 All right. Why is sleep important? We're going to be talking about all things sleep today. As you know, if you're a long-time listener of the show and you know that I have my swanis blue light blocking glasses, which help help you sleep better. And I love to talk about sleep. Sleep is super important. None of us are getting enough of it. And today we're going to talk about ways that you can sleep better. And we're going to talk about maybe sleep being the reason why you're carrying a few extra pounds, or maybe you're a little bit stressed, or maybe you don't have the love life that you want, or maybe you aren't performing in the bedroom the way that you would like. And it might not be sexual dysfunction. It might just be because you're not sleeping very well. Sounds crazy, but it's true. And today we're going to be talking to a US Navy SEAL by the name of Dr. Kirk Parsley. And Dr. Parsley spent much of his time serving as the undersea medical officer at Naval Special Warfare Group One. So it's safe to say, given his credentials that that Kirk knows what it takes to be fit tough and to get the job done. But he's also a sleep expert. He's been a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine since 2006. He served as Naval Special Warfare's expert on sleep medicine. And today he helps people achieve optimal health. Dr. Kirk Parsley, how are you, sir? Great to have you here. It's great to be here. Thanks. I'm doing quite well. Well, you're probably doing well because you slept well last night, right? Of course. I sleep well every night. How could I have integrity otherwise? Maybe once in a while, I don't get enough sleep. Yeah, I'm pretty good. Just before we get into some sleep habits here, Kirk, Navy SEAL, tell us a little bit about what it was like being a Navy SEAL. Well, I don't know how long it took to show, man. Being a Navy SEAL is probably the best time of my life, I guess. But it was my early 20s, which was probably the best time in any of our lives for a lot of reasons. I mean, it was a great place to spend your 20s. I got paid to do the stuff that everybody else was paying to go learn how to do. I mean, I had skydiving, I was rock climbing, I was scuba diving, I was whatever racing, running dune buggies, driving off road vehicles, blowing stuff up, shooting machine guns. I was a SEAL during the Clinton administration, so it was different. That's what we call the dry years. We kind of operated more like police officers than we did any real military force. So those are kind of the Hollywood days. They call them the SEAL teams. It was a lot of fun. I mean, obviously, it's really hard work and it's really hard training to get into. Once you become a SEAL, everybody thinks the SEAL training is the tough part, but it's a lot harder than the training one. But yeah, I mean, it was a really great time. You've seen that movie with Demi Moore, G.I. Jane, back from the 90s. You know where she's the... Unfortunately I have, yeah. And she goes through as the only woman trying to get through Hell Week, which is this very famous week where they put you through Hell, right, to try and get... Don't sleep for a week. You don't sleep a week. And ironically, I become a sleep doctor, right? And how realistic is that when you see Hell Week portrayed in Hollywood movies like G.I. Jane and other things like that? How realistic is that? Well, I mean, there's not much as realistic about Hollywood in general, obviously. I'd say Active Valor is probably the most realistic SEAL movie, and that's because almost all the actors in it are SEALs. But there is definitely some creative liberties taken with that movie as well. But Hell Week... I mean, I think it's been a long time since I saw G.I. Jane. I saw it whenever it was out. So it's not something... It's probably one of the least accurate. I just got some said our connection's unstable. Hold on. I have you back now, I think. No? Yep, I got you there. Let's carry on. Yep. Yeah, I mean, I think I remember correctly that she was... She was kind of this lone wolf, and everybody hated her, and everyone was trying to break her, and she beat everyone. That shit doesn't happen. There's no way. I mean, it's definitely an organization where if they hate you, you aren't going to make it through training. That's kind of the way it's set up because it's a team effort. Is there really a bell there that you have to go and ring the bell if you're going to quit? For the first few days, and then after that, you're so cognitively out of it. It's, I guess, staying sane and staying cognitively able to follow instructions. I mean, you have people hallucinating and running off in all different directions. It's kind of a mess. Once you keep people up for about 72 hours, they're pretty useless, especially since you're just doing physical activities all day, every day. I mean, from the time it starts to the time you stop, it's just the only time you're resting is when you're eating. The rest of the time you're running, paddling, swimming, digging huge ditches on the beach with paddles, just silly stuff to get guys kicked. And how long did you go with sleep deprivation when you were doing any of the stuff that you were doing with the Navy Seals Kirk? I think I've lost you. You're frozen. Okay, let's have a look here. So Kirk, what was the longest time you went with sleep deprivation, either during Hell Week or when you were a Navy Seal? And what happened to you and to your body when that happened? Well, depends on what you mean by sleep deprivation. You mean complete absence of sleep? Yeah, well, everything to give us the absence and not enough. So the longest I've ever stayed awake is during Hell Week. And, you know, you doze off here and there. So I can't say that I absolutely never slept during that week, but there's no time allocated for sleep. So you might fall asleep underneath your boat or something for a few minutes or something like that. But so that's from, let's see, Sunday, Sunday evening or Sunday afternoon they start. Of course, you've been up since Sunday morning and then you're awake until Friday afternoon. And like I said, super physical, lots of harassment sort of to keep you awake. Not really falling asleep isn't really an option unless the instructor's on around, which was very minimal. Now, the longest I've gone without adequate sleep is about 15 years. So probably starting right around that Hell Week time a little bit before, well, probably even before that. I mean, just the military in general is an organization that doesn't really value sleep. I mean, I've probably chose the worst two professions, like being a Navy SEAL and then being a doctor. Neither one of those professions really value sleep and they're very bad at regulating sleep. So I'd say during Hell Week that was a short duration. I was young. I mean, I was 19 years old when I went through SEAL training, so I'd still make a rubber. I could do anything. But I went from being a SEAL. I was in the military for six years. I got out, went to college, worked, had kids, was married while I'd just gone through college. So working and having a family and going to college full-time, trying to get into medical school, you can imagine how much I slept. 45 hours is probably a good night. Got to medical school, kind of the same thing. Slept about and then we got into, I got into another phase of training after that when I was doing the undersea medical school training where I actually had, or the undersea medicine training where I actually had a chance to get some sleep. And I thought, I don't know, I just thought it was kind of getting old, but I mean, I was losing my hair. I was forgetful. I had a lot of anxiety, actually. I mean, that's one of the biggest side effects of sleep deprivation is anxiety for very obvious reasons. Once you learn the physiology of sleep, I mean, bad body composition, bad athletic performance, you name it. I mean, there's nothing that sleep deprivation doesn't make you worse at and there's nothing that sleeping well doesn't make you better at. And as I understand it, we're sleeping about 20% less than what we slept about 30 years ago. And I think we're sleeping like four hours less a night than what we were sleeping 200 years ago. So how has this happened? Like, how are we progressively like not taking our sleep seriously, I guess? Yeah. Well, I mean, we get into heavy philosophical unsubstantiated and unsubstantiated of all claims here at this point. But I mean, I think it makes good sense that sleep deprivation started along the time of industrialization and rural electrification. So before you had lights at night, it was pretty hard to do anything at night. And so we use the sun as our cue once we had electric light bulbs. And around that same time is when at least in America, that's when it was like, you know, Ford was building his motor plants. And we had the railroads and all this industry where people could work shifts and time became money. And if you could work a few more hours, you can make a few more nickels. And if you can make a few more nickels, you could buy a few more loaves of bread or whatever in those days. And yeah, I mean, once time became money, it became the first thing that people gave up to get money, which is ironic, you know, because, you know, their sleep began the first thing they because they everybody equates, well, it's only waking time. That's money. Well, no, it's sleeping time. That's money as well. And in fact, I'd make the argument that sleeping time is more lucrative than though than the waking time. Yeah, they've done they've done studies that show that your people who sleep consistently well make more money than those who don't, you know, it's, if you're trying to convince people of the merits of because there seems to be this whole idea in modern society, which is like, push through, don't sleep, be the entrepreneur who's like, you know, burning the midnight oil, so to speak, there's there are songs, you know, I'll sleep when I'm dead. And, you know, I'll live while I'm alive, I'll sleep while I'm dead, I'm going to go on party, you only live once, you know, because you only live once, you should stay up to three or four in the morning. And then, you know, get a few hours and then just get up and just go again. I mean, that's the that's the way to do it, right? Like that's that's that's really getting the most out of life, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, the fallacy there, of course, is that sleep isn't good life. Right. I mean, if you, I mean, you can get really esoteric with it and talk about, you know, you talk about dreams. I lost you. I still got you. Don't worry. I'm just I'm just yeah, making sure that our Wi-Fi connection is as good as possible. Go ahead. Yeah. I mean, you can make the argument that, you know, that dreams are, you know, like plant medicine or something. It's like, you know, it's like, perhaps access to other parts of consciousness that you're not consciously aware of when you're awake. That's that's a little area in Fufu. But I mean, if you think of it in logical terms, everybody wants to get better, right? We're entrepreneurs because we want to be better at what we do. Like, you know, we we have some sort of passion. We want to get that message out to other people. We want to get our product out to other people. We want to get our service out to other people, whatever it is. And you know, as well as I do, your job's never done as an entrepreneur. You have 100 million things to do. You might check three off your list today. So when do you stop? Like, when you're exhausted is when you stop, right? That's how everybody approaches it. But, you know, you're trying to get better at running your business and getting your message out there. And, you know, all the things that you do, you want to be better. You want to be more efficient at it. When are you getting better at that? Yeah, it's when you're sleeping on it. It's when you're sleeping. That's the only time you're getting better. Yeah, when you work out, you don't get stronger when you work out. You get weaker. You tear your body up when you work out. You damage it to you. When the tissue repairs itself, it comes back stronger. And if you're lifting heavy weights, it comes back able to lift heavier weight. And if you're an endurance athlete, it comes back able to do more enduring activities. If you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to learn a new skill, and you want to bury that into your, you know, something as simple as, you know, you went to a marketing course and like you're going to, you know, you have a new elevator pitch or you have like a new slant to your marketing message. The way you're going to integrate that into your brain and the way you're going to, you know, tie that into what you already know and what you've already done and come up with the most successful utilization of that new skill is while you're asleep. You might practice it during the day, but you're going to actually get better at it while you sleep. That's been proven. You can prove it with naps because you can insert naps in between, in between training activities, anything and people actually improve about two to three times this past. Yeah, it's, it's kind of insane, isn't it? Like all the studies that show that sleep gives you the optimum life. It's kind of like the people who say, well, you know, sleep when you're dead and, you know, I'll just, I'll get the most out of life. It's really comes down to like the quality of your life, doesn't it? Like if you, so you might be saying, well, you know, I'm, I'm increasing the quantity of hours that I'm actually awake and therefore getting amazing experiences out of life, but the quality is going to be compromised of your life. Yeah. So try to make that argument with saying you're going to reduce your anxiety, your anxiety, the uncertainty of being an entrepreneur by being drunk all day. I don't think anybody would consider that a logical argument, right? However, that's pretty much what sleep deprivation is. I mean, there's lots of studies where they equate sleep deprivation to impairment on par with such alcohol level. Obviously not, you're obviously not drunk, but you're performing as though you were drunk. So it's like a 0.05, right? 0.05 alcohol level. That's just, that's, that's being awake 17 hours. So being 17 hours straight, which is normal, fairly normal for everybody, right? That's 0.05. If you miss two hours of sleep, so most people need about eight hours of sleep. If you're working out or working extra hard, you might need slightly more, but you know, it's seven and a half hours, plus or minus half an hour. Most people average out around eight. If you're sleeping six hours a night, you do that for 11 hours or 11 days in a row, you perform exactly as though you haven't slept for 24 hours, which is about a 0.0 to 0.1 blood alcohol level. If you do that for 22 days in a row, then you start performing as though you haven't slept for two days, which is like about a 0.15 to 0.2 blood alcohol level, back to your performance level. And just like a drunk person doesn't know they're drunk, a sleep deprived person will argue with you that they're not sleep deprived. They'll say, well, I'm totally used to this. I've been doing this for so long, I'm totally adapted to this schedule. It's not until you get them to sleep, it's just like, it's not until the drunk guy becomes sober, does he realize he was drunk, until the sleep deprived person pays back their sleep debt that they go, oh my god. The world is so much more fun, the colors are so much brighter. And if you're really trying to get everything you can out of life, it's the experience out of life that you want, right? If you're drunk or you get full experience, hell no. If you're sleep deprived, you're not getting the full experience either. The color zone is bright, the emotions aren't as rich. The success zone is high and the failures aren't as deep. It flattens emotion, it flattens emotional stability, it flattens your ambition, it flattens everything cognitively. We're talking to Dr. Kirk Parsley. And Dr. Parsley is actually the creator of an amazing sleep remedy, which I take regularly myself and it's actually pretty delicious as well. It's called Doc Parsley Sleep Remedy. It's a little satchel that you can pour into a nice warm glass of water at the end of the night. And you can check that out at docparsley.com. That's D-O-C-P-A-R-S-L-E-Y.com. We'll talk a little bit about his sleep cocktail in a second. So let's get into now some practical things, Kirk, that our listener and our viewer here can actually implement in their life to sleep better. Now we know that it's like poor sleep is horrendous for us. What are some of the things that we can do to improve our sleep? Well, interestingly, most of my private clients are entrepreneurs. And it's really surprising to me that the hardest thing that I do, when I work with people to optimize their performance, I don't just work around sleep. I do sleep, nutrition, exercise, stress mitigation and mindset. But the sleep is the hardest part to convince people to do. I can tell them to eat kale for every meal and exercise three hours a day and meditate three hours a day. And they're fine with it. But as soon as I tell them to sleep eight hours a night, they're like, oh, no, no, I don't have time to do that. So I would say the number one thing in getting good sleep is convincing yourself that you really need to sleep. The best way to convince yourself that you really need to sleep is to get really good sleep for a week. And that's how you feel. And you'll realize that you feel a hell of a lot better. Life is a lot better. All of your problems don't seem nearly as problematic. All of your weaknesses don't seem nearly as hamstringing as it was when you're sleep deprived. So that's the number one thing. The number two thing, probably stuff you've talked about on your podcast a billion times is the sleep hygiene aspect. And rather than go through the list of, you know, making a completely dark room and getting rid of electronics and, you know, decreasing the photo period and wearing your cool glasses at night and all those things, I break it down into two things, right? If you look at how we evolved, the way we evolved was to use the sun as our cue is when to be awake and when to be asleep. Period, right? You can't get around that evolution isn't going to change fast enough for us to escape that quick enough to be healthy in the lifestyle that we're living. So we also can't get people to go back into the caves and wear loincloths and recreate, you know, paleolithic time period or something. But it's important to just understand what sleep, what sleep hygiene is aiming to do. So when the sun goes down, the blue light goes down as you, I'm sure you talk about all the time, blue light decreases in the retinal ganglia that signals the brain that starts a whole cascade of events. One of those events is the production of melatonin which decreases stress hormones. Stress hormones keep us awake. They're not just making us stress, they're keeping us awake and proportioned to our environment. And another thing that does is it increases GABA in the brain and GABA then slows down the neocortex. And the neocortex is what we think of when we think of a human brain, that picture of like the wrinkly squiggly grayish tan sort of mass part that part needs to slow down. That's how we interact with the world. That's how we perceive the world. That's how we move. That's how we touch and maybe not smell technically. But that's how we interact with the world. So we have to slow down that and we have to decrease the light in our eyes. So your glasses are a great example of how you decrease the light in your eyes. I'll put the glasses on here. There we go. Your cool glasses. You do that to keep the blue light out of your eyes because these retinal ganglia that start this process are only sensitive to blue light, not the full spectrum. So you can, if you want to use the word hack, I hate the word hack, biohacking. The only reason I hate it is because I feel like they're original biohackers for the pharmaceutical industry and I'm pretty anti-pharma. So you can do that. You can put all the stuff on your computer, the flux on your computer, or you can put the right kind of light bulbs in your house that don't have blue spectrum, whatever, however you want to decrease the light in your eyes. But then you also have to slow your brain down. So just because you put on your glasses and have efflux on your computer doesn't work like that either. You have to slow your brain. With those two bits of information, if I put you in a room by yourself, gave you those two bits of information and said, write me a plan for going to sleep. What do you reckon that it looked like? Yeah, people wouldn't want to pay you for your advice. That's for sure. Exactly, right? Because if you've ever had kids or if you've ever been a kid, remember there was this protracted getting ready for bed period, right? What was that about? Yeah, you want to watch TV? That was about slowing down, slowing down these really active brains of these kids who are like trying to settle them down. That's what story time is about. That's what the bath time is about. The bath's dropping their body temperature a little bit, which is again one of the normal cues, which you can do as part of your sleep hygiene, but you can go online and look up sleep hygiene. But we get kids ready for bed hours before they're going to go to bed if we want them to actually go to bed. We need the same thing. If you look at hunter-gatherers who still live that lifestyle they have never been exposed to electricity, it takes them about three to three and a half hours to fall asleep after the sun goes down. Nobody's going to spend three hours getting ready for bed in America and Australia and Europe and all that stuff, but that would be the ideal. We use these little tricks to decrease the light and decrease our stimulation and give ourselves at least a solid hour. Really that's all my supplement is so we can completely tie that in and make that a really short packaged deal is that all my supplement does is concentrate all those things in your brain that the brain would have ordinarily concentrated over the course of three hours. They do it in 30 minutes, but then it's all out of your bloodstream within about three hours. Your brain has to keep the cascade going, which is the whole purpose of the reason I made it the way I did. Yeah, so if in doubt, then when you wake up in the morning, go and get natural sunlight as soon as possible because you want to set your circadian rhythm in motion so your body knows, yes, it's daytime. Then when the sun goes down at night time, try to limit blue light exposure as much as possible from your computer's electronics and this concoction that you have created, Kirk, which is Doc Parsley's sleep remedy, which is designed to calm the brain down. It's kind of like a three hour calming of the brain down, but in 30 minutes. Is that right? Yeah, essentially. That's it. It starts that initial cascade towards melatonin production. I know in Australia you don't have Thanksgiving, but over here we have Thanksgiving and our tradition around Thanksgiving is really just that we overeat. There's really nothing else to it. I guess we overeat with our families, but over here there's something called the tryptophan coma. Everybody knows about after you eat a bunch of turkey, you fall asleep on the couch and everybody plants it on the tryptophan in the turkey. It's not that turkey meat has any excessive amount of tryptophan, and it's just the only meat that we tend to overeat. I mean, people don't usually sit down and eat two pounds of steak or some reason eat two pounds of turkey. The pathway to produce melatonin is tryptophan, five-pigeotide, tryptophan, serotonin, and then melatonin. You're just front-loading with some tryptophan, and then five-pigeotide, tryptophan, sort of putting that in there. For five-HTP to become serotonin, you need vitamin D3 and magnesium, so that's in the supplement. Then there's a little bit of melatonin just because your brain would have made a little bit of melatonin by that three-hour mark is about that much in there, a little bit more than that because you want to absorb all of it. It just initiates everything. Then it has the gap, of course, that can cross the blood brain barrier, which is the other thing that builds up to slow down the brain. One of the questions I always get is about melatonin. They're always like, oh, should I take those melatonin supplements with five milligrams, 10 milligrams, two milligrams? One of the things I noticed in your supplement is that you have micro amounts in there, and in fact, in a supplement that we've just brought out as well, it's the same thing, micro amounts of melatonin. Can you just explain why this idea that we should pump ourselves full of supplement melatonin is actually maybe doing us more harm than good? Yeah. As I was saying earlier, my real profession is optimizing performance, and I do that by optimizing everything within normal physiologic amounts. Once you go outside of normal physiologic amounts with anything, all bets are off. I don't really know what's going to happen. It's important to realize that from the time the sun goes down until the time the sun comes up, your brain is only going to make about five, six, maybe up to eight micrograms of melatonin total over a 12-hour period or 14-hour period depending on the season. If you take a five milligram melatonin, you can do math. That's a hell of a lot more, and you're getting it all at once. It's not all going into your brain, but it's affecting your gut brain as well. That's where some of the anxioleic effects and so forth come from. Melatonin is, of course, a hormone. What we know about hormones is that when you give exogenous hormones, meaning take it from the outside and put it into your body, when we give people hormones, they tend to stop producing those hormones because your body is a smart machine. Why is it going to make something it doesn't have to make? If it's getting it for free, your body's going to quit making it. We haven't been able to substantiate that with melatonin, and I think that there's various reasons why I think that's true, but what we have substantiated is that the receptors from melatonin that matter, the receptors on the cell that are bringing melatonin into the cell and actually making that melatonin useful, those do decrease. When you take more melatonin in your body would ordinarily produce, you decrease those receptors. Now, if you take that away, you don't have enough receptors. Even if you're still producing a normal physiological amount of melatonin, you don't have enough receptors to pick it all up. Your body sees that as a deficit, and so now you've created a hormone imbalance, and you can't just affect one hormone. The first thing to know about medicine is that we don't know anything. What we think we know is half of it's wrong, and we only think we know about one million of what's going on at any time anyway. So there's thousands of hormones, and if you take all the intermediaries, and there's thousands of hormones circulating around that are affecting every aspect of your health, man. It's affecting our blood pressure right now. It's affecting how fast we're breathing. It's affecting our cognition. It's affecting everything, our ability to recover and grow and fight off infection. All this stuff is driven by hormones. I don't think it's a smart idea to go super physiologic on anything. Just because somebody feels good on it doesn't make it a good idea. If I gave you cocaine every day, you'd probably feel pretty good on that too, but it doesn't make it a smart idea. What about people who are taking prescription sleep medicines like Xanax, Valium? What are those things? What are your thoughts on those ones? Well, thoughts on those are that it's a really bad idea. Without getting too geeky on the science of it, it's a really bad idea because when you are under the influence of those drugs, you are not sleeping. You are unconscious, which is completely different than being asleep. When we do a sleep study, we can predict neuronal patterns in the brain. When we see these certain things happen in these neuronal patterns of the brain, we can say you're in stage one, two, three, four, or REM sleep. Some people call that now stage five sleep. If you aren't in the normal pattern of that and having normal sleep cycles, you aren't getting the real benefit of sleep. The original drugs, and what those drugs do is they act like GABA. We just talked about melatonin overdosing causing problems. Well, GABA overdosing causes problems as well. These drugs aren't GABA drugs. Valium and Xanax, they're not GABA. They're just molecules that bind to GABA receptors and they have about 1,000 to 10,000 times more effect than GABA does. It slows down your brain and it decreases your interaction, which as you remember is one part of the equation that we talked about. But it binds so tightly and it has such a profound effect on your brain that it gets rid of that normal sleep architecture. They came out with these Z-drugs that bind more specifically to certain GABA receptors and they think it makes it better. The Z-drugs block more of the REM sleep and the first generation benzodiazepines like Valium and Xanax, they block more of the deep sleep. They both block both. They both interfere with both deep. Decreases stages three and four sleep. Over-the-counter stuff like antihistamines pretty equally decreases deep sleep and REM sleep. All right, so there we go. Dr. Kirk Parsley, former US Navy SEAL, now a sleep doctor and health expert. If you haven't already checked out Dr. Kirk Parsley's TEDx talk, you can do a search for him. He did a TEDx talk on sleep. His website is docparsley.com, d-o-c-p-a-r-s-l-e-y dot com. I can personally vouch for his doc Parsley sleep remedy concoction, which sometimes I even go a little bit hardcore, Kirk. I don't put it in water and I just open up the satchel and I just throw it in. It tastes like a sugar hit. One of those old pieces, old lollies back in Australia or candy or whatever where it's almost like a sour candy. It gives you an aftertaste, but it tastes really good, but it also just makes your head feel like it's in a vice at the same time. It's kind of like, oh, it hurts so good. It hurts so good. You know what I mean? I've never tried that. It sounds like a pixie stick, what we would call a pixie stick. There you go. I'll give it a start. I'll do it tonight. One of your customers is experimenting with it. There you go. That's me, James Swannick. I'm sure there's people snorting it. Yeah. So there you go. So docparsley, thank you so much for your time and bringing your expertise to our well. This is anywhere else we can connect with you or did I get that right in terms of docparsley. I'm the same on social media. It's all doc Parsley. There might be some Kirk Parsley stuff, but you can find all that on my website too. Beautiful. Doc Parsley, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate your expertise. All right. Thanks for having on. And to you, the listener and the viewer, thank you for listening and I'll catch you on the next one.