In the Grand Scheme Of Fitness With Justin and Ethan
Welcome to "Coach's Corner with Justin and Ethan," where your health and fitness journey gets a simplified makeover! Join Justin and Ethan, two seasoned coaches with a combined 30 years of experience, as they navigate the labyrinth of health and fitness, unraveling myths from facts to guide you towards success.
In each episode, we dive headfirst into the vast world of well-being, shedding light on weight loss, dissecting diet fads, exploring diverse workout styles, and fine-tuning the often overlooked aspect of mindset. Our mission is to demystify the complexities surrounding health, making your journey not only effective but enjoyable.
Get ready for a lively and informative conversation that feels like a chat with your favorite fitness buddies. Justin and Ethan draw upon their extensive experience, sharing real-life stories from working with thousands of clients. No stone is left unturned as they break down what really works and what's just another fitness fad.
Whether you're a fitness enthusiast or a beginner taking the first steps toward a healthier lifestyle, "Coache's Corner" is your go-to source for practical insights, debunking myths, and embracing the joy of the journey. Tune in for a fun and engaging exploration of the truth behind health and fitness, and let Justin and Ethan be your trusted guides to a healthier, happier you!
In the Grand Scheme Of Fitness With Justin and Ethan
How Quality Sleep Transforms Recovery and Weight Loss
The quality of your sleep fundamentally shapes your ability to achieve fitness goals, affecting everything from hormonal balance to decision making.
• Sleep deprivation shrinks your bandwidth for making good decisions
• Lack of sleep triggers hormonal imbalances that directly impact recovery
• Protein synthesis for muscle building occurs primarily during sleep
• Poor sleep creates a vicious cycle of stimulants, stress, and bad food choices
• The 10-3-2-1 method provides a framework for better sleep hygiene
• No caffeine 10 hours before bed
• No food/alcohol 3 hours before bed
• No exercise 2 hours before bed
• No screens 1 hour before bed
• Consistent bedtime rituals train your brain to recognize sleep cues
• Hot showers before bed help trigger your body's natural cooling mechanism
• Creating a sleep moat helps protect you from making poor health decisions
how sleep impacts your weight loss and recovery.
Speaker 1:We know, that sleep is important and yet just so many of us just suck at getting to bed on time and waking up on time.
Speaker 1:What's going on, everybody? This is episode 55 of In the grand scheme of fitness, and today we're gonna be talking about how sleep impacts your weight loss and recovery. This is one of those things that we've all heard it a million times. We know that sleep is important and yet just so many of us just suck at getting to bed on time and waking up on time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it's like you get in this zone where it's like you wake up early and you know you're kind of tired around like early evening, but then you have like this second wind and next thing, you know it's like 10, 11 midnight and you're still like doing whatever you do and it's like shit, I gotta wake up, you know, in this cycle. So you know, we're gonna just kind of break it down, I think, street level, a lot of anecdotes and just our personal experience and just kind of whatever we know from what science tells us on just why sleep is important. This isn't gonna be some, you know, phd level dissertation on like the you know biology and biorhythms of sleep, but we're gonna just just bring to you some stuff that we know is important and also, I think, how you can optimize your sleep and improve your sleep hygiene with some really simple, straightforward hacks.
Speaker 2:Some applicable strategies.
Speaker 1:So what time did you go to bed last night, Ethan?
Speaker 2:2.45 am Failed. I did fail.
Speaker 1:Listen, life happens, happens. You know, sometimes here's, here's my feeling on on sleep. It's like it's elusive. It is you. You set yourself up for success the best you can. But if you, if I think we can all relate that, when you're laying in bed and the clock's just ticking and you know you gotta wake up it's almost like there's a proportionate amount of stress and anxiety starts to accumulate for every minute that goes by, and then by like 1 or 2 am.
Speaker 2:You're just like yeah the curse of looking at the clock after you've been laying in bed only to see the time that is way later than you know is going to be good for you you're like it's already been two hours perpetual moment of anxiety where you're stressing about how little sleep, you're going to get right.
Speaker 1:Yeah then, the anxiety about the sleep is what causes you to not sleep.
Speaker 2:It's very meta, it is so and there's so many things that can affect, like it could be physiological, like your nervous system could just be all wound up. It could be psychological or mental, emotional, where you're just having all types of train of thoughts or you're feeling a certain thing you know. So it's like I think addressing the things that might help you go to sleep can be multifaceted, and yeah if you don't necessarily have the tools, or even if you have the tools, it doesn't always work and yeah it's it can be very elusive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it can be very elusive. Yeah, you're in the past or you're in the future or anywhere but the actual physical place you are at the moment to just let yourself relax enough to drift. But yeah, it's a real pain in the ass and I think that as we get older we kind of condition ourselves. So if we have a history of not sleeping well for a long time, it's like that's just kind of the pattern that we've created. It can be a real thorn in our sides if we don't figure it out.
Speaker 2:But I also think it's interesting because on our last episode we talked about busy schedules and fitness and we talked about the sacrifice of exercise and healthy habits as like the first thing to go when kind of shit hits the fan or we're spread thin because of that kind of daily perception that well, if I don't exercise today, I'm not going to be any different tomorrow. And, and even though it's the most important thing we named health as the most important thing that many people name. It's like the first thing to go and I feel like sleep, sleep's in that same realm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like ah shit, If I only get like five and a half hours Like I'll make it through tomorrow, I can slug it out. Yeah, I might be a little tired, I'll have an extra cup of coffee, and so I think there's like a degree of perceptible sacrifice around sleep, yeah, where it's like, oh, I got to make food or I got to do this report, or you know, maybe it's a circumstance Like, oh, my kid's crying all night, but there's like this thing where, like, sleep is this semi-sacrificable thing in our life, where life comes first, the things that have to happen first, and sometimes it is Sometimes you've got to do the report or you've got to stay up late for work or something but it's one of those malleable aspects of life that I think we kind of throw into the grinder, whether we choose it or not, or we just allow it to be that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good point and I think it's the same. It's the same feeling that I have with fitness. It's like on those occasions where you do have to burn the midnight oil and get something, there's a real deadline. Or you have to wake up really early for something, or you do have some sort of emotional turmoil where, like, you just can't sleep and it's not your fault, like fine, those are excusable reasons. But then just like the normal night, where you're just like you know, three hours into a scroll hole and you've right, your eyes are starting to water, because you've just hammered through a hundred instagram reels.
Speaker 1:You know it's like those are not good excuses to miss sleep. So it's like it's same argument. It's like, on the regular nights, just practice good sleep which we'll get into in a second and get your ass in bed and try to get a nice sleep so that when the inevitable XYZ fire pops up and you got to put it out and that might require you sacrificing some sleep, then, okay, you got some equity built up. Yeah, for sure you know you've built up that.
Speaker 2:The sleep bank's got a little extra funds.
Speaker 1:You, you know you've built up that the sleep banks got a little extra sleep bank, exactly where you can tap into on those occasional rough nights. But if you're every night's a rough night because you just aren't thinking, you're not conscious, you're not aware or intentional about your sleep hygiene and every night's a hot mess, well then you're just digging yourself deeper and deeper into this, like deficit of energy and mood and tolerance and humor and all the great little personality accessories we can sprinkle on the top to just make ourselves an even more interesting person yeah, or like the icing on the cake, you get to show up to life more fully, and I think it's the same way, it's an inverse relationship of when we don't exercise and we, or we haven't ever exercised consistently and we're not on the other side of the positive benefits of reoccurring physical behaviors.
Speaker 2:We don't realize, like we've talked about in our past episodes. We don't realize what our potential can be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we just don't know you don't know what you don't know, but that's an action we have to do.
Speaker 2:And then I think it's the same thing when we're so constantly sleep deprived, we don't realize how dull we are, how lack of a shine to our personalities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're missing the inside jokes. You're not really trying to be friendly, you're just not showing up. I know when I get a full night's sleep.
Speaker 2:I'm so zazzy with my clients. I'm just on fire oh for sure, and especially when there's a contrast of not sleeping, I'm like, wow, I'm really on it today. Versus, this is me. Being on it today is my constant, and when I get a poor night's sleep, I'm off it today, and so I feel like we're just so many of us are living in this constant state of dull, just fatigue and dull.
Speaker 2:We're just like yeah, and then we acclimate to that we accept it as normal and we don't even know what it's like. And the same way, we don't know what it's like when we exercise regularly and what our potential could be if we do that. We don't know what it's like to be well rested and have good sleep and what our daily life operations would look like if we were just in a yeah, just like how much it just raises your baseline.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, yeah, and that's the thing about baselines is that we acclimate to them and so it all kind of just feels normal.
Speaker 1:But you don't realize like it's hard.
Speaker 1:It takes a real effort to like punch back a couple levels and like, observe yourself and realize like, oh, like, no, like I know how I could be at my best and I've just lowered my baseline to the point to where I've just kind of like adapted to that and I forgot how robust I am or you know how much better with, you know, whatever situation I find myself in, that I am when I'm well rested, and there's that's sort of like the soft impacts of not getting enough rest. But then there's some real hard impacts of it as well. There's some real like quantifiable issues where if we compound bad sleep night after night I mean cortisol levels, which is, your stress hormones go through the roof, causes inflammation, causes anxiety. You know, like when we're stressed and we're anxious, our IQ lowers. We just are not as smart as we would be normally. So that leads us to making bad decisions and not just not thinking through things and and just kind of making more like gut, like I was gonna say, yeah, it's almost like you're living in fight or flight.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you're not operating off like the higher procedures, you're operating off of like kind of survival yeah and so your food choices, your daily choices, you know if you're so tired. That, just like getting through the day is a struggle. The opportunity for you to make high executive functioning choices is going to be limited yeah, I just think of like energy as an aggregate, right?
Speaker 1:so it's just this big pie and that's, that's energy. Right, it's just, it's just, it's a hundred percent, it's just an aggregate. And then everything in your life your kids, your work, your spouse, your pets, your, all these things kind of take up like a slice of that energy aggregate every day. And if you're well rested, well then you have full bandwidth and you can kind of handle life and parry life as it comes. But all of a sudden you get like half the amount of sleep you should multiple days in a row. You know that that pie starts to shrink and that bandwidth just starts to shrink. And that's where we just kind of revert to like more lizard brains, instinctual operating systems, and not like higher level, really thinking through things deeply and from different angles.
Speaker 1:You know 100, you know, yeah, and then there's also like the impact on just your training.
Speaker 2:You know I was just saying, well, yeah, the physiological implications, the science behind what sleep does I mean? There's that meta study that came out like four or five years ago. That was done over like over a decade.
Speaker 2:And it was just like it basically showed that, like sleep is the absolute most important thing. You know it affects your endocrine system or your hormonal systems, your recovery, all your protein synthesis protein synthesis when you build muscles happening at night. Your testosterone tends to be highest at night. If you're a male, you know all of all of these components that are just part of your overall ecosystem, of your body are all being regulated and if you're not getting good sleep and those things just don't happen, you don't get good recovery, you don't build as much muscle, your hormonal system is going to start getting out of whack and not being as regulated. You know there's just so many things that go into the recovery aspect of sleep and the regulation of our sleep, and I think a lot of it too is like our urban environments, like especially if you live in an urban environment, we have so much coming at us.
Speaker 1:It's just like noise and light pollution.
Speaker 2:All of the things, whether it's lifestyle and the line of work I mean, how many digital nomads I know that are on call, where if the server goes down at 4 am and they call, they have to be available, Whereas that's a very specific lifestyle where now things are just kind of out of whack and you have to sacrifice that sleep. But the physiological components really are so real, they are so, so real and I think it's like we consider all of the like circumstantial and emotional components of our lives and they come first and I don't think we really realize just how we feel in our bodies and all the things we're kind of talking about that come from good sleep, that then affect all those circumstances that we just don't honor as much, and it's like like we were saying we just sacrifice sleep, when we don't realize that, like physiologically, we're affecting our vessel so much.
Speaker 2:It's not just like, oh, I'm gonna be tired tomorrow, but I have to do this, and xyz, it's like no, like you are literally gonna feel like shit over and over again yeah, and then you're gonna normalize feeling like shit, and so you.
Speaker 1:it's like this vicious cycle where it just keeps getting worse because you feel like shit. Then feeling like shit makes you want to give yourself a free day on your workouts, or just not want to cook dinner Cause you don't feel like it, so you just order it out, or you have three cups of coffee and you're all strung out Coffee all morning alcohol at night?
Speaker 2:Exactly, you're not strung out at night. I mean you know how many times myself or my partner or other people where it's like, oh, I get myself, or my partner or other people where it's like, oh, I get home, and because, like, your body will release norepinephrine and epinephrine and adrenaline and cortisol to keep you running through the day because your life requires that. And so now you get through the end of the day and you've been running on empty and you're frazzling your nervous system. And so you finally get home from work and you're like kind of blinking your eye and like where the fuck did the day go? I just struggled through that. And now you want reprieve because your nervous system is showing up the way it needs to, based on your life, to make it through the day. And now you're just, you're all shaky or you just you just didn't have a moment to yourself. You just you fucking hated the day. Your, your actual emotions, you're, you have negative it all just comes back.
Speaker 1:You're like, oh, I fucking hated my job today.
Speaker 2:Oh, my spouse was annoying me. Oh, like I didn't want to take the dogs for a walk. Like I just emotionally struggled throughout the day because I'm just like grasping at straws and like you said. Well, now I just want to cope. Maybe I want to reach for a drink, just want to cope. I want to cope. I want to do this. Now.
Speaker 1:I want to binge watch netflix because I want to escape my life or I want just like not, I want to, I want to.
Speaker 2:I mean, I know that for me, is that so often like watching tv, is this reprieve of like fuck, like my day has just been a lot. I want to escape. And I want to escape. And I'm not saying that watching tv is bad or escaping into a television show is a bad thing, but I think when we are just physiologically struggling to get through the day whether the day is actually that bad or not we have this sense of this was so hard and it's a lot of it's just physiology the day might have not been that bad.
Speaker 2:That's that like the normal, that more exactly, bandwidth, like that normal drive to work might have been extra shitty because you just didn't even want to like, you just don't got. Well, you know, you're just not, you lose your patience.
Speaker 1:You know it's like when you're tired and someone cuts you off, it's like next thing you know you're, you're just like flipping them off. You're like, you're like who was that where? If you're well rested and you're in a good present state of mind, if someone cuts you off, just go, whatever. You know it's so, it's like. That's like that how stress is so relative and it just depends.
Speaker 1:Stress is damaging to the point that you react to it, right.
Speaker 1:So if in that exact example, you know, if I allow myself to have like this, you know, sympathetic nervous system outburst and trigger like craze because someone cut me off God forbid in traffic and because I hadn't slept, and the last three nights I've been drinking too much caffeine in the morning and drink too much alcohol at night, not sleeping well, and just this, like digging this negative spiral down, all of a sudden someone cuts you off and you explode like in to go into lizard brain. Like you create such a stress response, right, that could frazzle you all day and you're telling, telling people, this person, I was at the light and I had to ride away and you're just like holding on to this thing that's just continuing to cause more and more stress versus. You know you slowly climb yourself out of that deficit, you practice good sleep hygiene, you pay attention to these triggers and these impulses, and then that exact same situation happens and the guy pulls out in front of you and maybe you just flip him the bird and turn back your radio on and just like start singing to your favorite artist and you show up to work and you say, hey, bill, how's everybody doing? And like exact same situation, completely different stress responses, and so a lot of that can be just boiled down to. It's like this secret little layer of our lives called sleep that we live in a culture that is okay with us, like burn the midnight oil, and there's some sense of pride and a badge of honor of like, oh man, I only slept like two hours last night because I was working, or just whatever.
Speaker 1:And it's like it's just one of those moments to recognize that, like it only hurts you and whatever rationalization we come up with to justify not getting, not initiating those evening routines, not turning the lights down and getting the tea kettle on, and you know, whatever that is for you to start trailing your brain. It's getting close to bedtime. Now let's start getting ready for that. You know, the longer you postpone doing that, then just sort of like the worse those vicious cycles tend to get. You know it affects, like we were saying earlier, you're too tired to work out. Now you're skipping your workouts. And you're skipping your workouts and you're ordering takeout food. And you're ordering takeout food and you're ordering takeout food and then, like the next morning, you wake up all puffy because you had too much salt and you didn't sleep well because you ate a bunch of spicy tacos.
Speaker 1:It's just this vicious cycle right, and it's like it's very hard to like. Look at that, because everyone has reward behavior. I had a hard day. It's like I hear you but you're not that unique. I'm so sorry to have to tell you this, but you're not that special Like. Everybody is stressed out.
Speaker 2:Everybody is doing their best, everyone is like figuring out what the hell this life that we're in even means, and it's like yet we can choose there is always that there's always a choice well, and it goes to something we were talking about pre-show is that, like willpower and the ability to make hard decisions, is directly correlated to the level of sleep and I think it's like, especially if you're trying to modify the way you eat or modify your activity levels.
Speaker 2:You know, if you're on this journey where you're trying to implement behavioral changes, that's already going to require some form of discipline, it's already going to require some form of willpower that might test your reserves in that capacity, your reserves in that capacity. And if a lack of sleep diminishes significantly your ability to have willpower and make certain decisions, then this, this forging a new pattern of life, if you're not already in this flow is going to be that much more challenging. And so it's like you know we're talking about the backend, but it's also limiting you inevitably fall to the backend, but it's just going to basically cap or just completely destroy your ability to forge ahead into something new.
Speaker 1:It's almost like when you it's like practically getting good sleep is sort of like the anchor of like just good lifestyle choices yeah, it's like it is. It is the most fundamental it's almost like the better your sleep gets, the more of a moat you create, create to sort of keep all of the bad decisions at bay. Yeah, 100%. And then the worse your sleep gets. It's like that you start to drain and shrink up that moat and all of a sudden, the takeout, the skipping workouts the binge watching TV, the alcohol, the social media, it just starts, you know, it's like a siege.
Speaker 2:You don't need an archer, you don't need like a crazy cannonball to get to the castle. Right, it's like you can just like literally like throw a rock and hit the castle but you know.
Speaker 1:But to your point, you know you get good sleep and you think clearly now, and all of a sudden you don't really have the same cravings because you're, you're rested, you feel good. You don't want to mess that up.
Speaker 2:You feel and and you just fill that moat back up, which just keeps you in that momentum of just like virtuous cycles versus vicious cycles, and I think it's like if life's about momentums and stacking upon little decisions we make to then build a momentum and build a momentum, and I think it's like the ability to build a positive momentum without, like you said, that foundation there is. It's almost like we're undermining ourselves and so then we might sit there and say, oh, I want to lose this amount of weight, or I want to start exercising, or I want to start living certain lifestyle changes. I want to play with my kids more. I don't find it whatever. I want to cook my own food.
Speaker 1:It doesn't matter Hard to spend an hour cooking your food with your kids if you're exhausted yeah, just exactly.
Speaker 2:So. Again, it's just like the anchor, the foundation there's.
Speaker 1:So many positive life experiences you could trace back to. You know like are you sleeping now? Listen, there's always the exceptions. There's always people that we know that for some reason can get four or five hours every night and live a wonderful full life and seem to have no problem with that.
Speaker 1:That's a genetic thing it really is like that's 100 you know that's just like that person just genetically, just has the ability to rest, you know, and that's great. I'm like the opposite like I need like eight or nine hours, like if I want to feel really good, like I need like eight hours absolutely, and that's something like I I just didn't even want to admit for so long. So I thought that like that was somehow, you know, taking away from me as and like my worth as a human especially with our culture, right I need nine hours of sleep.
Speaker 2:It's like but I think in any anybody's been going. It's shown like out again like the exceptions don't necessarily make the rule and it's just been pretty conclusive yeah like six as like an absolute minimum. Eight is really an optimal general zone. It might be seven for some, it might be nine for some, but that like it's pretty factual.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's really no like, yeah, there's not really like, like, like speculation here about this. This is, it's pretty concrete um, you know so. So at various points in my life and career I've always, you know, dug into like well, how do we do?
Speaker 2:this. I was gonna say so what are some strategies? Yeah, and how do we get?
Speaker 1:because here's the thing, like we don't want to get addicted to sleeping pills, we don't want to be taking 20 grams of melatonin every night and, like you know, so we want to. We want to, like, get ourselves to this place where, you know, our brain is designed to adapt to its environment and so for better or for worse, and that even if that means that you might shave off 10 years because you have a heart attack.
Speaker 1:If your brain's adapting to just not sleeping ever, then your brain's going to adapt. But the opposite's true as well, and we start like laying little breadcrumbs down for ourselves and we start thinking about sleep earlier in the day. You know it's like it's. It's analogous to a lot of things in life. Just because you know you want to work out three days a week doesn't mean that you just like cross your fingers and hope that three amazing opportunities per week present themselves like no, you gotta, you gotta plan it a little forward so monday is gonna be this, then wednesday is gonna be this and then friday is gonna be this.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna do my walk monday through friday at noon at my lunch break. Like you have to be intentional, and I think that sleep is like that too. Like think about it. Okay, like the easiest one is no caffeine afternoon.
Speaker 2:No like after 12 pm, no more caffeine next, the half-life caffeine will start to leak into your bedtime because there's exactly, there's the.
Speaker 1:There's like the first hit of caffeine where you actually feel it, but then there's like that half-life that can last for six to eight hours.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly and that's where you don't even feel the effects anymore. But your brain's just alert, you know, and so you need to give it plenty of time to cycle out. So you know you adjust those times according to your schedule. Like, we have a lot of nurses we work with and so they might have to sleep until 2 pm because they work nights, and so you know, figure out like what those numbers are for you, but essentially at least 10 hours before bed caffeine needs to be done with In an optimal state, 100% Done 10 hours. And then it's like try to get your last meal around three hours, not to say there's anything that's going to, you know, like there's anything necessarily wrong with if you have to eat a little bit later. You got to do what you got to do, right.
Speaker 2:If life circumstances requires it, but yeah, right. But we do find that like two to three hours before bed if you have a super full stomach it could disrupt your sleep.
Speaker 1:You know you might wake up in the night, you might have like heartburn, you might be like thirsty because your body's digesting food and so you know if you got to do what you got to do sometimes. But if you you can. It's that two to three hours before bed.
Speaker 2:It's the same for exercise. Yeah, again, I think it would be better to get an exercise session in if you had to, even if that means you're an hour before bed.
Speaker 1:Right yeah, versus not doing it, but in an optimal place.
Speaker 2:It's going to basically create a sympathetic nervous state. You're going to go into that fight or flight. You're going to release adrenaline and cortisol, just because that's the nature of the stress of exercise it's going to jazz your nervous system up and so it doesn't really let you wind down in the same way. So if we're talking about optimal uh, you know, optimal, yeah, yeah, practices, that would be again. Yeah, there are exceptions. I think it's better to get the workout in. But if we're looking to create that good sleep hygiene, looking to try to aim, when we're talking about planning our workouts and looking at our week and creating our schedule is to try to do that, yeah, same thing.
Speaker 1:A hundred percent. And then and then I think the big one and the probably the most overlooked is one hour before bed we got to start initiating evening routines, yeah, and so what that looks like is for me it's 9 pm, because I like to be close to sleep, sleep not just in bed, but sleep by 10. Doesn't always work out that way, but that's the goal. And I think that's the takeaway with sleep hygiene is that you can brush your teeth every day. That doesn't mean you're not going to get a cavity. Can brush your teeth every day, that doesn't mean you're not going to get a cavity. It just means that you're doing what you can to try to prevent unnecessary downside.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean? It's just like optimizing for upside and trying to prevent downside, not to say any. Anything is guaranteed. It's just you're just doing your best. And I think that's the thing when you think of the 10, 3, 2, 1. Uh sleep strategy is caffeine 10 hours before bed, food and alcohol three hours before bed. So it's kind of in your metabolized enough two hours before bed. You know no more exercise. And then one hour before bed is really just initiating those evening routines, and what that looks like for me is screens off, so for watching tv.
Speaker 2:I mean because I think there's like there's two things that we're kind of talking about is like, because I think the one hour rule, more than even the ritual, the sleep ritual is like no screens and it's such a hard one to do because again, it's in our free time. We might want to watch tv to escape, we want to fuck around on our phones because finally the day is done and we have the freedom to not be bound, but that limiting screen time one hour before bed is so huge.
Speaker 1:Well, it's circadian rhythm, so blue light from our screens, especially our phones and tablets that are like right up in our face, it just triggers, even if you have like a red light filter on. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It just doesn't matter, and it's just the nature of social media. It's the nature of our phones.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's the stimulus, it it just doesn't matter and it's just the nature of social media, it's the nature of our phones. Yeah, it's the stimulus, it's the dopamine hit.
Speaker 2:It's this whole, like jazz, you love more.
Speaker 1:It's not this. Let me wind down Totally, totally. And so you know whatever that means like turn the TV off, put your phone on the charger. I like to take a shower at night. It's like a hot shower. Hot shower's huge. I like to get some bedtime tea going, and so then we listen to an audio book, and so all that kind of happens in 30, 40 minutes. We kind of wind it down TV's off, shower, get the tea going, you know, get ready for bed. And then it's like we lay in bed with tea, put the audible timer on for like 30, 40 minutes and just listen to the most boring audio book, but like it'll be like a, a biography of george, george washington right now we're doing a biography of einstein and so you, you sit, you lay there, you're like, oh wow, that's so crazy quantum physics.
Speaker 1:You know it really does I would say 75, it works 75 of the time.
Speaker 2:There's always the 20 that like 25 but the the bedtime ritual like when I've gotten the most sleep, and it's amazing because you do literally train your brain it's not just like oh, these things are relaxing, like having tea is relaxing, like it's. No, it's that if you actually commit to this rhythm, your brain gets trained to understand that when you have tea, that you're in bed or you start stretching at night or you do some self-massage or you listen to an audiobook book, that that's triggering to your brain that you're going to go to sleep.
Speaker 2:And if you commit to that pattern enough, it's not just like, oh, this is a relaxing activity or it's not being on your phone, it's that it actually is creating a physiological response for your brain to be like oh, it's bedtime.
Speaker 1:You condition yourself now. It's just like you can condition yourself to like oh, it's 10, time to watch TV. Well, that's conditioning. We're just a bundled ball of conditioned responses. That's all we are.
Speaker 2:I got home at 9, I'll order some takeout.
Speaker 1:I'll wait for it to come, I'll watch. Tv until it gets there, and I speak from personal experience where I've been, in that place where I'm just like yeah, like oh this feels good.
Speaker 2:This is the barrier of least entry, because it does feel good, it is indulgence, and indulgence always is short-term gratification and long-term kind of struggle.
Speaker 1:You're like fuck, this isn't working. But the opposite is true, like within a month's time, next thing you know it's 9 pm, tv's off and it's like, ooh, let's finish up that biography. What kind of bedtime tea did we get? We got these. A nice like there. You do look forward to it, you do kind of anticipate it and it triggers that parasympathetic nervous system, just like massage would.
Speaker 1:That's why people fall asleep in massages, just like stretching or rolling or or whatever you do, or listening to a guided meditation Guided meditation, but like we have to like you know, your your sympathetic nervous system's kind of counterintuitive, because sympathetic kind of feels like it'd be gentler, but really that is more of your stress, fight or flight. And then your parasympathetic nervous system is more like your present moment you're relaxed, you're just. You know, you're just in a state of, of, of relaxation yeah, and so we got to get that parasympathetic nervous system activated before bed and so watching like fucking social media reels and eating war movie or like a suspense documentary.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like this is not gonna work, not really what's best and so you know, dim lights, candlelight, audiobook, bedtime, tea, hot shower, a stretch, you know whatever, because our body temperature naturally drops when we sleep.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's like the same way that cultures drink hot tea in hot cultures is that when you expose yourself to heat, you have a reactionary physiological response of dropping body temperature and so a super hot shower at night has actually been shown to facilitate a better, more significant drop in body temperature as you sleep yeah. Which facilitates more deep sleep, not even REM, but way deep sleep Right, right, right, right.
Speaker 2:more hormonal response and you know it makes a lot of sense yeah, and I think like in the end it comes back to what we've talked about many times with nutrition is that there has to be like a degree of personal responsibility. Yep, you know you, you can't just wish for the best like you have to choose to take this on as my best. Life will be lived with XYZ, so I need to take this choice on and make conscious choices. And in doing that, what are the tools? How do I meal prep easy? How do I plan and count my calories the easiest way, or what tools allow me to be in a caloric deficit in the easiest way for my lifestyle? There's a degree of self-responsibility that has to be chosen because you recognize it's important to then learn the tools and make it as accessible in your life as possible.
Speaker 2:And I think sleep's the same way. Is that we kind of just like, oh yeah, sleep.
Speaker 1:Oh, I only got five hours last night.
Speaker 2:It happens when I'm tired, yeah it happens when I'm tired, and I think it's the same degree of that. It's more personal responsibility, but that's life.
Speaker 2:And that has to be a choice that you then make to understand how important sleep is which is the whole first half of this conversation to then recognize that it's so important that I'm going to make a conscious decision about it. Then I'm going to make that conscious decision, learn the tools, learn about sleep hygiene, start making intentional decisions in my life to reflect that and then hopefully build this new pattern so that I can reap the most decisions in my life to reflect that and then hopefully build this new pattern so that I can reap the most out of my life, because if you don't fucking sleep, you're not going to have the best life you know exactly 100.
Speaker 1:And it's like why are humans apex animals? Because we don't get sleep and we work hard? It's because we can plan. We have the ability to plan and to think about the future. And if we sleep when we're tired, we eat when we're hungry, we drink when we're thirsty, we're no different than every other animal. But if we just go, let me think about my day when. What am I going to eat?
Speaker 2:especially in this modern day lifestyle for hunter gatherers. Maybe we're sure, but like right now, we don't. We do this. Everything is so malleable.
Speaker 1:The beautiful thing is that we can design. It's called lifestyle design, folks, and we can actually create the reality that we want for ourselves by these daily, weekly, monthly, annual choices. You get good sleep, you eat healthy, you drink your water, you, you are probably making better decisions and aligning yourself with better than 90% of the population out there. Just by those fundamental baseline choices, you're thinking clearly, you're in a good mood, you know you're probably more creative, you want to take more risks, all more, all the, all the things that that equal up to like success. However you want to define that probably all come and sprout from the foundation of just the basics in our life, that being optimized and we can plan that.
Speaker 1:The good thing is is that, like, you can decide to do that. You can get, you know, you can get the right black out curtain so you don't get woken up too soon. You can, you can. You can get bedtime teas. You can uh, you know, um decide to exercise. There's all these things like it's just a choice. But I really love how, I love the analogy of the moat being filled by getting good rest, because it just puts you in such a better position to make smarter choices and keep all those bad sort of like bad low self-discipline choices at bay, right, because you're thinking at a higher level, the mode of response versus the dry bed of reaction, dry bed of reaction, exactly.
Speaker 1:So I hope that helps, guys. You know the big takeaway is the 10-3-2-1 caffeine, food and alcohol evening routines. Initiate them before bed and really have an intention of like going to bed and waking up and you know, within a month's time I'm sure you'll see a huge difference. But that's episode 55 of the. Grand Scheme of Fitness. How sleep is so important. Hope you guys enjoyed it.