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Peak Performance: Sleep

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April 11, 2022

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The following transcription was from the Bulletproof Youtube channel. Here is the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r61bnL1fmUU

Peter Boulden
0:00:00
Hey everybody, welcome back to another edition of the Bulletproof Dental Practice Podcast. Today I'm doing something that I've been wanting to do for a pretty long time and I actually got Craig's blessing on this and it is something that I feel is important and important to talk to for dentists because I've gone through this path and I'm going to try and slow down because sometimes when I get excited, the cadence of how I speak goes faster. So, this is something I want to do called peak performance. And I got inspired by the book you see on, I read this book on Amazon. It's a great book by the way, and it helps you avoid burnout and thrive, and there's science of success. So I would highly encourage the read. I'm not gonna go through and summarize, but it did encourage me to kind of talk about some of the things that I'm very passionate about. For those of you who know me pretty well, I'm pretty passionate about three things in the professional world. Dentistry, business of dentistry, cryptocurrency, and some biohacking things. And I've had some events in my life that encouraged me to be forward thinking with my health, not take just the results that I was delivered at face value, and dig in and become the CEO of my own health and advocate. And I feel like that in my case, the things that I focus on are in six buckets. And I'm gonna try and break these down, and I've encouraged Lacey to promote, she's the director of Bulletproof, encourage her to maybe do a five or six day small little segments on peak performance. So this is not gonna be dentistry related, this isn't gonna be business of dentistry or anything about associates or contracts or marketing, but it is gonna be something that I feel is important to you as a human and important to you as a dentist. So many times, and you will find me end on this, that it's so important for us to put the oxygen mask on ourself first. I always tell people in our mastermind that you are no good if you perish. There are so many people that depend on you, not even if you perish, but if you decide that you were just not performing well. Your family, your teams, their families all depend on you as probably the individual. So it makes sense to take care of yourself. Massages and time off and luxury this, whatever, it's not a frill. It's mandatory so that you don't avoid burnout. So, anyway, these key buckets and the one I'm going to do today is about sleep because I think that's been the biggest game changer for me in my life and professional life and emotional life. There's key buckets of sleep, food, testing, testing yourself, meaning beyond what the doctor or your physician has advocated, exercise, brain training, which includes nootropics, and then longevity and the science of longevity and the research that is out there. I recently spoke at my YPO group about a lot of this stuff, one being biohacking and one being cryptocurrency. And it seems like everyone just kind of wants the takeaways, like what is the cool findings? They don't want all the science, they just want kind of like what are some recommendations? So this pod is only gonna be about sleep, and I just wanna show you kind of what I've discovered because I did not sleep well, and it affected everything from cortisol levels, to stress, to emotional health, and sleep is when we regenerate in terms of how we look and feel. So I made a science of it, like most things, if you're not getting what you want, you need to dig in and kind of reverse engineer why you want it and then figure out how to get optimum results. So, for sleep, there's been some bulletproof here. Like I said, it's been the biggest game changer in terms of my personal life. There's a difference between REM, which I used to think was like the one you always wanted versus deep restorative sleep. You want both. The deep restorative, as you'll see, I'll kind of dig into what it is, is probably more so important because that's when things heal and growth hormones get released. But there's also things, you know, if you have one of those Tempur-Pedic mattresses, you probably flop around all night. I know that if I am hot to, you know, just even a little bit hot, fractionally hot, I flop around all night and then I was never reaching that deep sleep. So Chili Pad is something that it changed the game. I think I put Craig onto this and a lot of friends and I've had people swear that I changed their life. I mean, not just my recommendation because they didn't know about it. And I actually stole it. All good ideas are either stolen or copied. And I actually remember reading it about in the Tools of the Titans. And I used to carry that book around almost to the point where it weighed down my satchel, my book bag. And it's a huge book. And I remember looking and seeing this common theme among all the people that Tim Ferriss had interviewed in the Tools of the Titans. And the common theme you kept seeing was this chili pad thing. And it was about getting your core body temperature down pretty low, almost like a micro-hibernation. That kind of blew it off for several years because I looked it up and I was like, man, that's about $1,500. I don't know, it seems a little hokey. And it never pulled trigger on it. Well, I can tell you it's not hokey. I can tell you it's worth every penny, even if it was 10 times more. But let's get into sleep real quick. So I am someone that I focus more now on getting deep sleep. And you can see here from this chart that deep sleep, your blood pressure drops. That's when muscle growth and repair happens. That's when growth hormone is released, tissue growth in cells. That's when the healing occurs. This is when your brain flushes waste and you show long, slow brain waves. And this is when waking up is super hard to do. So if your alarm clock has ever gone off in this deep state, then you probably wake up like, holy cow, what's going on? You're very groggy if you wake out of this deep. REM sleep, you know, that's kind of, I think everyone knows where your eyes kind of flicker a little bit under your eyelids. And that's where it seems like your mind gets re-energized. So deep sleep, your body gets energized, and REM sleep is when your mind gets re-energized. And that's where like the vivid dreams occur. So it is important too because it's good for memory and learning and problem-solving. That's why if you go to bed with a kind of a problem or something, that's why reading is really good at night, especially as it relates to your business or something that you want to solve, because your brain, kind of your psychology, kind of goes to work for you, which I think is really, really neat, kind of a cool little hack there. So let me go back to some of the products here. This is the Chili Pad and this is kind of the advanced one. It's called Chili Sleep. And I think for, like I said, for the king, half the king, it's $790. That's half of a king. So, usually people buy them together. So, you know, you're looking at a $1,500 investment. What it does is it just takes water, you set it to cooling, it actually connects to your app or your phone rather. And you can either heat or cool under this mattress pad. So like I said, most people nowadays are sleeping on Tempur-Pedic mattresses, which as we know, we can all probably attest to, especially men. Men feel like they get hotter more because there's more muscle mass and muscle mass, you know, the metabolism creates more heat. But men seem to be hot more often, especially maybe just the friends I talk to, although I'm probably not querying women if they're hot. I digress. What it does is it takes water, shoots it through the mattress pad and cools you down. It's just regular water, but it obviously works on some kind of refrigerant and fan. But it gets down, obviously it's trying to reduce your core temperature. And believe it or not, putting it on kind of 60 degrees is where you get into and you stop kind of moving, you stop flopping around. So when you're cold, you get into that deeper sleep. And I can attest to having this ring, an aura ring, that prior to having this, statistics were not very good. So I've quantified it and tested it by either having a whoop, an Apple watch, or a ring. And this aura ring is designed to really kind of look at sleep primarily. But it does work so something to try and look. It's got a 30 night sleep trial. We're not sponsored by this or anything like this so I'm not pushing this. I'm just giving an idea that it's it's worth a try because it could change the way you sleep if you sleep poorly. Going back to The next thing I would recommend looking at is that so many of us look at our phones when we get in bed. That's kind of like our time and we're winding down. I was a victim, I was guilty of doing that as well. When I dug into that, the blue light of our phones, the blue light of the TV, I didn't think anything of it. But the problem is that it suppresses our own melatonin production by about three hours from the last you look at it. And so a lot of times for me, let's just call it a couple of years ago even, the last thing I was doing was looking at my phone until my eyes got tired. I wasn't reading or reading something that didn't project blue light. I wasn't doing the things I should have done, which obviously was affecting the way my body was falling into deep sleep. So now I utilize, even when I go to bed, if I'm watching TV, because I enjoy watching TV, I enjoy looking at my phone, I enjoy, but when I do it, I utilize these glasses. And so these are blue blocking glasses, they look a little ridiculous, but again, who are you seeing in your bed? So it really doesn't matter. If you've ever seen Dave Asprey of the Bulletproof Coffee guy, he's a giant biohacker and he almost always wears these. I almost see him in interviews wearing these kind of glasses. But they're a great investment to put by your bedside table and they are good for blocking out blue lights and TV and your phone or your iPad. And this is important. There is science that goes along with this. I believe it's right here. Yeah, the effects of blue light. So sleep is fundamental and critical. There's actually a book called Why We Sleep and the Effects of Blue Light. And sleep is fundamental. And we know this. The people that you hear, maybe it's you that says, I can sleep when I'm dead, or I only need four hours. It's kind of BS. It's kind of BS. You may function and be a more efficient sleeper, but more than likely you're functioning on cortisol or epinephrine, and your adrenaline is just getting you through the day because you have to. You're almost in a flight or fight reaction all day long. And that's fine, you can do that temporarily, but over time, that is unsustainable, and you all know that. So, here's a Harvard EDU study, if you don't believe me, that blue light, and our iPhones are probably the biggest emitters of that, even if you push it to the spectrum in the settings where it changes it to more of a yellow light, it's still at its core a blue light. But exposure to light suppresses the secretion of melatonin, a hormone that influences circadian rhythms. Even dim light can interfere with a person's circadian rhythm and melatonin secretion. A mere eight lux, or that's, I guess a lux is one candle power, that is, it affects us even at eight lux. So light at night is a part of the reason so many people don't get enough sleep, because you're not falling into restorative sleep. You're getting into that very light sleep that really doesn't do much. So there you can see blue light suppresses melatonin secretion by three hours. And this was a Harvard EDU study.

Peter Boulden
0:12:11
So this is an interesting thing.

Peter Boulden
0:12:14
So this is, I'm looking at the aura ring here. And this is one that I took from a, that I was pretty fascinated by. And this is my own data. And so even though I only got six hours and 44 minutes, because I had these lights on, because I had the light glasses on, the blue blocking glasses on, I should say, that my sleep, I went from immediately kind of going to bed here, I was awake, I went immediately into deep melatonin secretion

Peter Boulden
0:12:43
and stayed there.

Peter Boulden
0:12:45
And I would not have been able to do that without being able to block that blue light from the glasses. So they really helped and here is proof and statistics that show you can almost immediately go into deep sleep just by putting on these glasses at night if you're looking at your phone or your iPad. The Aura Ring, as I already mentioned, is a pretty cool thing. They just came out with the Gen 3. It's good for athletics. It's good for sleeping. It's the first thing I look at in the morning because I've gamified the way I sleep. Like how did I sleep? What was my score? And I aimed to shoot in the 90s, which is pretty rare. I think Craig was telling me that he's probably in the 70s, but he's a lighter sleeper. But I believe that you can, you know, this is just beta testing and testing things in your environment. You know, do I take melatonin as a supplement? Do I use the chili pad? Do I, the blue glockenslasses? It's probably not one magic bullet that's gonna make you have an amazing night's sleep, but it's a combination of things. Like you didn't have alcohol the day of, you also didn't have any caffeine, like all these things. But I think it's foundational to how we function as humans and our performance the following day, so it's just vital. Because we have a lot of obligations as dentists. We have big days that are very stressful and we can't always be functioning on cortisol. And then lastly, something that potentially could be affecting your sleeping is are you putting the phone right by your head? So these push off big electromagnetic fields because there's obviously electronic and it's also receiving cell phone radiation or cell phone waves that are coming down as a receiver. I had a situation where I was having headaches a lot and I couldn't figure it out. But the headboard of my bed was right behind all of my HVAC equipment on the outside of course. And when I bought one of these testers, I was just kind of curious. I had a tremendous magnetic field on one side of the bed so things were having to be shifted around. I actually had to put a lead kind of blanket on the backside of the bed just to help block things and honestly stopped waking up with headaches. I may be you know my body may be more sensitive to things like that but I just thought it was fascinating that I was kind of going to sleep with this giant magnetic field around my head every night every night for eight hours. Pool equipment and HPAC and then I was putting the cell phone kind of right here as an alarm clock all of which is not done anymore and it seems to be abated, which it's made a big difference, like I said. Point is, these things, you know, the premise of this peak performance pod or little series I wanna do is because it can't always just be about dentistry. And if we can perform better as the body that we were given, right, if we can obviously perform better as business leaders and bosses and owners of practices and associates and we can just be better for the people around us. And I think it starts with sleep. The next thing I'll do next time is talking about food and water. And now that was kind of another breakthrough in my own life. I used to eat just to eat when I got hungry and I would take the fastest thing possible, which as we know, fast food doesn't equal quality food. So, that's it. Hope everyone has a great day. We'll catch you at the next performance, performance part two. performance part two.

Peter Boulden
0:16:13
♪♪

Transcribed with Cockatoo

Key Takeways

Introduction
Biggest Game-Changer In Life
REM Vs. Restorative Sleep
Tools For Better Sleep

Key References

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