 Hello, everybody. James Swanik here from Swanik Sleep. Nice to have you here. If you are watching on Facebook, if you're watching live on YouTube, if you're watching on the replay later on, thank you very much. Pleased to go ahead and post your question. Anything you have about Sleep, go ahead and post your question. Say hello to us. In fact, if you're just joining us, why don't you start off by typing which city and state and country you are actually watching from. And we are joined on today's show by the lovely Tara Youngblood, who is the co-founder and CEO at Chili Sleep, which is a company that I have invested in. And more specifically, they're wonderful products. The, well, I think it used to be called the Chili Pad, or maybe it's called something different now. Tara, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. We can clarify. Yeah, because we're gonna be talking about sleep today, how was your sleep last night? I was just curious, like how was your sleep and what was your sleep practice? Yeah, it was okay. I have to admit it was a Saturday night so I went out with some friends and had some drinks, which isn't good for my sleep. And I know that it isn't, but every now and then, especially now that we've opened up a little bit, it was really nice to go out with some friends. So I didn't have an awesome sleep. It was okay. The Chili Pad actually really does make a difference on that, but my resting heart rate definitely went down later than it would have without the alcohol. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. My sleep wasn't great either. And the mistake I made when I went to sleep too late, knowing that I was to get up early in the morning, where I am doing this at the moment is in Brisbane, Australia. So I'm in the future. It's tomorrow where I am. And I knew that I had to be up at 6.30 because it's 7 a.m. here. And I didn't get to sleep until sort of after 1130, closer to midnight. And I was up at about 6.15. So it was a, and then, you know, when you know you've got to get up a little bit earlier, you kind of like, for me anyway, I don't quite get into that deep restorative R-A-M face sleep. So the irony of this whole thing, Tara, is that we're both somewhat sleep experts, and we're both coming on here for pretty happy tonight. Not being able to brag about our night sleep. Yep. That seems very typical. I'm thinking about going live. Like, inevitably, something happens and I don't get great sleep, but... Yeah. Tara, you're the co-founder and the CEO of Chili Sleep, and you're the author of Reprogram Your Sleep, the sleep recipe that works. You're a speaker, and you've been on TEDx and spoken at the National Sleep Foundation Sleep Show. I've seen and hung out with your wonderful husband, Todd, a couple of times. That's some various sleep exhibitions around the place. And, you know, I mean, I'm the creator of the Swanee's Blue Light blocking glasses, so I'm somewhat of a sleep expert. And I think let's just touch on the first thing that you mentioned before we get into science and technology and sleep, because you are the creators of Chili Pad, which I want to ask you about and dig into. But the first thing you said was talking about alcohol. Let's talk about the last thing to do, the last few hours before one goes to sleep at night and the first few hours after someone wakes up, because I think there's a... I believe the biggest leverage that you can get in your sleep is what you do in those last three hours and very much what you do in the first 30 minutes of the day. So why don't you speak to the last few hours and also maybe the technology of sleeping throughout the night. And then I'll talk to first things in the morning. Sure, yeah. So I always base it on Clifford Sapier, Harvard was the first one to coin the term, but you want to be able to flip that sleep switch. And there actually is a switch to turn on and off and it's unconscious. The good news for both of our companies is it's light and temperature. Are the two things that are sort of our unconscious mind is looking to release the melatonin naturally and on all those hormones that help us get to sleep. So one of the things you want to do is create that framework. So it's set up properly to turn off your switch because it's a whole lot easier to flip that switch for sleep. If you've kind of done, like you said, that last three hours is really important. In our modern world, we like to have a bigger dinner and we didn't really evolve that way. Lunch was much heavier and we tend to want to stack that before dinner, but keeping food and alcohol out of that last three hours really helps a lot. Yeah. Yeah, when you have food and alcohol, your body's got to digest it and break it down and it's got to go to work. And we don't really want it to go to work, do we? We want it to go to rest, we want it to go to sleep. And people who are clinging on to drinking the alcohol certainly always try to argue with me and they'll say, oh, but having a glass of wine helps me unwind at the end of the day and it helps me fall asleep. And my response is always the same, which is it is true that the alcohol may make you drowsy and may help you to fall asleep. However, the quality of your sleep will be severely compromised as a result of you drinking that alcohol. And the same with food, isn't it? Because if you eat within the last three hours, your body's then try to break down that food. Yeah, so it is really in America in a way, I don't know what the statistics are for Australia, but a majority of Americans use alcohol to fall asleep. It's actually a pretty common problem. And what it steals from mostly is your deep sleep. So that's where I talked about my resting heart rate not going down until closer to morning because I had a drink. That's where your body wants to get cooler, it wants to be able to settle into that deep sleep. And if your metabolism is going quickly, you'll actually be hotter. A lot of people that are tracking that temperature will realize they're actually hotter that night as well from the alcohol. Yeah. And I mentioned before that I was going to talk about what to do with first thing in the morning. Well, actually at nighttime, obviously we like to encourage people to block as much artificial light as possible. So we encourage people obviously to wear a pair of blue light blocking glasses. This is, you know, Swanis from our company, Swannick. And, you know, because every time you're staring into a screen like this, you're tricking your body and your brain into believing that it's daytime. It actually, the light is actually stimulating your pineal and pituitary glands and that suppresses your body's ability to produce melatonin. And then first thing in the morning, I always encourage people to get as much natural sunlight as possible. Our skin has receptors in it. And when we stand in front of a window and let the sun come in or go outside for just even like two or three minutes and we let the sunlight hit our face or hit our, in my case, hit our bald heads. And... Hot as well. You have similar haircuts. Yeah. We hit our skin. It tells our internal body clock our circadian rhythm. Oh, this is daytime. And so our body wants to flood itself with daytime hormones and starts to like, cortisol starts to rise. Obviously we don't want a lot of cortisol throughout the day, but in the first part of the day, our bodies were high in that. And we're wanting to like, just trigger like, okay, this is daytime. And then, you know, about 12 to 16 hours later from that, the body knowing what time wake up was because it's got the sunlight on it is then going to start to prepare for sleep again. So... Yeah, respect to that sleep switch that I talked about. You know, again, you and I are both in that same thing. And for a lot of people, temperature is consistent in their house. And so there is no temperature change. But just like you want it to get dim because the sun's going down, you also want that temperature to go cooler in your house or trigger it by going outside and walking outside if it's cooler outside. So those same things, when you flip it off and then when you flip it back on again, it's a, the neurons, it's a clearer mechanism that that's what it needs to do. Yeah. Well, we're seeing some night shift workers come in. We've had a lot of conversations about that. I don't know about you, but we did a one-for-one with the COVID to healthcare workers and they are notoriously on shifts and not having great sleep. And so, you know, a lot of, we've had a lot of conversations about how to shift your circadian rhythm. We kind of talked about, you know, understanding and knowing when that clock is, you can shift it when you travel, like if you're going to Australia and you're going to flip it around, but it is possible to kind of retrain your body to shift and do that same pattern on and off, despite what time of day it is. Yeah. If you're just watching, you're just joining us, please do leave a message or ask us a question in the comments below and we'd be happy to answer your questions. So we talked a little bit about some simple natural things we can do. As natural as putting on a pair of glasses is obviously at nighttime, but you have a wonderful product that I have used. When I was living in Venice Beach, California for about 18 months or so, I used it. You were kind enough to let me have one of your wonderful products, the chili pad. So just tell me a little bit about how that uses science and technology to help people sleep better. Why don't you just explain what it is, what's the concept behind it and how it helps people? Yeah. So it really is all about those temperature triggers that we talked about. So at night when you're asleep, your body is trying to drop two degrees by your core body temperature, that's inside. So it doesn't sound like a lot, but when you think about your heart and lungs getting two degrees cooler, that actually has to put a fair amount of heat. And the thermodynamics of that aren't that complex if we were to not have blankets on top of ourselves, if we didn't have that squishy, blank comforter and mattress and foam and all that packed around us. All of that actually insulates that heat and makes it very difficult to shed that. So when we talk about sleep, we want to have at least neutral to cool to be able to enhance and enable our bodies to drop those two degrees. So what our product does is it kind of works like a radiator for your body. So if you think about your car engine, you have a radiator to keep it cool. And if you didn't, it would overheat. Your body needs that at night as well. And so we really have these water coils that go throughout the mattress and it maintains whatever temperature you set it at. So we do have the chili pad still, which is remote controlled. And it's kind of like your traditional thermostat where you set it and forget it and that it's one temperature. But then we also have the cooler, which allows scheduling. And if you think about it as a smart thermostat, so you can go ahead and for me, I like to warm up to fall asleep, but then that's not really good for my body to actually get great sleep. That's part of that recipe that I discovered. It turns out what makes me fall asleep isn't what keeps me asleep or really helps my sleep. So I have to get cooler once I fall asleep. So that's what enables you to do. It's a pad that goes over the mattress, isn't it? And now it's to the point where you can actually have a cool side and a warmer side. So if you sleep with a partner who likes cold and you sleep with a partner who likes slightly warm, you can actually have each side of the bed be different temperatures. Is that right? Yeah. Because Todd I think would sleep on a slab of ice if he could. And I like it cool, but not quite that cool. So anywhere south of body temperature, which in the US is that 98 and everywhere else in the world is 37. But as long as you're sort of south of that, you're actually still enhancing that cooling. So you can actually set it pretty warm and still be enhancing and mitigating some of that thermogenesis that's happening at night. It seems to be a general consensus that in Fahrenheit, 65 to 69 degrees Fahrenheit, a cool temperature seems to be the optimal temperature for sleep. Is that your understanding somewhere in that range? Yeah. So the problem about throwing it out that way is it doesn't take into effect that thermal dynamic environment underneath our blankets. It doesn't take into effect our metabolism, our BMI. It makes sense that someone with a high metabolism or you look at our NFL linemen football players here, those are big guys. They're gonna put off more heat and have a different dynamic than a small child. There's a pretty wide variety of how much heat's coming off in the middle of the night. So the biggest thing about setting that room temperature is you've actually are comforters and what we put over top of us with our blankets insulate us from that room environment. So depending, it has to be actually pretty cool for that to translate at that temperature. You're just mitigating some of the other factors slightly. You're not really at a spot where you're enhancing sleep or are optimizing that experience. And that's really where we're at is under your blankets, where your body is maintaining that temperature and really influencing that equation. The room helps some, but if you figure if you're covered up to your chin, the only ventilation is coming out through your head. And that's where a lot of people will flip their pillows and try to do that. Their head is trying to still vent all that extra heat. Yeah. The best way I could just maybe describe what the chili patty is, it's kind of feels like a hot water bottle. You know, when I was younger and I was, when I was ill, for example, my mom might make a hot water bottle and stick it under my back or under my body. And then if you're, you know, frightfully hot in the middle of summer, say, it might be a cool water bottle, right? It might be putting like an ice pack underneath your back instead. So you have that ability to be able to play with the temperature when you use the chili patty, yes? Yeah. And that's really the advantage. So we're not saying, you know, go with no air conditioning or, you know, set your room at 100 degrees and this is what it is. It's really an enhancement for that. It's really mitigating and thinking about the temperature inside there. So whatever temperature you want, whatever your metabolism is looking for to help keep you asleep. And a remarkable number of people wake up in the middle of the night and use the restroom and think it's, I needed to use the restroom and that's what woke me up. But a lot of times it's actually just that heat equation because if you're actually in deep sleep, your body emits a hormone that will prevent you from needing to use the restroom. But if you're waking up, it's more of a side effect of habit that is saying, oh, I guess I'll use the restroom. But a lot of times it's heat that's waking people up and they don't realize even a small amount of heat is gonna push you out of deep sleep during that first half of the night especially. Can a small amount of deep cold also push you out of that deep sleep? Yeah, you know, it can. Deep sleep, honestly, you can really push a lot of limits. You don't actually register temperature when it too much when you're in deep sleep, when you're actually in that deep sleep cycle. What it is is when you come through those cycles and you appear up in REM sleep, that's when you're gonna trigger either warm or cold. And so if you're too warm, you'll just go ahead and wake up or you're too cold, you'll just go ahead and wake up. But for most people that first half of the night is, although you cycle through all those different kinds of sleep, that first half of your night is your body's trying to drop to its lowest point. That's really the zone of best deep sleep. And so that's why, as you mentioned, when you don't go to sleep, when you're supposed to, that window just gets shorter. And so it's much harder to get that same quality of sleep if you've shortened that window and you really have to be conscientious if you're gonna shorten that window from eight hours. How and why and what are you gonna do to help mitigate that change of timing? Yeah, if you are watching and you're listening and you are curious about the chili pad, you can actually get 25% off using a swanic code. So if you just click on the link on the screen there, if you wanna go to chilitechnology.com but we've actually put a direct link straight there. And if you use the swanic code, which is swanic25, you will be able to get 25% off. I have used it, it's wonderful. I recall using it both in, well, I first started using it in summer and then I ended up using it in winter as well. So in summer I had it run cool and then in winter I had it run warm, obviously. So that was lovely. Mel here asks, do you recommend drinking cold water before sleeping? So a lot of this will depend on you as a person. So Tim Ferriss, for example, prior to using the chili pad would use an ice bath. So a real extreme part of that. But drinking cold water will help some, but you need to think about over the course of the three, four hours after you fall asleep, your core body temperature is gonna drop. So just a cold water may not be enough to really indicate that. But that cooler shower will do that. For some people, warming also, because it's all about that change of temperature, we're looking for some sort of change in temperature to trigger that sleep switch, certainly as part of falling asleep. Yeah, I hope that answers your question, Mel. Thank you. I've got Bianca who's watching on Facebook and Bianca on Facebook says, I can't get through the day without naps. It ruins my bedtime. Should I avoid naps? I'd say if you're really driven to do naps without being like shift work or when you're a true night owl, you can get away with it a lot more. But if it ruins your bedtime, then that is definitely something where you wanna try to push and try to keep that sleep where it should be. I'm actually a big proponent of naps in general, but it's about making sure you get the, if you're struggling to what you are, I would recommend at least tracking your sleep and being able to have a sense on what kind of sleep you're getting during those naps. Because there are shift workers that will use a polyphasic and they will take naps because they have to. But then they have to be conscientious of how much quality sleep and what kind of sleep they're getting and being balanced in that approach still. Yeah, thank you so much for your question, Bianca over on Facebook. And if you're just watching or you're watching on the replay, go ahead and type your question in and we will do our best to have it answered for you here. And just a reminder, if you click on the link, there is a link there to Chili Technology where you can use the code SWANIC25 or 25%. Oh, if we're talking to Tara Youngbud, who is the co-founder and chief executive officer at Chili Sleep and then the author of Reprogram Your Sleep, The Sleep Recipe. So eight hours sleep a night. Is that a myth or is that super important? Is that the most important thing over the quality of sleep, Tara? Oh, I love that question. It is one of my favorites, actually. So eight hours is absolutely something that came about as part of the industrialized world. Prior to that, we actually slept in multiple phases, at least two, depending on which culture you came from. So it's actually because we became driven to have work start and end at a specific time that we had a drive to have sleep exist in a particular grouping. And so it is one of my pet peeves and I think very damning for a lot of people that eight hours is the one and only sort of holy grail. It's more, for me, I look at, when you look at a 20-year-old, they're getting two hours of deep sleep, two hours of REM sleep, that's a good balance. It's a good amount of either of those types of sleep. And so if you can, with the chili pad, for sure, using blue light glasses, flipping the switch, timing it, you can actually get that in six hours, it is possible. It's just about being very succinct and making sure you're doing it right. Todd, as a night owl, actually doesn't tend to sleep eight hours, but he does do a nap and he loves his power naps. So a lot of it is, it's all possible and I think it's very individualized. I think it's a good benchmark of if you're not sure, start with eight and making sure you're waking up and you shouldn't feel tired in the afternoon, you should feel rested if you've spent eight hours in bed, but if you're spending those eight hours and it's not feeling good and you're restless and you're waking up, that's definitely, that means you need to start breaking down sleep and look at, well, what is my recipe to get good quality sleep? Yeah, so interesting. Just a clarifying question with your products, Todd, what is the difference between the chili pad sleep system and the oolar sleep system? Is there a difference? Yeah, so the chili pad is the remote control, it's sort of that standard thermostat, set it and forget it. A lot of people, they just love that simplicity and they're not doing a lot of changes in their sleep. So throughout the course of the night, they're gonna pick that one temperature and they're good to go, chili pad is absolutely that. The oolar is kind of our next evolution, it has an app, it has scheduling itself cleans. So it has a UV light, it has multiple fan speeds. So depending on what you think of white noise, you can adjust that and also be able to adjust it as far as boost its performance or have it in silent or somewhere in between. So it's kind of just that evolution of being able to take it to the next level. Yeah, so we actually have a 15% off code for that as well on the oolar sleep system. It's just in the comments there, if you use the discount code SWANNIC15. So the chili pad is the OG, the original gangster, so to speak, that's the one that I used or you can use the ramped up model, which is the oolar sleep system and we have a code there that views SWANNIC15 for 15% off. What about caffeine, Tara? What are your thoughts on people who drink cups of coffee before they go to sleep each night? So I love that question as well. Todd is definitely one of those people we met in college and he would have a full pot of coffee and then literally go to sleep. Now, if I were to do that, I'd be wired into next week and that is not how I work at all, but there is about 5% to 10% of the population that their caffeine receptors are basically don't work and they don't work like they do for the rest of us. So caffeine for most of us really should stay, again, outside of that bedtime window, but there are definitely people like Todd that it doesn't matter at all. So again, that's one of those things that I hear when I give talks a lot, they'll hear certain tips and they're like, well, that tip doesn't work for me, so I threw them all out. It's important to keep in mind that not all sleep tips, not all health tips are gonna be applicable to you. You really have to kind of A-B test and figure out for yourself. Yes, this is definitely something that triggers me and for most people they either know yes, caffeine is it and if you have a cup of coffee in the morning, you're gonna feel it or if you don't feel it, then please use other tips to make that recipe work. Yeah, we can, in many ways we can generalize, but then there are always unique cases or there's always a percentage that, you know, it's personalized health, right? Like we can say blanket statements like you should eat lots of vegetables and you should limit your red meats intake, but then there are people out there who just do the caveman diet and eat nothing but red meat and all of their markers seem just fine. Whereas other people who eat less red meat have, you know, get very high cholesterol and, you know. Yeah, I had a great aunt and I swear she was firecracker and she smoked and drank and, you know, lived into her 90s and was a firecracker till then. So all the metrics like they would say, ooh, don't do that. You know, there is always gonna be exceptions to that. It is all about you finding and, you know, kind of the language of being a CEO for your own body and understanding, yes, this is what works for me or that is not it. And even between light and temperature, you'll find that there's tons of people that are very sensitive to the light. They should absolutely be using glasses and possibly all day just to manage that. You know, it's not even just a bedtime thing and yet temperature is very similar. There's a lot of people that like, oh, that's definitely a big issue for me. Yeah, so what you're saying is that I should go out and buy a pack of cigarettes, buy a six pack of beer, get some McDonald's, get a meal on the way home tonight and crawl into bed around 12, 30 because I'm the exception to the rule. Ooh, I'd cross your fingers really hard and hope that your genetics is that one in a million that is gonna make that work. And if it is, God bless you, but for the rest of us, doesn't seem to work. But again, there's always exceptions and that's what's important to really own your recipe. Yeah, we've got one of our Facebook viewers right now, Sharif Soror is saying, L-O-L, laugh out loud. Sharif is thinking, why would you, you eat a McDonald's Burger King every time. All right, so we are talking to Tarah Youngblood, CEO of the Chili Sleep and author of Reprogram Your Sleep, the sleep recipe that works and we're talking about how to optimize your sleep quality using science and technology. Anything else that you might use to, maybe any other technology just besides the Chili Pad or the Ula that you use to optimize your sleep or have used in the past, Tarah? You know, actually the big part of my recipe goes back to, again, starting the day, flipping off that switch. I mimic the idea that if you go outside in the morning and get that outside, I call it the stress monster probably because I have four boys and I've had to explain this to them over the years, but you wake up in the morning and the stress monster is good. He helps you get going. It's part of what gets you moving. But if he gets really big throughout the day and right now there's a lot of stressors out there between pandemics and everything else that can be pushing you. Every time you look at social media, that ups that stress monster. And by the time you get into bed at night, if that stress monster has grown throughout the day and you haven't squished them down to keep them nice and manageable, that's where a lot of people will be struggling to fall asleep, that racing mind, all of those kinds of things. And so it is about getting the adore friends going outside. Dopamine is a good response to that. Get stuff done, make a list, accomplish something. Even in weird times, you can still say, I did this, I made my meals, I got my bed made, all those little things, do that list. Another great one is oxytocin. That's my favorite because I have teenage boys so I make them give me five hugs a day. That's a good other way to manage stress even in quarantine, who's ever in your quarantine team. We still need to touch each other and connect. All of those are easy ways to help keep that stress monster managed. But that's a big part of my recipe, breathing, gratitude, meditation, any of those things you can do to keep that stress monster, he is not friendly to sleep. Yeah, I have a gratitude journal here and I write down 20 things that I'm grateful for each morning. I got pages and pages of things that I'm grateful for and that certainly helps me throughout the day. I tend to do it first thing in the morning rather than at nighttime, but there's no reason why you couldn't do it at nighttime. This is a reminder of what was great about today because all too often speaking from my own experience, sometimes I'll get to the end of the day and I'll have a little bit of stress. I'm pretty good, like I'm not a high stress person but sometimes maybe last night, actually I had a little bit of stress. I think I was working a little bit too late and thinking about the week ahead and then when I go to sleep, my mind's working and then as soon as I wake up, I'm thinking about work. I think I'd like to change that. I think I will commit to change that. What do you think, Tara? Yeah, I love it. We started a habit that came from the boys when they went to summer camp and that is, what was your daily good for the day? So what did you do to sort of give back what's some small thing that you contributed? What was your highlight of the day and what were you grateful for? And so those are our three questions that we close the day with when I'm tucking them in and then honestly, they usually ask it back which is really great and be able to have that conversation of, yeah, this turned out it was a really good day because when you reflect on almost every day we're very blessed in our world that we can look back and say, yes, every day there was something to be grateful for, something that I did was good and that helps settle that mind a fair amount. Alayna Federick over at Swannick is saying, I hear you, Tara, I have five boys and that stress monster is pretty big. Morning routine is so important. I also avoid media to help with self-care. Yeah, putting rules around that is pretty important especially it can, it just sucks you in and it generally doesn't do good stuff for your stress monster at all getting sucked into all of those issues. Try to, a lot of the phones now have given you like screen time and being able to keep track of that. So it's, I would set good goals for yourself and try to continue to be, when did I use my phone? When was I on electronics? And did I keep it in the windows that I wanted to or did I sort of sneak in, binge watching Netflix is a really hard one especially you'll get stuck and it's like just starts the next thing but it is really important to try to keep that you certainly out of that bedtime window and to try to mitigate that taking over a bigger chunk of time than you want it to. Yeah, I find it's been challenging for me to pull away from consuming so much media. I used to be a newspaper reporter. I used to be a magazine reporter. I used to be a television host and so I was, I spent the first almost 20 years of my professional life in the media and now that I'm out of it, I still like to observe it. However, I have noticed that, I have noticed until recently that I slipped into a like overconsumption of media, overconsumption for me and it's frightening how challenging it is to pull away from media. Just this kind of like habit of going to news sites and looking at the latest stories of the day and being and watching people's outrage over certain issues and me feeling outrage over people's outrage on super issues and politics and things like that. And then it's so prevalent in today's society like even when you just catch up with family members or friends that everyone wants to talk about the news of the day and so you get sucked back into it but on those occasions where I have limited my media exposure I have definitely felt the correlation of increased happiness or if not increased happiness certainly reduced stress and anxiety. Has that been your experience? Yeah, absolutely. I have to really create again, it's really easy to get sucked in same sort of things. There's always stuff going on, answering questions or whatever and then you're down a rabbit hole and suddenly you've lost time and you're more stressed. So it really is, I have to create pretty strong rules for myself otherwise I end up at the end of the day again with that big stress monster staring me in the eye and then it's harder. It's not that you can't overcome it. I do use yoga near draw and breathing exercises. So if you do get to that bedtime window and you're absolutely stuck it's not to say you can't unstick it but it sure is a whole lot easier if you're managing it throughout the day instead of kind of hoping at bedtime you can make it work. If you have sleep questions go ahead and post them in the comments here below we'd love to answer them. I've got Bianca here asks about decaf coffee. She says can't live without coffee. Spoken like a true coffee addict. Bianca decaf, what do you think Tara? Yeah, I think at all of those sort of things I'm a big proponent of balance, whatever that is. So if you can't live without it try to find a way to do it but it's kind of like sweeteners versus real sugar and you can get really into a heated debate about sweeteners and trying to fake it because you're not willing to give up that sugary soda or that drink. And it's all about picking the habits and the habits you feel like you want to change. So if coffee is affecting your life then probably it should be targeted as something you want to look at or consider. But if it's not and decaf works and you've got other things on your list you're working on that's where there shouldn't be sort of that damnation part that goes with help and wellness. It should be whatever path works for you is really important. So if you've got your decaf and you got your coffee routine go for it. Yeah, whatever path works for you go for it but I would offer that McDonald's and smoking and beer and all that kind of stuff is probably not really working for you. I don't even know about those things. Like you do that, you overdo that it's probably not gonna work for you. No unless you're Aunt Winnie probably not. Probably not. Have someone on Facebook here, Pictorial Lane I quit smoking with the help of a patch. Any chance of a sleep patch happening? Yeah, actually there are some sleep patches. I'm trying to remember the name of the brand. They're very similar to supplements. It's just a way of dosing the supplements. So I'll try to in the follow up notes try to remember the brand for that. But there are some sleep patches there's some great sleep supplements out there but I would also encourage you again they're generally a mix of a punch of different environments melatonin it's way healthier to wear those blue light glasses or use temperature use your body's natural triggers to try to get it first as by far the better way to do that. But melatonin especially with jet lag or as you're trying to reset something isn't necessarily a bad thing or even some of those supplements. It's just at least my opinion for me. I try to do it every other way before I put anything different in my body. If you're joining us and you would like to test out one of Tara's sleep devices which is the chili pad or the Ula system. We do have some discounts there. So there's 25% off the chili pad if you use the code SWANNIC25 and we've got a link in the comments there. And if you would like to try the Ula system which is the fancier version then and the newest version then we have a code that says SWANNIC15. If you'd like to follow Tara Youngblood for some more sleep tips ongoing Tara you can follow her on Facebook at sleepgeek.me that's facebook.com forward slash sleepgeek.me And of course, as always you can grab a pair of SWANNICs blue light blocking glasses from our SWANNIC sleep store and follow us on Facebook at SWANNIC by SWANNIC. And there's a link there in the comments as well for anything that I just referenced. Okay, who we got here? Someone's asking on Facebook curious about the genesis of chili pad. What's the story behind the technology? So we touched on that a little bit but why don't you just touch on how this came to be? Yeah, well it actually is really fun and multi-generational if you consider that Todd's uncle invented the water bed and then Todd and I have brought lots of other products to market. So chili pad was honestly a natural market niche we saw when people were coming out temperopedics like comfort we're adjusting pressure in the bed and at the same time microclimate control in cars of driver and passenger being able to adjust the temperatures differently. Todd and I as I mentioned both sleep very different temperatures. So we were like, yes, let's put this in the bed because that makes absolute sense to us. Honestly, we thought it was much more about those comfort metrics kind of matching to pressure matching to adjusting it in a car. It turns out very similar as we talked about that light and temperature actually talk to your unconscious brain. And so the beauty of temperature or light is unlike a diet where you're like, okay, I have to have willpower. And even as you put those glasses on it's not like you have to think through it you put your glasses on or you set your chili pad those type of things, that's unconscious. It's talking to your hypothalamus that regulates your heartbeat. You don't suddenly stop beating your heart when you're not thinking about it. It's in that same part of your brain which is pretty magical. And that is amazing. But we didn't know that when we invented it. It just kind of came, the science kind of came along at the end of it, which is a really good perk, frankly. Yeah, I love that. Love that natural evolution. Well played. Well done, Todd and Todd. And well done, Todd's uncle. Yes. Yeah, he can move them up as Charles P Hall. It's the 50th anniversary of the water bed. So if you ever had one, it's been 50 years since it first came out. Wow. Alayna was saying, hey, I love using herby tea as a coffee replacement, naturally caffeine free and often you can use that one helps with sleep and relaxation, which is great. And Alayna is also saying, Tara, do your kids have any sleep routines? This is one of our household struggles as they get older and want to stay up longer, way past when their old parents can stay up. Yeah, so this is absolutely a big issue for me. And the US, there's multiple reasons why our lifetime expectancy has actually been decreasing. And unfortunately, a lot of it has to do with under 25 that suicide rate is going up. And the anxiety for our kids is terrible. And they're attaching it to this lack of sleep. And it's not to say that if they don't get one night sleep they're gonna be suicidal. But that long-term trend of not getting good sleep is very harmful for them. Their brains are still developing, especially that prefrontal cortex all the way up to the age of 25. So there's a real need for them to get good sleep. And electronics, whatever that form is of TV and phone and that social for them is a huge driver. Gaming is really big in our house. We have two guys that live and breathe and it is absolutely have had to create rules around it. I'm obviously very neurotic about sleep. But one of the things that all of my boys use now I started using it and then they kind of came along we do have a cooling and heating weighted blanket but I will say that weighted blankets is a great way when they say, I'm not tired I don't wanna go to sleep talking them in even at 15, 16, 17, literally the 17 year old can't sleep without his weighted blanket makes it sound he's six two, so he's not like this little guy he's this big guy he's probably good thing he's not on Facebook watching me but weighted blankets can be a really big lift for them as far as reducing that spin that they're going through and stopping that racing mind it's a great hack for them but anything you can do to try to keep their bedtime they need an enormous amount of sleep in order to keep growing that brain and that prefrontal cortex that ability to make good decisions is really all forming and we need to give them good sleep to continue to form that properly. What, how does a weighted blanket work? I must admit I haven't done into this like what is it about something that's a heavy blanket why does that help you sleep? So it's the deep pressure it was originally started for children with autism and they went through it sort of that deep pressure therapy but it really it releases serotonin so when you have deep pressure and again serotonin is one of those things that helps you sleep it helps reduce anxiety it helps balance that stress monster that we've been talking about but it is amazingly magical it is kind of like I talked about temperatures like shouldn't be really that easy but it really is that easy to reduce stress and anxiety just putting something heavy on you. Yeah, I like that something heavy on me so it's probably most comfortable is putting a whole bunch of bricks on yourself then. Bricks would be less comfortable I would definitely start with a blanket before bricks but even my dog loves the weighted blankets so now I end up with like the dog and at least one cat also on there so they've added extra weight to my weighted blanket regime. How does your chronotype impact deep sleep? And your chronotype refers to your body's internal clock so maybe you could just clarify or just elaborate on that a little bit and talk to that Tara? Yeah, so chronotype I think is one of the best pieces of health information easy to get but it is so empowering when you understand how that works it works beyond just sleep, it works and everything and it makes sense that any machine the computers were on they all have clocks inside they all are sort of run by that mechanism of a clock and your body does too and it's driven by genetics, your P-E-R-3 gene drives it you can influence it like we talked about with that shift but it is driven whether you're a morning person or a night person or somewhere in between and it is a pretty broad spectrum of what that is you could, there's a way far morning and way far night and lots of people in between but you can take a chronotype quiz online we have one on our website we can include in the show notes but when you understand that it tells you when that bedtime window that switch timing really helps that the reason you wanna time your sleep to match that and even your nap because there is also a dip in the afternoon but again, we talked about that core body temperature dropping all of your mechanisms are geared towards that so again, when you flip the switch off properly in the morning by getting outside saying it's fishly off, I'm done sleeping I'm moving on with my day you start towards that drive to sleep and you're looking to flip it on and knowing that window means that you've just emphasized your rest of the you've just amplified that result by doing it right and for deep sleep again, that window starts when you go to sleep and it doesn't matter if you've decided to stay up late like you did if your normal routine if your body's looking for going to bed at 10 o'clock and you go to bed at 12 unfortunately it just means two hours less of that deep sleep window it just makes it much harder to still get deep sleep because it really wants to be in that first half of the night when your body temperature is dropping REM sleep is usually happier as you're warming up and you can get better REM sleep it is one watch out with the chili pad if you get too cold and that's where the cooler helps if you warm it up you'll actually help your REM sleep in the morning so that second half of the night you're emphasizing REM but it is very temperature driven and it helps but timing is everything the power of when the power of when you do stuff really does matter Yeah, let's wrap this up as we head for home Tara I want to kind of just close out really with how we would sleep like a superhero and what I mean is like generally speaking what's like the gold standard of sleep from when you wake up in the morning and the actions you take or the actions you don't take right up until you go to sleep and then hopefully sleep many hours of beautiful deep REM restorative sleep so you wake up in the morning feeling nice and refreshed and restored unlike both you and me today obviously as we admitted at the beginning of the call both and interesting for different reasons right like so your reason was you had a couple of drinks with friends last night my reason was I went to bed later than I ordinarily do and got up slightly earlier than I ordinarily do so let's start with the morning so first thing in the morning and I'll kick this off what I suggest if we're doing a gold standard sleep is try to get as much natural sunlight as possible I know I just touched on this a few minutes ago but first things first let the sunlight hit your skin tell your body's internal clock your circadian rhythm this is wake up time and that is gonna help you fall asleep and prepare for sleep later on at night over to you Tara what's next? All right so this is where I have to give the credit to BJ Fogg and Tidy Habits it's a great book if you've never read it but his philosophy is there's tiny habits throughout the day so when you're looking for that perfect sleep recipe it is not in grand gestures as you said it could be just getting some sunlight on your skin is enough so think about what you're doing throughout the day one of his great analogies on average a human being uses the restroom seven times during the day and what I try to do even in quarantine to sort of I love my kids but take one extra minute in the restroom and breathe for that minute try to do less in than out whatever works for you box breasts there's multiple different breathing techniques but throughout the day manage that stress monster in all the ways that we talked about try to have your heavier meal at lunchtime all of those kind of things if you're a morning person and you're gonna work out try to do that earlier in the day all of those habits build towards that bedtime and then cutting off caffeine in the afternoon and cutting off food and alcohol that three hours before you hit your window is part of building that ideal day towards sleep. Yeah I think studies have shown that you wanna cut off your caffeine within eight hours of sleep so if you're gonna go to sleep at 10 no coffee after 2 p.m. I mean I have a blanket rule I just don't drink coffee in the afternoon if I have coffee I mean I go months and years without drinking coffee. A lot of it's to think of the half-life right so part of it is people like well why do you need to cut it off it's really because that is how long it takes to get out of your system where it's not going to have an influence on your receptors and so that is part of understanding that it's really that's how long it takes your body to dump that caffeine effect entirely even though you fill the buzz of the caffeine immediately it's actually that lift and that staying in your body still has an effect on your sleep just cause it takes that long to flesh out. Yeah they've done studies that show that people who exercise in the morning tend to sleep better as well and they believe it's cause of two reasons one because people who exercise in the morning tend to do it more as a habit just like you referenced BJ Fogg there the world's leading habits expert when you're exercising in the morning you tend to do it more regularly before life gets in the way and people who exercise regularly tend to be healthier overall which helps them sleep overall and then also because you don't want to sleep close to the bedtime because it raises your core body temperature which we know is anti-conjusive to a great night sleep. So I like to exercise in the morning not for everyone but I certainly like to do that that keeps me feeling healthy and strong and I find that it helps me sleep at night no caffeine in the afternoon gratitude and anything you can do to reduce stress and anxiety throughout the day you came up with a few great things. One of the things you referenced there before about BJ Fogg it's interesting we use the bathroom we flush the toilet seven times a day BJ Fogg actually has this system where you create a little rule for yourself it's like when I X I will X and celebrate with X so what you can do is when I flush the toilet I will think of three things to be grateful for and I will celebrate by washing my hands and now you've created a whole new habit and if that's seven times you're using the bathroom each day and three things to be grateful for you've just knocked over your daily 20 your 20 things to be grateful for in the day. Yeah his philosophy is just magical that way it isn't and he has a great I think new emotion called shine and it's a great sense because when you think of being proud of yourself or whatever but that moment of like shine and he say that it can be as simple as throwing that paper towel and hitting that basket you have a moment of like oh that felt good that feeling reinforces habits so anytime you can attach that little bit of shine that little bit of reward that little bit of feel good at the end that just reinforces those healthy habits and well it feels good. Yeah and then of course at night time block as much blue light and artificial light as possible our bodies weren't designed to be subjected to all of this artificial light especially at night time which disrupts our sleep pattern so where a pair of the Swanee's blue light blocking glasses there's a link in the comments here below where wherever it is where you can go and check out our range of blue light blocking glasses I'm wearing the classic pair at the moment and then certainly try out the chili pad and the Euler system which Tara and her husband Todd have created which can control the temperature of your sleep or the temperature of your bed and therefore your body's temperature as you sleep throughout the night and we've put a link up there just to remind you that if you'd like 25% off the chili pad there's a link there and if you'd like 15% off the upgraded Euler system there is a link there as well. Let's do just two more quick fire away questions here question is coming from Melanie says my kids don't use thick blankets but they can't sleep without at least three pillows under their heads. Is there any harm in letting them do that? I try to take one out when they fall asleep but they wake up. I think it's really interesting they're actually that you're seeing it in some of those adjustable beds actually for people that are snoring having a little bit of incline can actually help and actually we've had one of our boys has asthma and when he would get congested we would absolutely prop them up because it can help you breathe it doesn't really hurt them so as long as they're not doing anything funky but kids are magical you'll see a baby sleep like frankly arms head over heels backwards upside down just about and they're still sleeping fine so sleep is sleep is sleep and what feels good is generally the right thing if you're getting good sleep it's right probably. Yeah, well thank you so much Tara so appreciate you joining us here and for your words of expertise on all things sleep where can we follow you on social media I think you have a pretty cool Instagram page, right? Yeah, so I think it looks like they're popping up on the screen there you can also find my book on Amazon I think every book in the world on Amazon just up but you can find my book reprogram your sleep there as well and if you're not much of a reader the TEDx talk kind of gives you the cheat version in about 16 minutes so just go to YouTube TEDx YouTube panel and you can get the cheater version that way. Yeah, and there's some links in the comments here below where you can follow Tara on Twitter and a link to her book and you can follow her on your Instagram and on her Facebook page. We've got the young boy behind us he wants to be a television anchor you want him to be on the show, come on, come on, up you come, let's go. There you go. I'm very boy friendly, we have 15 four boys and then we always seem to, Todd teaches me I collect lost boys and so I've been up with my parents and had other boys over the years that have come to live with us so I tend to collect boys I'm not sure why I don't have a problem against girls but for whatever reason they end up on my doorstep so pretty good. Milana, Alayna Frederick from Swannick Sleep likes to collect boys as well so between you two you could run a whole boys commune I think. I think so, actually I dream of retiring and having a farm and goats and like total natural experience and I keep thinking that it'll be a good place to collect boys that will show up. Well Tara, thank you so much for your time thank you so much for your expertise I so appreciate you and yeah, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, have a great day.