There's many studies that have been done on basketball players. A lack of sleep can go through and interfere with reaction time. It can interfere with visual acuity, their ability to see the ball at the speed of line and react to it. So that's the software things, their ability to think fast, that really goes down and that's diminished.
One second for LeBron James can mean the difference between winning and losing, right? Louisa, Nicola, welcome to the show. Yeah, Chris, so happy to be here. How would you describe what you do for work?
Well, my company, neuro athletics is literally the intersection of neuroscience and athletic performance. Around six years ago, I would say six years ago, 2016, I saw a gap in that market where I was looking at athletes. I was training athletes, I had a neuroscience background, and I thought, why is everybody obsessed with making these athletes better by just working on their speed and agility? Why are we not working on their brains?
The brain is a powerhouse of the entire system. So that's what I did. I just started my company and started working on the brain. OK, but you don't just work with athletes, right?
Correct. So right now, so at the start, the conception, your athletics was purely athletes, and then we moved into an only major league soccer, NFL, and NBA pathway. And then just by chance, two years ago, we are with the attention of the finance world. And let me tell you, their brains are, their brains are in dire need of neuro athletics.
So we now serve as some of the financial world. What's the similarities between a portfolio manager and an athlete? Lack of sleep, first and foremost, secondly competitiveness. Thirdly, they've got that ability to do whatever it takes.
They're not just getting up for a day job at 9am and putting their suit on. They have to train athletes to get the best results. Some of the guys I'm working with tell me, Louise, if I don't make this trade tonight, if I'm not in the peak state to make a good trade, I could lose $30 million. OK, so it's slightly high stakes.
When you actually put it like that, you think, I was kicking a ball about, you know, kicking a ball into a goal, what is it, man? It's not 30 million. You said that both of them were under slept. Do you find that your athletes on average are under slept?
Is that something specific to athletes? Or do you think that this is just the entire world is under slept and athletes are a subsection of the world? Very good question. So I think everybody, not just athletes and portfolio managers, I think everybody is under slept.
Now, just 12 hours ago on Twitter, I posted a tweet saying, guys, I think I have it all wrong. I've been talking about sleep deprivation, but instead, why don't I talk about, why don't we say REM sleep deprivation or slow wave sleep deprivation? I think we've got it all wrong when we talk about sleep deprivation. Now, a lot of people in society are sleep deprived.
Now, sleep deprived is classified as six hours or less. I live in New York City. Almost everybody in the city is sleeping six hours or less. It's a hustle city.
But then also now because of technology, because of what we're eating, because of how we're going out, the fact that the pandemic has brought us inside, we are being exposed to things that are keeping us up longer throughout the night, but also disrupting our patterns of getting into deep sleep and slow and REM sleep. So I coined this new phenomenon. I think of 2022, instead of somebody saying, I'm sleep deprived, I'm going to say, well, what part of sleep deprived are you? Are you lacking REM sleep or you're lacking deep sleep?
Yeah, well, most people aren't tracking on average. You know, there's some freaks amongst us that are that have got a whip strap or that we're in ordering, but not many people aren't. It was only when I started wearing a whoops strap that I realized time in bed doesn't equal time of sleep and time of sleep doesn't always equal the same amount of quality of sleep. Even though you wake up on the morning and you realize there's something good right wrong side of the bed syndrome.
But the fact that even about what about 85% efficiency or a 90% efficiency say, which is pretty good. So that's all right. You need to be in bed for nine hours to get eight hours. And the number of people that are in bed for nine hours is basically zero.
Yeah. And sometimes that's a struggle for me, especially now being in Australia. But here's the thing, you're wearing a whoops strap. So I wear all three.
Now, what we know when we're talking about sleep physiology in order to really understand sleep apnea, okay, we'll go through a sleep. So you have to go into a lab and they hook you up with all of these machines. They start with the head, the eyes, you've got an oximeter, a nasal cannula. Now, that is that gives you a very precise measurement.
Okay, of your sleep stages. How can we possibly mimic that outside of the lab? Well, companies such as Ora, were other companies have now invented these wearables. But the accuracy is where I think we need to talk about you're wearing a I'm wearing an Ora right now.
Studies show that the Ora has a better PSG reading, sleep study reading. What's PSG? Oh, it's a polycellular theory. That's basically a sleep study.
Okay. When you go into a lab. So it kind of mimics, I think it was the statistics are around 87 percent of mimics. What's happening in the lab, whereas the whoops strap is a bit different.
It's more so better for exercise and performance and HIV tracking. Do you know what the percentage was for the whoop? I don't. But my thing is when I wear the whoop, sometimes at night, it can be, it slides around on your hand, sometimes you wake up and it's like misfolded.
So maybe that's the, maybe that's what's happening. Getting back to brain health. We'll talk about sleep in a bit. But what do you mean when you talk about a high performing brain?
What is that? So we've got, when we look at the brain, we've got both the software and the hardware, the hardware being the actual brain itself. Okay. And we can have many problems wrong with that.
For example, when an NFL player has a concussion, that's really messing with the hardware. Okay. They could have a dent in their brain. They could build up, how what that is within that area.
But then there's the software, which is how are you thinking? How are you feeling? What are your thoughts doing in your brain? It's like the cognitive part of it.
How's your reaction time? So I work with both of those. Now with anything in terms of progression, how we're meant to measure things. So what we do with all of our athletes is we measure them in month one.
They come into it. They come and see us, whether it's in person or whether it's online. And we do an actual EEG scan. So we put a cap on them.
We're measuring their brainways. We're understanding what's happening with both the software and the hardware. And then from that, we then put in a performance program. And that could consist of upping their vitamins or upping their EPA-DHA, which is known as visual oil.
We look at sleep because sleep has an impact on the brain. We look at reaction time. We look at visual acuity. And we even do breath work because breath work is another major factor affecting the hardware and the software.
So if I would say if you've got a high performing brain, there's probably about 10 different set points. And if you're at 10 out of 10 for all of those set points, then that would be a high performing brain. What does it look like on a biological level? So do you mean like...
When you go inside of a scan, what do you see? Do you see more connections? Is it to do with the speed of the sign-up? So it's the speed.
Okay, it's a speed. We look at information processing speed. Your ability for your eyes to perceive a stimulus, relay it back to your brain and for your brain to understand what it is. So that speed, it could be 0.4.
It could be 1.4. So obviously the 0.4 would be better. And this is measured in milliseconds. So why do we want that?
Well, you think of driving. A lot of traffic accidents happen on the road because of reaction time or sleep deprivation. So we're looking at everything. Your ability to make a decision at work, whether to make the trade or not make the trade, to make the phone call or not make the phone call is all dependent on your information processing speed.
And then there's also decision-making skills. So when they're doing the scan, they're looking at... It's not just a scan, it's a hospital-grade EEG. But you're not just sitting there, you're doing a task.
We're going to have them reacting to something on the screen. So it measures that in real time. What sort of things are you getting them to do? What are the tasks?
Look, I spent 16 hours with that EEG on watching one of our NBA players just do jump shots. It was a very hard day. Hang on. He's got the cap on while he's training.
Yeah, we're just having doing jump shots. And I was literally measuring what is happening when he's getting the ball in the basket. And I don't really speak technical when I'm talking about sports because I just don't know the technicality of it. Right, I understand.
That must be... So there'll be a particular pathway, right? There'll be a sequence, a common sequence of particular neurons that need to fire in order for the throw the ball toward the basket. Actions to be deployed.
And we can put this on a trader, for example, the entire month. And we can measure at what time, what was his brain doing? At the time he made a good trade? What was his brain doing at the time he made a bad trade?
So then we can then predict, we can then pull the software and predict when he's going to make a good trade or not. Mm. What are the main principles that people should consider when they're trying to maximize their brain's performance? Oh gosh.
Do you have a few days? Yep. Yes. So first one that I'm going to talk about, the ones that I think are not spoken about.
Okay, that are looked over. First one is hydration. Christopher, you've been drinking some water that's been on this core for 15 minutes. Again, you're hydrating.
It's so important for the brain to be hydrated. Now we have anywhere from 80 billion neurons in the brain, nerve cells, in order for them to think, react, produce a movement, or do anything. Those two brain cells need to synapse together. You mentioned that earlier.
It's when they fire together. In order for them to fire together, we have a pump called the sodium potassium pump. So literally our brain, where have you heard sodium potassium? Electroploids, right?
So our brain really needs to be hydrated to literally do anything. When we're dehydrated, we're not thinking straight, we're not being able to produce many things. So I always say, keep hydrated, not just with water, but with electrolytes too. So we have an electrolyte protocol in your athletics.
We do sweat tests. So some of our athletes are sweating a lot more than the others, and we determine that sweat test. We think, okay, if you're sweating this much, this is how many electrolytes you're losing. So we dose them for that pre-game post-game, and throughout the day.
So that's number one. Again, the second thing is consistency. Your brain is actually pretty dumb. Okay?
It's just this hunk of meat sitting inside your skull, but it likes consistency. It likes to wake up at the same time every day and go to sleep at the same time every day. It also doesn't like to be shocked. When it's shocked, it doesn't really prepared for anything.
So consistency with sleep routines, morning routines, eating habits, etc. Then we can move on to more of the pharmacological aspect. Now outside of normal pathologies, if you've got any diseases, etc. There are certain nutrients that our brain likes.
Our brain is literally made of DHA. And if you look at an omega-3 supplement, official, okay? Omega-3 is consistent of EPA, DHA, and ALA. So I'm always supplementing with EPA, DHA.
I do two milligrams in the morning, two milligrams at night. There's so many benefits. You're not just feeding your brain, but you're also lowering inflammation. We know that inflammation in a chronic state is bad for us, both nearly and physiologically.
So one of the utmost biggest protocols that we do with our athletes is you've got to be having EPA, DHA. I would urge everybody out there to be looking at the scientific literature on that. Do you have any brands that you suggest, particularly? I'm going to guess that there's some changes in the quality.
Oh yeah, I speak about that as well. Manufacturing right now is that it's a scary thing out there. You don't know sometimes what you're buying. Some of the drugs that they're selling just at the supermarket, you don't know what they're laced with.
So manufacturers matter. Now the brand that I use is Thorn, T-H-O-R-N-E. Why? Well, there are so many certifications.
I know them, like I've gone in, I've really researched. I've done my research on them. Manufacturing is clean. And you also want, when you're having an EPA, DHA, sometimes you know that the quality of an official, when you have it and you feel that you can taste the fishiness of it.
You ever felt that? And it's like, this is disgusting. Yes. Yes.
So that's how you know the quality of it. So it really matters what you're having. Okay. If when you're ingesting it and if you're ingesting the EPA, DHA, if it smells, it's not that fishy smell or taste, you know it's not a good quality.
So everything else, you know, when we're talking about supplementation, we do that. Okay. But then there's also, what are you supplementing at night to get a good quality sleep. Okay.
Because we know that sleep is one of the determining factors of brain performance. So what are you doing at night to get yourself into deep sleep stages? Now, I have a sleep stack, I would say, sleep protocol and it consists of the first one is magnesium L3 and 8. I take this every night.
First and foremost, magnesium. Okay. We know magnesium that should be good for the body. There's three types of magnesium.
We have it when we want to stress to leave and have better functioning muscles, recovery, etc. But there's one magnesium out of those three that crosses the blood brain barrier. And that is magnesium L3 and 8. So once it crosses the blood brain barrier, it's going to calm down your nervous system.
It's going to get you into deep sleep. So that's one of the sleep protocols that we have, magnesium L3 and then for some of our athletes or clients, some of them are feeling as if they've got a racing mind at night. So we may get them to supplement with GABA, which is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. So these are the things that, you know, without walking on too much that you can be doing at night or during the day.
What are you thoughts on 5HTP? I don't supplement with it, but I'm noticing a lot of men asking you this question, not women through. So I can't comment on it because I don't have it, but I have noticed that Andrew Huberman talks about that a bit. OK, what about dosage for the magnesium?
What would you aim for? So the one that I get is from pure encapsulations or life extension. It's a blue bottle and you have to take three at night. So you're just following the recommended dosage based on whatever it says on the bottle.
Well, yeah. Yeah. OK. Yeah, there's a jigsaw health through a mag SRT and that's one that's pretty well touted Spengringfield, a big fan of that.
That's pretty good. Yeah, yeah, it is. They have a magnesium chelate pre-bed drink thing, which is OK. But because it's, it must have some sort of bicarbonate or something to help it mix with the water.
And if you have that last thing before you go to bed, I always end up finding myself needing to sit up and burp like the most weird byproduct of having a sleep drink. You think, oh, yeah, but the fact that it's fizzy means that I need to anyway, what about exercise? So let's say that that's some of the principles behind making your brain healthier. What about things that people could do exercises that you take your athletes and your traders through to try and improve their mental capacity?
Oh, so many. So one thing that we focus on is zone two training. And that's when you're, you know, we've got different zones of training. Obviously, maybe zone five would be at maximum zone two.
Is that comfortable pace where you can talk or you're also exercising? OK, and we measure this through our VO2 max testing. So we do a lot of zone two. And the reason being is that this area of exercise is the most efficient to be training the quality of the mitochondria, the mitochondria or the powerhouse of the cell.
So once we get out of a zone three, once we get into zone three and zone four, we're training outside of that mitochondria. So that's one area that we train because we also focus on longevity. OK, everyone knows that an athlete has an expiration date. So we're focusing on longevity as well.
But the next part of it is so the reason why neuro athletics really came into play or existed was because I was doing a lot of reaction training. You know, I was working just with a tennis ball and a couple of lights back in 2016, just getting them to throw the ball to the wall. And what I found this was doing was it was training different areas of the brain or working on hand-eye coordination, so their ability to see a target, catch a ball, use reflexes, and then I started working from there. I got them to stand on one foot, throw the ball to the wall, contralateral movements with the brain.
So we were doing so much with hand-eye coordination. And that's how neuro athletics really came into play. So if you want to do anything for your brain, in terms of exercising, train it to its fatigue, you want to be doing, you just want to get a tennis ball. We're actually going to bring out some new rules.
And I'm trying to figure out a way to name that better. Yeah, anything with balls in is going to be difficult. Just going back to the zone too. Duration and frequency per week, what would you say?
Three times per week, or one hour, or around 50 minutes at minimum. Okay, so it's a big commitment for this, especially if you're an athlete, you've got your other training to do skills and work and stamina and blah, blah on top. But I suppose that's probably not a bad active recovery day. Exactly.
Is that how you try to use it? I use it like that, depending on who I'm talking to, because some of the, I've got a 56-year-old male who's in the training business, he may be very unhealthy, so I'll just get him to zone two, yeah, three hours a week. And he does that on a stationary bike. It's so easy.
He's got one set up in the living room. He's got kids, so he's just on that. No hard. What's the heart rate range that people should be aiming for to hit zone two?
Well, see, this is the thing that the science suggests that you shouldn't just work on heart rate. But for my athletes, we do, okay, because I do a VO2 max test for them. You always rated against what their max is. Exactly.
Everybody's different. But if you want to measure it, it's really around 65% of maximum HR, which you know is really easy. It's just walking around really. Am I right in thinking that zone two for that sort of duration, for that sort of frequency, is also what would be prescribed if you want you to raise the ceiling on your HRV as well?
Well, yeah, look. So HRV can raise HRV values, yes. And that's purely because you're working within that space. You're working on the mitochondria.
If you really want to get technical, you want to measure your blood lactate. And that's what we do. The only caveat on that is who wants to pin-prick themselves every time they're writing, right? Okay.
And measure blood. Let's say that someone does want to take the ceiling of that HRV up. What would your prescription be for that person? Well, we know that HRV or heart rate variability reflects how adaptable your body can be.
It measures the specific changes in time between successive heartbeats. So we know that we've got resting heart rate, we've got our actual heart rate. We know that it's measuring the time between those two heartbeats. Okay.
And it's basically a measure of your autonomic nervous system, which is everything that is happening automatically. So we know it's a good measurement of health and recovery. So if we want to be working on that, then we know that, okay, first and foremost, we need to really have a recovery day, okay? Or we need to be doing recovery things during the day.
Second thing is it's dependent on food intake, okay? Or the quality of if you're having alcohol or any type of drugs per se, that's going to go in and mess with your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Okay? So we want to wait to stabilize everything.
So sleeping well, sleeping consistently, hydrating, getting adequate exercise, all of these things are going to eventually into a higher, almost stable HRV. That is keeping HRV more stable and also acutely making it as optimal as possible. How about raising the ceiling of HRV overall, taking it from 100 or a maximum green recovery on your loop being 70 to a maximum green, now being able to be 80 or 90 or 100? What are some of the things that you could do to raise that ceiling?
Well, it's measured during sleep, okay? So I don't know if you know that, but it basically goes in, whether it's an oring or whether it's a workshop, you're basically going in and it's taking a two-minute, two-to-four-minute measurement during your sleep. So if we're not in a deep sleep stage or we haven't recovered properly, you're not going to get a high enough value. So if we really want to raise the roof and I would say the number one thing you need to work on is sleep.
Okay, cool. What about the impact of sleep on brain performance then? What are the impacts that you see there? Look, it's not just brain performance, it's also immunity, okay?
So sleep or sleep deprivation plays a number of key roles, okay? Now I've pulled up, if you don't mind, I've pulled up a study that I referenced a lot, but I really want to get it right for you and your audience, okay? There was a really very famous study that was done in the Journal of PNAS. What they did was they took a group of healthy adults and they limited them to six hours of sleep a day for one week.
They found a change in the activity of 711 genes, okay? So we've got our genes, our epigenetic pool, we've got the human genome is around 20,000 genes. From getting lack of sleep of 6,000,000, resulted in the change of 711 genes. That's around 3% of our entire genome.
What they found was out that 711, about half of the genes were upregulated and half of them were downregulated, okay? The ones that were impaired, when we say downregulated, that means impaired. The genes that were down regulated were the ones associated with the immune system, okay? And the ones that were upregulated were the ones associated with tumor production, long-term chronic inflammation, cardiovascular disease.
So that's really important to know that only after one week, you're changing your epigenetics, you're changing your human, you're changing the genes. That's insane to think about, right? Because we're all sleeping, sometimes we've gone through a week. I'm sure you've gone through literally seven days of sleep deprivation somewhere in your life, especially for your parents out there.
And in that time, you're probably finding that, you know, when you're working so hard and then all of a sudden when you stop, you get sick. So it's the same thing. So it's pretty much the same thing. So sleep deprivation or sleep impacts immunity, okay?
But then let's go into more of another thing. And I'll give you the link to that article. Let's talk about why athletes need sleep. First of all, back to the software, okay?
What we see, there's many studies that have been done on basketball players, but we see that a lack of sleep can go through and interfere with reaction time. It can interfere with visual acuity, their ability to see the ball at the speed of line and react to it. Okay? So that's the software things, their ability to think fast, that really goes down and that's diminished, which one second for LeBron James can mean the difference between winning and losing, right?
That's the first thing. But then let's look at more of a hardware thing. Okay? When we fall asleep, we go through three stages of sleep in the first third of the night.
Okay? We go through stage one, two, and three. That's comprised of deep sleep. Okay?
Slow wave sleep. During these stages, there's one really critical thing that happens, and that's hormone secretion. Hormones are released during that stage. It's predominantly in stage three, which is slow wave deep sleep.
These hormones are human growth hormone and testosterone. So for yourself, Chris, if you're not getting into those deep sleep stages, you're not going to be getting the adequate release of human growth hormone or testosterone. So human growth hormone is responsible for protein synthesis and recovery and a whole bunch of other things. Babies sleep a lot, and that's why they grow fast because they've got a lot of human growth hormone.
And then have you ever heard of the same, or maybe seen men that have got breasts? Mantini's. Call them what they are, the loser. Listen, well, whatever you want to call them, you could say that it's a build up of estrogen and a lack of testosterone.
Okay? Maybe because they're not getting into that deep sleep stage. Do you see a typical before you start working with the guys that you're floor traders? Do you see a particular body start?
Are they built like bags of milk mostly? Yes, I do. And that's the first thing I say, and they get really upset. Tell them that you tell these guys that have made $30 million trades that they built like bags of milk.
I go too much each of them, you don't sleep in the lack of milk. They're not really coming to me with their shirts off either. I can just see it. I'm like, I'm going to leave your shirt on.
It's fine. Please see it. For the lovers. All that is holy.
So many different things happen during deep sleep. And then we move on to REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. Now during this time, your body is completely paralyzed, but your brain is still active. It's what we call the dream sleep state.
But what else happens during this stage? Well, we get things such as learning, so memory consolidation, and all of the learning takes place during REM sleep. So if we're not getting into these two stages, it's really going to mess us up the following day. We're going to wake up with brain fog.
We're going to wake up feeling irritable. We're not going to be remembering things, but also not going to be able to execute to the best of our abilities. So we really need to be optimizing for sleep. And that's a really big thing that we focus on in your athletics, because there's coaches out there.
So we work with one particular NBA team. And I'm actually going through and coaching the trainers and the coaches, because they're like, well, we didn't know this. Everyone's just working on the ball skills. You know?
No one thinks about what's happening when they go home at night. How long did you play Xbox for? What time did you get up? What's your pre-bedroom team?
Like, yeah, it's um, how does sleep debt and sleep repayment work? Is that a thing? No, sleep is not like a bank. So if you're going to debt, you can't go through and pay it back.
So once you lose sleep, that's it. You're done. That's why I don't like binge sleep. It's people who are like, it's like, I was like, five hours during the week, maximum productivity, and then just, you know, build it up on the weekends.
It doesn't work like that. That's a shame. Yeah. Because that would be, well, I mean, what can you do?
Let's say that you do have a bad night's sleep. Presumably sleeping a little bit more the following night isn't a bad idea. Well, no, of course not. There was actually, I just put out two weeks ago, there was a study that was just, um, that's just gone out in a very high stringent journal that says, there's no such thing as too much sleep.
Okay. Meaning, sorry, meaning that we know what happens. We know the effects of sleep deprivation of the brain and the body. But when you have too much sleep, there's not really much that happens.
You just maybe you might get a bit fatter over the course. There's nothing bad that happens, which I think is great. But that would be a good study to run. You know, if you could try and somehow get people to sleep 12 hours a night or 14 hours a day, I guess for seven days or 14 days and try and record the changes there, that'd be really interesting.
I'd be more interested in finding out why they have time to sleep that much. Because they're not high powered floor traders. That's why they're not selling the salt, the Goldman Sachs. That's the reason why.
I mean, here's another thing I've got in my mind. There must be attention. You go into these high powered trading floors. I think the athletes on the whole probably would be more accommodating to, I understand that I need to sleep.
This is my entire life. It's Gatoran performance. But not many people treat their output at work on a trading floor with the same level of riggo that athletes do, right? They're not going in to get a massage to loosen off whatever it is or the equivalent mentally.
How do you get someone who isn't bought into the world of I need more sleep than I'm getting? High powered, go getting type A people or massive ties and pinstripe suits. How do you get them to let go of that hustle and grind mentality? Well, actually I find the reverse.
I find, and I didn't think this, I see the sporting world as, now I've got some athletes who say to me, well, always I am number one or I'm in the MBA. What's the, I don't want to be like LeBron, I'm already in the MBA, I'm doing better than 99% of the world. I don't really need to get better. They're the ones that annoy me.
Whereas the traders are the ones who say, well, if I'm not at that state, then I'm going to lose 30 million dollars. So they do everything they can. Actually, they're more coherent and obedient to the method than your athletics method than the athletes. That's right.
Also, yeah, both of them do go through jet lag. A lot of them are both groups are flying. That's another thing that the athletes are getting on and off planes, especially during the playoffs. Some of them are doing three flights a week and they're feeling it.
And they're just a bit, you know, like, so we've got jet lag protocols as well. Whereas there's more consistency in the finance world. Yeah, that's interesting. That's both the markets are always going to open at the same time, which is going to give them that sort of rigidity that they need.
But also, you think if a player is going to play me a year ago, let's just say he's in Miami Heat, he plays a year ago. He's not going to lose 30 million dollars. He might just not play as well, but he's got the team carrying him. If the day trader needs to make a trade on Saturday at 3am, he makes a mediocre trade.
He can lose a lot of money. OK, so the pressure on a trading floor is much more on the individual. And the changes in his performance are a lot more acute. Yeah, that's interesting.
I suppose specifically with basketball, it is such a team sport. You know, you could probably have a player that has an absolute stinker of a game and the team still win. And maybe the coaches think I had a bad day, but they'll probably forget about it because the team won. As opposed to the accountability that you get being on a trading floor.
And if you make that bad decision and you're 30 grand in the red, someone somewhere is going to come and shout at you. Oh, yeah. Or you've lost the life savings of a family. Or that, yes.
What are talking you through your pre-beds or your optimal pre-bed routines? You know, I know that everyone that's listening will be familiar with the digital sunset, but realistically, what's the sort of minimum viable dose or the most compliant, easy routine that somebody could go through before they go to bed on a night? Well, the first thing I start with, don't make it law. Just do it as many times throughout the week that you can.
If you knock off three nights a week, great. Next week will work on four. The first thing is not eating three hours prior to falling asleep. Anything at all.
Yeah, we don't want any activity. We don't want any raises and quarters. That's what happens when you eat. We don't want anything digesting.
That's the first thing. Okay. The second thing is obviously we're not going to be having any caffeine. Past the hour, the caffeine has a half-life of 12 hours.
We don't want caffeine past 12 PM. Okay. That's the first thing I always say that you're preparing for sleep the moment that you wake up. Okay.
Now, one really important one, I struggle with this every day. And that's eliminating, like you said, digital light, but it really is bad. So I know for some people they say, well, I can't do that. So I do get them to wear blue light blocking glasses, although I don't particularly believe in them 100%, but it has some small effect.
I've seen some mixed studies about them. It's... Well, it doesn't block out all of the blue light. That's what the promise is, but it's not that.
So if we just treat it as if it blocks out some, that's a better thing to say, because it's true. It doesn't block it all out. So if we could be walking around with X-ray vision at night, then that would be great. So that is eliminating light.
Okay. Especially don't want to be looking at light between the hours of 10 PM and 4 AM. Now, that's that. But then it's about...
There's always two complaints that you have. You have to figure this out. Do you have a problem falling asleep or do you have a problem staying asleep? So these two things offer different prescriptions.
You have a problem falling asleep. That means your brain's just going at a million miles an hour. So you may be wanting to supplement with gamma, amino, butary acid. But around a year ago, I called on to the fact that there was a lot of research that was being brought out about temperature, okay?
And the ability to manipulate your core body temperature to get into sleep. So in order to fall asleep and stay asleep, our core body temperature needs to drop at least two degrees. Okay? So that's great.
So we can get cold. But then I realized that it's not about ambient temperature. It's not about... You can't just put the thermostat on the air condition and get really cold.
It's about core body temperature. The only real way to do that is by two things. First one is sleeping on a temperature controlled mattress or hiring somebody throughout the night to just cool you down with ice packs. The latter probably isn't feasible.
So you have to look at a cooling bed. And around a year ago, somebody said, have you seen eight sleep? They're a sleep fitness technology company. I don't know if you've heard of them, but I invested in one of their mattresses and I had the best quality of sleep that I'd ever had.
And so I now sleep on an eight sleep temperature controlled mattress. So basically it locates your heart rate. Okay? And it gets you...
Once it figures out all the ways it's in deep sleep, it gets you into that... It drops your core body temperature down by dropping the temperature of the mattress. And you're able to get into those deep sleep stages. How does it detect that?
It's actually... You've got an app, but also the bed because it's technology driven. It's picking up on your heart rate. So in the morning, the app actually...
Your bed can pick up on your heart rate through the mattress. It gives you HRV metrics in the morning. It says that you slept in your deep sleep. You did the exact same thing that you see with your roof.
It does the same thing. Wow. Okay, that's pretty impressive. Yeah, oh, it's amazing.
And so I partnered with the company because I harassed them. I said, I need to be part of the movement that you're doing. So now I have all my athletes sleeping on that. So I got a chili pad mattress, which is very, very similar sort of thing.
Although it doesn't know when I am, where I am. And I took it off because it was winter and I was using it to cool me down. But now maybe I'm thinking that you're probably right, because the house is quite warm. It's cold in the UK at the moment.
Then ambient temperature is okay-ish, but in the bed, it's completely different to what you have going on outside. The same as being in a hot country and thinking that blasting the air con and changing the temperature of the room is going to change what happens underneath the covers. Exactly. I don't know what the chili pad though.
It doesn't do heating, does it? Yeah, yeah, it goes both ways. Yeah, so the second one which I've got is the- They've given it a stupid name and I can't remember it. So sorry, chili pad.
Anyway, it's the small one that goes underneath. It's on the all row or something. And that comes with an app. And the app, you can change temperature throughout the night.
It'll cool down to just below 16 degrees Celsius and it'll heat up to 40 degrees or something unbelievably hot. And it'll move you throughout the night. It also has, I think, eight sleep has this as well, where it can wake you up with- is it heat? But it does vibration as well, right?
It does vibration. It's very annoying because it doesn't stop because it doesn't stop until you get out of bed. So it's like- What about this? Yeah, so sometimes I kind of sat out and I'll jump up and I'll jump up.
Get back in. Out where did you bed? You've done well. What about reducing sleep?
Reducing the amount of times that you wake up throughout the night then. So that's sleep latency, maybe some GABA, make sure that people are feeling a little bit. What about deep breathing and stuff like that actually for sleep latency? Any other texts?
Well, let's just define sleep latency is your time that it takes you to fall asleep. But when we're getting up throughout the night, so that's a different thing. And some people are waking up to go to the bathroom, usually with men over the age of, I think it's around 65 to 70, they're waking up at 4am. It's like a thing.
They're going to the bathroom. All men worldwide or nationwide are getting up to go and have a waz at the same time. Exactly. Same time.
It's funny. But what can we be doing? Well, you've got to figure out why it is that you're waking up. But in order to, like I said to, to decrease that sleep latency, that's comes down to not having a lot of activity happening in your brain and body.
Breathing exercises are amazing. It calms down your sympathetic nervous system, activates the parasympathetic rest and digest nervous system. So your karma. What would be a protocol for that box breathing or something?
I like box breathing, but I actually have a 1pm and like a 4pm protocol, which is literally being silent for 10 minutes. That's all it is. Because I noticed that if you put in too many protocols, like sit there, put candles on, do this, things like this. It doesn't really work out.
So all it is, it's about 10 minutes of silence. It's very hard. If you close your eyes and you try and keep that notion happening, it's very hard. But you can try it and start off with that.
One thing that I woke up this morning, in one of my, she's a portfolio manager, she mentioned, she's like, I had the best sleep of my life and my HRV increase because of this one technique. And I'll tell it to you. Have you ever taped your mouth during the night? I've tried it.
Yes. It never really seems to stay on my mouth. I don't know whether I'm trying to talk in my sleep or something, but yeah, I've tried. Or the sweat may have ripped it off.
No, come on. Yeah, I don't know. But I got that. But you, that's a great little hack.
Okay. Taping the mouth. Mouth breathing is bad. We don't want to be mouth breathing.
So in order to really breathe through your nose through the night, you want to take enough? Just make sure that you don't have any breathing issues, but I want you. Mm-hmm. I've used, so I've just started using this, yeah, nasal strips to open my airway up on my nose.
So you've seen athletes use these before. That's really, really nice, especially if you have like narrow nasal passages. That makes, oh, it's such a difference. Yeah, it's literally like constantly having an ostril is flared.
So there's so much more room. It feels really lovely. It's really satisfying. I have no idea.
I haven't done it for long. I've only done it for maybe a week. So I haven't been able to compare. But I've tracked it on my woop because you can give custom inputs about what you did during the day.
So I've got days when I did and days when I didn't. And we'll see if that makes any difference. I mean, by the end of the night, I asked Ben Greenfield about this because I think his wife is the most normal person on the planet. And Ben Greenfield is like the complete opposite.
And I asked him, what does she think? He's getting into bed. He's got the blue light blockers on. He's got something stuck up his nose.
He's got his finger on a HIV monitor. All of his crazy technology. And apparently his wife just reads a Dan Brown novel and falls at the perfect eight hours sleep that nobody ever needs to try and alter. Um, so yeah, I think they're it well.
Yeah, but there are going to be a lot of very odd or disgruntled partners after someone just decides to go to, but whatever, you know, you're already married. They can't leave now. Now that you've decided to adopt a weird bedtime habit, um, I want to talk about the guys that you're dealing with, whether it be athletes or floor traders about how you instruct them to stay calm under pressure. No, well, that's, that's hard.
And um, to do it in a healthy way, it's all about consistency and protocols. So we have this one protocol, which literally every time you think about thought, every time you freaking out, you have to perform a drill. It might be a clicking drill, which anchors your thought, okay? Or it might be practicing a double inhale exhale, like a physiological side to calm down the nervous system.
But what I find is no matter how many, how many protocols you put in place for that moment, it's how strong are you and how strict are you to activate them during that stressful moment. Okay. So I've got one player on the Miami heat who I talk to every time he goes on, before he goes on the actual court, because he freaks out too much. Okay.
And we, we do video calls. So. And you're talking this guy through some cues. What do you mean when you say either clicking or a double breath inhale to anchor their thoughts?
What do you mean? Because when you're, when you're freaking out, your anxious mind is going a million miles an hour, you're thinking so many things. So if you just stop it, okay, and change direction, literally what you have to do when you're going down a highway and you want to change direction, you have to stop eventually. And once you stop, you can stop by doing, so clicking is like a form of your brain is like a camera click and they're, they know through their protocol that in order to click, they have to anchor their thought into something else.
Okay. So that's kind of like noting in mindfulness meditation. Yeah. It's in sports psychology.
There's one method where they get you to wear an elastic band around your wrist. And every time you have a panic, basically you swipe your wrist. That's very old school though. Yeah.
So people do not. So that's one, but also sometimes if I'm talking to someone, it's just about, they're making things up in their head, everything that can go wrong. Okay. I'm going to go on the court.
I'm going to lose this. I'm not going to get the ball. I'm not feeling good. It's just calming that down.
It's strange to think that players that are professional athletes and do it week out, still have the same sort of nervousness that a normal person would do before they go and give a talk or whatever. It is, it gives a different perspective when you see a good example, maybe someone like Jake Paul, who is very new into the sport of boxing. But they're putting him in the athletic. I'm trying to be delicate here.
But my point is that you have someone who isn't a trained athlete, who hasn't gone through yours decades, several iterations of walking out in front of a huge crowd. And yeah, I, I don't know, I have a friend who's a very high level DJ. And he, every single time before he steps behind the decks throws up, every single time, every single one of them, because that's how nervous he is, because he wants to do well. And he is playing in front of 10,000 people at Madison Square Garden or whatever it might be.
And every single time before he goes out, he throws up. Wow. That's, yeah, no. Look, anybody, I say athlete, but I mean, anybody performing at high level.
And he obviously is too. Yeah, it's scary. What about research on heat and cold exposure? Is there any new cool stuff that you've seen recently on that?
I'm actually about to get, I love cold immersion. I speak about it. I've got a podcast dedicated to it. I'm actually getting my first ice bath.
That's going to come here to Sydney because I can't fit it in the New York City apartment. But it's absolutely incredible. Okay, there's so much research around this to suggest that this is so important to do, to literally bring down the inflammatory biomarkers responsible for inflammation. That's the first thing, okay, immersing yourself in cold water.
We know that there's a pathway now where you get into cold water and the path that can go up to your brain and have a really good effect of decreasing neural inflammation. But one thing that I love about it is that once you get into cold water, within about five minutes, you get this massive release of not just cold shop proteins, but we get a massive release of normal pennephrine. And that is that it's both the hormone, okay, and neurotransmitter. And as a neurotransmitter, it is responsible for focus and vigilance.
So if you want to get that, I think everyone should be doing some form of cold therapy. I absolutely love it. I do it. You just got to be really, really strict to not do it straight after training.
Because once we do that, what we do is we block the traumatic response of hypertrophy. So when we go and work out, we're working out our muscles, we're strengthening them. We want them to create a bit of inflammation. So they tear a bit and rebuild.
That's what makes them stronger. And if we go and stop that rebuilding by blocking those pathways through cold, we're not going to get the effects. So cold emersion, love it. Everybody should get a cold bath.
Give me your optimal cold emersion protocol across a week. What would you prescribe to someone? I don't do it for less than 12 minutes. And that's really hard, depending on the temperature.
So I'm not going to speak Fahrenheit because it's not my first language. But in terms of I do, I've got a thermometer inside the bath and it drops to around 12 degrees, which is freezing. Celsius or? Yeah.
Okay. And you're doing that for yourself. No less than 12 minutes. Very less than 12 minutes.
Sometimes it goes down to nine. How many times a week? I try and do this five times a week. Wow.
So I saw Cuban had posted not long ago saying that the most recent research suggested nine minutes of cold exposure a week. And you're doing what? 60? So there seems to be a big disparity between those two.
What's the reason for choosing 12 and five times? Well, I mean, that's what when I found this, you know, in the scientific literature, it said you've got to be doing this at least once a day, really. It's like when people say, well, why can't I just get into it? What's the cryotherapy chamber?
It's not going to do you anything. Oh, yeah, it's not going to do you anything. It's just I feel like it's gimmicky and no one's going to, no one has $90. I think it's like $90 a session to do this every day.
I think at bare minimum, the science says, okay, bare minimum three times a week. Okay. Bare minimum. I'm just crazy.
All right. Just having a copy of the animal. Have you had a look at contrast therapy? Ronda Patrick was talking about this.