. Here'swhat that means in real language. What time do your kids get up? What time do your dogs get up? Orwhat time do you get up and have to pee? Okay? Because that's really what's driving a lot of that kind ofstuff. Then count backwards from that seven and a half hours and that becomes your bedtime because thevariability is almost always in the bedtime, not in the wake up time, because you wake up at roughly thesame time at least five days a week. My argument would be I want that to be seven. And there's somevery specific reasons why it should be seven. To be clear, trying to catch up on sleep over the weekends, it's a terrible idea, number one. And number two, it doesn't work very well. Let me explain the sciencereal quick and then we'll get back to sleep deprivation and how it affects the workforce.

The reason that we get up at the same time every day, including the weekends, is twofold. When we wakeup and our eyes open up in the morning, there's some cells in your eye called melanopsin cells. Whenlight hits that cell, it tells your brain to turn off the melatonin faucet in your head. Remember guys, melatonin is kind of that key that starts the engine for sleep. So we want to make sure that that gets turnedoff in the morning, otherwise we feel groggy and kind of floaty in our heads.

There's a second thing that goes on that's even more important, is our brain sets a timer for approximately14 hours later. Here's the trick that nobody knows, your brain cannot tell time. This is a very strangeconcept, but let me explain. If you're waking up at 6:00 AM, 6:00 AM every day, 14 hours later, yourbrain kicks in, melatonin at 8:00 PM. But if you're waking up at six and then you wake up at nine, yourbrain doesn't know to kick off at eight. It just knows 14 hours later, which means your melatonin isn'tkicking off until 11, which means you're probably not falling asleep until midnight. You do that for acouple of nights in a row, you've shifted your circadian rhythm. This is why Mondays suck, okay? Because we stay up late on Friday nights, sleep in on Saturday, stay up late on Saturday, sleep in onSunday. What does your body want to do by Monday? All it wants to do is sleep in.

Speaker 2:

Well, that would also explain jet lag to some extent.

Speaker 3:

Exactly.

Speaker 2:

Right? Because now you're traveling. So I learned many years ago, because I travel a lot around the worldspeaking, and what I found was is that it didn't matter when I went to bed, I knew I had to wake up at thesame time no matter where I was. So if I'm in London and I would normally wake up at six o'clock in themorning in Phoenix, I need to still wake up at six o'clock in the morning in London, which means I needto readjust that timeframe. Right?

Speaker 3:

Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 2:

Does that make sense?

Speaker 3:

It does. And so there's actually an app that will help people do that. And full disclosure, I helped developit and I'm a part owner in the app. It's called Timeshifter, T–I–M–E–S–H–I–F–T–E–R. So what we do is welook at where you are, where you're going, and your chronotype, and we give you a jet lag plan so thatwhen you land, you arrive on the time of your destination. Now, it takes two days for this to get intoeffect. So I want to be clear, when you download Tmeshifter you have to start working on yourself twodays before you leave. However, once you do that, you literally land on the time that you need. So I'vedone this to Beijing, I've done this to Portugal, I've done this to Spain, I've done this to Paris, to London, and it works like a charm. The stricter you are, the better off you are. But let's get back to the whole ideaof sleep deprivation for just a moment.

Speaker 2:

Please.

Speaker 3:

So as you recognize where your level of sleep deprivation is, whether whatever you figure out, numberone, let's talk about what does that do to your work performance. Now, here's what's interesting, is whenwe think about performance, a lot of cases we think about physical performance. So reaction time slowsdown. We know that's for sure. Believe it or not, testosterone slows down for you guys out there. We'venow seen that if you lose approximately an hour of sleep each night, at the end of 10 days, yourtestosterone is equal to that of somebody that's 10 years older than you.

Speaker 2:

Wow.

Speaker 3:

Okay? So if you're 55 and you don't have a whole lot of testosterone to begin with and you're sleepdeprived, you've got the testosterone of a 65 year old. When you're talking about competitive athletics, that gets very interesting very quickly. So some of my patients are professional athletes, 22 years old. They're not getting enough sleep, they're playing like a 33 year old. Their shelf life is done at that point, right? So understanding what the parameters are of your job from a physical standpoint, know andunderstand something. If you ain't sleeping, there's no universe where you're going to be able to keep up.

Speaker 2:

All right? Hey, if you like financial education the way I do, you're going to love Buck Joffrey's podcast. Buck's a friend of mine. He's a client of mine. He's a former board certified surgeon, and he's turned into areal estate professional. So he has this podcast that is geared towards high paid professionals. That's whohe is geared towards. So if you're a high paid professional, you're going, “Look, I'd like to do somethingdifferent with my money than what I'm doing. I'd like to get financially educated. I'd like to take controlof my money and my life and my taxes,” I would love to recommend Buck Joffrey's podcast, which iscalled Wealth Formula Podcast with Buck Joffrey. I hope you join Buck on this adventure of a lifetime.

So let's get to the practical part. The most practical part of this is so you're not sleeping. So what do youneed to do? What do you have to change? Let's say you wake up in the middle of the night, or let's saythat you wake up, and I've had nights where I wake up and I'll literally be up reading for an hour before Ican get back to sleep because–

Speaker 3:

I got a whole plan for people. I got a whole plan for everybody, but I just want to finish one little extrapoint here, which is we also have to talk about cognition and sleep deprivation. To be clear, when you'resleep deprived, you are not thinking clearly. I want to make a very important point here. You are a higherrisk taker when you are sleep deprived. So if you're a stockbroker and you're managing people's moneyand you're sleep deprived, you will make more risky decisions than you would if you were well slept. That becomes very important from a performance standpoint in a lot of different areas.

Morale is another one. Leadership follows the well slept, okay? If you are a well slept leader, you aremore open to new ideas. You have a less aggressive attitude, you work better with your employees. Andyour employees, and this is real data, employees love working for bosses that sleep well because they'renicer humans, they get bigger raises and the environment works better. There's tremendous amounts ofdata on this particular area that's really pretty interesting.

So when we start to think about it like, “Okay, Michael, we get it. If you're sleep deprived, your workproduct isn't so great. What do you do about it? And how do you stop from being sleep deprived?” Number one, like I said before, head on over Chronoquiz and figure out when you should be sleeping, because if you sleep inside what I call your chronotypical swim lane, here's what happens. Your sleep getsmore efficient. You actually require less sleep if you're inside your genetic chronotypical swim lane.

But let's say you're doing that, but you still wake up at two o'clock in the morning, just like you said, andyou say, “Oh crap, what do I do now?” So I have a particular method, and it's going to take me aboutthree minutes to explain the whole thing. I'm letting everybody know, sit back, but it's going to makesense and it works. All right?

So number one, most people wake up between two and four in the morning. When your core bodytemperature rises, rises, rises until about 10:30, it has to fall. That fall is a signal to your brain to releasemelatonin. Remember, key that starts the engine for sleep. Your core body temperature continues to falluntil about two o'clock in the morning, and then it has to go up otherwise you're going to go hypothermic, you're going to freeze. So as soon as it starts to get, your body gets warmer, it's easier to wake up. Sothere's a biological reason why most people wake up at that time. Now, to be fair, if you've had a lot ofcaffeine that day or a lot of alcohol that day, you're going to wake up a lot easier than if you didn't at thatparticular moment.

But let's just keep going on this idea of, I woke up because my body is getting warm. The very first thingthat 99% of people do is look at the clock. Now, I got to be honest with you, this is a terrible idea becausehere's what happens. You look at the clock, you instantly do the mental math and you say, “Oh crap, it's3:30 in the morning. I have to get up at six. Sleep, sleep, sleep,” and you try to sleep. Okay?

I have a theory. I think sleep is a lot like love. The less you look for it, the more it shows up. Okay? Sowhen you're out there looking for that perfect person in your life, you never seem to find them. But thesecond you stop looking so hard, they wander in. Sleep is exactly the same way. When you look at theclock and you say, “Oh crap,” you have instantly now raised your heart rate, raised your blood pressure, and raised your anxiety. Here's the metric that nobody knows. You have to have a heart rate of 60 orbelow to enter into a state of unconsciousness. So this is not a difficult game to play once you understandthe rules.

So how do we get somebody back to sleep to a heart rate of 60 or below? Number one, don't go pee. Iwant to be clear about this. If you don't have to go to the bathroom, don't. So many people that wake up at3:30 in the morning, they're like, “Well, I'm up. Let me see if I need to pee.” This is a terrible idea. Remember that 60 heart rate? When you go from a lying position to a seated position to a standingposition, and you walk across the room, what do you think happens to your heart rate? Straight up.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Right? So then you have two problems. You have a sleep problem and a heart rate problem. So if youdon't have to go, please don't. I want to be clear, if you got a pee, go pee. All right? Because it's going tomess with your head the whole time. But if you're thinking, oh, maybe I do, maybe I don't, you don't. Okay? Lie there and relax. There's now data on something called non–sleep deep rest. This is veryinteresting. So you're not actually asleep, but you're lying in a dark room, quiet, not moving. Okay? Turnsout that's rejuvenative. To be fair, it's not like sleep, but if you did an hour of that, it's like 20 minutes ofsleep.

So for a lot of people who are sitting there saying, “Oh crap, I'm never going to fall back asleep. It's threeo'clock in the morning.” Relax, okay? While you're just lying there, you're actually helping yourself out. So even if you don't fall back asleep the whole morning and you lie there for three hours, you're gettingabout an hour's worth of sleep. Okay?

Now comes the part where, how do I reduce my heart rate? 4–7–8 breathing. This is a technique that wasdeveloped by Dr. Andrew Weil for the Navy Seals. So if you're a Navy sniper, you know that if your heartrate is above 60, you can actually change the trajectory of the bullet. Okay? So what they have to do isthey have to lower their heart rate below 60 and fire between heart rates, heartbeats rather, but they getthem to below 60, and 60's our magic number. So we're going to use their technique to our advantage.

So the technique is quite simple. You breathe in for a count of four, you hold for a count of seven, andyou push out for a count of eight. I want to be clear, this is not a hard push. This is a soft, easy in and out. But what it does is it dumps all the excess carbon dioxide out of your system, allows for fresh oxygen tocome in, and your heart needs to do less work, which therefore lowers your heart rate. Seven to eightcycles of this, your heart rate is below 60, you're calm and relaxed knowing that even if I don't fall asleep, I'm here and my body is getting some form of rejuvenation, and then the natural sleep process has thetendency to take over. Makes sense?

Speaker 2:

It does. Do you find that also helps? Because a lot of us, you wake up in the middle of the night, yourbrain, you woke up because your brain's busy, right? That's part of why you woke up.

Speaker 3:

So to be honest with you, that's not accurate.

Speaker 2:

Good. Well, the thing is-

Speaker 3:

The reason that people-

Speaker 2:

We're breaking the myths here of sleep.

Speaker 3:

We are, we are. So here's the thing about stress and stress before bed. Once you're unconscious, it's veryunlikely that stress is what's waking you up, unless it's a nightmare. Now, if you wake up and your heartis beating a million miles an hour, which is different than what we've been discussing, we've beendiscussing the casual wake up at 2:30, “Oh shit, I'm awake,” type of thing. But if you wake up and yourheart's racing and there's something going on, like you're thinking about the dream, that's a wholedifferent scenario.

But generally speaking, the main reason why people wake up is biology, number one, and what else didthey do to their body ahead of time. A lot of people kind of use sleep as the shock absorber of their day, meaning that they don't really care what's going on. If they've got a lot of stress, maybe they stay up later, maybe they go to bed earlier. It's quite variable in there. The consistency is what turns out to really helppeople out a tremendous amount. And again, it has a lot to do with wake up time.

But waking up in the middle of the night due to 100% stress, it's highly, highly unlikely. More likely thatsomebody drank alcohol or had caffeine before at some point in time during the day, which has put theminto a lighter stage of sleep, and now it's difficult to get back because your brain can't get into the depth ofsleep any longer because of the caffeine that's still on board. Many people don't realize it, caffeine has ahalf–life, meaning 50% is still in your system for six to eight hours.

Speaker 2:

Oh wow.

Speaker 3:

So if you stop drinking caffeine at two, eight hours later, which is 10, which is when most people go tobed, 50% of that caffeine is still rumbling around inside your head. And so that's going to have a bigeffect on not just your ability to fall asleep, but specifically your ability to maintain sleep. A lot of peoplefall asleep because they're just so exhausted. But then all of a sudden, the caffeine's still wanderingaround. So they stay in this light stage of sleep, then their biology moves to make them a little bit warmerand then they're done. And so if you can go decaf, I highly recommend it. Me personally, I like to have acup of coffee almost every morning, so that's what I do. I have it about 90 minutes after I wake up, andthat's the only one that I have throughout the day. And that really will work much better for people as ageneral rule.

Now, let's say you can't turn off your brain in the middle of the night. You've done your 4,-7–8 breathing, and Michael, this shit just isn't working right? Here's what you do. Count backwards from 300 by threes. This is mathematically so complicated you can think of nothing else, and it's so doggone boring, you'reout like a light. It really works. People laugh at it. But if you try it tonight, you will be surprised becauseit's very difficult to figure through a pattern there. And so you end up just really doing the math, doing themath, doing the math, and you can't think of anything else, and math is boring, and boom, you're done.

The other thing you can do is a technique called cognitive shuffling. It's like a word game that you play toavoid anxious thoughts. So you start with the letter A, beginning of the alphabet is apple, then the nextletter B is banana, and you try to do fruits for 26 letters or whatever. All that you're doing here at thispoint is doing a boring type of memorial retrieval, which should slow you down quite a bit.

The other big thing that I talk about with people who wake up in the middle of the night, you can't fallback asleep is heat. We're in the middle of the summer, and so we do know that heat plays a large role inour ability to stay comfortable. So keeping that bedroom cool is going to be pretty important, as well askeeping your body cool is going to be important as well. We see a lot of people waking up in the middle of the night with night sweats and not just, by the way, women going through menopause. Men as wellget night sweats, and especially if you have a cocktail with dinner.

Now, I'm going to be honest with you, I like scotch. I like bourbon. I like having a cocktail with dinnerevery once in a while. But I will tell you, I notice a difference in the quality of my sleep, even with one ortwo cocktails. That doesn't mean I don't have them. That just means, okay, Michael, remember something. If it's Friday night and my wife and I are going to go out and have dinner, and she gets a glass of wine andI have a cocktail, that's going to be fine, but I need to have a glass of water to offset that cocktail and Ineed to give myself enough time before I go to bed, approximately two hours, so that it doesn't have amajor effect on my sleep.

Speaker 2:

That's really interesting because I find white wine will keep me up at night, for sure. Right? But theFrench, they drink wine for lunch and–

Speaker 3:

And their wine is very different than our wine.

Speaker 2:

And it is. It's not nearly so much alcohol in it.

Speaker 3:

Right.

Speaker 2:

In France, you can share a bottle of wine and you're fine.

Speaker 3:

You're fine.

Speaker 2:

You can't do that. You can't do that here.

Speaker 3:

No, no, no. Not at all. So yeah, so it's really about being thoughtful about things throughout the daytimeto be able to sleep better at night. The other thing that I think a lot of people don't really think through asan idea is this is another reason for daily exercise, and I want to be clear about something. You don't haveto run a marathon, you don't have to exercise for an hour. I'm talking 20 minutes of cardio. Go for a walk, go with your dog. I don't care. But doing consistent exercise daily, the data is tremendous, that it helpsover the course of your lifetime with sleep. It will help your sleep immediately, but just being a dailyexerciser. Here's the thing, sleep is recovery. You got to have something to recover from. So moving thatbody around turns out to be a very important aspect.

And then the other big, big, big one that I want to kind of double tap on real quickly is hydration. Somany people don't understand how to hydrate and get hydrated. So number one, sleep in and of itself is a dehydrative event. We lose almost a full liter of water every single night from just the humidity in ourbreath, not even the sweat and oils that come from our skin, mind you. So when people wake up in themorning, a lot of them drink coffee as their very first liquid of the day. Remember guys, coffee's adiuretic. It makes you pee. Nothing could be worse for your system than coffee first thing in the morning. Water is what you need.

I tell people all the time, when you wake up, within 10 minutes of waking up, you need to drink 15ounces of water, period. Now, I want to be clear, I didn't say 30 ounces. I didn't say 45 ounces. A lot ofpeople over–hydrate in the morning. 15 to 18 ounces is exactly what your body kind of needs. Let it soakin. Then if you want to go do your workout or meditation or whatever it is you're doing, you will haveenough hydration in your system.

Speaker 2:

Got it.

Speaker 3:

Then hydrate throughout the day.

Now, here's the other big thing that a lot of people do, is they say, “Well, Michael, I forgot to drinkenough water today, so it's eight o'clock at night, I'm going to drink three glasses.” This is a terrible idea, okay? Because you're going to wake up and pee. I can assure you. Now, I don't want you restricting fluidsper se, especially if you have diabetes. This is something you would want to talk about with your doctor, but you probably don't need to be drinking a whole lot within 90 minutes of bedtime.

And make sure that you go to the bathroom before you go to bed as well. A lot of people don't think aboutit. They're kind of like nodding off on the couch, watching TV, They stumble into their closet, they pulloff their clothes, throw on a t–shirt, boxers, maybe brush their teeth, and then they fall into bed. Reallykind of thinking through what's going on with your body at that time can be about very valuable. I tellpeople all the time, you need runway to land the plane. And so give yourself some time to move into thatsleep universe and sleep environment. It will serve you well, and I promise you it'll help you in your job.

Speaker 2:

Well, Dr. Michael Breus, this has been amazing, a lot of fun and lots of practical stuff. So remember, watch this over and over, listen to it over and over because these are very practical tips. So for moreinformation about what you do and how to not be sleep deprived, how to get that good night's sleep and the right amount of sleep, where would we go?

Speaker 3:

So head on over to the sleepdoctor.com. We've got a tremendous amount of information over there. Also, one of the things, this is interesting too, Tom, the number one question that I get asked is, what bed shouldI buy? So we've done a tremendous number of mattress reviews for people so you can really kind of knowand understand what's out there, because they all look like fuzzy rectangles to me, and so you got to get inthere and put some science on it and kind of figure it out. So if you do head on over to Sleep Doctor orcheck me out on social, I'm at, the handle is thesleepdoctor on Facebook, on TikTok, on all the otherdifferent ones. I don't know them all anymore.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. So again, Dr. Michael Breus, the Sleep Doctor. And just remember that when we get the rightamount of sleep, when we get enough sleep, we're not sleep deprived, we're going to perform better. We're going to make way more money and we're going to pay way less tax. We'll see you next time.

Announcer:

You've been listening to the WealthAbility Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money. Way less taxes. To learn more, go to wealthability.com.