[38] Exploring the Science and Strategies for Optimal Sleep

3:23PM Aug 20, 2024

Speakers:

Andrew Holecek

Ed O'Malley

Keywords:

sleep

napping

hrv

question

study

work

shown

talk

open

increase

sunlight

light

hour

data

tissue

reduce

day

device

francois

cognitive behavioral therapy

Hey everybody, welcome to What was the name that Mr. Ed, right? Mr. Ed,

yeah, talking horse, yeah,

that was one of my favorite shows way back when. But we this is not just mystery. It

was mine too. It was mine too. He had a good quality that that horse. Yeah,

remember that the opening line a horse is a horse, of course, of course. Unless you're talking the horse is just like,

Oh my god. It

just shows us how old we are. But the people that I'm listening that are listening here like they can relate to this, right?

I love gray hair out there.

Yeah, there's a few. So I wanted to share just a little bit. People have been asking me about my experience on the lab. So this is, I don't know if you can see it, but this is a I did a couple of little videos that we posted on Instagram three weeks ago or so. Ken paolo's lab out of Northwestern University, they're doing a really cool Dream Yoga study, and they invited me, and year ago, I just kept deferring, deferring, hoping they would forget. But Ken's lab is famous. He's He's world renowned as a scientist on memory, so lest he's never going to forget. So, fine, yeah, I went and so, yeah, so I try sleeping with all this crap on, you know. So you had all these electrodes. What you may not see is I also have a cannula in my nose. I've got all these electrodes that are like a leash there. I have a turning radius of about two and a half feet. We're stuck in a room the size of a coffin with no ventilation. It's great volunteers come join us, but I have to say, the people there were fantastic. I delivered I was able to to pull out all the stops, because that wasn't exactly the best environment, but I was able to deliver a lucid dream nice every night for them. And it was kind of cool, because it was actually pretty sophisticated. So just to show you how it'd work, I didn't, I didn't have them touch my sleep at all until 3am so I went to bed around 10 or 11. Took them about 4550 minutes to get all this stuff hooked up. And then I said, you know, don't touch, don't do anything. They need to get my non REM deep sleep until about three. So then they woke me up at three, and I did my go to stuff. I did the waking back to bed method. I stayed up for 30 minutes, 35 minutes or so, did all my stuff, then I went back to sleep. And what was was interesting was, when you they showed me the whole EEG, it's kind of cool. Ed's lived in this world, so he knows it, but kind of live, live time, real time, EEG with all these electrodes scanning across. And so I had to rehearse my eye signals and my cyst angles. And so when I had a lucid dream, I signaled them with my eyes, you know. So then they I just went back and forth with this most card, most code, that told them that I was signaled to them that I was dreaming. And then they could, of course, confirm that on the bullshitting him, they can look and say, yeah, he's really dreaming. So then and I have to send two sniff signals to start the action. So I say, okay, tonight, I'm going to do this. So I go. So that's the cannula, so that would send the sniff signal. Then I do my silly, goofy thing. And then either when the task was over, or I felt the dream was ending, I did four sniff signals to signal, okay, task is closed. And then I wouldn't say unfortunately, but unfortunately in the sense that I didn't sleep for shit, and pardon my French, but by the end of the third night, it was like, just forget it. Shoot me. So I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not much. And so then what happened? Then they cut, they wake me up, and then they they, they'd interview me. You know, like they do, they do an interview, and I'm being streamed live to this micro phenomenologist in Australia who's a scientist who's then going to spend the next hour and a half to two hours when I wake up, doing a micro phenomenological interview of my experience. So the whole thing was actually incredibly interesting. And the other thing that they did that actually was kind of cool, because I had not had this before, was when I was in REM, because I said, Don't touch me, don't, don't rouse me until three o'clock, 330 then I went back to sleep, even before, I would have a lucid dream that I recognized from my side. They could tell when I was in REM, so they would ping me. They would send either Sonic sounds, he had this little beeping thing they'd send. That didn't work entirely for me, because I'm a pretty dumb sound sleeper. And so then we worked out this little thing for the lights to flash. And so that was a little bit like the dream goggles thing, right? But now the whole lab set up, but I have to say. It really was pretty, pretty cool event. I learned a lot these scientists are. They're so fun. They're so cool. Three of them over there. I don't know Ed, if you know Ken paler, but he's a really great guy. No, it was fun. Quote, unquote. So I thought I'd share that, because Ed works in the in the world of sleep labs, I have some experience, but not a ton. And so it was interesting in that regard. So anyway, I just wanted to share that with you before I turn it over to Ed,

yeah, no, that's great. I wish I might be able to go back and dig up some of my old pictures, you know, because I always, before I would make anybody do anything, I would do it myself. So I've had you as I've had all the wires. You know, I've had more wires than those. In fact, we pulled 1020 across my scalp. So this

is what, this is what they had to do before I went to sleep. So I look like a mummy. So they put all this stuff on me so that when I'm turning around, I'm not going to yank it, yeah. So, you know, yeah, try and go to sleep with all that crap on. Oh, yeah. And then I had these electrodes in this respiration thing. You can't even see it underneath my shirt. So I had all this other stuff underneath, right? These electrodes and

and what are they for? Now that you've heard me talk about all that stuff, why that you have those bands there to be able to tell when you have obstructive events versus central events, right? Central events, these don't move. That's

exactly right. Yeah, exactly right. So this is old school for Ed, but, but I thought I'd share with you, just to show you I had some fun. So anyway, cool. Okay, back to you, my dear friend,

alright. Well, we have a bunch of questions. We also have

one very last thing. Don't don't mean to interrupt you, my friend. This is actually going to be our last session for behind the firewall with nightclub. We're going to be restructuring it. I forgot to say this. Please excuse me, we're restructuring nightclub. We're moving it onto a new platform called circle. It's going to be pretty massively restructured. And one of the things we're going to do is we're going to open up Dr Ed session to the general public as an outreach because, you know, not them, not that many people are interested in lucid, lucid dreaming. Give me yoga. Tons of people are interested in sleep and sleep medicine and sleep hygiene, and so instead of keeping this behind a firewall, we want to make this going forward an outreach thing. So I would suspect this is the last time we're going to have a nice, intimate group like this. That's one of the small, so called side effects of this. We expect to have a ton more people joining us as we do this outreach thing. So I just wanted to say that. So next time you come on and you see, hopefully a bunch more people, that's what that's about. So sorry to interrupt my friend, but I just wanted to say that, yeah,

okay. All Fun, all fun and games. Yeah, and the more you know, the more people we have, the more interesting discussions can occur because people have different questions. Some of it will repeat, but there'll be a lot of just different ways of looking at things, which hopefully, if I get to the napping stuff at the end, I was kind of surprised by some of the most recent data that that we've been trying to put together a napping one of these ask the sleep docs. And, you know, between not being able to do it or not having to do right timing. So I got it together tonight to at least do some of it open the discussion. It'll probably come back up again, especially when we open it up to the general public. But so there were some questions that came in. Yes, Denise, I have yours here. You're in the list. Let me share my screen that just ran away. This is today. Yes, this is today. So we're going to just go with the questions as though, as they came in. So this first one was, this comes from and, you know, we have to probably make some some qualitative or some kind of announcement about your names so it's intimate now, and generally, a lot of us know, and if you put your name in the question, then I'm going to assume you want your name to be out there. If it's not in the question, as you'll see, Lynnea put hers in, and that's fine, but if you don't, I don't assume your question is attributed to you in particular. Okay, especially when people ask some personal questions in a larger group, you may not want that information out. So anyway, so this is from someone who said, I'm replying to my earlier question about the HRV and HeartMath coherence. She appreciated what I said before, and she tried to increase her HRV by practicing Heart Math coherence. Right? We did that at one point or other where you're basically allowing your breath to slow deepen, and you bring up some gratitude, or some happy place to allow your HRV to increase. So she was practicing that before sleep, and then she went to sleep, and when she woke up, she would do it, but it didn't seem to improve it at all, and she wondered if it was because of how she was sleeping. When she sleeps in her supine position, she has much better HRV than on the side. And as it turns out, there is data to suggest that when you sleep supine, you're sleeping more deeply. Number one. Number two, your HRV does grow up, does increase. Typo there, and a lot of that data first came out when they were looking at the SIDs studies in the babies who, you know, sudden infant death syndrome that started the whole back to sleep issue. They were afraid people were or the infants were a couple of things. One was rebreathing, CO two, they weren't getting I don't know, things weren't going well, but when you sleep prone, and that is face down on the bed or on either side, your HRV will be lower, suggestive of increased sympathetic arousal, which is, in a sense, not good for your sleep, right? We want your sleep to be deeper. And so I would ask a question. Back to the questioner, Did she notice a difference between the sides? Because there's not really clear evidence on whether one side's worse than the other. There is some suggestion that you know from the sleep yoga world that if you sleep, you know like the Buddha and the Buddha position, the Buddha sleeping position is on his right side, right, and the on the right side offloads the heart. Okay, right? Because if you're on your left side, you've got to this side the weight of the body pressing on the heart cavity and making it work a little harder to expand. So there is something to that I'm curious about the HRV. So if you've noticed that yourself, or you have your own data where you know you've slept on one side versus the other, be interesting to follow up on that. And I'll keep it on and see if questions are popping in. Okay. Hi. My father struggles with sleep apnea. Wasn't sure if that was the name of his father or he was just saying hello, but could be either he has to sleep with the machine. It was CPAP, right? This is somebody with sleep apnea, and he wondered about sleep yoga exercises, or something you can do to improve and actually, we mentioned this before. Did you do playing? Has been shown, at least in a very small couple of studies that it did you do playing? You are doing circular breathing, which it's kind of like the the and I don't do it well. I'm still trying to learn it myself, but the way to think about it is, if you breathe while you're drinking a glass of water, right? You can do that. Try it sometimes. So you're drinking your water and you can take a breath. And that's what circular breathing is. You're getting these airway muscles to open up and at the same time as you're taking water in so that you're actually working two sets of muscles, and that apparently strengthens the airway muscles that collapse during apnea. And singers, or at least voice coaches, who give out these singing exercises for, you know, for vocalists allow their airways to become stronger, and they seem to be at less risk of sleep apnea. So those are the two bits of info I know about that

I have been sleeping as sort of an attendant one. I've been sleeping with my mouth open some of the time, which has been interfering with my quality of sleep. What are your recommendations for sleeping with a closed mouth? I'm not too keen on taping my mouth closed at night, and I tried one of those bands to keep the jaw closed. These chin straps, we call them, they can be really uncomfortable. You saw the picture of Andrew, right? It's just, it's almost like that. It's just not comfortable at all. And so they, you know, is there anything else they can do? And I suggested that one of the new things people are doing, and I got this from a sleep dentist, actually, one. Who works with sleep apnea, who's a dentist and makes the mouthpieces. And she said, you can put the tape on both sides of the mouth so that when these muscles begin to strain to open, there's a signal to them to remain closed without actually having to tape across the mouth. So you might want to try that, use some of that mouth, tape along the sides of your mouth and see how that goes and let us know. Let us know how it goes. I would also say that what, what quality of sleep issues that you are having with your mouth open. It could be that if your mouth is really dry in the morning, it could be you're having some apneas. So I would check that a little further, get a little deeper on that and just make sure you're not experiencing some sleep apnea.

Okay, so I see Barry had something about HRV, the Apple Watch, nightly measure. Yeah, it's a difference in measurement devices. So each device, most of them, use a similar measure, but there are at least three or four different measures that you really have to check to figure out which one is, which that the different devices use. And even in the research that looks at HRV, they use a variety of different measures. But essentially, yeah, whatever your device is doing, you want to look at those relative changes to really get a sense of what you're doing. I would predict it Barry, that both the ring and the watch go up and down similarly, maybe not to the same values. Yeah. Okay, cool. And Francois, I put the tape vertically in the center of the mouth so that the lips are not completely sealed. Do you mean, yeah? Like this, right? A little strip like so I can't see a picture of Francois, so, yeah, that's another way of doing it. Some people have to take the full mouth, and that can be really annoying, right, you know. And are you talking about a little strip down here, Francois, right down the middle of the mouth? Yeah? Yeah. That can be much more tolerable. A lot of people do it that way, but this is the first time I heard this new way of just putting it here and leaving the mouth alone entirely. Then try that out, see how that goes. Report back next time. All right, let's continue. Okay, this was an interesting question. So this is from Linnea. She attached the name to it. So, L, O, L, L, T. It's Oh gosh, it's light. No blinking on the name. It's like light laser therapy. So it's basically, you know, it's along the lines of what Denise does with the light device, but it's much more directed and it's much more intense generally. So the light has, if it's a red light, it's not just red light, as we get with our little he lights, but rather it's an intense red light, and that apparently it in a couple of ways. It works in one way, it actually penetrates because of the intensity of the light. It can penetrate the tissue just like light can go through your eyelids and be detected by your retinas. More intensely, I can go through the tissue of the body and actually reach some of the internal organs. Low level laser therapy. Thank you, Denise, and so that that it's low intensity relative to what laser activity actually does. So you know, laser can actually burn off tissue. They use laser at certain intensities and distances to actually ablate tissue in the body, in the brain, but in this case, they're really just trying to reach into the body, into the tissue and to stimulate the mitochondria. That's one of the effects that's been shown, but essentially to innovate or activate the cells in that area, and that activation creates a healing process, like from inflammation, but in a good way. So it's been shown to reduce fibromyalgia. It's been shown to increase wound healing, and actually, with a little more intensity. It's been shown to reduce sleep apnea by increasing the size of the oropharynx. And it I just put this in here because I thought that was pretty interesting. I kept seeing this air colon. Yag, what the hell. And when I found out what it was, it really didn't help. And. Or erbium doped U tritium, aluminum Garnet, you know, it has something to do with how they direct that intense beam of laser light that's less intense than a full laser, more intense than the typical red light, but it does. It activates, in this case, more intensely it activates the tissue, and it it it doesn't ablate the tissue, and it doesn't cause any specific pain. So it can be done, uh, without any anesthesia in the airway. And what it's doing is it's heating up the tissue enough that it actually breaks down and gets resorbed by the rest of the airway, so that or the rest of the muscle musculature around the airway, so the airway becomes wider, and thereby reducing the level of apnea. But also, specifically in its it's directly related to sleep, in chronic insomnia. There's just been a couple of studies, and that's the one I quoted here on the bottom of this slide, in which it appears to shorten sleep latency and decrease the number of awakenings, and overall improve sleep efficiency in chronic insomnia. So there's something to that. And so I learned something new there as well. I mean, we know about the low level and or the lower the lowest level of right red light that we get, for instance, from our heights, which have been shown to increase melatonin, and that's presumably the mechanism helps sleep. But now this goes a little bit deeper. You could actually get light exposure that will improve sleep beyond the melatonin mechanism. Okay, question popped in. Let's just see if,

oops. Okay, so do you have any alternative suggestion for encouraging nose breathing during sleep? Well, yeah, yeah, you could, yeah. There are the nasal strips. So I don't know if people are allergic to that too. That's what they were asking about. Who was asking that? That was Stephanie. There are, and I don't recall the name of these, either. But there are these, like, plasticky type devices that are nasal dilators that actually go inside the Nairs and open the Nairs up from the inside out. Doesn't actually attach to the skin and pull it out that way, goes in and opens it up that way you would sleep with that. You know, clean it every day, and you can use it before a number of uses. They're reusable. So nasal dilators of some sort, and I can't remember, I mean, there are the two types, there is the external and there's an internal. So it's an internal nasal dilator. If you Google it, I'm sure it'll come up. Some of them look like little U's like a U shape, so it goes in, and the two bottom pieces are what hold it open. And there are a couple of further questions, where do you apply the red light in order to improve sleep? Oh, that's a good question. This is done on the brain, so, I mean, you got to have the device, and I'm not sure whether it's through a helmet type or over particular areas, because that wasn't very clear from the paper I read. I'll have to go back and look at that. They actually presented the red light. But the device, even that was initially talked about, the TQ solo, they're fairly expensive. They're in the several $1,000 range, so you don't want to take that lightly. And I'm not sure if that TQ solo is directive enough, strong enough, or any of that, but it's, you know, compared to what they used in the study. So you can look up that study and see for your own personal information. All right, let's see. A colleague of mine has suffered sleep issues for a long time, and unfortunately, their doctor prescribed drugs. Oh, this is Denise, right now. They're having difficulty getting off them. They're engaging in holistic treatments like acupuncture. Do you have suggestions for your patients who also experience this issue to help them along the way? That word acupuncture reminded me of this study here actually did use the red light on acupuncture points, and they're listed now that it comes back to me, they're listed in the paper which ones they used, and they compared it to Sham red light. Llt, but they also did a second. Set of acupuncture points, and one set was better than the other, so you'd have to go look out of my acupuncture, is that that up to speed? So an acupuncture can help, and I think the mechanism, again, is through reducing stress and arousal. But sometimes it's not enough. So, so this is a power packed answer to this one, okay? Because there are a lot of issues. So, you know, unfortunately, somebody gets prescribed drugs, right? Well, first thing I would say is, if somebody's on meditate medications, especially for long term use, don't abruptly stop taking prescribed sleep meds. You got to work with your prescriber to gradually taper these medications, right? You're just going to create a ton more problems. You're going to have a lot of rebound insomnia, and then you're going to feel like, Oh my God, my brain is so broken I need to go back on those meds. And then you feel like you're going to be on them forever. But if you gradually taper them. That's the way to really get off them. But you may need to be doing other therapies along with it, other processes, and I'm going to get to that in just a second here. Also, if you have suffered for months and nothing you have tried has worked for you, then get some sleep meds to at least temporarily relieve the insomnia, give your system a chance to get, you know, to repair itself so that is strong enough to then take on some of these other behavioral protocols I'm going to talk about, but you don't want to then, you know, if you go in and try sort of milder therapy, some behavioral stuff, some acupuncture. It's probably not going to wait, not going to work if you've had chronic insomnia, which means it's lasted for months, and you know, several nights a week, every week for several months. That's required for the diagnosis. If you've been out that far, then you really need to do something, get some sleep, and then at the same time, explore these other options. So cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia has been shown in study after study to be as good as sleep meds, if not better, and it certainly is better for the long term, because it will last well beyond when you stop a sleep Med, if you are taking the meds, and you compare the two, when you do the cognitive behavioral therapy, you've got tools that will help you deal with the occasional insomnia night that you'll you'll have down the road, instead of it becoming a pattern again, and that's what you want to avoid. So you want these long term treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy, and they will work with you. They'll monitor your sleep, blogs, your tracking devices, whatever, to see how your sleep is doing. You get feedback, and then they encourage what you need to do to keep improving. It's it's going to take a longer haul than just popping a few pills, but it will, in the long run, repair your sleep and give you great tools going down the road. And then you always hear me talk about neurofeedback, biofeedback, you know, Heart Math. There are other devices out there, most chronic insomnia involves some type of hyperarousal, right? The nervous system is amped up for whatever reason. And these reasons can be myriad, right? They can be hereditary. You know, my mother or my father, they did it. My uncle, my aunt, they did it. Grandma had it, or epigenetic, which is situational or environmental, something that happens with development or your life exposures as you grow and and deal with the world. But whatever that is, you want to do a comprehensive evaluation determine what's contributing, what may be the major cause. So we're looking at, hopefully we've done we've done our medical evaluations. We don't have anything other than the insomnia that may be causing it. Then we look at the contributors. What are our lives like? Okay, so one of the ways we can get a better and a deeper look at this is to do the feedback so it quiets the nervous system, so then you can make the needed changes right. You can get some insight into what's going on. It can reduce or correct the hyper arousality, and then you're able to move on and finally, see someone, for example, a holistic sleep specialist, anybody know one, or at least someone, who will deeply listen to you right to really hear through not only what your complaint about the sleep is, but what else is. Going on in your life. You You want someone who's willing to look at your lifestyle, your worldview, philosophy of life, along with your medical and family history, because all of these contribute to how well we sleep at night. If I've learned nothing over the years of working with insomnia, it's that it is not a simple or single symptom, single or simple issue. It's how we move through the world. So we have to look at all of that and and then we can really allow for the changes that need to take place, which most of the time are going to require time, effort and some lifestyle changes. We hate to change. It's, I thought it was just New Englanders, but it's just in general, you know, like, we just don't like, I like the way I'm doing my things. I just want this fixed. Okay, it's just that in order to fix that thing, yeah, the rest of life has to be managed around it. So, so that's my spiel on that. And let's see. Oh, good. We're not popping up many more questions, and we have time, so I'm going to jump into the nap. Question, to nap or not to nap? That is the question. And I, you know, I, you know, full disclosure here, I always recommend napping when you are needing to make up the lost sleep. Um, we'll get to Tim's comment in a second. The The thing about napping, when you are making up sleep, this is a different story, okay, so

you'll hopefully recall the sleep regularity versus sleep duration data that just came out recently. I've been hyping in almost every one of these after sleep docs now, because it's really the biggest, newest data in in sleep, in the sleep field. And I'm surprised it's not out there more. But they, you know, they looked at 60, over 60,000 people, and they came up with this data that said that sleep regularity is more important than sleep duration. Now you've got to have a certain amount of sleep to just even come into the same ballpark. But beyond that, if your sleep is irregular, if you're sleeping late and getting up early, and then sleeping early and getting up late and and napping variable times throughout the days, going in, day in and day out, on and on and on, that ultimately will decrease your lifespan and or contribute to all cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease and cancer. Now they looked at a ton of studies over the years, forever, up until 2024 and they picked out all the ones that had at least control groups, groups that control for napping, duration, frequency, aid, sex, BMI, and follow up years that they looked at people. And pretty much these data hold up solidly. And there have been a number of reviews, I'm going to mention another one in a minute in which habitual napping. That is people who need to nap every single day. There may be something going on now it's it's not necessarily there. They are beginning to say that this is cause, not just correlation. It may be intertwined with the metabolic disease causing increased fatigue or an increased need to nap during the day, or, you know, sleep disturbance at night causing an increased need to sleep during the day. Because we know insomnia will cause all of these things as well. But the fact seems to be now that habitual sleeping, habitual napping during the day can create a lot of issues. Now they also found, in the same analysis of all these studies, that decreased is a disk decreased risk of cognitive impairment and age related muscle loss. Oh, so maybe there are some good things. But again, this is looking at habitual napping, and when you actually look at the relationship between napping and well, let's finish this first, they found one other really important bit of info. Information that if the nap was 30 minutes or less, they were okay, no significant risks. But if you have you're taking longer than 30 minute naps, that became the issue. And again, this is habitual. Every day you're taking an hour, two hour nap. That also indicates to me there must be something wrong somewhere else too, if that's what's happening. But they kind of control for most other variables, and came up with these data. So if you are doing a daily net, try to keep it under 30 minutes, and that may have to do with you know you're going into the deeper levels of sleep, and I've talked about this before, where when you then try to get up from that, you're in sleep inertia. And so you may be fighting against your brain wanting to be asleep, and now you're forcing it to be awake. And so there may be some cost to doing that as well, but I also found a meta analysis of cognitive impairment, and you know, their study found, and this was done pretty recently as well, that there were associations between long napping durations and cognitive impairment or dementia. Okay, so they actually support this in the sense that longer napping is a potential risk factor for adverse cognitive outcomes. So even though it didn't show up in this study, they had a decreased risk of cognitive impairment. They didn't parse out the 30 minute versus two hours in their cognitive impairment assessment here, so they didn't see much of a risk of cognitive impairment by habitual napping. But it could have been mixed because they didn't really, they didn't look at that directly. And when they look at, and when these guys looked at this directly, this is what they found. So so, you know, there's still some questions out there, but again, the sleep regularity. I mean, if you think about, if you think about, like I was talking earlier, about we don't want to change our we like to our lives just the way they are. We get a regularity in with our lives. And so that means we have a regular amount of strain, you know, a usual amount of activity, and then a usual amount of sleep. And so we're in these rhythms that the body really loves. Circadian rhythm is really important. That's why being out in nature, that's why light exposure and going with the seasons, and getting your light more in the summer, less in the winter, getting it in the morning, getting it in sometime during the day and again, at the end of the day, every single day. Yes, there'll be exceptions. Life will intrude at different times, but if that's your regular pattern, then, and you like to take naps, keep them under 30 minutes, I think you'll be just fine, at least. That's what I'm telling myself. But I get most of the sleep I need every night, right? That's where I start. So that's, that's where we should all start, is getting a regular habit of getting in regular sleep, really prioritizing it every night, not just, not just after you get off this call right on these nights, I'm sure you all go to bed early after after sleep. Doctor. I see Myra smiling away there. Yes, yes. Alright, so we have a couple of questions that came in, and then I'll open it to the floor. I think there's still some time for a little discussion. So I think Tim had the first question. I have noticed some decrease in hours of sleep over the years. I used to average about eight to nine per night, 20 or more years ago, and now seem to average about six to seven per night. Is that normal? Is that normal in that respect, no, but that doesn't mean it's not normal for you. Okay? So in general, what we need during our adult years continues into our elderly years. It may drop by half an hour at most by an hour. At most by an hour. So if you're noticing a couple of hour change in your sleep need over time, what else are you doing now? There may be there may be a i. An interaction with you were meditating deeply over these 20 years, because there is some evidence to suggest that long term meditators actually do need less sleep than they did when they were younger. So that's why I say maybe it is normal for you. Depends on what you're doing with the rest of your life. In general, for the general population, if you needed eight hours when you were 25 or 30, you should still need seven to eight hours when you're 85 and 90. Okay, so that's the general notion there. You can come on and talk more about that, if, if there's more information. Francois question about restless leg syndrome, a condition I continue to struggle with. So sorry to hear that. It's a pain. It really is. My latest blood test shows my Ferran levels at 103 that is perfectly sufficient. You know, anything above 50, generally should be all you need to get rid of the restless legs. And so if you still have them, it's probably not your iron utilization at that stage. And you know, I would ask you, have you? Did Have you tried iron supplements at all because, yeah, and they didn't really seem to, did they bring it up to this level? Or you actually go ahead and unmute, if you can, we unmute. Francois, Alyssa, yeah, of course. Thank you.

You're welcome. There we go, okay,

good, yeah,

okay, thank you. So you were asking me, I'm sorry, could

you repeat Yeah, so did you take the iron supplements and they brought your ferritin up to one, three, or you weren't taking them, and it it was that high. I

know I had a previous reading a year prior, and it was around 60, so I think the supplements brought it up to that level and but I'm puzzled, because sometimes I can be a few weeks without symptoms, and at other times I'll be every night almost so,

oh, Well, okay. So what I would suggest is you maintain what you took to get up 203 because that probably reduced its sum. What's kicking it back in are external factors, and now you're going to have to be doing more detective work and figure out what's kicking it up at those times. It may not be what you've immediately done that day, maybe what you did a week ago or several days ago. So you're going to have to broaden your your exploration. Here

it is true detective work. Yeah, yeah,

because you don't, you don't, you know, you don't even notice, until it happens again, and you go, Oh, what did I do today? What did I do yesterday? What I did and, you know, who knows? You kind of, you know, we don't. But maybe keeping a log, you know, those sleep logs I threw out there. You can use the sleep log as just a general log for what are you doing, what are you eating each day. Use it as a sleep diary. What supplements you you know, which days you exercising, which days you doing this kind of exercise versus that kind of exercise. And really start, you know, jotting it down and see what associates,

yeah, right, trial and error. The important is tracking whatever is going on in our lives to see if there's a correlation?

Yeah, yeah, no, I know someone who is perfectly normal never had them, except when she was training for marathons that extra and that, you know, maybe she was just exceeding her circulatory capabilities of getting the iron around fast enough, because she was running so many miles and doing it in the city at that. So, you know, yeah,

that reminds me that stress seems to be a factor. So I mean, if you're looking forward to a marathon, I mean, I would think it is a stressful event, stress like, I know, if I'm particularly stressed, it seems to exacerbate,

yeah, condition, yeah,

yeah, okay, well, thank you for that clarification. Anyway, sure. Keep searching,

yeah, yeah, okay, yes, keep keep posting, keep letting us know. It goes Okay, thank you. You're let's see. What about siesta? Maya asks a cultural tradition after lunch, yeah, certainly if you're gonna nap, that's the time to do it. But one of the questions, the unanswered questions. To me, with the siesta is because dinner is late and nighttime is late in those same cultures, is and is wake time earlier. So that that siesta is always a makeup time, you know, a makeup sleep time. It's part of the 24 hour period of getting that seven or eight hours of sleep. So, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna dig a little deeper, unless you have, you know, something specific about that, yeah, I'll look a little deeper and see, see if there is that association. Because, you know, it's not like they've looked at, you know, like, oh, the Spaniards, they're dying earlier because they have siesta? You know? I don't think that's that's been shown in any way, shape or form. So it's like when people ask me about diet, you know, and I've become so much more flexible when we talk about diet now, because I'm like, you know, there are people all over this world who eat all kinds of different things at all times of different times of days and amounts, and, you know, and we all live about the same length of time. And there, and there are people throughout the world who live to be 100 no matter what they're eating, for the most part. I mean, obviously there are some no nos, but so there's a lot of variation in all of these. And when we look at a large population, yeah, then something seems to be strongly related, but individually, as long as you're doing healthy things, that's what I do, all right, how much sunlight per day is suggested? Andrew says, well, in the morning, the more so the morning in the evening exposures. We're talking 510, minutes, 15 minutes. That's really just to set your clock, but to keep your whole body. There are circadian genes that are active in all different cells of the body. Every organ system has their own. They're regulated by or governed, let's say by the SCN in the brain. But they all need light, and so the light throughout the day. If you can get yourself a few hours of light outside every day, that would probably be the healthiest you can be. And if we go back to what we did back in the day, you know, we lived outdoors for the most part. So everything we've done since then has reduced that and probably hasn't added to our longevity by reducing all of those things. So I'd say during the day, at least, getting out for a couple hours. You know, in the book by I um, he's an Indian researcher. He's done some great work. He calls it the circadian code. The book is called The circadian code. I'm blanking on his his name, but he will argue that, yeah, you need to be out several hours a day, every day. A good book on on circadian system. Hi, Ed, I would like to email you directly, if that's okay, yep, get some further out. Sure. Yeah, you can, Alyssa, you can put my email in the in the chat, I don't mind the people email me, especially if you want to follow up on something Tim is saying, although I still exercise, it is substantially less than 20 years ago. Interesting, interesting, yeah, um, and I do meditate more. So you know that combination may may actually explain it, because more exercise means you probably needed more sleep, and less exercise means you probably need a little bit less, and meditating more means a little bit less. So that you know that might explain it. If your daytime action, your daytime functionality, is good, you're alert all day, all the things I say. You're not irritable, you're you're perfectly focused and able to concentrate and memory is reasonably good. Or, you know, we all have that age related stuff, but for the most part, then you're getting an adequate amount of sleep, and it is just different now. Oh, sure. Might be nice to take down that so we can all see each other. Yeah. Sachin, Panda, thank you, Francois. He is the author of circadian code. He's done some great work. He's got a great lab doing a lot lots of of circadian research. So that's really good. And wow, and that's the last question that's amazing. We got through a ton of information. That's because we have. A really, you know, close, intimate guru. You guys get it. I don't have to explain half the stuff. I can throw a bunch of data at you, and you're just like, yeah, good, good. So floor is open. We have a few minutes. I'll permit there. I thought you were crying, Barry, that was a laughter. Those are laughter, tears. Andrew, you're back on question, concern. You're muted.

Hey, you think I figured that one out by now, just sucking in. But it's also, it's also so interesting. It's so much of it really is a question of balance, because when, when they're recommending up to two hours of sunlight now, well, with the ozone layer being depleted, unless you slather up with sunscreen, then you got to work with increased skin cancer risk. So it's the whole thing is really titrating and finding the Middle Way and the balance, right?

Yeah. Let me interrupt a minute and say light doesn't necessarily mean direct sunlight. So you can be out in light and shaded and still be deriving the benefit of the light, just like the light going through closed eyelids, it'll go through in your skin. But yeah, I would not necessarily say you need to be out in the sun directly for a couple of hours a day. Yeah, I would. I would qualify that. I think just being out in bright light should be enough

when you say bright light. So here I am. You can see the room I'm in. Does this qualify as being out in light? Or you have to be outside to be out in the light? You're

getting a little picky here. So the problem is, we never get as much bright light indoors, even in a bright window, than we do outdoors. It has some impact, and Panda will talk about that. It'll have some impact. But you know the for the daylight, daylight for the daylight, light being near a bright window versus being indoors away from a bright window is worse. So you want to be near a bright window, but to really get that light, you want to be outdoors. You know, whether it's under trees, whether, talking about whether it's getting a little direct sunlight, you're going to get an order of magnitude more light outdoors than you will indoors, even through a bright window.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, on the sidebar, I noticed that I have two different studies that I work out of. One is a little bit more secluded, kind of darker, and then I have one like this is actually quite flooded with light, and I find dancing going back and forth between them is quite interesting, because if I'm down in the dark one, I do find myself getting a little bit more soggy and my concentration a little bit harder to maintain. So I come up and and bathe in the sunlight, and it definitely perks me up. So, yeah,

good, yeah. I mean, I would just, you know, I would say, Yeah, bright indoors, better than not any bright light at all outdoors. Of course, the best if you can protect it from the sun. And I, you know, getting a little bit of sun, my mom always I'd rather risk a little bit of melanoma and get my sunlight, because we've done that for millennia, you know, and maybe all the other crap we're doing to ourselves that's really underlying the impact of the mediating the impact of sunlight, and not necessarily the direct sunlight itself. But cool, yeah, other questions concerns some

of the data, the data around the napping, is actually kind of interesting, though you'd think that intuitively, taking naps and resting, restoring, like that would be categorically beneficial, but that kind of research, that meta analysis, I find quite interesting. You know that there are some aspects that do benefit and others at deleterious that's compelling to me.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I really, I was surprised by myself. I hadn't really, you know, I always recommend getting naps when you can to make it's usually to make up sleep. But now I'm saying, Well, maybe it's not so great to be a regular, habitual sleeper or nap, you know? And it could be, this could all be due to the fact that we've we've select what's the term. We have purposefully reduced the amount of overall sleep we get. And so for some people, they're just really shooting themselves in the foot by also napping during the day and increasing their irregularity because they're not getting regular sleep at night for whatever reason, whether it's going to bed at different times, whether it's disturbed sleep at night, there's, yeah, it's. Still a lot of lot of questions out there, but that's why balance is good regularity. I think that's, that's the way to go.

Yeah, huge. Yeah, cool. Well, us, there's something else, but look at that right smack on the hour mark. Bloody. Yeah, we're getting

good at this. So now we'll take it was, taking it to the next level. We'll see, yell,

see how it develops as we open things up a little bit, but I suspect we're going to get quite a few more people. But as always, add big thanks. I always learn every every one of these. I always learn so much. I'm really delightful to have you with us and everybody on board. Alyssa, thanks everybody for joining us. Book study thing again on Thursday. Join us for that, and outside of that, pleasant dreams, pleasant napping,

sweet dreams.

Thanks, Ed, you.