 Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. Today I had an awesome conversation with a guy called Nick Little-Hales. And Nick is an elite sports sleep coach. I worked with Alex Ferguson back in the 90s, Arsene Wenger, British cycling, Bradley Wiggins, all of those guys. And sleep is an interesting one because you have three cornerstones of like good health and fitness. You have nutrition, you have exercise and you have sleep. And sleep is often the overlooked one. And we seem to be getting it completely wrong as well. So I spoke to Nick about his method, which is the R90 technique and what methods and strategies we can put in place to manage our sleep, to plan our sleep and to really get control of it. So brilliant conversation, really interesting. And it's good to take and understand what elite sports people are doing and implement it into our own daily lives. This podcast was recorded over Skype. Hope you enjoy it. Hey, it's Lewis. Welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations anytime, anywhere. And we're live. Thank you very much, Nick, for speaking to me on the podcast. My absolute pleasure, Lewis. Great stuff. So what is your story? What's your background? I'm trying to keep that short and sweet. You know, it's been a little bit of a journey when you look back at it. I sort of got involved with the sleep industry a long time ago, mid-80s. I always loved sports at school, trying to become an athlete, sportsman, whatever, at some sort. Didn't quite crack that. So I ended up in the sleep industry with a company called Slumberland. It was a very sort of high profile brand in those days and two raw warrants. And I started off as an area rep and, you know, running around a patch, selling beds to retailers. I very quickly became their international sales and marketing director at 32, which was all about sort of my particular approach of maybe trying to do things differently or the focus on trying to elevate the importance of sleep into sleeping products. I was always wandering around the world and looking at the challenges of how people slept around the world, how humans did it around the world and all the different challenges of occupations and everything else. And all the professors and clinicians and academics I sort of commissioned to work with or came across along that route. I came a little bit fascinated why the importance of sleep was so very evident to us. We always focused on the disorders, the real clinical disorders. And as far as humans getting from A to B, it was simply some very basic principles. You know, get your eight hours, don't eat too late, 16 to 18 degrees if you room. And it was always like, this is sort of a natural process that we don't need to concentrate on. We'll just focus on these clinical disorders. And like a lot of things that have changed over those years, the only time we sort of invest in sleep is when we sort of have to buy a bed. Yeah, we don't go to clinics. We don't have sleep personal trainers. We don't have anything like that. So they're actually getting involved with sleep. There was a lot of barriers and conceptions and understandings. As a small group of us decided to create the first ever UK Sleep Council, which I was the chairman of for a while, we tried to generate a stronger interest in sleep and its importance. That was quite successful for a period of time. Then sort of, you know, taken for granted, it sort of started to lose its emphasis. I sort of got to a particular point that of a midlife crisis, maybe sat in my office in Oldham, Manchester, UK and just thought, you know, I've done a lot of great things, innovative product, UK Sleep Council, all sorts of things, but maybe it's time to move on and do something else. During a period of time when I was working out my involvement contract as a director of that company, I was asked by the local football club, Oldham Athletic, if I'd write a check out to sponsor their shirts. This was sort of mid to late 90s. That was something that was just ridiculous to do because how are we going to sell more beds just because we put our name on the front of Oldham Athletic shirt? Most of the workforce in the factory in Oldham had some sort of relationship with their local football club. So I did it so that they could see their company's name on the front of that shirt. It then engaged me because I was the guy writing out the check into a few little events locally and I became sort of happened to start having some interaction with another football club called Manchester United just down the road. And the manager at the time, Alex Ferguson, around that particular area of the Northwest was a particular breeding ground for Manchester United players. So there was lots of clubs like Oldham Athletic and Berry where they were breeding young players that played for Manchester United. So I think it was just a combination of... I was a local director of a big employer. We're in the same postcode. So I just asked the question because I'm just twiddling my thumbs thinking, going off somewhere else. What do they do about sleep or recovery? I think if it was any other club that didn't have a manager like Alex Ferguson, whether you like Manchester United or not, he's a business leader and revered by many people around the world. He sort of said, well, we know nothing. So maybe we should find out. And just to keep that a little bit shorter, we started some dialogue. They were all sleepers, but they were not inside of the sleep industry. So it allowed me to sort of go into areas that were probably my industry thought were not relevant or a bit maverick, but it allowed me to have those kind of discussions with them. And we did one or two things with the club that sparked off an interest that maybe we could learn more. We started just with the physios, with the doctors and with the manager himself, started to make a few little changes. There was a bunch of players there who were, they called the class of 92. There were a bunch of UK-born bred individuals who, you know, we weren't on social media or anything like that. So there were very much, you know, a pocket of players who were brought up through the rank when something came along, which was something new back in the late 90s to actually double up pre-season training. So not only the players would train in the morning, but also in the afternoon, we actually exposed them to the first-ever nap room where we encouraged the players to actually sleep. Oh, wow. Between training sessions, rather than just mucking around playing ping pong or lying on the sofas or whatever. And I think because there were so many things missing to what we have today, they were very much engaged with it. Another little crazy thing is they went off and won what was called one of the biggest trebles where they nipped a game by a Munich right in the last seconds. And that created a lot of media attention around Manchester 90s. So, you know, all the press are going, wow, wow, wow, wow. And around the same time as well, those players were playing for the England squad. They started to, you know, open up conversations when they were around the England squads that created a reason for the England squad physio at the time called Gary Lewin, who was also shared with Arsenal Football Club to become interested. We started a dialogue there because they had a new manager called Arsene Dengar who was a bit more of a, had a different perspective about coaching and managing athletes and players. And so I was faced with, you know, will you come and talk to the first team squad at Arsenal? And I think that's when it's sort of the realisation because one morning I woke up and read that Manchester United got a sleep coat and it had been tipped off. And it was all very tongue-in-cheek as though what the hell is he doing with these pampered players? You know, they didn't mention me because they didn't know it was me, but I suddenly read, you know, I'm a sleep coat. And I thought, well, okay, I need to apply what I've been learning and everything else and apply it to the Arsenal Football Squad team and see if I can cross some of those barriers. Not an easy job with much broader cultural team, the Manchester United, because we had everybody from the Czech Republic to Nigeria, to French, to Spanish, to all sorts of things. And I think it was around that particular time that, you know, I just decided, well, you know, I'm being asked to do this. I'm a sleep coat. I'm in sports, so I'm a sports league coach. I don't really know what that means, but maybe we'll start that journey. And I think over, that's some 22 years ago now, and over that couple of decades, there's been an enormous paradigm shift in human behavior and 24-7 and technology and media and pushing the boundaries in all sorts of areas. And technology just keep giving us the opportunity to do more and more and change our own social and personal behaviors. So along that route, Lewis, it's just simply been like, okay, we're getting faced with this now and then we're getting faced with that now. So it was a combination which sort of really, I suppose got its, you know, the toolkit came together around 2008-9 when British cycling was charged with trying to make cycling famous in the UK again, on the road and on the track, trying to get us all being healthier, take some impact off the NHS, get us all riding around on our bike. Yes. At the same time, Team Sky was born, so there was a lot of investments. The British Cycling was looking after British Cycling, but also looking after what was then called Team Sky, now INEOS. And, you know, they came up with a little process called the aggregation of marginal gains, that it wasn't necessary about the equipment. They're trying to compete with the Australians and Germans. It wasn't about the equipment. It wasn't about the helmets and the clothing. We could make lots of, it was about the human, the engine on the bike. So if we can touch on all the areas possibly and just make some little 1% gains here and there, it'll aggregate up into an overall warm-up. And they couldn't ignore sleep. A lot of clinical expertise around the world, but it was too intrusive. So I was the only sort of crazy guy wandering around looking at this and have been doing for quite a long time. So I got involved with that. And that really culminated then in 2012, at the London 2012 Olympics, where just before then, Sir Bradley Wiggins was the first British rider on the Tour de France podium, which was, you know, one of the toughest sports out there. They started talking about sleep because it was one of those elements that, you know, people were not really aware of in the impact of everything else. And where we find ourselves to Daenerys is, you know, that process has been going on. We're, you know, about to move 5G and whatever G next. We've been shifting schedules, practices. There's a lot of areas under pressure where that's in the public or private sector. I got asked to write a book in 2016 with Penguin Random House, which was just a different take on an everyday natural health pillar called Sleep. That was published in 2016. It's now in 14 languages around the world. And it's almost like something you should read part of your educational process. Just some of the basic principles put into context so you can try and redefine your approach. And both the reason why it's such a subject matter now is where it was always about performance gain. In recent years, it's more to do with enabling people to cope with such a fast-paced world that we live in. And there's a lot of health and wellbeing factors that are really being uncovered behind, you know, using that term, you know, below the tip of the iceberg. And so I not only go, advise to go into places to help with performance with an individual or a group in elite sport, but we also get asked to go into organizations to try and give them an approach that can protect them and help them be productive and have some tears and motivated and should make the right choices. So it's become a much bigger subject in there. So it's going to be fascinating over the next period of time how that whole interest in that area, I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people come in, a lot of organizations, a lot of technology and everything else will come into that space. We'll then go away from that space and we'll be left with a nice core of interventions and approaches that can really keep developing this process in this ever-changing world. And, you know, that's really the story of where we're up to today. I think it's fascinating and you've obviously had some great success with some very good sports teams, cycling, football. And it's also interesting because when we, you know, when I speak to people in the business world and just life in general that, you know, that aren't elite sportsmen, people talk a lot about nutrition. They talk about exercise. They talk about these things and sleep. It's interesting that, you know, it's maybe, it's further down the list, but it's so important. And you have this culture in a lot of companies where, you know, it's like fashionable, fashionable, you know, to sleep a small amount and to work really long hours. And you had like they market thatcher who wasn't as famous for, you know, for short sleeping, you know, four hours or whatever it is. So it's just really interesting culturally. And you said you worked with Arsenal with all the different nationalities. I think it seems to also be different depending on where you've grown up in the world and people's view on sleep as well. I think, you know, you've just touched on somebody there whether it's relevant to everybody else in the modern world. But there was an individual in a highly pressurised set of circumstances for a relatively long period of time in politics. They were adopting a particular principle about how they slept. It wasn't coming from knowledge or education. It was just trying to keep on top of everybody else around them and keep in front and manage and actually be in control. At the end of the day, I'm not suggesting it was one of those outcomes, but, you know, dementia kicked in. And there's a lot of research that is continuing to go on, not to give us the fear factor, but you can't just make this up. You do have to manage it and manage your approach. And there are some long-term side effects if we're not careful. So while we think we're going to live forever and we can still do triathlons and ironmans when we're in our 70s, and that whole cultural thing of being the healthiest, fittest and knowledge, the reality is we've got more indications now that we might be in that place, but actually we've ignored something that could be quite a significant, have a significant impact on our long-term future. So we need to just, you know, step back a little bit and go, this is how I'm going through my every day, but maybe I just need to refine that a little bit, because ultimately I could see the consequences of it, maybe in five, 10 or 15 years time. Definitely. But why is sleep so important? I think, you know, wherever you look back into our history, we are human beings with brains and bodily functions. And that hasn't changed, Lewis. We live on a planet where there is a sun orbiting our planet and that hasn't changed and never will. And if it does, we won't be here. And I think that process is fundamental to, like a lot of animals and mammals that live on this planet. We are synchronized to this process. It's about light, dark and temperature changes. It happens absolutely every day. And we've always been synchronized to that process. So when we're activated by light, we unsuppress everything. We become active, our organs and all our muscles and joints and every cell in our body to go out and be active while the light's there. And then as it disappears and we move into diminished light, then we start to produce other types of hormones and functions and we suppress things. And then what we have to do within that 24-hour cycle is we have to move into a state where the brain can literally put you in a semi-paralyzed state, shot down. And during that period, you're able to rejuvenate, replenish, repair your body. And your body has to have that place to be in the deeper sleep stages where it can do that. And if you're synchronized with that process, this is what happens. So you start every new day by having a repair period, a recovery period for brain and bodily function. And so because we've always looked at that and there's lots and lots of research out of there, the more and more you get out of sync with that process, you might think that what you're doing is a very healthy and proactive approach and positive approach. But actually your brain and body not processing this in the way you think it is. And I think that's what the intriguing thing is coming out of research now, is that why aren't we the healthiest, fittest, most-knowledged human population ever on this planet? And we should be able to deal with everything. But underpinning all of that is some quite serious problems. So the importance of it, every single piece of research I've ever read and studied, it always has at the bottom the little caveat that says we're still learning. Still learning because we've not done it to death like exercise and nutrition, the other two health pillars. For a lot of us now, we're starting to, well, I've been doing it for 22 years, so it's no surprise to me, but it sort of is to bring that to the first health pillar that if you can get your approach to every 24 hours rolling, it's not on a seven-day week anymore, it's just a rolling 24-hour process in front of you that you're in control of and not in control of, you need to adapt to manage that process without an influence and impact on you, is that when you get that right, then basically the other two pillars, better decisions about exercise, nutrition, relationships, mood motivation, all of those things, the impact of negative things on you with anxiety, depression and all that sort of stuff, as you get yourself into a better place to cope with this 24-7 management process, not only within your occupation, but around your own social networks. And I think that is what's been, that's the bit, the sort of game changing shift, is to put that first, and then everything else will roll off better. Can you go through, yeah? I've always been told, I mean, we've always kind of, six to eight hours sleep per night is the ideal, I mean, is that still the case? Who told you that? I can't even remember, but I'm gonna, There you go. That's been always fascinating to me, and it's happening today on this podcast with an, you know, I actually, I think I listened to, I read a really good, well, I listened to a podcast, actually, with Matthew Walker. The bit, why we sleep. And I thought that was interesting. And he, you know, he was going, talking around like, you know, seven, eight hours or whatever it was being, being the kind of optimal number. And I know you have a different approach, so it'd be interesting. Not on the slightest. I mean, like a lot of books or research studies that, you know, over those years I've looked at, they were always like, well, what do I do? You know, you're telling me all this sort of stuff, but what do I do? And at least the reason why Matthew's books has been so successful because of the area he's coming from, from Neurosight, and actually putting in context of why we sleep, and all the little indicators as to how that all happened. And you've got to go away and find a little way. So I don't think there's any argument, as we just pointed out in your last question, that within that 24 hour process of the sun shifting around our planet, we do have to be in around 30% of it in this recovery state. And that's called sleep or mental and physical recovery. So that equals eight hours out of the 24. There's no argument there. But the reality of that is, up until things like we invented electric light and put it on our streets, the human always slept in polar phasic manner, which is multiple periods more often, not necessarily one blocks. And it's sort of, I think, it's one of those little changes and certain parts of the world have daylight saving time. We have that in the UK. We created that not for human performance. That was because very sad war years is we've still got it. And that creates another desynchronizing shift. You've got, you've always had night shift workers and day shift workers. So you can't say to a night shift worker that they need to get eight hours at night. You have to say you need eight hours a day. And then suddenly, you've got pilots and we've got the ability to fly more often and more economically. So that's been a growth. We've got online trading. We've got all sorts of, and then we've got our technology that allows us all to do so many things. So what happens is that you're trying to sort of think about just sleeping in one block, which is called monophasic, getting all of your eight hours in that nocturnal period, sort of between 10, 11 at night and at some point in the morning when you have to get up and go and do stuff is that has been put under more and more pressure. As you put that under more pressure, it doesn't wash for everybody. So you do have to sort of look at it. How do I get my eight hours worth of mental and physical recovery? How do I get that out of my role in 24 hours? Is I can't do this in a fixed way. I can't do my occupation. I can't do anything. And when you mix that in with one or two other things, which I'm sure will come on to, no argument about this 30 odd percent of your 24 hours, but there's a lot of people who adapt to a more polyphasic approach, but they don't actually realise that they're doing that. And it's actually a bit more natural than just trying to sleep at night in one block. Yeah, no, very interesting. So it's eight hours within a 24 hour period. And that could be in blocks of whatever it might be, two blocks of four, or you have a little nap in the afternoon to catch up if you haven't had enough in the evening. Is that how it would work? Yeah, it's just, you know, there's basically a biphasic approach. So you've got monophasic, which we've only done one monophasic approach since the light bulb 1700s to where we are now. So we've got biphasic, which is twice a day. That's a shorter period at night with a balanced one midday. You've got triphasic, which is a shorter period at night, balanced midday and also early evening. With shorter little periods, you mentioned naps. You can define those a little bit better, but they're little shorter cycles at the right time of day within that circadian process. You've also got multi-phase it, which could be six times a day. So no real specific blocks, but shorter periods, six times a day. And there's also sort of crazy phase. It would be four periods a day. So I think what we do and what we've been doing in elite sports is going, well, there's a sort of seven-day period in front of us. We know these things are happening. We know those things that we don't know are gonna happen. How do we cope with it? Is when you look across that week is, is where can we define those recovery moments and how we can make sure that person can go from A to B throughout that period and generate enough recovery over that period rather than just focusing on what's happening in that specific 24-hour period and nothing else. Right. So how would one go about designing a good routine for themselves at the certain steps that you should go through? How would it work? That's a big old question, but the principle of it was that, you know, as we mentioned off there or on air, but when I ever asked anybody, you know, throughout my whole career in this industry, you know, how many hours you try and get, they picked the number eight. They might say seven. They might say six at a push, but they won't say anything less. Ask them where did they find that out? It wasn't in school. It probably was something their parents had heard of or whatever. It's just something you say. When you just tap it into your browser, you realize that in that clinical environment, if you're being tracked, the brainwave patterns of your frontal lobe, these slow wave, beta wave, whatever it is, trying to gather these brainwave patterns that shows us where you are in all these sleep phases and stages, you know, REM sleep, light sleep, deep sleep. Now, a lot of professionals I came across would look at that period in a 90-minute cycle and then they'd look at the next 90-minute cycle to benchmark how you are going through these different phases and stages. So, principally, five 90-minute cycles is 7.5 hours, so there's our rate. So if you could define it with an individual that you're on a five-cycle routine of five 90-minute cycles back to back to get your 7.5 hours, there's a start. Don't laugh, Lewis, but it also happened to be the length of a football game when I started. Right. So trying to talk to young people about sleep in the late 90s was not an easy job. But if we could certainly define it a little bit and say, you know, we don't talk eight hours, we talk about five cycles a day and there's your 7.5 hours. Football game is 90 minutes with a break in the middle. So we don't do the whole thing, we have a little break and that's a little opportunity to hydrate, to do this, to do that, to allow the brain to put things in context and then maybe we can get the second half of that period a little bit more focused and because we've still got time. So if you take that principle, everybody's got what we class as a natural chronotype. It's a little genetic twist. They were called hours and laps, called AMs and PMs, morning types, evening types and we all relate to this process because it's how our brains relate to that circadian rhythm outside, the sun coming up and the sun going down and it's about a couple of hormones and it's melatonin and serotonin. The serotonin will activate you to unsuppress everything. The melatonin will tell the brain to suppress everything and the melatonin is created within diminished light and dark and the serotonin is created in light and daylight. So that relationship with an AM and a PMR is the PMR is like a little phase delay of one or two hours in producing the serotonin, the unsuppressant and active hormone from an AMR. So if Lewis is a PMR, Nick is an AMR, we live outside, the sun starts to come around to our horizon, Nick is an AMR starts producing serotonin, not melatonin, he becomes active, hungry, ready to go and stimulated. But the PMR Lewis is not creating this hormone level yet. So it takes them one to two hours before it gets that particular point before they want to start their day. So when you sort of get that in place and particularly the majority of research I've ever looked at and mainly all the research that I have been doing over 22 years with large groups of people, is I think there's around 60 to 70% of the population of PMRs not AMs. And yet we all live in an AM as well. So when we start to look at that, it sort of makes more sense. So all we do is we take your natural chronotype wait time, not your occupational one. So for me that will be 6.30 maybe for you Lewis as a PMR that might be 8.30, okay? And you put that in your choppy day up into 90 minute cycles from your natural chronotype wait time. Now, if Lewis has to get up at 6.30 like me because we've both got the same job, we have to get up at 6.30 to be somewhere for a particular time. Then that's our constant wait time for that period which is 6.30. But you know that you're getting up two full cycles before your natural one. Whereas I am getting up at my natural chronotype wait time. So the way we, by chopping your day up into 90 minute cycles from your natural chronotype wait time and then sliding that back to your actual occupational time which can change. We create a series of timings when you can sleep, wake, nap, take little breaks and it gives a nice little subconscious tool in the back of your head of how to manage that 24 hours and keep it with a little bit more rhythm. A little bit more pattern not be so random. Get some harmony in there because the sun going around our planet is about rhythm and pattern cycles and harmony. So the more we have a little subconscious thing in the back of our head, 6.30 into eight, da da da da, five o'clock, three o'clock, 3.30, 11, 12.30 is like we can actually manage seven days in front of us to find out where our recovery cycles are, how will they look, and maybe the only objective we need is the best five a day is five cycles a day, 35 cycles in a week gives us the level of cycles that we want and how that looks is like this and it can change week in week out or even the next three days in front of you, but you have a little bit better understanding of how to keep that rhythm and pattern going. Oh, that's great. I think that sounds like the message is to be a little bit more thoughtful and planned about how and when you sleep, which I think most people don't do. Well, you know, some people get away with it, you know, but there's, I think once you sort of get that, that's why I think it's been so significant is that you can, you know, you can't tell somebody to chill out, you can't sometimes just stop worrying about something, but I don't even worry about not getting enough sleep and the impact on you is one of those significant things. So you find a little technique that takes that worry away, so they don't get exposed to the anxiety and stress of not being able to sleep in a manner that actually is not necessarily as natural as you thought it was. True. No, that's true. What are some of the routines and maybe secrets that you use with the Premier League footballers and elite cyclists that us mortal folk can implement? There are none. They're just human beings, Lewis, you know, it's their occupation happens to be sport. Yes, you might not have to tell them to exercise well or eat well and be committed to something, but you know, that's long changed in the modern world that we have now. I think the thing is over the years we've picked up on what's called seven key sleep recovery indicators, KSRIs as you want to cliche talk it maybe, focused on the R90 technique, which is recovery in 90 minute cycles and 30 minute cycles, which is 30% of 90 and there's your nap bit or we call them control recovery periods. So the first thing is to, you know, catch up on what your parents didn't talk to you about, what your education didn't talk to you about, and that is to just tap it in your browser, circadian rhythms. Just look at some images. This hasn't changed and it won't change. And your relationship, you know, I'm called Nick, you're called Lewis, but we can call ourselves what we want. I can call myself Samantha tomorrow or Stephen Fry. I don't care. It's about a brain and a bodily function. So you tap that in and just get a better understanding of this circadian rhythm that's going on every day. You then very quickly, you can do a test if you want, but you only have to ask somebody, you know, are you a morning type or evening type? There's plenty of people who might say, well, I don't know because I'm a bit of an in-betweener. And that's because we can camouflage it. We can camouflage it with overstimulating, with addictive behaviors, occupations, and, you know, you might be an AMR who's a surgeon in a hospital and works night shifts or a policeman or whatever, or a CEO traveling the world. So, but when you sit somebody down and just ask them a few questions, you know, do you love breakfast? Do you like getting up at that time? Is it the best point of your day? Do you get that second wind in the evening where wow, you become quite productive? You can identify, once you identify that with us, that particular point, along with the circadian rhythm, suddenly you can see in front of you that it's quite a number of things that you are doing quite naturally, going to the gym with your friend, doing this, doing that, having meetings, doing this and doing that. There's all those little things and quite a number of them are a bit out of sync with these two things. And if you can make some subtle little changes. So, when you come to the third one, which is natural chronic weight time, chop it up into 90-minute cycles, now you've got some little timings that shows you what you do in the first 90 minutes of the day, the most critical one, post-sleep, because we're not in control with sleep, eating and exercising, we choose what we're going to do, we do it, we eat it, it's a mental and physical activity, same with exercise. But sleep is about getting yourself to a point where you present yourself to go to sleep, your brain takes over, it's going to give you what it's going to give you, you're not in control of it while you're asleep. So, when you wake up in the morning, who cares what has happened? You've still got to get on with your day, so it's how you start your day and go out throughout your day, which is the critical bit. So, once you've got that in place, there's a great trick. Exactly, when you wake up in the morning, whether you slept well, whether you didn't sleep at all, whether you came in late, whether you came in late, prepared for sleep or not, forget it. What are you doing in the first 90 minutes? Every 90 minutes, little distracted breaks. Are you going to grab a little CRP midday just to balance that out? So, yeah, are you going to grab one early evening because you don't want to wreck the evening because we're moving into summer, now we're moving into winter, now you're traveling to this particular time zone, now you're doing this, and then once you've got that, you start to get a better balance of another KSRI, which is the balance between physical activity, mental activity, and recovery, and recovery activity. So, that starts to appear in front of you that we have these little moments that helps that whole process. When we look at your environment, because humans can sleep on anything, anywhere, anytime, in any place, we do it, we've always been doing it, we can do it outside, we can do it camping, in tents, we can do it on planes, trains, sides of mountains, we can do it in posh bedrooms, we can do it in hotels, we can do it up friends' houses, we can do it on the couch, in a chair. When you look at it like that, in certain parts of the world, there's far too much emphasis placed on how the bedroom is going to help you recover from an approach that's out of sync, which it doesn't. So, we put a lot of investment into bedrooms, and the seventh one is products. When you're working with the elite athletes, very few of them walk out their front door straight onto an Olympic track, or a training system, they travel around down to other places where they have to recover while they're training, and this happens to everybody. So, you want to look at what sort of product are going to help you recover wherever you are, and we touched on before the sort of sometimes the emphasis on this, go fast to strike, full of springs, memory foam, whatever, mattress that does all of this sort of stuff, this pillow that does that, that does this, that, all of it is laid. Really? I teach athletes to sleep on the floor. Really? Because they're doing extreme sports, like a race across America, which is on a mountain bike. We've got 13 days plus a few hours to get to the other side, we're going to make it really tough. So, the only way you're going to do this is 20-minute slots every so often at the right times to achieve what you want to do. I think when you look at what's coming in front of you, you can actually approach it in a much greater way, so you can quite happily use a multi-basic approach if you're having to sleep on the floor, in a tent, because you're a professional mountaineer going up the side of a mountain. Very interesting. It's funny, you just get geared up for this eight-hour thing in overnight. And also, I've got a couple of young kids and all my peers are having kids, and you get so into this, making sure your kids are sleeping for the right amount of time, and making sure you're sleeping for the right amount of time. That's a really good point because it is all about this. A lot of people have said you're non-academic, you're not clinical, everything else, but some of your experience has really resonated with me, so I've been reading your book or listening to it, and it kind of, sort of every chapter, I kind of think, I knew that anyway, didn't I? That sounds like it's so logical that I should have known that anyway. And it sort of leaves you with this sort of thing, well, I can just start doing this tomorrow. I can either redefine it a little bit or just start doing it because it sort of sounds as if Nick's just told me what I already knew, but I don't apply it. And that one with children, when you just put it in your browser and look at human sleep wake cycles, up until the electric light bulb, this polyphasic approach where there was four significant ones, none of them monophasic, you also realize that a child comes into your world in a polyphasic manner, and the challenge is to move the child into a monophasic approach as quickly as possible, because the parents have shifted to a monophasic approach. And those challenges have a real sort of almost counterintuitive effect on us. We don't look at our children's chronotypes developing because our parents didn't do it with us. So suddenly with your two kids, you suddenly go, well, hang on a minute. My one child seems to be quite intelligent, active, seems to be able to make things, seems to have a better aspect about them in the evenings. The other one sees already up before I'm up making breakfast and got the uniform on and everything. So you kind of start to work around this and go, hang on a minute. This shouldn't be such a shock. And I did exactly the same thing, bringing my first child in James into the world. We didn't trust our parents or grandparents. They knew everything, didn't they, because they brought kids into the world. No, we had to go get the latest book on childcare. We were careful about the cot, because if the bars are too wide, then they stick the head foot and die. We were about, you know, infant death about this and the cot matters. We'd create the room environment, we'd clean it, it doesn't happen all over the world. People get born under a tree. But in certain parts of the world, we know the right color on the wall. We put a mobile up there that created music. We put stimulus around. Everything was fresh and new. We read the books. And then even then, we would still stand over the cot and watch them doing it, just in case. Yeah, it's true. And then as soon as they get to a certain point, we just go yada. Right. Chuck them in that room. We'll put brothers and sisters together. They can sleep in bonkers. They can stick what the hell are like on the wall. We're not interested in sounds, noise, light, nothing. We just forget it and let them go, because that's what we do. So I think that sort of dynamic of the new parents and their children is some of these things that we're, you know, I've been doing for a long time, but everybody's learning. Suddenly you start to bring children into the world with a different perspective and it's not about shut your tech down, blue lights bad for you and being stuck to your pad all day long and yada, yada, yada. You know, my parents use the same tools to keep me occupied, whether it was the TV when that came along or other things or whatever. It's always about just getting from A to B. And don't use it so negatively, is if you can as a new population, give them these things we just went through, these seven little things, then they could have a much better approach to their everyday life than the challenges they get faced, rather than just shouting at them to do the same thing at the same time. A hundred percent. And I mean, I probably do that. I mean, you get caught up in, they must sleep until a certain time and then you have the nursery that's saying, we need to drop their nap. And all of these things, it's funny, it's all geared to this. They have to sleep from, you know, the time you put them to bed to the time they wake up and then the parents. If I asked you to cut in, but if I asked you, are you an AMR or a PMR? I actually, I think I'm an AMR. I'm up by 5.36 o'clock and I'm supercharged. Yeah. So when you chose your partner, did you choose a PMR or an AMR? Or do you come here often? Would you like a drink? I fancy you. Yeah, pretty much. Well, I do. I didn't think of it. I didn't think of it. You know, my sister set me and my wife up on a date. We had a blind date and we got on and all these things. And the sleep, I was going to ask you a question actually about how sleep changes as age, as you get older. But I remember, you know, when we were single, I mean, we were out late and we were sleeping later. And as time has gone on, maybe with kids and stuff, it's shifted to we're getting up earlier and we're going to bed earlier. I mean, the amount of sleep is probably the same. I think she's probably also a morning person, actually. So we probably like just fortunately. These little things that, you know, if you do paradigm shift the way that humans operate and their behavioural approach to everyday, is that these little things can have an enormous impact on knowing where the barriers are and how you can protect yourself from their influence on you. So when you do start having a regular sleeping partner, you know, what environment are you sleeping with them in? Other things that are around you that you're doing together, your ability to spot when they, when you or they change occupations. So they go to work earlier or go to work later or come in later or whatever, because those are the challenges. And as children come along, if that's your bag, then you can see how that's going to change your dynamic. And so you suddenly have something in your bag that goes, that's absolutely fine. Absolutely fine. But you do this and I do that, we do that together, we do that there, that there, that there. And if we share and they could just shift that around a bit, do that there, and we're absolutely fine. Not sort of a random fall into its approach and try to randomly manage it when it happens. Yeah, which I think most people probably do. I know you touched on this before and you said environment wasn't so important, but I mean, there are certain things you shouldn't, shouldn't do. I mean, people talk about not using your phone before bed or not eating or the temperature and the mattress we spoke a little bit about. Are there certain kind of things that are regarded as that you shouldn't be doing this or? The key thing is within the circadian rhythms, it's moving from warm to cool and cool to warm and light to dark and dark to light. Those are the triggers. They create that place for you to present yourself. So you always want to be thinking about that as the critical thing is as you get towards a particular point, whether it's midday, early evening in this polyphasy approach, or it's a nocturnal sleep period, you want to be thinking about warm to cool and from light to dark. But it's not about 16 to 18 degrees in a clinical environment. It's just wherever you are sleeping, whatever environment you're in, is that your approach from the point of wake is trying to manage those little things so that when you do present yourself, you are able to move from light to dark and from warm to cool. Not cold, just warm to cool. Whether that's really hot, just a bit cooler, or whatever it is because I don't have to touch on it, but humans are sleeping on our planet in all sorts of different climates and that's the process. So once you get that, then you're also thinking about visualization and familiarization. It's about smells and sensory stuff that makes you feel comfortable. It makes you feel like you're in an environment of some level of security. It's about looking at things because the brain processes what you're looking at and it's constantly doing that. So the simple thing is, I was always fascinated by why is it that when I went camping with my family and when I go camping with my children and my grandchildren is that we've just got a piece of sort of polythene protecting us from the outside world. We're on the floor on something we've blown up or a bit of fun. We're outside with the natural circadian of the room. So we seem to be having breakfast. We seem to be waking up at our natural times. We seem to be having lunch. We seem to be having some chill out moment just looking at that view or whatever. And in the evenings, we effectively affected by diminished lights and we have some fun for all asleep and do it again. And we feel we're having a fantastic time. And I think that's where you bring it back to your environment, little things. And I got asked the question the other day, suddenly we get a hot period of where you get into the summer and we get a period where it gets very hot and the UK is very susceptible to that. You know, one week or a few days, we could be 26, 27 degrees, 30 degrees and then next week back down to 15 or 16. Certain countries don't have those fluctuations. What do you do about when it gets hot? Well, in your home, there are plenty of little places that are cooler and protected from temperature increase. We know about Mediterranean terrain in countries where you have tiled floors, you have shutters, you keep the place dark during the hot day. We also know that, you know, just because it's your bedroom, that's the only place you sleep. Well, strangely enough, when it gets hot, when it gets like that, then I'll just chuck the tent in the garden and I'll just sleep shorter periods because I'm going to get hot. The body temperature is there. I can't do anything about it, but I just sleep shorter periods more often while it's hot because, you know, all the little things we get worried about change your duvet, do this, get the fans on, do this air conditioning, that sort of thing. Well, it's just hot, so your bodily functions are not sort of creating that natural body temperature. So you can have a cool shower, you can do this and you can do that, but that only impacts on the very start of any sleep period. It won't keep it going. So sleep shorter periods more often while that process is going on and you'll be absolutely fine because trying to sleep for eight hours in a hot environment, even with the fans on and all sorts of stuff is difficult. So it's kind of like, it's not happening every day, you know, like there's a, you know, within your world, within my world or anybody, you know, your kid's world to come. There's a period where they're running into exams, you know, and their anxiety and stress and worry and things like that will start to increase. You know, will they pass these exams? Will that mean this? The parents get worried, everybody else? But if you've actually got to approach, this is easy. We'll just bang, bang, bang, bang, do that like that, keep a nice balance to it, get them doing things in the right places. And suddenly you stop and it's not for everybody. You know, we live in cities and all of us have got gardens and all sorts of things. But you've been absolutely fascinating, like you asked me earlier on in the podcast, what do elite athletes do? Well, there will be, in anybody's room, in anybody's home, there will be a place where the temperature and the lights ticks more boxes than in other places. So when you can see that certain circumstances are going to come is that we would go and sleep in the kitchen or sleep in the lounge or sleep in the hallway or sleep in the garage or just sleep at the other end of the bed or sleep on the floor, not in the bed. And it's kind of, once you start to get that concept together, we mentioned earlier on about the Tour de France and three weeks on a tour, mental and physical recovery is massive. You've got sort of like three weeks of different hotels and different environments all throughout France. And so, you know, what's the point of trying to have the same approach to every single environment and every single thing? You just go in, adapt, choose that and that, and that's to maximize your recovery rather than trying to just do the same thing in so many different environments and so many different temperature changes. That can reveal, you know, there's a new generation coming along, you know, I bought this property, these are the rooms, fine, it's all laid out like that. Yeah. I'm a CEO. I do triathlons. I am an elite athlete because doing a triathlon, you can't do that in front of the weekends. I do this and I do that. I'm really into high performance and all this stuff. So actually, you know, my home is a recovery environment. Absolutely. It's a social environment, but also a recovery environment. And I just because they're built like this doesn't mean to say I have to use it like this. Very true. It's just changing that mindset slightly. But no, I think that's great advice. I mean, I do marathons, I work hard, all this stuff, but I also am caught up in this, got to sleep in my bedroom and it's really hard and I need to buy a fan and all these things. And no, it's great advice. Really good advice. You know, one thing you might, have you ever, you mentioned light? One thing is this whole sort of is it's something I start hearing everybody, you know, shut your tech down, blue lights bad for you. Yeah. So, well, okay, but can we just tell everybody how, how fantastic blue light is first, because it is absolutely natural and free. And it's the most wonderful thing for your brain and certain hormone. And let's not keep talking about how negatively straight away. Yeah, let's look at how positive it is and how we can manage it better. So if you wanted, maybe a lot of your listeners have already done these things, but if you download onto the app, you go into the app store and download a little thing called a lux light meter, it's free. And the reason I like the free one is because I can get all the young athletes to just download it on the phone while we're even sat outside, because we've got Wi-Fi and 4G and they just download it onto their phone, it puts a little dial on there and it measures the strength of light through the camera of what we're being exposed in where we're sat right now. And they measure light in what's called lux, that's why it's called the lux light meter, lumens. So there's no science, we're not sort of trying to evaluate light, we've got other products we can do that. It's just literally to get that group of people download it while you're outside, put it onto your phone, now what's it registering? And they go, well, I'm sat here and it's 60 odd thousand at the moment, 60 odd thousand, yeah, yeah, don't know what that means. And I've got 74 because I'm sat on the other side of the park. You've got 74, you've got 60, you've got 59, you've got there, okay, okay. Now let's just walk towards the building where it's dropping, Nick. Yeah, yeah, because we just went under the shade of a tree. We just started to get closer to this building. Now what's it reading? It's down to like 20,000. Okay, let's now walk inside. And this is a fantastically lit training center, fluorescent tubes everywhere, brightly lit light matter, we walk inside, and it drops to 500. And we go, what's just happened? Well, the thing is, is if you use this little light meter guys now to wander around your kitchen, your bathroom, your bedroom, your office on the train, walking to work, catching the bus in all your little places, and just get a relationship to what strength of light you are being exposed to. And then realize that outside at certain times during the day, that light is not burning your skin. It's not doing anything bad. It's literally just so much stronger. So if you were going to sit anywhere in this office, where would you sit? Well, not on that side of the room. I'd sit on this side of the room. Why? Because I'm getting a natural charge from a natural product that's making me in sync with this natural everyday tool. And if I can be outside in the right way and managing great. If I can't be, it's not a problem, but I need to do something about it. So I can get this level of light exposed to me on a day to day basis, wherever I am, whatever I'm doing. And then suddenly, you get a realization is you put that lux meter in front of your pad, in front of your laptop, in front of another phone. And you realize the strength of light coming off there is quite weak. You can put diffusers on it, you can knock the light down, you can put something on your phone, you can download a little app to do it. But it's sort of like, you should be doing that all day long. So it's like a lot of things is in moderation in in a healthy balanced way. It's from the point of way you need to feel as though you woke up outside. And if you don't, then you need to raise the level of light that's around you way beyond normal lighting, because that's diminished light. And once young athletes and even your kids get a realization that they are spending most of their time with their phone being charged up at a few bars every six or seven hours, when actually they want to get that phone charged in many, many bars every five or six minutes. So it's fully charged in a few minutes. And that's their concept about sort of using that little sort of simplistic terms, but charging them, it's keeping their brain fully lit up. It's keeping their whatever they're doing is being processed in the right way because they've got this level of light getting into their brains and triggering these things. And it is a little bit like, you know, wandering around, you need to keep yourself charged up with this beautiful natural process. So the worst thing you'd want to send to anybody is shut your tech down because of blue lights, because that's going to affect your sleep. What you've been doing since the point of wakes going to do that, not just before you get to that particular point. I'm more interested in the information overload that's going on running into that next recovery period. Because you just need to pull yourself away from it, do something else that's proactive and positive. Yeah. And don't laugh, Lewis. You are laughing already. I've already started. I can't help it. For all the CEOs and board members might be listening to this or sparring once in a while. We built, I didn't build them, the training center that built, you know, at least 10, 15 years, well, 10 years ago. And what we did is this particular room is where they have all their strategy meetings. And we put all the plug sockets on the wall, where the windows were, because not every room can have windows everywhere. And all we did is because we knew that everybody would come in and want to sit over that side so that they could plug their phones in and charge them up. So they don't even know what they're doing, right? But we just, we need to help the PMs. We don't need to help the AMs, but we need to get everybody much closer to this area of this room. We can put things on the other side as well, but we need to try and change their behavior without sort of telling them to do it. In a very short space of time, they could charge their phones up without a plug socket, because they had a little charger with them, portable charger. And then they just put all their phones on top of each other in the room and charge each other's phone. So what happens is there's such a dynamic change that sometimes you're doing that, and then sometimes that happens, then that happens, and that happens. And we used to create little moments and just say, there's two or three athletes, and we're talking to them about managing their recovery. And we're talking about how that importance is. And they're going, yeah, yada, yada, yada. But I got no fear and I'm doing everything. Yeah, but he's just trying to find these little things, guys, little things that just get you away from something. So it still feels positive. You're still doing stuff. But we just try, whether it's tech or whether it's this, it doesn't matter. It's just little moments in time when you can just have a few minutes. And it's just like this five minute meeting we've had today. Yeah. What do you mean? Well, we're in a swimming pool, guys, aren't we? Yeah, we've had this little meeting, this 10 minute meeting, and we're inside the swimming pool. And your phones are in the locker, technology is in the locker, we've left everything behind in the locker, and you're just focused on me. And we're also, but you don't feel doing something negative. We could do something now. So, but even then, so I think it's, it's not a challenge. It's just, once you've got these seven little areas inside and you can make little aggregating changes along there and keep adapting and everything else, then you don't stop. You know, this is not a technique that just stopped. This technique just keeps opening it up. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we had a bunch of them outside on the football pitch. And we're all smashing it up having a real old gamer's day. Because we've got 4G, we don't need everything else. And we're all, you know, doing the things that they love doing, but they were doing them outside because we could. And just that process starts to affect things. You don't have to do all your gaming inside your bedroom, inside the dark, and other because you could do it out there. So you get a double whammy, double whammy. So it's kind of, yeah. Anyway, I could ruffle on about that for a moment. I think it's amazing advice. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been great to speak to you and hearing your story. You've done so many great things. And I certainly am going to be implementing an awful lot of stuff when I get home tonight. Whether you're a CEO or a company or a big company, small less than me, whatever it is, whatever market place you're in, there's a lot of money and investment put into health and wellbeing and employee care and everything. But some little things that have really had a massive effect is just going to your business. And whether you do it intentionally or not, it's just spot how many PMers you've got around you and how many AMers you've got around you and your own crime. Because how you manage those people could start right there. And then if you've got, if the PMers would only, you know, start a revolution because they're in the majority, then you would get rid of daylight saving time. Or you can certainly get rid of that whole impact of the process inside your own little world. And don't ever make it a performance criteria. Because in sport, when anybody comes along and goes, we're going to start putting trackers on you to measure your sleep, to measure this and to measure that. And they just go, hang on a minute. This is going too intrusive. Too, too intrusive. We're never going to wake up in the morning and go, oh, I only got this. So I'm not going to train. I'm not going to do my business. I'm not going to do that podcast with Nick at 11 o'clock today. It's not going to happen. So you can bring it in as not a performance criteria because the CEO is going to fire everybody because they're not sleeping well. To expose it and have the conversation that it's not going to do anything other than help everybody bring themselves to their day in a more positive way. And every month and every season, if you can make subtle little changes of asking Nick to do the business accounts in the morning, not in the evenings, don't put him under pressure to produce that piece of work by that particular time because he's likely if he's encouraged. And so is a piano that the PM I would like to do the business accounts at one o'clock in the morning, not at nine o'clock in the morning, because that's their moment in science. So if you say to somebody, can I have revised business accounts by tomorrow morning, then they might do them at two o'clock in the morning when they feel that they're best to produce that information. You say to a PM, I want those series of strategies and accounts and analysis on my desk by two o'clock this afternoon, you're not going to get the bits that make the difference. They won't be there. No, I think it's great. It's about as a leader or manager of someone understanding what these people and when are they most productive, but also as an individual, realizing when you yourself are most productive and finding that out and looking at ways to find out is very interesting. Well, I've got I've got three colleagues who work with me. They're young and three of them. They're all three of them are PMs. And so I don't want them in my workspace until 10 o'clock in the morning, because if they try to come in here at half eight, nine o'clock, they're going to drive me nuts. All they're doing is sitting there, switching the counting out, having breakfast, chatting about Love Island, and all these happening. I'd much rather get all that out of the way and start work at 10. They leave at 4.30. That's not great business practice, but I want them to get home. I want them to go home, cook some nice food, maybe go to the gym, relax and everything else, enjoy their evening bang bang and strange enough. They're all working for me at 12 o'clock at night doing research, because that's their moment in time. Not everybody can do these things, but if you can just have a 10% shift within any organisation, that can be massive. Absolutely. Great. Well, that's a great place to end it. Thank you so much. How can people find you if they want to get in touch? I live in Nottingham if you live close. I think it's just all the normal stuff. We're sleepcoach.com. There's our main landing website. We've got lots of really quick first step services, because I know how difficult it is for anybody to think I'm going to go and speak to a sleep coach or do something. But there's some really simple, inexpensive first steps that people can take. We've got other more elite organisations services there, but we've got loads of free content on all of our platforms, Twitter, Instagram, things like that. We're linked into all of those things. We're always posting free stuff. We're always trying to find out what's working for people, what's not, whether it's supplements, Iron Mass, trackers, whatever. I encourage anybody, wherever they go, whether they come to us or not, do something like you did, read a book, get a little bit of knowledge, make those little first steps. Just because going to see a sleep coach or get some advice or to put these things in context, just like personal trainers, physios, yoga, pilates, all these things that we get involved with and try to develop our best approach. Of course we've got that together, but this is probably your best first step. Get that right and we'll be fine. Definitely. Thank you so much and great to have you on. No comments all of us. Thank you very much. Hey, folks. 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