February 6, 2024 • 18 mins
Please enjoy this Q&A session I did at the EPIC Community event all about sleeping soundly.
Let me know if you have any questions via @drgregwells on social.
Also you can ask me questions via the Dr. Greg Wells GPT that is trained on my books: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-AetMyeiiv-dr-greg-s-wellness-gpt
Have a great week everyone!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey everyone, welcome back. Great to be with you and thanks
for joining me for another episode of the podcast this
week. I am super thrilled to share
with you an interview and conversation and presentation
that I did back at the Epic Community gathering in December.
At that event I had a whole bunch of stuff prepared, but it
ended up just being a massive Q&A all about sleeping soundly.
(00:23):
So I know that that is one of the most important topics for
people right now. I know people are really
struggling with sleeping soundlyand there are just are so many
questions, which is actually what I did in this session.
I ended up just answering questions and I went really
great and I wanted to make sure that I shared that with the
community 'cause I know that so many of you also struggle with
sleep and want to learn a littlebit more.
(00:43):
So in this session, I do a little bit of a presentation and
we go completely into Q&A. And if you have questions that
aren't answered in this session,please ping me on social at
Doctor Greg Wells and I will do my best to either answer them
directly or creates more contentfor you to answer those
questions this year. So much of the work that I'm
doing is about building. The community.
(01:05):
And making sure that there's a conversation going back and
forth. That's why this is the way that
is, and what we're going to be doing for the next 7 episodes of
the podcast coming up. Here's some really cool episodes
coming on different topics, but largely just around focusing in
on answering all of your questions to make sure that
you're able to move forward the best you can.
So without any further delay, please enjoy my epic Q&A on
(01:28):
Sleeping Soundly. Today is going to be all about
the body and the foundation for your physical health that I want
you to establish. Again, 12 events.
Sorry, 10 events like this, a decade of research, a decade of
practice, The one single foundational principle upon
which you can build health, well-being, and high
(01:49):
performance. If you do this, everything else
is possible. If we don't do this, everything
else is extraordinarily difficult.
It's sleeping soundly. If you can sleep well, you will
feel good and you will be able to move forwards and navigate a
very difficult, very difficult circumstance, which is the world
right now. And I say a difficult
(02:10):
circumstance deliberately, because ten years ago, right
after I finished this event, notthis event, but the earlier
precursor to this event, at thishotel, I drove home and I just
met Richard Branson. I just spoken at my first really
big event. I just finished commentating on
Olympics and I was driving home and I was like my life had
(02:31):
changed. I felt it like things were
absolutely different. I knew that my life had just
changed trajectories and I was on a very, very different
upwards path. And I got home and there was a
Christmas party happening and myGod, Ingrid was so sick.
I got home, she was crying and Iheld her.
(02:55):
She had a huge seizure as I was holding her and I ran her
through the party. So I get the hell out of my way
and got her into the car and I drove her to my hospital.
Sick kids and I always know thatwhenever my friends call me from
the hospital emerged and they'relike, word emerged.
I'm like how long you been waiting?
(03:16):
You know like 3 hours. I'm like, that's fine, there's
nothing wrong, you'll be OK. And they zipped us right in and
I was like, oh shit. And I was with Ingrid and we had
the bed set up and I was holdingher and she had a massive,
massive seizure and the coat blew and crashed.
Team and everything else like that came in and I just put on
(03:36):
my hands as they came in around me.
I just sort of step back, you know, out of the way to navigate
the situation. That's her a few days later
watching Anson. She ultimately ended up
recovering from viral encephalitis.
And H1N1 went in through her nasal nerve into her brain and
inflamed her brain. And there was some hearing
deficit. She's ultimately OK.
(03:57):
But my God, that was hard. And afterwards, as Greg the
physiologist is sitting there inhis own hospital trying to
figure out how am I going to getIngrid healthy again.
And I'm scanning the research about the brain I encountered
the fact that we all have this incredible system inside of our
body called the lymphatic system.
This is the system that keeps your body healthy, is the system
(04:18):
that keeps your body clean. It fights off colds, flus, it
picks up viruses, bacteria, broken down cells, waste
products. Pulls that into your lymphatic
system, where white blood cells from your immune system fight
off all the invaders. This is the system that keeps
your body healthy and clean. That's why your doctor feels the
lymph glands in your neck to seeif you're fighting off a cold of
the flu. That's why we're concerned about
breast cancer spreading to the lymph nodes in the underarm.
(04:39):
The system fights off cancer. It's incredibly important, but
if you'll look at the image, you'll notice that it's
everywhere except the brain. And up and around that time that
Ingrid was so sick, there was a number of discoveries that were
made about how the brain accomplishes, what the body
accomplishes in terms of keepingitself healthy.
This is an MRI scan of the braindone by Mike Noseworthy at
(05:01):
McMaster University. Just down the road.
I do a lot of MRI research. So I'm going to show you a lot
of videos of the inside of the body today just because I'm
fasting and I love it, I think it's super interesting.
Ingrid's brain was actually scarred right in what's called
the corpus callosum, which joinsthe two sides together, sort of
that red zone right in the middle.
So I was like, how are we going to get her better?
(05:22):
And what I discovered was that when we sleep, the 100 billion
neurons that you have inside your brain, that control,
thinking, problem solving, concentration, focus, alertness,
music, drama, all of it shrink by about 60% and all the space
opens up inside your brain. And a clear fluid called
cerebral spinal fluid washes through your brain every single
night while you sleep. That has become known as the
(05:43):
glymphatic system. You can now image this.
You can actually see neurons changing shapes and fluids
washing through the brain every single night while we sleep.
It's actually like legit brainwashing, but like, in a
good way, right? So it's like, actually this is
brainwashing. And it's like, yes, it's
actually happens. That fluid then moves up to the
inside of your skull and a network of vessels that are
(06:04):
connected to the lymphatic system in the body.
So the brain washes itself out and cleans itself out every
single night while we sleep. This happens slightly better if
you sleep on your side and you sleep less.
Your partner loves you more. That's another benefit of that.
And so once I saw all of this data, I was like, OK, cool,
Sleep is the priority for us as a family.
So I got an ordering and I started measuring my data.
(06:27):
And this is what some of the data looks like early on in this
journey. And as you can see, stressed
Greg staring at the ceiling for three hours trying to fall
asleep every single night. I'm not sure if you've been
there before, but when you're stressed, you're like can't fall
asleep. That was absolutely me.
Another situation that people often encounter in this space is
that you wake up 2:00 in the morning and you're replaying the
(06:47):
events of the day or planning the events for tomorrow.
And I did something different. So I wrote this up on my iPad,
ironically enough, when I wasn'tsleeping and I was like, this is
the plan, this is how we're going to move forward.
So again, if you've seen me, you've probably seen me present
this before, but the idea was tosleep.
Awesome. Recover and regenerate. 6:00
(07:09):
screens are off. 7:00 time with the kids and Judith, my wife.
Just to be clear about who I'm talking about.
Judith Meditation, gratitude, journaling, all those sorts of
things. Hot bath, cool shower.
Because decreasing body temperature increases melatonin
release such that I can fall asleep and to stay asleep.
And as soon as I executed this plan, the sleep was
(07:29):
instantaneously into that deep sleep.
When the brain is washing itselfout, it's like a week later it's
like I have the solution. The priority is sleep.
It took us like 6 months to get this happening, to all the
different things, like blackout blinds, 20°C, consistent
bedtimes, all those sorts of things.
But this was the path that led to Ingrid healing and
recovering, intergenerating and getting better.
(07:51):
And I now know that this is alsocrucial to a whole host of other
things as well. We know that we need five
complete sleep cycles, so there's five different types of
sleep. R.E.M. in stage 1234.
They're all important. They're all different.
They all do different things. They're all critical.
R.E.M. Is typically when we encode
memories for the day. Stage one and stage two is when
there's a lot of physical recovery and stage 3 and stage 4
(08:13):
is when there's a lot of mental recovery.
We cycle through those throughout the course of the
night, roughly 90 minute increments.
Need five complete cycle sleep cycles, roughly 90 minutes each,
to have the lowest risk for all 'cause mortality.
So for me at the time, I was like, good, reduce the risk of
mortality. Awesome.
For all of you. Let's live a very, very, very
long time. And so we know 7 to 8 hours best
(08:34):
possible chance of living the longest possible life, lowest
risk of cancer, heart disease types, diabetes, metabolic
syndrome, neurodegenerative diseases, all of those factors
together. We've also discovered that when
we're in deep sleep, when the brain is washing itself out,
that's when new neural connections are made, which is
how we physically encode memories.
(08:56):
So if you pick up information throughout the course of the
day, you actually learn nothing during the course of the day.
I said that accidentally to school and the kids were like,
yes, we know we learn nothing when we're here.
It was like, that's not what I meant.
I meant that when you're sleeping at night, that's anyway
that's when the neurons grow inside the brain and that's when
we actually heal, recover and regenerate.
So learning happens in that first half of sleep.
(09:16):
That's when those neurons make new connections and we
physically encode learning in the first half of sleep.
The second-half of sleep is whenwe're creative and we problem
solve whole host of entrepreneurs, whole host of
creators in this room. This is essential for us.
This is why we in this room especially need to give
ourselves permission to get enough sleep, because it is in
(09:38):
the second-half of sleep. Especially in and around the REM
sleep stages when we are creative, when we problem solve,
when we set the stage for comingup with new solutions to old
problems. This enables us to ideate, to
innovate. So giving yourself permission to
get enough sleep is fundamentally critical for our
ability to activate multiple different regions of the brain
(10:00):
at the same time, which is what we do when we're being creative.
I'll talk a lot more about that tomorrow, so I won't get into
that too much right now. Trust me, it's super cool.
I'll explain that more tomorrow.The other really cool thing that
I discovered is that naps work beautifully.
There's loads of research that shows the benefits of naps, but
there's two types of naps that work, one type of nap that does
(10:22):
not. So no one's taken a nap and felt
horrible for hours afterwards? Yes.
OK, so that's the sleep. That's the nap where you wake up
out of stage 3-4 deep sleep. When the brain is washing itself
out, the neurons have shrunk. You wake up, you have sleep
inertia, you feel kind of nauseous.
You can't. You have the brain fog.
You can't really understand what's going on, right?
You just don't feel very good. That's that zone.
(10:42):
The 20 minute power nap set an alarm 20 minutes or less clears
out adenosine. So you have this molecule in
your body called ATP. You break it to create energy.
The leftover piece is called adenosine.
When you do lots of mental work,you break ATP and adenosine
levels go up. When you sleep, you clear out
that adenosine. A 20 minute power nap will do
(11:04):
that. Actually as little as 3 minutes
we'll do it, but up to 20 minutes.
And that keeps you from falling into deep sleep, which is
awesome. So don't be afraid to leverage
the power nap. 20 minutes less use an alarm.
Second type of nap that works isthe full sleep cycle.
Nap 75 minutes to 90 minutes, wake up naturally with no alarm,
and that gets both mental recovery through clearance of
(11:25):
adenosine and also physical recovery because there's a
growth hormone pulse that heals,repairs and regenerates physical
tissues, which is why pro athletes will often do the 90
minute nap before they compete in the evenings.
So that's the idea behind that. You can probably use that on the
weekends, especially if you've had a tough week and you need a
(11:45):
chance to sort of boost your recovery.
I will do that often on airplanes.
But as much as we now know why we need to sleep, the
brainwashes itself out. We know how much sleep we
actually need. Roughly 7 to 8 hours.
By the way, the younger you are,the more you sleep that you
need. But that's OK.
There's a graph for that if you need me to show that to you
later on. We also have some habits that
maybe aren't serving us when it comes to sleep.
(12:07):
This specifically mean one of them.
And as much as Stu talked earlier about what?
What would it look like if you were off your phones for a
period of time? I would encourage you to
consider what would what would it look like if you were off
your phones for an hour before you wanted to fall asleep and
back into the MRI studies? We know that if we look at the
brains and MRI scan of the brainsliced to the head at the level
(12:29):
of the eyes you're looking at. Oh, I'm in a brain look at that.
That was cool. Sliced to the head at the level
of the eyes. If we zoom in, you can actually
see them up top. When we have these devices and
we shine them into our eyes lateat night, the light goes from
the device into your eye, hits the back of your eyeball right
there in a structure that looks like this.
That converts light into electricity.
That shoots back through your optic nerve into the pineal
(12:52):
gland that controls the release of melatonin.
Which makes it very difficult for you to fall asleep if you
have devices shining into your eyes late at night.
So my first core practice for you, the first core discipline
is to defend your last hour. Please, please, please, moving
forwards. Consider that maybe screens
aren't serving you if you are using them.
(13:14):
In the hour before you fall asleep at night, first thing in
the morning, grab your phone, shove in your eyes.
I don't care. But last thing, right at late at
night before you fall asleep, Wewant to try to avoid that at all
costs. Should you do this?
Building on that data that I showed you before, this is what
happens. You'll notice that throughout
the course of the night, from 9:00 PM until 9:00 or 5:00 AM.
(13:36):
This is some of my data. We are just gradually lowering
and lowering and lowering our heart rate.
So it's the rate before you wakeup, it's significantly lower,
like 20 to 30% lower than it waswhen you go to sleep.
That's the pattern that we see when we're recovering, when
we're regenerating, when we're healing, when we are repairing,
(13:58):
when we're refueling. If you have a wearable device
and you want to track this, whatyou're looking for is the lowest
possible heart rate in the latter half of sleep.
I know that if I'm below 50 beats per minute, everything's
good. If I'm above 50 beats per
minute, I'm either stressed or about to get sick.
This is what we tracked with theOlympic team.
We used to use our fingers and astopwatch.
(14:19):
For a minute you count your pulse, or now you can just use
your Fitbit, or your Garmin, or your Apple Watch or whatever.
They've all got different tools in which you can do these
measurements. And what you're actually looking
for is a fundamental shift in your nervous system from the
sympathetic stress system over to your parasympathetic rest,
recover and regenerate system. Which we see, because, as you
(14:41):
can see, when we're super stressed out, your heart rate
goes up. When you're a little bit more
relaxed, your heart rate slows down.
You can actually measure this, You can see this, you can
practice, you can learn, you canexperiment, you can explore, see
what works for you. I know that if I sleep in a cold
room, my heart rate drops and itis awesome, except that Judith
hates it and she steals all my blankets and then my sheets,
(15:03):
right? And so I'm shivering and I would
wake up early and then I just goto the gym.
The other aspect of this that many of you have probably heard
of before is heart rate variability, which does the
opposite. Your heart rate variability
actually goes up throughout the course of the night, which is
good because when we are rested,when we have low stress levels,
there are fewer signals coming out of the brain, down through
(15:24):
the spinal cord, out into your body.
Which means that your heart beats on its own, not through
drive from the brain. And so it is more variable.
Think about if you're nervous oryou're you get suddenly scared,
your heart will go beat, beat, beat, beat, pounding in your
chest very rhythmically. So when you're stressed, your
variability is low. When you're relaxed, your heart
is beat, beat, beat, beat, beat,beat.
(15:48):
It's kind of all over the place.So variability is high.
So what we're looking for in that case is high heart rate
variability. If my heart rate variability is
over 100, all is good and I can.I know that I've had a great
night's sleep and I'm going to feel pretty good throughout the
course of the day. If you don't have a wearable and
you want the exact same data, you can wake up in 30 minutes.
(16:09):
After you wake up, you can ask yourself, how do I feel?
And if you say good, you get theexact same information.
So you don't need all of this tech.
You can simply pay attention to how you feel.
It's like when you use a do I need a garment to figure out how
hard you're running? No, you can just are you
breathing hard to get the exact same info.
But the core message that I havefor you here is I just want you
(16:30):
to defend your last hour now in the workbook in front of you.
You don't have to do it. Now.
On page 20, there is a deep sleep planner.
And the Deep sleep planner is designed to get you to think
through one simple exercise. And the one simple exercise are
what are the few two to three things that you want to be doing
(16:51):
right before you fall asleep? To deactivate your Physiology
and your psychology. Taking a bath, journaling,
talking to your partner or lovedone or not, depending on how
things are going, could be very different, right?
And once you have that protocol,reading fiction, like whatever
(17:12):
it happens to be, meditation works to prayer.
Looking at the window, at trees,all of it works beautifully.
Once you know what those ideas might be, I would like you to
practice them and put them into play and see how you do.
All right everyone. Thanks for tuning in.
I really hope that was helpful. Obviously it's a little bit of
a. Different format.
But super psyched to be able to share.
(17:34):
That information with. You.
I hope that it was helpful. If it was, please share this
with your community. Please let someone else know
about the show. Let someone else know about the
episode. Forward it to them and that.
Helps us tremendously. If you could also leave a review
on. Your podcast platform of choice,
whether that's. ITunes or Spotify?
That also makes a massive difference for us and really
(17:56):
helps us out. And of course, if you can follow
me on social at Doctor Greg Wells or on LinkedIn forward
slash Doctor Greg Wells, that would be tremendously.
Wonderful as well. Ping me with.
Questions. Make sure that this is all about
you and we will continue to build content for you this year
that helps you to be healthy, toperform better, and to get to a
place where your well-being is exactly where you want it to be.
(18:17):
All right, everyone. Thanks again.
We'll see. You in the next episode.
Really. Really soon.
Hey everyone, welcome back. Great to be with you and thanks
for joining me for another episode of the podcast this
week. I am super thrilled to share
with you an interview and conversation and presentation
that I did back at the Epic Community gathering in December.
At that event I had a whole bunch of stuff prepared, but it
ended up just being a massive Q&A all about sleeping soundly.
(00:23):
So I know that that is one of the most important topics for
people right now. I know people are really
struggling with sleeping soundlyand there are just are so many
questions, which is actually what I did in this session.
I ended up just answering questions and I went really
great and I wanted to make sure that I shared that with the
community 'cause I know that so many of you also struggle with
sleep and want to learn a littlebit more.
(00:43):
So in this session, I do a little bit of a presentation and
we go completely into Q&A. And if you have questions that
aren't answered in this session,please ping me on social at
Doctor Greg Wells and I will do my best to either answer them
directly or creates more contentfor you to answer those
questions this year. So much of the work that I'm
doing is about building. The community.
(01:05):
And making sure that there's a conversation going back and
forth. That's why this is the way that
is, and what we're going to be doing for the next 7 episodes of
the podcast coming up. Here's some really cool episodes
coming on different topics, but largely just around focusing in
on answering all of your questions to make sure that
you're able to move forward the best you can.
So without any further delay, please enjoy my epic Q&A on
(01:28):
Sleeping Soundly. Today is going to be all about
the body and the foundation for your physical health that I want
you to establish. Again, 12 events.
Sorry, 10 events like this, a decade of research, a decade of
practice, The one single foundational principle upon
which you can build health, well-being, and high
(01:49):
performance. If you do this, everything else
is possible. If we don't do this, everything
else is extraordinarily difficult.
It's sleeping soundly. If you can sleep well, you will
feel good and you will be able to move forwards and navigate a
very difficult, very difficult circumstance, which is the world
right now. And I say a difficult
(02:10):
circumstance deliberately, because ten years ago, right
after I finished this event, notthis event, but the earlier
precursor to this event, at thishotel, I drove home and I just
met Richard Branson. I just spoken at my first really
big event. I just finished commentating on
Olympics and I was driving home and I was like my life had
(02:31):
changed. I felt it like things were
absolutely different. I knew that my life had just
changed trajectories and I was on a very, very different
upwards path. And I got home and there was a
Christmas party happening and myGod, Ingrid was so sick.
I got home, she was crying and Iheld her.
(02:55):
She had a huge seizure as I was holding her and I ran her
through the party. So I get the hell out of my way
and got her into the car and I drove her to my hospital.
Sick kids and I always know thatwhenever my friends call me from
the hospital emerged and they'relike, word emerged.
I'm like how long you been waiting?
(03:16):
You know like 3 hours. I'm like, that's fine, there's
nothing wrong, you'll be OK. And they zipped us right in and
I was like, oh shit. And I was with Ingrid and we had
the bed set up and I was holdingher and she had a massive,
massive seizure and the coat blew and crashed.
Team and everything else like that came in and I just put on
(03:36):
my hands as they came in around me.
I just sort of step back, you know, out of the way to navigate
the situation. That's her a few days later
watching Anson. She ultimately ended up
recovering from viral encephalitis.
And H1N1 went in through her nasal nerve into her brain and
inflamed her brain. And there was some hearing
deficit. She's ultimately OK.
(03:57):
But my God, that was hard. And afterwards, as Greg the
physiologist is sitting there inhis own hospital trying to
figure out how am I going to getIngrid healthy again.
And I'm scanning the research about the brain I encountered
the fact that we all have this incredible system inside of our
body called the lymphatic system.
This is the system that keeps your body healthy, is the system
(04:18):
that keeps your body clean. It fights off colds, flus, it
picks up viruses, bacteria, broken down cells, waste
products. Pulls that into your lymphatic
system, where white blood cells from your immune system fight
off all the invaders. This is the system that keeps
your body healthy and clean. That's why your doctor feels the
lymph glands in your neck to seeif you're fighting off a cold of
the flu. That's why we're concerned about
breast cancer spreading to the lymph nodes in the underarm.
(04:39):
The system fights off cancer. It's incredibly important, but
if you'll look at the image, you'll notice that it's
everywhere except the brain. And up and around that time that
Ingrid was so sick, there was a number of discoveries that were
made about how the brain accomplishes, what the body
accomplishes in terms of keepingitself healthy.
This is an MRI scan of the braindone by Mike Noseworthy at
(05:01):
McMaster University. Just down the road.
I do a lot of MRI research. So I'm going to show you a lot
of videos of the inside of the body today just because I'm
fasting and I love it, I think it's super interesting.
Ingrid's brain was actually scarred right in what's called
the corpus callosum, which joinsthe two sides together, sort of
that red zone right in the middle.
So I was like, how are we going to get her better?
(05:22):
And what I discovered was that when we sleep, the 100 billion
neurons that you have inside your brain, that control,
thinking, problem solving, concentration, focus, alertness,
music, drama, all of it shrink by about 60% and all the space
opens up inside your brain. And a clear fluid called
cerebral spinal fluid washes through your brain every single
night while you sleep. That has become known as the
(05:43):
glymphatic system. You can now image this.
You can actually see neurons changing shapes and fluids
washing through the brain every single night while we sleep.
It's actually like legit brainwashing, but like, in a
good way, right? So it's like, actually this is
brainwashing. And it's like, yes, it's
actually happens. That fluid then moves up to the
inside of your skull and a network of vessels that are
(06:04):
connected to the lymphatic system in the body.
So the brain washes itself out and cleans itself out every
single night while we sleep. This happens slightly better if
you sleep on your side and you sleep less.
Your partner loves you more. That's another benefit of that.
And so once I saw all of this data, I was like, OK, cool,
Sleep is the priority for us as a family.
So I got an ordering and I started measuring my data.
(06:27):
And this is what some of the data looks like early on in this
journey. And as you can see, stressed
Greg staring at the ceiling for three hours trying to fall
asleep every single night. I'm not sure if you've been
there before, but when you're stressed, you're like can't fall
asleep. That was absolutely me.
Another situation that people often encounter in this space is
that you wake up 2:00 in the morning and you're replaying the
(06:47):
events of the day or planning the events for tomorrow.
And I did something different. So I wrote this up on my iPad,
ironically enough, when I wasn'tsleeping and I was like, this is
the plan, this is how we're going to move forward.
So again, if you've seen me, you've probably seen me present
this before, but the idea was tosleep.
Awesome. Recover and regenerate. 6:00
(07:09):
screens are off. 7:00 time with the kids and Judith, my wife.
Just to be clear about who I'm talking about.
Judith Meditation, gratitude, journaling, all those sorts of
things. Hot bath, cool shower.
Because decreasing body temperature increases melatonin
release such that I can fall asleep and to stay asleep.
And as soon as I executed this plan, the sleep was
(07:29):
instantaneously into that deep sleep.
When the brain is washing itselfout, it's like a week later it's
like I have the solution. The priority is sleep.
It took us like 6 months to get this happening, to all the
different things, like blackout blinds, 20°C, consistent
bedtimes, all those sorts of things.
But this was the path that led to Ingrid healing and
recovering, intergenerating and getting better.
(07:51):
And I now know that this is alsocrucial to a whole host of other
things as well. We know that we need five
complete sleep cycles, so there's five different types of
sleep. R.E.M. in stage 1234.
They're all important. They're all different.
They all do different things. They're all critical.
R.E.M. Is typically when we encode
memories for the day. Stage one and stage two is when
there's a lot of physical recovery and stage 3 and stage 4
(08:13):
is when there's a lot of mental recovery.
We cycle through those throughout the course of the
night, roughly 90 minute increments.
Need five complete cycle sleep cycles, roughly 90 minutes each,
to have the lowest risk for all 'cause mortality.
So for me at the time, I was like, good, reduce the risk of
mortality. Awesome.
For all of you. Let's live a very, very, very
long time. And so we know 7 to 8 hours best
(08:34):
possible chance of living the longest possible life, lowest
risk of cancer, heart disease types, diabetes, metabolic
syndrome, neurodegenerative diseases, all of those factors
together. We've also discovered that when
we're in deep sleep, when the brain is washing itself out,
that's when new neural connections are made, which is
how we physically encode memories.
(08:56):
So if you pick up information throughout the course of the
day, you actually learn nothing during the course of the day.
I said that accidentally to school and the kids were like,
yes, we know we learn nothing when we're here.
It was like, that's not what I meant.
I meant that when you're sleeping at night, that's anyway
that's when the neurons grow inside the brain and that's when
we actually heal, recover and regenerate.
So learning happens in that first half of sleep.
(09:16):
That's when those neurons make new connections and we
physically encode learning in the first half of sleep.
The second-half of sleep is whenwe're creative and we problem
solve whole host of entrepreneurs, whole host of
creators in this room. This is essential for us.
This is why we in this room especially need to give
ourselves permission to get enough sleep, because it is in
(09:38):
the second-half of sleep. Especially in and around the REM
sleep stages when we are creative, when we problem solve,
when we set the stage for comingup with new solutions to old
problems. This enables us to ideate, to
innovate. So giving yourself permission to
get enough sleep is fundamentally critical for our
ability to activate multiple different regions of the brain
(10:00):
at the same time, which is what we do when we're being creative.
I'll talk a lot more about that tomorrow, so I won't get into
that too much right now. Trust me, it's super cool.
I'll explain that more tomorrow.The other really cool thing that
I discovered is that naps work beautifully.
There's loads of research that shows the benefits of naps, but
there's two types of naps that work, one type of nap that does
(10:22):
not. So no one's taken a nap and felt
horrible for hours afterwards? Yes.
OK, so that's the sleep. That's the nap where you wake up
out of stage 3-4 deep sleep. When the brain is washing itself
out, the neurons have shrunk. You wake up, you have sleep
inertia, you feel kind of nauseous.
You can't. You have the brain fog.
You can't really understand what's going on, right?
You just don't feel very good. That's that zone.
(10:42):
The 20 minute power nap set an alarm 20 minutes or less clears
out adenosine. So you have this molecule in
your body called ATP. You break it to create energy.
The leftover piece is called adenosine.
When you do lots of mental work,you break ATP and adenosine
levels go up. When you sleep, you clear out
that adenosine. A 20 minute power nap will do
(11:04):
that. Actually as little as 3 minutes
we'll do it, but up to 20 minutes.
And that keeps you from falling into deep sleep, which is
awesome. So don't be afraid to leverage
the power nap. 20 minutes less use an alarm.
Second type of nap that works isthe full sleep cycle.
Nap 75 minutes to 90 minutes, wake up naturally with no alarm,
and that gets both mental recovery through clearance of
(11:25):
adenosine and also physical recovery because there's a
growth hormone pulse that heals,repairs and regenerates physical
tissues, which is why pro athletes will often do the 90
minute nap before they compete in the evenings.
So that's the idea behind that. You can probably use that on the
weekends, especially if you've had a tough week and you need a
(11:45):
chance to sort of boost your recovery.
I will do that often on airplanes.
But as much as we now know why we need to sleep, the
brainwashes itself out. We know how much sleep we
actually need. Roughly 7 to 8 hours.
By the way, the younger you are,the more you sleep that you
need. But that's OK.
There's a graph for that if you need me to show that to you
later on. We also have some habits that
maybe aren't serving us when it comes to sleep.
(12:07):
This specifically mean one of them.
And as much as Stu talked earlier about what?
What would it look like if you were off your phones for a
period of time? I would encourage you to
consider what would what would it look like if you were off
your phones for an hour before you wanted to fall asleep and
back into the MRI studies? We know that if we look at the
brains and MRI scan of the brainsliced to the head at the level
(12:29):
of the eyes you're looking at. Oh, I'm in a brain look at that.
That was cool. Sliced to the head at the level
of the eyes. If we zoom in, you can actually
see them up top. When we have these devices and
we shine them into our eyes lateat night, the light goes from
the device into your eye, hits the back of your eyeball right
there in a structure that looks like this.
That converts light into electricity.
That shoots back through your optic nerve into the pineal
(12:52):
gland that controls the release of melatonin.
Which makes it very difficult for you to fall asleep if you
have devices shining into your eyes late at night.
So my first core practice for you, the first core discipline
is to defend your last hour. Please, please, please, moving
forwards. Consider that maybe screens
aren't serving you if you are using them.
(13:14):
In the hour before you fall asleep at night, first thing in
the morning, grab your phone, shove in your eyes.
I don't care. But last thing, right at late at
night before you fall asleep, Wewant to try to avoid that at all
costs. Should you do this?
Building on that data that I showed you before, this is what
happens. You'll notice that throughout
the course of the night, from 9:00 PM until 9:00 or 5:00 AM.
(13:36):
This is some of my data. We are just gradually lowering
and lowering and lowering our heart rate.
So it's the rate before you wakeup, it's significantly lower,
like 20 to 30% lower than it waswhen you go to sleep.
That's the pattern that we see when we're recovering, when
we're regenerating, when we're healing, when we are repairing,
(13:58):
when we're refueling. If you have a wearable device
and you want to track this, whatyou're looking for is the lowest
possible heart rate in the latter half of sleep.
I know that if I'm below 50 beats per minute, everything's
good. If I'm above 50 beats per
minute, I'm either stressed or about to get sick.
This is what we tracked with theOlympic team.
We used to use our fingers and astopwatch.
(14:19):
For a minute you count your pulse, or now you can just use
your Fitbit, or your Garmin, or your Apple Watch or whatever.
They've all got different tools in which you can do these
measurements. And what you're actually looking
for is a fundamental shift in your nervous system from the
sympathetic stress system over to your parasympathetic rest,
recover and regenerate system. Which we see, because, as you
(14:41):
can see, when we're super stressed out, your heart rate
goes up. When you're a little bit more
relaxed, your heart rate slows down.
You can actually measure this, You can see this, you can
practice, you can learn, you canexperiment, you can explore, see
what works for you. I know that if I sleep in a cold
room, my heart rate drops and itis awesome, except that Judith
hates it and she steals all my blankets and then my sheets,
(15:03):
right? And so I'm shivering and I would
wake up early and then I just goto the gym.
The other aspect of this that many of you have probably heard
of before is heart rate variability, which does the
opposite. Your heart rate variability
actually goes up throughout the course of the night, which is
good because when we are rested,when we have low stress levels,
there are fewer signals coming out of the brain, down through
(15:24):
the spinal cord, out into your body.
Which means that your heart beats on its own, not through
drive from the brain. And so it is more variable.
Think about if you're nervous oryou're you get suddenly scared,
your heart will go beat, beat, beat, beat, pounding in your
chest very rhythmically. So when you're stressed, your
variability is low. When you're relaxed, your heart
is beat, beat, beat, beat, beat,beat.
(15:48):
It's kind of all over the place.So variability is high.
So what we're looking for in that case is high heart rate
variability. If my heart rate variability is
over 100, all is good and I can.I know that I've had a great
night's sleep and I'm going to feel pretty good throughout the
course of the day. If you don't have a wearable and
you want the exact same data, you can wake up in 30 minutes.
(16:09):
After you wake up, you can ask yourself, how do I feel?
And if you say good, you get theexact same information.
So you don't need all of this tech.
You can simply pay attention to how you feel.
It's like when you use a do I need a garment to figure out how
hard you're running? No, you can just are you
breathing hard to get the exact same info.
But the core message that I havefor you here is I just want you
(16:30):
to defend your last hour now in the workbook in front of you.
You don't have to do it. Now.
On page 20, there is a deep sleep planner.
And the Deep sleep planner is designed to get you to think
through one simple exercise. And the one simple exercise are
what are the few two to three things that you want to be doing
(16:51):
right before you fall asleep? To deactivate your Physiology
and your psychology. Taking a bath, journaling,
talking to your partner or lovedone or not, depending on how
things are going, could be very different, right?
And once you have that protocol,reading fiction, like whatever
(17:12):
it happens to be, meditation works to prayer.
Looking at the window, at trees,all of it works beautifully.
Once you know what those ideas might be, I would like you to
practice them and put them into play and see how you do.
All right everyone. Thanks for tuning in.
I really hope that was helpful. Obviously it's a little bit of
a. Different format.
But super psyched to be able to share.
(17:34):
That information with. You.
I hope that it was helpful. If it was, please share this
with your community. Please let someone else know
about the show. Let someone else know about the
episode. Forward it to them and that.
Helps us tremendously. If you could also leave a review
on. Your podcast platform of choice,
whether that's. ITunes or Spotify?
That also makes a massive difference for us and really
(17:56):
helps us out. And of course, if you can follow
me on social at Doctor Greg Wells or on LinkedIn forward
slash Doctor Greg Wells, that would be tremendously.
Wonderful as well. Ping me with.
Questions. Make sure that this is all about
you and we will continue to build content for you this year
that helps you to be healthy, toperform better, and to get to a
place where your well-being is exactly where you want it to be.
(18:17):
All right, everyone. Thanks again.
We'll see. You in the next episode.
Really. Really soon.
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