Written by Christopher Kelly
Oct. 24, 2019
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Greg: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name is Greg Potter, and I've been lucky enough to be a guest on this podcast a couple of times before. Today, however, I'm on the other side of the mike for Chris asked me to guest host this episode. When I found out that Dr. Kirk Parsley was lined up to be today's guest, I couldn't say no to the chance to interview a doctor with such a badass background.
Doc was on the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast back in 2016 so, if you haven't heard that episode, you should definitely tune into it. Without further ado, Doc, welcome back to the podcast.
Kirk: Thank you. It's good to be back.
Greg: What's new in your life since you last spoke with Chris?
Kirk: Oh, man, there's the whole podcast, one question. Professionally, I spent my full time gig is still really consulting individual clients and trying to improve their health, intense health makeover for people who traded their health for wealth for 25, 30 years. Now they have a lot of money, and they're broken and out of shape and want to get fixed up. So, that part is pretty much the same.
I've moved to Austin, full-time. I don't think I was there last time in '16. I wouldn't have been here yet. Actually probably my book wasn't out even the last time we talked or maybe it had just come out or not, the last time I was on this podcast. Reformulated sleep supplement, changed up a few things in there, and I've been training pretty intensely for the past probably year, nearly, now with peptides and trying to see what type of sleep, health and performance gains are in this new ball of wax. That's the professional update on me.
Greg: Interesting. I suppose that we might circle back to peptides a bit later in this conversation. We're going to focus primarily on discussing your new dietary supplement in-depth, but before we get to that, I know you've got a particular interest in the relationship between sleep and the endocrine system. Which sleep-related scientific discovery has most piqued your interest of late?
Kirk: Let's see. Honestly, I've been reading so much about peptides lately. I'd have to throw those in there. Clinically, they're turning out to be quite disappointing. Actually there is a study, I'm not sure if it's published yet, but there was a study done by NHRC in Point Loma, it's Naval Health and Research Center in Point Loma, that they'd done on the SEALs.
Actually, to back up, while I was at the SEAL Teams, they did a study. As far as we could find, were the first ones to publish the correlation between total testosterone and sleep, they've since gone much deeper than that. Dr. Karen Kelly is the PhD who runs that and who have definitely done most of the studies, and she has done a lot with other hormones and other metabolic markers.
She has been messing around with the overall endurance or their VO2 max but also just performance actually on the job is measured through their training. Also she has been correlating more and more hormones and more and more inflammatory markers in this special population.
It's almost certainly generalizable data, but I guess I can't say that because it's not a general group. I've been treating it as though it's generalizable data, and it's by and large confirmatory with every other research trial out there that chose the correlation between sleep and endocrine regulation.
One thing that really surprised me was, I'm not sure if it surprised me, but there's something I still don't understand, what she found, which I've seen clinically when I was working with the SEALs, was exceedingly high estradiol levels with chronic sleep deprivation. So, given the total testosterone and free testosterone and dihydrotestosterone, everything is low, why is estradiol so high?
Greg: Do you have any hypotheses related to that? Could it be something to do with fat mass and aromatization, for example?
Kirk: My guess is that it has something to do with insulin sensitivity and sex hormone-binding globulin because I know that as total insulin goes up, sex hormone-binding globulin goes down which would free up more testosterone to be aromatized. It's a guess.
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Greg: Yeah, and this work hasn't been published just yet?
Kirk: It may be. I would have to ask her. It was probably six months ago that I talked to her about it. I'd have to ask her, if I can get back to you, and I could give it to you for the show notes if it is.
Greg: Yeah, it sounds good. Let's move now to supplements. I've heard you comment previously that supplements are just that, supplements, not things that can replace fundamental behaviors that are conducive to healthy sleep. With that in mind, what's your general approach to identifying who should take supplements?
Kirk: Well my general approach for people who should take supplements, of course in my clinical work would be different than just to the lay audience. If I'm just talking to the generalized audience, I say that you need supplements for anything that you can't idealize. You need to do something to mitigate or you need to do something supplemental.
Now that might be something that you ingest or that could be some behavior. Perhaps you're using your far-IR saunas as your supplement to helping you get more deep sleep, or maybe you're doing ice baths and decreasing inflammatory cascades and lowering your body temperature. Those would all be supplemental behaviors.
As far as people who have nutritional deficiencies that they need to supplement in order to sleep, the only way to know that for sure would be of course to look at their nutritional status, some sort of lab, whether it's urine or salivary or serum, whatever you do, and then you could identify specific things.
The approach of my sleep supplement really isn't as much to correct your nutritional deficiency as much as it is to try see if we concentrate, what would have happened over that three to three-and-a-half-hour time period of when the sun went down and when you would actually be ready to sleep, evolutionarily.
We know that lots of things get in the way of that. Of course the light saturation is a big piece. I know everybody is pretty hip on these days. Of course any other type of behavior that's stimulating and is exceedingly stimulating to the brain can override a lot of the sleep processes obviously.
So when I tell people that they should take -- well, I don't actually ever tell anyone they should take it, if people want to try it. The basic premise is that if you can't do everything that you need to do to idealize your sleep ritual then you know it's right for you which is, I believe, like any other type of biological process. It can be totally prescriptive. We know the general things. We know the gist of sleep hygiene.
If you basically turn the power off in your house and you have no electricity as soon as the sun went down then you probably wouldn't need anything. If you, say, you put on some blue-blocking glasses but you don't maybe have the idealized light in your situation, or maybe you're working late at night, your circadian rhythm is off constantly because you're working late at night, or you have to stay up and work late therefore obviously stimulating your brain and overriding the GABAergic pathways that should be slowing your brain down.
It's like eating. You could play out, here's the absolute perfect diet that I think I should eat given my genetics, epigenetics, my preferences, whatever, but if I don't eat that or if I'm not able to source that from the ideal sources then I might need some supplements.
I feel sleep is the same thing. If you can't idealize your sleep ritual and there's something getting in your way, try supplementing with some of the usual nutrients. Obviously there's nothing super fancy in my product, and see if that gets you over the hump and allows you to get deeper, higher quality or longer sleep.
Greg: It's really one solution to a problem that arises from our modern environment, and the purpose is to better mimic how our biology once would have been in preindustrial times.
Kirk: Yes, very well summarized.
Greg: I haven't tried it myself, but I have heard many people praise your sleep remedy, including Chris and several people from [0:09:58] [Indiscernible] collective. Why did you decide to change the formulation, and how did you go about that process?
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Kirk: Actually, this formulation is closer to what I was giving the SEALs in the first place when I created this. If you don't know that story, the purpose of creating this was to get people off of sleep medications because literally like 85% of the Command was using Z-drugs every night and alcohol on top of that.
If you know the SEAL community, one is good, two is better, and three is great, so they were taking three, four times the recommended dose, to just taking a couple of cocktails and getting like four hours of sleep. We know that wasn't good sleep obviously.
So, when I created it, it was really because I just felt like every -- and I didn't know a whole lot about sleep at this time. This was very, very early in my research and study about sleep. I just didn't know a whole lot. I just read basic physiology about sleep, and I said, well, this leads to that and that and that. Why does melatonin work?
So we just started putting together, me and the guys I was working with, we just started putting together combinations of the melatonin production pathway and then some GABA. There were a few guys who were buying phosphatidylserine off of the Internet, but they were having to go all over town to buy these different products. It was a pain in the ass, for one. It was exceedingly expensive. They ended up with different volumes and quantities and forms. One was a capsule. One was a powder. One was a liquid and whatever.
So, really they just pressured me into making it. It was pure, pure peer pressure. I was going to just make it in my spare time, I was going to create this product because I had no idea how involved that was, to create something. Of course I couldn't do it in my spare time, so I had to do it in my -- I had to take a year off of a brick and mortar practice, and I actually never ended up going back. I kept consulting.
So, yeah, this product is really very, it's very similar to what we started with. This is much closer to what I wanted to make when I first started the whole -- I mean, honestly, I didn't have the slightest idea how to produce a supplement. I didn't know the very first step. I was, okay, I'll do this, and I couldn't even pick up the phone and make an intelligent phone call. It was a complete blank space for me.
Fortunately I knew a couple of guys who did know how to make supplements, who had supplement companies, and I slowly started figuring that out. I considered going through a compounding pharmacist. The compounding pharmacist told me -- this guy I worked with early on -- he said, "You should substitute the GABA for this ph GABA, the phenibut. This crosses the blood-brain barrier better, and you'll get better results." I said, "Okay, whatever, we'll try it." I don't think we ever really tested it, head-to-head.
We were really more interested in trying to get the flavoring right more than anything and keep the cost in the right place. Because basically I started this business with just the money out of my pocket and a few of my friends threw in a little bit of money and that was it. It was just kind of a lottery ticket. We're going to give it a shot. If it worked, great; if not, we all lose our money and move on. It wasn't enough to set anyone back super badly.
We always knew that that was a slippery ingredient because it wasn't really classified as anything. It wasn't classified as a nutrient. It wasn't classified as a supplement. It wasn't classified as food. The FDA classified it as a non-organic compound that was considered safe, and that's what it's still classified as. We got a lot of blow back from that.
It's much like when I started this whole thing. I was recommending, in hindsight now it was probably excessive, but I was tracking everyone's labs on this doing this, but I started out with vitamin D3. I was giving guys like 6 to 8000 IUs per night. You remember those little [0:14:41] [Indiscernible] bottles that had these single drops. They were either 2 or 4000 per drop or something. I had this handout, everybody go buy these things. The vitamin D3, I was doing 6 to 8000.
The Bureau of Medicine that oversees all military medicine, they just lost their mind on me because the US RDA was 400 IUs at that time or something. They went crazy on me like I was going to kill people. I was like, I'm checking everybody's labs every month, and nobody's going supraphysiological in vitamin D3 at these levels. I stepped on a lot of toes doing just everything that I was doing to be helpful.
[0:15:22]
So I dug into the literature to find out how common and how terrible is this vitamin D3 toxicity, the thing that everybody was so worried about may be causing. There are literally two case reports ever. In all the medical literature, there were two case reports of people with vitamin D3 toxicity; these two men, maybe a year apart so maybe they're on the same chat group or something online.
They were taking 2 or 3 million IUs every single night for six months, and the vitamin D3 toxicity was they had a headache and they felt nauseous. The solution was to quit taking vitamin D3, and they went away. I was like I don't think that's something that I need to worry about, so I kept with that but then when I started the product, I just thought my population could be a little bit strained. I backed off on a lot of stuff and vitamin D3 was one of the things.
The reason I mentioned that is the point about phenibut is I got a lot of kick back from people -- and of course when the pharmacist recommended, I didn't say, "Yeah, fine." I read into that. I did my due diligence on it. Everybody was saying the same thing. It was going to cause this dependency, and ultimately it was going to end up harming people because there would be withdrawal symptoms if they quit taking it. There will be chemical dependency on this product in order to get sleep.
So, again, readily went through Google Scholar looking for case reports on this and again coincidentally found two. It was almost identical. These guys were taking millions of units of phenibut every day, and they were taking it for, whatever the -- they were taking it as an nootropic.
It was supposed to be increasing their intelligence, or I don't know exactly what mechanism it was purported to do, but they were buying this thing in five pounds of bags. Again, this isn't the same thing, is it? It's like aspirin. I take an 81-milligram enteric-coated aspirin every day, but I wouldn't take five grams of aspirin every day. That would kill me.
Anyway, I [0:17:51] [Indiscernible], but when we -- so, what we wanted to produce originally we couldn't just because it was too expensive and we were too small of a company. When you're only making a few thousand boxes of something, it cost five to ten times more than if you're making a big quantity of that. We hit some economy of scale then we could effectively bring that down, that cost down.
I wanted to put phosphatidylserine in it for a super long time. When I first started, that was a super, super expensive ingredient. That has come down probably 10X, and they're continuing to improve on the magnesium salts to improve the bioavailability especially in the brain, the magnesium.
Our new formulation of capsules actually has the Magtein in it which is the best as far as I've seen, research-wise. You get the most amount of magnesium into the brain the fastest. Then we switched, the drink, we switched to magnesium bisphosphonate.
Greg: There's a lot in that to unpack. An important message is that people shouldn't take Pharma GABA by the tablespoon if they're going to take it.
Kirk: Exactly.
Greg: You mentioned many interesting things in there. One thing that probably won't occur to many consumers is the importance of things like flavor if you're trying to sell dietary supplements. You also mentioned Pharma GABA and the fact that its somewhat gray market. I know that in some countries, it's probably legislated against.
Another is the idea of dependency, and we'll cycle back to that, and GABA and vitamin D as well. Just for some clarity, you haven't systematically compared the new formulation with the previous one, but the new formulation is more similar to what you were trying to originally formulate. It's just that for practical reasons, it was difficult to enact.
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Kirk: Yes, but I can, if you'd like me to compare, side by side, I could.
Greg: Let's go through the ingredients individually. I think that makes sense.
Kirk: All right.
Greg: Before we get there, my first question is actually about quality control. A study published a couple of years ago reported that the melatonin content of over-the-counter supplements range from -83% to +478% of the labeled content. So, as a supplement producer, how do you try to ensure that your product contains what it says it does?
Kirk: Really the key to producing a good supplement is twofold. One, you have to get a good production house. It's like anything. A house is like getting your car worked on. There are shops that will do excellent work. There are shops that would do enough to get your car going again, and you'll continue to have more problems. Everything will be additive.
Basically, there are more qualifications in the States. In the States, of course you always want it FDA-approved. You don't want to be foolish not to do that. There's GMP which is a certification that they can get if they have certain equipment and use certain procedures. There are all sorts of certifications that prove that the quality in which they produce and the quality in which they test. The testing is really the more expensive bit. I'll come back to that. So, one answer to that -- I said there are two -- one is to get a very good manufacturing house.
The other one is to make sure that if you're letting your manufacturer source your ingredients, that you know where those ingredients are coming from and that they're getting good quality ingredients. Or the more optimal idea is to actually source your own ingredients. When you source your own ingredients of course you have to buy in bulk. You have to buy enough to produce most of the year. You just have to buy all at once and so it's a big capital outlay.
When we first began, we didn't source any of our ingredients. We just went with a really high quality production house. It was very expensive because they were known to be super high quality, and they sourced the best ingredients out there. They stayed away from the crushed bird feathers that get sold from China all the time. There's all sorts of things that comes from overseas that they're just very, very low quality. So we don't source anything from China.
The challenge for us basically, when we're sourcing, is how far do we want to go down the path of pleasing everyone. Because there are different sources for different ingredients, and where are you deriving this from? If you derive it this way then that can be a vegan product, but if you don't do that then it's not a vegan product. Do you want to do enough to include the vegan crowd? That's where we're at, but we're sourcing everything from the US.
To go back to the production house, if you get a really good production house, they will test the ingredients when those ingredients arrive. They test them for purity, and they test them for accuracy of potency. Then maybe you're going to do a production run right after they arrive, but maybe there will be two or three months before you're actually doing a production run. They'll go back and they'll test it again. Essentially they're testing for contaminants or testing for any type of decay, a decay in potency or any type of decay of the new binders or whatever else that could possibly affect the efficacy of your product.
Then they'll make your product. After they make your product, they will test it again to make sure that during the production, there were no combinations that led to some ingredient being stripped away or some ingredient being bound to something else or that you introduced any type of contaminants in there, all of that.
Those three steps of testing actually cost more than making the product. So you can see why a lot of companies wouldn't opt for that route, but if you have a medical doctor behind it, I feel like there's a higher level of credibility expectation, higher level of caution that's expected, and I think accurately so. I had no problem if the business fails. My life will be just fine if the business fails, but my life would not be just fine if I sold some crap product that made a bunch of people sick.
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Greg: That all makes sense. Let's move now to the melatonin synthesis pathway. Melatonin, as the listeners probably know, is a hormone that's produced by the brain that promotes sleep when it's taken in supraphysiological doses.
My first question related to this is, in the supplement, you include L-tryptophan and 5-HTP, both of which are precursors to melatonin via serotonin. Regular melatonin supplements often have half-life of less than an hour, meaning that they may not sustain elevated blood melatonin levels over the entire night.
So, related to this, is your rationale for including the precursor to melatonin, to prolong the period in which blood melatonin is raised and if so, why not just use a time-released version of melatonin such as MicroActive?
Kirk: I do a lot of clinical work with hormones as well, apart from sleep. One of my operating philosophies in medicine in general is that we don't know nearly as much as we pretend to know. Just because we know, oh, there are these five major steps that go from -- there are four major steps that go from L-tryptophan to melatonin, that doesn't mean that every intermediary end in between there. It doesn't mean that every chemical reaction in there and every [0:26:35] [Indiscernible] that gets spent off doesn't have a physiological effect.
The same as, if I have, say, a guy who is in his 50s or 60s, and we've done everything we possibly can, and he can't make enough testosterone to basically just satisfy his needs and his health goals and --
Greg: His wife.
Kirk: -- and his wife and his performance and whatever, and we go along the pathway of giving him testosterone. Well, a lot of physicians will go, "Your testosterone is low. Here's your testosterone." What about all the stuff in between? What about everything from DHEA all the way out to testosterone? What about everything after testosterone? What about the aromatization? What about DHT?
You can have the pregnenolone steal with the cortisol production pathway. You can have -- the point being you can't just mess with just one hormone and say, "Oh, I'm just doing this one hormone, and everything else doesn't matter." That's not true. That's not even close to being true.
So, that example, I give my patients DHEA, and I give them pregnenolone. I give them something to inhibit the aromatization of the DHEA so that it doesn't go onto make supraphysiological amounts of estradiol. I give them something to control the DHT. We're looking at the entire pathway.
If there's sex hormone-binding globulin that's going up because they're getting this exogenous testosterone then we work on how frequently do you have to dose this stuff and how much of bolus can they take with that. There's a lot to do.
Melatonin is no different to me. Melatonin is a hormone. It's just the ignorance of controlling powers that be in various countries. In the US, melatonin is a hormone, but it's an over-the-counter supplement that you can sell, no problem, because the FDA's charter says it's something that exists in nature. It doesn't need to be altered from its natural state in order to be effective in the human body then it's not a drug.
Testosterone is a drug, and estradiol, estrogen is a drug. Thyroid medication is a drug, but melatonin is not a drug. Vitamin D3, of course another hormone, that's not a drug. Part of that is game-playing.
Anyway, my point being, my product isn't designed to do what I would call a hack or a trick. It's not designed to say, well, I'll put supraphysiologic amounts of melatonin in your brain, and that will make you sleepy. If I do it in a time or extended release, it will keep you asleep longer. That's not what I'm trying to do.
What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to bring all the resources there. I'm trying to bring all the lumber to the construction site so that your brain can do what your brain should be doing. I know you know well and probably most of your listeners know well, of course we use the sun as our cue. When the blue light decreases on our eyes, that stimulates our entire pathway back to the pineal gland to eventually secrete melatonin, but there's a lot of intermediaries in there. There's a lot of stuff that's going on.
Melatonin, of course, is not even by any stretch of the imagination anywhere close to being the only or the most important neurophysiological change. There are hundreds and thousands of the things that are changing all throughout the brain's neurochemistry all throughout the night.
[0:30:12]
As a good example, if I gave you a gram of testosterone every day, you'd feel great probably. You'd probably die pretty soon or who knows. Some bad things would almost certainly happen. You'd probably feel great for a while. If I gave you -- I don't know how much cocaine people take, but if I gave you a cocaine dose every morning, you'd feel great. That doesn't make it a good idea, and that's how I feel about melatonin.
Research around melatonin, which I'm sure you're aware of, obviously we haven't been able to prove it. It actually is decreasing melatonin production in the brain. I think we will eventually prove that. It's just a really hard study to do, but it would definitely have shown that supraphysiologic dosage of melatonin, chronically, will decrease receptor density.
That's essentially the same thing as a decrease in the production because if you're producing the same amount and your receptor density is half then you're really only producing half as much. So, now you're going to be dependent upon that supraphysiologic melatonin dose just to have a normal amount of melatonin stimulation, which I just think is a slippery slope. It's foolish, and it's not truly supplementation at that point. When you're going supraphysiologic, I wouldn't call that a supplementation. That's something else.
When I give people testosterone, their testosterone level is -- I take them up into the top 20% of the normal bell curve. Bodybuilders have their 15 or 20 times higher than the highest end of the dial. You could say that my client is supplementing. They're doing hormone replacement therapy. You can't say that about somebody who has ten times more testosterone than they could ever possibly make in their body. It's a totally different thing. So that's the rationale behind having everything along the pathway in there.
Greg: That makes sense. So you're trying to support the entire pathway. I must admit, I've always found it frustrating that most studies look at single compounds in isolation. I haven't seen much work looking at combining melatonin with L-tryptophan, for example, or 5-HTP. To be honest, there's not much work that has been done in recent years on L-tryptophan.
Many of the studies were done in the '70s and '80s and even though they seem promising, it routinely were showing reduced sleep latency or how long it takes people to fall asleep, for example; in the last couple of decades, there has been next to nothing that has come out on it.
Anyway, we will move on. On your site you mentioned that the new formulation is particularly well-suited to helping people who have sleep maintenance insomnia which is a condition in which people can fall asleep but they struggle to stay asleep. As I mentioned, there are time-released versions of melatonin, one's called Circadin, that are prescribed for people who have this disorder.
Something that's sometimes missed in podcasts about sleep is that there's a huge number of factors that can lead to poor sleep, as you of course know very well, Doc. With this in mind, which sleep phenotypes do you think are most likely to benefit from your supplement?
Kirk: It's a tough question for me to answer. I say that because of course the design of my product, there was a very specific intent for it. You're certainly aware of the studies that show people who use sleep drugs chronically die 16 years earlier on average which is the same with shift workers, which is the same as chronic insomnia, which makes me believe --
My working hypothesis on that is, well, the people who are using the sleep drugs are really no different than the people who aren't using the sleep drugs or the people who are on shift work. They're all getting poor sleep. Even if you're using a Z-drug, you're still negatively impacting your sleep architecture, so you're not getting idealized sleep.
The World Health Organization has declared shift work as a type 2A carcinogen which is the same classification that they put cigarettes under. So we know that it's very unhealthy to not get good sleep. I, of course, do not have the studies that say, well, if you use my product, it's going to reverse your risk. If you're on shift work and you use my product, it will reverse that 16- year deficit that you're running into. Of course I don't have that study or I'd probably be the richest man in the country because then we'd just make that mandatory.
[0:35:16]
I basically tell anyone, if they have sleep difficulties especially being the lifestyle thing -- so, again, my preference is always that people handle this through understanding of what they need to get their body ready to go to sleep and try to do as much with lifestyle as possible, something I would assume, you've given your education, you're very sharp on as well.
People who has some metabolic disorders that are almost always associated with nutritional issues, of course that impacts sleep as well. There's nothing in my product that's going to help those people. If you're prediabetic or you're diabetic or your metabolic syndrome or something like that and these wild fluctuations of your blood glucose levels while you're sleeping is what's waking you up, there's nothing in my product that's going to help that guy.
I say this all the time. I lecture to law enforcement agencies and DOD and DOJ, and I see this all the time, that people work from midnight to 8 am, their entire career. They do this their entire career, so their circadian rhythm is off their entire career. They never normalize. Of course their circadian and ultradian are never matched up either.
These people have heart attacks, on average, six years after they retire or seven years after they retire. That was some research that Robb Wolf was a part of in City Zero in Reno. That was true for that Police Department. Whether it's exactly that number across the board, I don't know, but I know that it's very common.
The concept behind my product is, well, basically if you can't live an appropriate lifestyle, this is the equivalent of taking a multivitamin, multinutrient, maybe pre, probiotic or something for knowing that you don't have the best diet, but there's not a whole lot that you can do about your diet. Because of the way your work or live, you're not going to be able to idealize your diets. You're going to take a supplement as sort of an insurance policy. That's one population.
I think anybody who is just chronically going to sleep at the wrong times or get chronically insufficient sleep, that's just the case. The other group that's doing very well with the product are people who are doing -- again part of this could be lifestyle, but part of it just could be personality type and personality tendencies towards neuroses and anxiety and so forth.
Of course we know that there's a large population of people who can't sleep because their brain is overactive. When they're trying to go to sleep is really the first time that they start focusing on all their deficits and everything that they messed up during the day, and it just keeps this adrenalin spike.
Adrenals spiral going upwards and they're just producing more and more stress hormones. Their poor brain is doing its best to decrease its sensitivity to stress hormones through physiological changes, but they can't override this. They can't go to sleep.
If that is the case -- and that's one of the reasons I really like the phosphatidylserine, which I don't believe that there are any studies that show that it will decrease your adrenal hormones for going to sleep, but there are plenty of studies that show that phosphatidylserine won't decrease your adrenal hormones during intensive exercises and other stressful activities during your day.
So, it just made sense to me that that would work. I had guys take it, and it works a lot better than if they don't take it. That's the extent of my research with that, but it definitely works. There's a lot of variability in that one, in that ingredient specifically.
Greg: You raised many good points too. We've all experienced that tired and wired feeling. It's so common now. Work-related stress is such a problem. That's how I use melatonin myself periodically if I just can't shut down my mind. Maybe once every three weeks or so, I might take a small amount of melatonin and it seems to help me out, so that would make sense to me.
I'm going to ask you about antidepressant because you mentioned anxiety, and obviously mental health problems are rife nowadays. Many antidepressants boost brain concentrations of serotonin. So because they tend to raise serotonin, I know some people have reservations about taking L-tryptophan and 5-HTP with antidepressants such as SSRIs and MAO-inhibitors.
[0:40:05]
I guess some people will feel like they sleep better if they take your supplement, but do you think there are people who shouldn't take it?
Kirk: My medico-legal cop-out on that is you should check with your physician, your prescribing physician, is what I have to always say, but I can tell you that one of my closest friends in my life, I went to actually junior college with him, college with him, medical school and then internship with him, so this is a guy I know very well.
He's a practicing psychiatrist, and he did about two years of research on serotonergic sickness. I discussed all this in great detail with him, and he said to me that it is anything except 100% impossible, which is you just can't have impossible, but he said it's as close to impossible as I could assure you that the amount of ingredients in your product is going to cause somebody to have serotonergic syndrome.
Especially because when you look at people who have serotonin syndrome, that's obviously -- there are rare cases that are obviously tied to genetic disorders where people can get it almost instantaneously, but for the vast majority of people, it's a long build-up of this. If they've been taking their sleep drug for a long time then, yeah, I would just say, be cautious.
If you start noticing some symptoms, you should maybe talk to your doctor. If you start noticing anything different about yourself, if you feel like there's anything going on different with your mood or your level of anxiety or jitteriness or you're sweating, anything that would suggest the parasympathetic overload then talk to your physician about that.
I can tell you that so far -- I mean, hundreds of people have asked me, and I always have to tell them, you need to check with your physician, but as far as I know no one has ever had any problems with. Like I said, there's a conservative dosing of everything in my product. The reason for that is, as I've mentioned, as I alluded to earlier, it's not intended to take over.
It's an initiation product. It's there to initiate the cascades of events. Because you have the substrate to keep producing the melatonin pathway, we're hoping that you're going to keep producing melatonin, but there's nowhere near enough amount of melatonin in my product that's actually going to make you feel sleepy and is going to knock you out. It's just going to help with the initial cascade.
If you haven't really been doing anything along the appropriate lines of discipline to get ready for sleep and you've just said, "Oh, I'm just going to take this supplement instead," and get in bed; it's the best we can possibly do. Really everything in there is going to be gone in three to four hours. It's all going to be in your bladder or your bowels.
Greg: That will make sense to me. Since there's melatonin in the supplement, I'm keen to just briefly discuss circadian rhythms. Melatonin and fast-acting melatonin specifically can of course play an effect on the timing of your circadian system. That means that if taken at the right time, people can use melatonin to get over jet lag faster, and it can also be used in other circadian rhythm sleep disorders, but we can skip those in this conversation today.
Do you have any thoughts on using the supplement during jet lag, and how do you think it will compare to regular melatonin by itself?
Kirk: As I said, I think that regular melatonin by itself is a bit too simple. It's a bit too simplistic for my preference. Now, again, I don't have double blind clinical trials to support that, but I don't believe in anything that's simple.
What I do believe is that if you are traveling across multiple time zones and you want to realign your circadian rhythms as quickly as possible, basically anything that you can do that's going to help you go to sleep when you don't feel like going to sleep is going to help you along that line, as well as obviously the opposite. Maybe exercising late at night so that you don't go to sleep earlier and you're using bright light therapy in the morning to pull the circadian train the other way.
Of course there are individualized protocols to do that. I've seen patients that do that with melatonin. I've seen patients that do that with Benadryl. I've seen people that do that with sleep drugs or with benzos or whatever it is. My guess is that all of that is aligning you more quickly. At least that's the anecdotal report on it. I don't know that anybody has tested whether alcohol or Benadryl or those types of things bring you back into enlightenment as quickly.
[0:45:14]
In my understanding of physiology, basically if you can get yourself to sleep earlier and you can get yourself to sleep, obviously the higher the sleep quality while you're asleep, the faster your circadian rhythms are going to realign in your new environment. I just think a more complete approach where you're working on more than one pathway.
One is that you're giving your brain the ability to produce melatonin. You're getting a small initiation of melatonin. You're getting some phosphatidylserine to decrease stress hormones. You're getting some GABA which of course doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier extremely well, but I put some L-theanine in there because that seems to work synergistically with GABA to get GABAergic pathways. You're attacking from more than one front in order to do that.
Now, granted, I don't think it would make you as sleepy as taking a sleep drug or taking whatever over-the-counter prescription or something like that, but I think in the long run you're handling more pathways and more concerns with a single supplement or a single dosing of something.
Greg: Yeah, that's an interesting idea, whether trying to affect the timing of your cortisol rhythm, for example, at the same time as the melatonin rhythm, will help you get over jet lag faster than just targeting melatonin alone.
Just as a suggestion for people who experience regular jet lag, there's a website called Jet Lag Rooster which Dr. Simon Marshall from Nourish Balance Thrive actually alerted me to. It's a great resource. It's free. It tells you the optimum time in which to take melatonin according to your particular travel.
I've got two more questions about melatonin. This one has been a bit of a hot topic in recent years. Various studies have used untargeted methods, genome-wide association studies for example, to show the variation in one of the melatonin receptors, MTNR1B specifically, influences risk of diseases such as type 2 diabetes. Genetic variation of that receptor also seems to influence how negatively melatonin influences blood sugar regulation after meals.
With that in mind, for people who are very interested in their health, do you think that people have the high risk variance of that gene should finish their final meal of the day earlier relative to when they take your sleep supplement?
Kirk: I guess my question would be -- I'm not sure that it would be as simplistic as that because it seems unlikely that the melatonin receptor in isolation is the issue. If we're worried about regulation of blood glucose along with their melatonin production pathway, I don't know. I can't say that I know enough about that mutation to say that in isolation -- I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. It's a good question.
Greg: One more on melatonin and it's just whether you have any experience with any of the other melatonin receptor agonists perhaps in your clinical work, for example. One example of these is agomelatine, and it has quite close antidepressant actions without many of the side effects of other antidepressants.
I've got a friend who is on an SSRI, and I find it frustrating that her doctor was quick to give her the SSRI when I think that agomelatine would have been ideal for her. Do you have any experience with any of those drugs in your clinical work?
Kirk: Actually I don't. I do not prescribe any sleep drugs to my clients. If I cannot get my patients to sleep then I obviously have them do an observed sleep study, an in-patient sleep study. It hasn't happened too many times. Over the course of maybe ten years of consulting, I've probably had five clients that ended up getting a sleep study and all ended up with sleep disease.
I don't claim to be a Board-certified sleep specialist usually dealing with sleep disease. I'm dealing with lifestyle issues and behavioral issues more than anything. I don't prescribe anything. I just feel it's contradictory to my message and my approach.
Just like if somebody has, during the course of me working with them, turns out that they have diabetes, I don't manage their diabetes either because that's not what I'm going to help them do. I work alongside their doctors if they choose, but I'm working more as a performance consultant for people who are trying to optimize their health and performance as opposed to overcome diseases.
[0:50:18]
Greg: Okay, let's move onto magnesium specifically which is of course a mineral that many people don't get enough of. How is magnesium involved in regulation of sleep and wakefulness?
Kirk: Magnesium and vitamin D3, both are co-factors for the production of -- from the transitional 5-HTP to serotonin which is the primary reason I have them in the product.
Greg: Okay. You mentioned earlier that you've changed the type of magnesium that you're using. I didn't actually catch what you said specifically. I know that you mentioned magnesium bisphosphonate. What are your general thoughts on the different types of magnesium such as citrate and glycinate and threonate?
Kirk: There's, as you said, citrate. There's glycinate. There's threonate. There's bisphosphonate. I think there are maybe 12 different commercially available types of magnesium.
Stanford, of course the designers of Magtein drew up the patent for the magnesium threonate over here at least. I don't know if it's worldwide. It was a Stanford research team who came up with that product, and their design of that product was specifically to get magnesium into the brain, to cross the blood-brain barrier, which combination, which cells would do that the best. Magnesium threonate turns out to be the best, which I said is in our capsules.
In the drink, we hope to be able to scale that pretty quickly to have the threonate in there as well, but we did the second best product which cost us about 30% less than the threonate, to the bisphosphonate. That's the change in magnesium, as well as we decreased the overall amount of magnesium in the product because one of the more common complaints obviously with it is GI distress. We don't want to create too much of a laxative effect. I find that a lot of the bigger men are taking, oftentimes, two servings at once essentially or one-and-a-half servings at once, and the GI distress is the bigger issue.
We started with glycinate. That was considered the premier one back in 2014 or whenever we started this. Threonate wasn't around yet. Bisglycinate is the one that we're using. That was shown, with Stanford's trial, to be the second most effective at crossing. So, since we're getting more into the brain, we don't feel like we need as much in our product. Of course we test this in small groups of about 20 to 30 people. It definitely makes a big difference what type of magnesium you use.
Greg: Another change that you made is adding L-theanine which is an amino acid that is found in things such as tea, which is generally thought to have anxiety-reducing effects. Can you explain your thoughts on how L-theanine interacts with GABA, as well as how L-theanine might otherwise affect sleep?
Kirk: I'm not sure if taken as directed it would help with the anxiety component just because I don't think it would be fast-acting enough to say if you took it 30 minutes before bed and an anxiety was keeping you awake, I'm not sure that it would be enough of an anxiolytic to work that quickly.
My primary reason for taking it was several studies showed that GABA and L-theanine worked synergistically. The overall simplified explanation or hypothesis on it, I don't think anyone has a proven mechanism, it somehow makes GABA receptors more sensitive to the available GABA. The sleep latency was, I'm going to say three times faster with L-theanine and GABA than it was with either of them alone.
[0:55:10]
Greg: That actually brings us nicely back to something you mentioned earlier which is the sensitivity of GABA receptors. Of course many sleep drugs target GABA-a receptors. One issue that you touched on is that lots of these drugs eventually leads to intolerance and withdrawal effects, and that's in part perhaps because of down-regulations of these receptors.
Do you think the supplemental GABA is different, and do you think that people should cycle on and off your sleep remedy if it's used over a long period of time?
Kirk: I would say, of all the ingredients, the one ingredient that I'm putting in there that would have the potential for going supraphysiologic momentarily would be the GABA, but as we know, most of that is not crossing into the brain which is one of the reasons for it being so high. I'm really trying to work on the rest of the peripheral nervous system to help get the GABAergic effect there.
I find it very hard to imagine that it would down-regulate GABA receptors just because, as you well know, not only is the binding affinity order of magnitude higher for these GABA analogues that people are using to induce sleep, but the actual effect is order of magnitude higher. You're getting 10,000 times the receptor impact as a GABA molecule.
Some of the receptors are getting 10,000 times the effect of a GABA molecule when they're getting bound one molecule of Ambien or you choose whatever sleep drug that people are using, benzos or something like that. I believe that would be the reason for a down-regulation because you're chronically overstimulating in the first place, and you have this ridiculous difference in binding affinity.
Like anything else, if we're putting 5 grams of GABA in there like these guys did with the vitamin D3 and with the ph GABA, okay, maybe we're going to run into some problems. I just can't imagine an initiatory where it would be supraphysiologic in GABA, from the amount of GABA that's in this product. Again it's only enough to initiate and it's going to be cleared in three to four hours.
Greg: As always, the dose makes the poison. Now that we've been through all the ingredients, how do you recommend that people try to identify the effects of the supplement on their sleep? What should people track and how, for example?
Kirk: I don't know how geeky London has gotten but in the States, the Oura Rings and the Whoop bands and the Garmin watches, everybody I know, it seems like, is tracking their sleep.
Greg: Yeah, me too.
Kirk: That seems like the obvious low-hanging fruit. I've talked to plenty of customers and I've had consulting clients. They just simply aren't high tech people. They don't want to use a wearable. They don't want to use an iPhone app. They don't want to use any type of actigraphy device in their bed or pillows or anything like that. It's just they travel too much, or they're just not interested in it.
My whole push on sleep has always been that you should literally look, feel and perform better when you're sleeping better. If you don't feel better and if you don't feel like your performance is increasing, if you don't feel like your life is getting better in multiple areas then you're probably not improving your sleep.
The problem of course with without using any sort of tracking device is that we don't have a great subjective experience of sleep. By definition, we're no longer aware of our environment so we're no longer really aware of ourselves or our sense of time. Our own estimation of it is not that great. I'd have people who would just write, "I went to bed at this time. I woke up at this time. I feel good. I feel great. I feel average or whatever." For some people that's good enough.
I would encourage not only wearables, but I would encourage metabolic and hormonal panels because that's what I found to be the biggest shifts. Clinically I can geek out all day on somebody's sleep architecture. We need to get you a higher percentage of deep sleep or higher percentage of REM or whatever, and what can we do to that? We can go all day on that, but the end result is really what I'm looking for.
[1:00:20]
When I'm dealing with clients, I'm looking for an overall health panel which would include a ton of nutritional markers and a ton of hormone markers and a ton of inflammatory markers, as well as other blood and serum and indicators of other organs' function like liver function of course and kidney function and all that type of stuff. I'm looking to optimize people's anabolic and decrease their catabolic states with sleeping, one of the major functions.
Another thing that I don't personally administer because most of my stuff is virtual, but some sort of neurocognitive testing. It could be as simple as Lumosity or something like that, that people track their neurocognitive performance. I don't know. They can time themselves on crossword puzzles. I had one guy do that. It doesn't matter. It really depends on the metric that they're looking for.
Again, my focus is really around performance on people. Some people's performance metric that they're chasing is their emotional liability as a parent or as a spouse or something. I'm sure you're aware of all the research around that. When you're sleep deprived, your EQ goes down. Your ability to perceive other people's emotions goes down. Your ability to express your own emotions goes down. Your range of emotions is flattened, how quickly you go to rage, how quickly you go to negative neurotic thoughts or tendencies, [1:02:01] [Indiscernible]. All of that changes with sleep.
If that's one of the major reasons or one of the reasons that we're improving your sleep then track that. Don't worry about the Whoop band or don't worry about the O-ring if it's about how well you can keep your cool with your spastic children. That's a different word in America. I shouldn't say that.
Greg: I'm not sensitive. I'm pro free speech so don't you worry.
Kirk: I did not mean disabled children at all.
Greg: Yeah, people are up in arms about everything in 2019, and they just need to chill out. You don't mean any harm so don't worry about it, Doc. Again, you make really good points.
[1:02:51] [Indiscernible] published some interesting work on loneliness last year finding that during sleep deprivation, people become more socially withdrawn. The problem is that then led to other people in their social network to feel more withdrawn themselves. They feel lonelier. It propagated this vicious cycle of social isolation. So, actually, the detrimental effects of sleep loss aren't confined to an individual. They might be somewhat contagious.
Kirk: Yeah. William Dement's couple study back in the '70s or early '80s, that was fascinating. You could just sleep deprive one -- or sleep restrict one person out of couple and then have them spend their day together, and they both rated each other at the end of the day. It didn't matter which one you sleep-restricted. They both reported the same negative results.
They both said that their partner wasn't as present and wasn't as available and didn't seem as interested and empathic. They weren't as good at communicating their emotions, and they didn't feel the same connection, regardless of which one you sleep-restricted.
I think it's the biggest problem out there. Thank God people are starting to pay attention to it. I'm hopeful but maybe a bit pessimistic that it's actually going to change a whole lot simply because of the action, the time is running.
There's an organization in the United States that has been lobbying Congress for, jeez, at least ten years that I know of and probably ten years before I came around. They've been lobbying Congress to start school later for adolescents because we know that their circadian shift is ridiculous. It would be like you or me going to work at 3 am or something, going to school at 3 am and being expected to learn.
[1:05:04]
It's definitely cruel, and we're impairing our children's cognitive growth and the development of their prefrontal cortex. That's why it's making them moodier and angrier and doing all sorts of other physiological shifts to their metabolism and hormonal system.
We've known this data forever, and the argument is always, well, the reason they don't shift the school times is because parents have to be able to get their kids to school before the parents go to work. We can't afford to bus everybody. It's just this logistical and financial argument.
No one argues the science and says, well, we don't believe that's true. Science is overwhelming. Yeah, you're doing probably the worst thing that you could for your child's development, but let's make sure that we don't spend too much money or the parents aren't inconvenienced. People usually do about five times more for their children than they'll do for themselves.
So, I'm not 100% convinced that we're going to get a hell of a lot of societal change with the data, but there's no other option than to just keep beating the drum and hoping that you can get a couple of converts here and there.
Greg: Well, thank God, we've got people like you out there who are banging that drum, and people who haven't listened to your TEDx talk should do so. I thought that was excellent.
Kirk: Thank you.
Greg: Final question on ingredients, we've discussed all the ingredients in your product. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the future of sleep supplementation pharmacology. Hopefully it's clear to listeners that there are lots and lots of chemical ways to effect sleep but with that in mind, are there any top secret ingredients that you think we'll find out are very beneficial to sleep but right now nobody is really discussing?
Kirk: Are we talking about just nutritional supplements or just anything, any compound?
Greg: This could be peptides, it could be anything like that.
Kirk: I actually think that peptides have the highest likelihood just because they're just so overwhelmingly effective in other areas. Like I said, I've been fairly disappointed with what I've tried with patients so far. However the ones that really do seem to improve sleep, I'm not usually, exclusively giving it for sleep, but basically the [0:07:43] [Indiscernible] and the GnRH analogues, just through stimulating the pituitary, probably secreting and producing lots of intermediates that we don't know exactly what else is involved in that, but just taking something that's a GnRH --
Like taking a peptide that's going to increase how much growth hormone your brain produces, that seems to improve sleep. Is that improving sleep because it's increasing growth hormone, and that's one of the normal things that's going on during sleep, and there's some sort of cascade in that? I don't know if that's the answer or if it's because stimulating the pathways in the pituitary that leads to the secretion of more growth hormone is having other beneficial effects.
Across the board, people sleep better when their growth hormone and IGF-1 levels are higher. There's a peptide called the epitalon which it's like this four amino acids, super short peptide that's actually extracted from the pineal gland, and this thing resets a ton of pituitary function, increases melatonin secretion. It's supposed to help with resetting circadian rhythm and some other thing like that.
It has such a super durable effect. You only take this for less than two months. It's like 50 days, and you do that twice a year. It has pan pituitary increases across the board. There has been some really good reports with this as far as people's sleep. Obviously there's the DSIP, the Delta sleep-inducing peptide. I've been really disappointed with that one.
The point being that none of these, I would say, are prime time for, hey, you have sleep problems, I would use this, but there are so many peptides out there. We're at such a nascent stage with them. There are thousands of peptides out there. We're mucking around, clinically, with, I don't know, a couple of dozen, at tops.
[1:10:08]
I think that's the most likely thing that we're going to find. My primary reason for saying that is because these peptides already exist endogenously, so they have physiological effects that you're built for or they wouldn't be in your body. They just seem so much more effective in everything we're using them for than whatever the legacy solution to that was.
For example, we're essentially seeing people be able to regenerate cartilage with certain peptides, and we've never been able to really regenerate cartilage before. You go inside a joint. You can do these microfractures. You go into surgically and pack it in with chondrocytes and stem cells. There are all these surgical things that you can do.
There are peptides that are actually beating that. They're just simply injecting this peptide into the joint and then letting nature take its course. It's stimulating the activity of chondrocytes. If we're getting better joint repairs with peptides as we're getting with surgery, that's hard to say. I believe that we're not just going to find some amazing effects with these things. They just seem to be the most promising in every area, for me, and I don't think sleep is an exception.
Greg: Very interesting stuff and hopefully we see some untargeted screens for peptides that might have roles in sleep regulation that could reveal something that's very useful.
Just to give people an idea of how many different ways that you could affect sleep, if you think about this, we could sense [1:11:50] [Indiscernible] receptors of sleep promoting your immodulators. There are lots of these, GABA, galanin, glycine, MCH, endocannabinoids, or we could increase their concentrations, or we could slow the degradation, or we could prolong how long they spend in the synapses in our brains.
We could do the inverse with [1:12:08] [Indiscernible] promoters. We could try to boost the build-up of sleep pressure that people experience during the daytime by effecting things such as adenosine, cytokines like IL-1Beta, prostaglandin D2, nitric oxide and even brown fat potentially. Or we could try to enhance how we cope with stress which is one of the ways that you target sleep in your formulation of course. That's not an exhaustive list of targets either, so we really are just scratching the surface of this stuff.
Kirk: Along with all of that, there's this undoubtedly synergistic ratios of everything that you just discussed in there and idealized timing and administration and all these things. We really know so little. It's embarrassing. We're good at using fancy descriptive words, but for the most part the body's order of magnitude is more complex than we're currently capable of truly managing right now. We're just learning piece by piece and trick by trick as quickly as we can, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement.
Sleep is always going to be one of the things that people are chasing just because it has such enormous impacts on psychology and health and longevity. My personal opinion is if you're looking at it as a societal problem, I don't think there's any more important than getting people to sleep more, but a lot of that is a societal problem and not truly a medical problem. I place chronic sleep deprivation above obesity largely because getting rid of sleep deprivation would probably improve a significant portion of the obesity anyway.
Greg: Yeah, it really does amplify all of the other bad stuff, doesn't it?
Kirk: Yeah. If you just get people to sleep better, they have more daytime energy. They have more prefrontal cortex function. They have more willpower. They are less likely to make poor eating choices. They're more likely to exercise. Their anabolic state goes higher. Their catabolic state goes lower. Their inflammatory cascades go lower. Their insulin sensitivity increases. Their ghrelin sensitivity increases.
Everything about them, everything about their physiology is improving simply by getting sleep. Of course that's going to lead to a decrease in body fat because we know that sleep restricting people increases body fat. We've proven that. There are studies on that, that prove that unequivocally. We know that things like stress hormones, when you give a patient cortisol as basically a systemic anti-inflammatory for certain autoimmune disorders or whatever you give patients cortisol, they balloon up. They're taking 30 or 40 pounds of fat in like six months.
[1:15:07]
Of course we know that adrenal function is intricately tied to how well you sleep and the quality of your sleep. You have significantly higher stress hormone production and lower sensitivity to them which leads to escalations over time. So, I think it's the most important area, and the most optimistic right now are peptides. That's what I'm studying the most. You know what they say, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Right now peptides are the hammer, I guess. I don't know which it would be, the hammer or the nail, whichever one. It's an apt metaphor probably.
Greg: Yeah. So, time for my penultimate question. Other than taking your sleep remedy of course, what's one sleep-enhancing tip that you wish that you gave more often when speaking on podcasts?
Kirk: That's a new question. The one I wish that I had done more, and I don't know why I quit because I have done this a lot in the beginning of my career, but in the last three to four years I've really dropped off on this.
One thing that I tried to do just because so many gadgets were coming out and so many people were talking about sleep hygiene, I just really try to simplify sleep hygiene and tell people, hey, if you're motivated, if you can convince yourself that sleep is good and you're going to really focus on making it a priority in your life, you don't need a whole lot of fancy stuff.
Basically just think of how you get a kid ready for bed and you're there. You talk about life situation, and you talk about stimulation. Decrease stimulation, decrease life saturation and you're on-track. You can keep kicking up from there.
What I used to say a lot at the beginning was that I had my patients completely remove their sense of time. You set an alarm clock that -- and this isn't novel. I know other people said this. You set an alarm clock that says it's time to start getting ready to go to bed. Now that alarm clock is just as important as the alarm clock that says it's time to get ready to go to work or to get the kids to school, whatever. You don't get to fiddle about or you can't say, no, I'm just going to push it past. I'm going to watch one more episode of Dexter, whatever.
I tell my clients, well, if you're so adamant that you definitely want to watch that show or do that one thing or do one more of whatever you're doing, 30 more minutes of whatever you're doing, simply set your morning alarm clock 30 minutes, an hour earlier and get up an hour early to watch one more episode of your show. Of course no one will ever do that. If it's not important enough to get up early for then it's not important enough to stay up late for it.
That's something that I really moved away from is I tell people, set this alarm clock an hour before bed or whatever and that's when your sleep ritual starts. You can't stop that. There's no blowing it off. It's just as important as when you wake up. So now you get yourself ready for bed in whatever time you're giving yourself, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour, whatever. You go to bed. You never look at the time again until your alarm clock goes off.
I find that to be a very effective tool for people with maintenance insomnia. Because if they wake up in the middle of the night and they look at their clock, they start doing mental math and they start thinking about, if I fall back to sleep in the next 17 minutes and I didn't go to the gym. They start trying to reorganize and change their plan with this sleepy, dumb brain. That's a terrible idea.
If you need to go to the bathroom, get up and go to the bathroom, use as little light as possible, as little stimulation as possible, get back in bed, lay in bed, do some meditation, do some progressive relaxation, whatever it is that you do to calm yourself.
If your alarm clock goes off 15 minutes later, great, you've got 15 minutes of meditation and you're going to be better. If your alarm clock is not going to go off in three or four hours and you're just allowing yourself to be okay that you're awake, and you're just focusing on your relaxation; you're going to fall back to sleep 99 times out of 100.
That's a piece that have dropped off, the get ready for bed alarm clock, the importance of that and don't look at the time again until that alarm clock goes off. It doesn't matter what time it is when you wake up because you're committed to staying in bed until that alarm clock goes off. You've made that decision when you had a high-functioning brain.
You're deliberately planning on when you're going to sleep and for how long and what time you're going to get up. To rethink that decision at 5 in the morning is akin to creating a business plan and then getting drunk and reevaluating the business plan. You're not at your best. That's not when you need to be changing the plan.
[1:20:20]
Greg: Yeah, I feel guilty of clock-watching anxiety myself, and I love the altruistic of treating yourself like a child in preparation for sleep. That's not one I've heard before. That makes complete sense to me.
Just an aside, it's funny because I was emailing Chris and advance of this podcast and mentioned to him that there have been some work showing that if you rocked the bed of adults in the same way that you would rock a baby then this would boost deep sleep and sleep maintenance is better. As a result, people's ability to form declarative memories or memories of facts tends to improve too. I think that's a really good rule of thumb for people.
Kirk: It's not surprising to me, I should say, because I think about how well I sleep on a boat. I lived on a sailboat for three years. It wasn't a great mattress, but the quality of sleep on that. That was the closest to being a teenager again that I'd been. I was in my late 30s when I did that. So it doesn't surprise me that rocking the beds would make a difference. I don't think it takes any big cognitive stretch to say, well, these are the things we need to do to get a kid ready for bed. Why do we think we outgrow that? Why do we think that that whole ritual, we're just going to outgrow that and not need that anymore?
When we can look at hunter-gatherers, never been exposed to electricity, and they still do what humans have presumably done for millennia. They're essentially getting ready for bed once the sun goes down. They're changing their behaviors, and everything about their lives is changing. They're doing, they're not trying to sleep [1:22:01] [Indiscernible] three hours. Why we think we can just get past that, because we're educated and we have computers. I don't know.
Greg: Yeah, and I've experienced that too, sleeping on boats and sleeping in hammocks. It's probably something due to the fact that we were arboreal. We lived in trees. Our ancestors did once upon a time, so maybe there's some vestige from that time now in our biology that results in that effect.
Anyway, how can people follow your work online, Doc, and where can people pick up your sleep remedy?
Kirk: Everything is in one easy spot, docparsley.com. The product is on there. There's lots of podcasts and videos and blogs and what-have-yous and whatnots. We're always adding new material. I'm not so on Facebook and Twitter and all of that, whatever, all that social media crap. I don't do a whole lot with it, but all that is on my website as well. You can follow me on any of these things.
Greg: I'm in the same boat as you. Doc, thanks so much for your time and keep up the great work.
Kirk: Thank you.
[1:23:24] End of Audio
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