 Well, we're going to talk about stress, reducing stress and anxiety with great sleep. We're going to kick things off. Hello, everybody. We are live. I am James Swannick, the founder of Swannick. And today we are talking about optimized sleep. We're talking about how to get a great night's sleep, how to reduce stress, how to reduce anxiety. We're joined today by Dr. Kirk Parsley, also known as Doc Parsley. He's the founder and creator of a wonderful product named Sleep Remedy, which is an all-natural sleep supplement of choice for Navy SEALs, pro-athletes and city-level executives. Doc Parsley is a former Navy SEAL. And Doc's passion is to help his patients and clients achieve the highest quality of life possible and achieve all of their health performance and longevity goals. Doc Parsley and I have met on several occasions now in Austin, Texas, and I interviewed him on my show I think a few years ago. Maybe I think I was on your show also a few years ago. Doc Parsley, welcome. Great to have you here. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. It's a pleasure to catch up with you. I've got a few more new glasses there, I see. Yeah, I'm wearing the daytime swanis, which don't have the as-orange lenses, the nighttime swanis. So the daytime swanis I use obviously in daytime, so it filters out the blue light and gives me energy and clarity and focus. And then at nighttime, I put on the orange glasses, so I'm blocking out that blue light that's responsible for messing with our melatonin production and therefore messing with our sleep. I know I don't need to explain all that to you. You're somewhat of a sleep expert, right? I hope so at this point. I mean, that's the rumor. I keep hearing that. Yeah, I guess after lecturing on it for about 11 or 12 years, I probably fall into that expert category in somebody, in some people's mind at least, legend in my own mind. If you're just joining us and you're watching us live on Facebook or YouTube, go ahead and type in a question for Kirk Parsley who would be happy to answer your questions. Hello, Elizabeth Starr. Elizabeth Starr says, love the swanic glasses. Thank you so much. We've got Ameth here who says lauda type diabetes. Let me just try and can't quite see that question there. We'll get to that as another question comes in. But if you do have a question, go ahead and post your sleep-related question, your navy seal-related question, your stress and anxiety-related question in the comments, and we will we will get to that. So how should I refer to you? Should I refer to you as Kirk, Doc? I'm happy. I'm happy with Kirk. That's the name my mama gave me. All right, Kirk. Well, Kirk, tell us a little bit about your story as an undersea medical officer at the Naval Sperter Warfare Group and how you then got into this life of optimized sleep and health and vitality. Just share a little bit of your story first and then we'll dig into a few practical tips that people can implement around sleep. Yeah. Well, I mean, it really started with me being a seal first. So I actually dropped out of high school and joined the navy. I wanted to go be a seal. I heard it was the toughest training in the world and I wanted to see if I could do it. That's about how much I knew about the seal teams at the time. And I was fortunate enough to make it through training, then went on to spend six years and the seal teams got out, went to college, and then I was commissioned as an officer in the navy when I started medical school, went to the military's medical school. And the way that navy works, they'll pay for all sorts of stuff, but you pay them back with time. So I got to, I had the benefit of being able to support my family when I went to medical school without my wife having to work. I was already married with kids and so they paid me to go to medical school, but then I had to give them eight years as a doctor, which of course they still paid me. So it's a great deal. And I figured I would get back to the seal teams and I did. And the seal teams are a lot like professional athletes or first responders even. The worst thing you can do is put them on the bench, take them out of their job. So they don't really trust anyone who has that capability. And of course doctors have that capability. They can say, oh, you're not medically qualified to do this. And so you have to sit out until we can qualify. So there really has been to share any real struggles. And fortunately, because I was a seal and they trusted me, they would come and tell me what the real struggles were. And I pretty quickly realized that nothing I'd learned in medical school was going to help me. Because what I learned in medical school was how to recognize these diagnosed and treat disease. And no, no, these guys had any diseases. They just weren't performing to their metrics, which, you know, we're far outside of the normal range of what most people would consider acceptable performance ranges. I mean, these are the most performant men in the world. And so they have really high expectations of themselves and they couldn't figure out like why were they in a decline? Why was their memory declining? Why was their attention declining? Why was their mood becoming labile? Why were they having a harder time dealing with their stresses at home with their families? Why were they putting on body fat and losing muscle? Why were they getting weaker and slower? And they would say, maybe I'm just getting old doc, you know, and I'm like, you know, yeah, you're 28 or you're 32, you're way over the hill, man. It's all over from here. And, you know, there were, I just, I didn't really know the answer, obviously, like I said, I wasn't well prepared for that. So I just started testing everything I could possibly test. And I found that they essentially had metabolic syndrome, you know, right on the cusp of that they their labs looked like what you would expect from a, you know, 65 year old overweight prediabetic man and not a young ripped like the guy sitting in front of me is like muscular and ripped and, you know, strong and robust and capable. But they're all our anabolic hormones are really low, all the catabolic hormones are really high, their inflammatory markers are really high, their oxidation was really high, thyroid function was down cortisol was either through the roof or not or unmeasurable. And so I just, I just started trying to figure out like I just started calling experts and alternative and non traditional functional integrative medicine, whatever you want to call it, I'd read books, I'd call these experts and say, hey, I'm the doctor for the West Coast Seals, can I consult with you? Can I train with you? And they, and they were, they were all to a man, they were all like more than willing to, to train me to do what they do. So I got to learn really quick about really performance performance based medicine. And kind of the first thing that stuck out to me the most was that nearly every guy who came and complained to me was using Ambien. And so I thought, well, maybe that's, that's the problem, right? It's, it's this Ambien. Then I dig a little deeper and I found out, well, actually 85% of the entire seal command was on Ambien. I was like, well, that doesn't, like, and I'm a medical doctor. I don't know. I'm like, you know, I know what Ambien does. Like I know that, I know what the drug is called and it binds gabar receptors and like, how it ostensibly works, but I don't know anything about sleep. And I don't know if Ambien changes the kind of sleep that you get. And so I started digging in that, learning about all that. And I, I, you know, I wasn't 100% certain, but I said, you know, Occam's razor, the answer that has the fewest assumptions, your inadequate sleep, lack of sleep could actually cause every single symptom that you're complaining about. And every single lab finding that I'm finding could be explained by inadequate sleep. I wasn't naive enough to think that it would solve everything. But I thought it would be a big piece of the puzzle. And, you know, being a medical doctor, I just, what I wanted to do is just like, you know, give them testosterone, give them growth hormone, give them thyroid hormone, like, you know, give them medication to decrease their oxidation, their inflammation and like, I just wanted to go in and fix the labs. But that's not the right thing to do. You can't put seals on medications that they're reliant upon because what happens when they get away from their ability to take their medication and they weren't, you know, it wasn't disease anyway. So it wasn't the right thing to do. So I just, I learned a lot about sleep. I got a lot of these guys to try getting off of Ambien. That's where the sleep supplement came from is we just tried to come up with a concoction that would help them sleep while getting off of Ambien. Because a lot of them, almost all of them were dependent upon Ambien actually. And that led to, you know, me sharing the stage with guys like Rob Wolff and Chris Cressor and Sisson and Wellborn and like all those people who were in that health optimization, health and performance field and, you know, led me into private consulting and lecturing and working with sports teams and, you know, companies, you know, corporate America, all that stuff. And so that's how I got here. Yeah. Thank you for sharing your story. I'm just going to go to a viewer question here. We have live from Ameth Gonzalez Orocha. Is there a link between sleep wakefulness, cycle disturbances and the development of autoimmune diseases, including diabetes? Yeah. I mean, I would be hard pressed to point to a specific piece of literature, but, you know, for let's say the, you know, the mechanism of action of that would be pretty clear. So one of the, I'm going to feed right into what we're going to talk about today. One of the major functions of sleep, well, let me say it this way, the major function of sleep, the reason we sleep, the reason we're going to sleep tonight is because our brain and body need to repair from today and get ready for tomorrow. And where our brain is going to use today as the most likely predictor of what tomorrow is going to be like. And that's how, and it's going to prepare us to do today, again, tomorrow. And one of the things, and, you know, there's a, there's myriad of things that are going on, anabolic processes, you know, flushing out toxins, you know, rebuilding, repairing things and heightened immune function or all of that stuff. And then, but one, like one of the, one of the sort of hallmarks of the fact that you're getting adequate sleep is that you don't need an alarm clock to wake up. So what wakes you up? If you're in a completely dark and quiet room and it's cold, why, why do you wake up? Well, you wake up because of stress hormones, right? Cortisol, like cortisol gets a bad name. It gets a bad rep that it's like this nebulous thing that's going, or not nebulous is what's the word I'm looking for, disastrous hormone that's going and wrecking our bodies. Well, cortisol is what keeps us alert and proportion to our environment. So if you're in a calm environment and you've just woken up and you're laying around on your couch and you're reading a book, you don't need a lot of cortisol. If you're in a fist fight or a car crash or, you know, something like that, you need a lot of cortisol and we call that fight or flight, right? You get in fight or flight. Well, one of the hallmarks of fight or flight, you know, there's a lot of things that go on and we could talk about it if you want to. There's, you know, dozens of things that change about our physiology to make sort of our body or anything. You can think of fight or flight as our immune system for what's outside of our body. It's protecting us from an external threat. It's going to make us superhuman to deal with that threat. You know, it's going to make us as fast and strong and enduring and, you know, everything that we can possibly be. But it's going to use, it's going to do that at the expense of using our own body as a fuel source and cutting off all the symptoms that aren't important, things like reproduction and digestion and immune function. So the opposite of fight or flight is deep sleep, cortisol-wise. So if you look at just stress hormones, maximum is fight or flight, slow wave sleep cycles stages three and four, theta, delta, whatever you want to call them, the deep sleep, that is the exact opposite of fight or flight. That's we have the lowest amount of cortisol and stress hormones. You also have the highest immune function during that. So if you are losing that component of sleep, then you are losing immune function, right? And then when you don't repair well, you know, so I said, you know, sleeping tonight gets you ready for tomorrow. Well, if you need, you know, the contract through millions of years of evolution is this body requires eight hours of sleep. So what happens if you only sleep six hours? Well, tomorrow still comes. How do you get through that? You secrete more cortisol, right? You and when you secrete more cortisol, you start impairing your immune system, you start elevating your blood glucose level, right? Cortisol causes us to release our stored glycogen. So tomorrow still comes, but we use basically a catabolic pathway. We were actually breaking our body down and we're becoming weaker and our immune system is actually becoming weaker as well. And then when you're wreaking havoc with the immune system itself, you're just more likely because you're getting inappropriate immune responses because you're blunting immune system functioning during part of the day, you're not getting enough during the night. And, you know, really, autoimmunity is really just a confused immune system, right? It's just an immune system that's not quite sure what it's doing and what it should be attacking and what it should be nurturing. So I would say that that mechanism would make perfect sense to me, but I can't point you towards a book like that. That would be multiple readings to get to what I just said. Got it. We're talking to Dr. Kirk Parsley, also known as Doc Parsley, who is the founder and creator of Sleep Remedy. He's one of the, one of our long-term swanic friends and partners, and Sleep Remedy is an all-natural sleep supplement. I want to make sure I emphasize all natural sleep supplement as opposed to a prescription sleep pill such as Ambien or Xanax or something like that. I've got a question here from Bianca, or it's more of a statement, but maybe we could talk to this. She says, I'm a night nurse and mother of three. I'm lucky to get three hours of sleep in a day. Kirk, what are your thoughts on what may be happening to Bianca's body and her mind and her immune system as a result of being lucky to get three hours of sleep a day and being a night nurse? And so I would imagine her internal body clock, her circadian rhythm is probably out of whack also. Right. So, I mean, I think the most approachable metaphor that I usually use with this, like what I said a few minutes ago, through millions of years of evolution, we've evolved to need eight hours of sleep. You just can't get around that. It would be like saying, due to my body mass, my age, my activity level, I need 2,000 calories a day, but I only eat 700. Can I still be strong and healthy and muscular? And no, you can't. You're going to emaciate. You're going to become ill. The same is true with sleep. And the metaphor that I give on that is just think about any piece of machinery. So think about a car. Most people have cars. Most people understand some basic stuff about cars that need to be maintained. Well, think of sleep as like pulling, you know, if this were a daily thing, sleep would be pulling your car into a mechanics garage every night. And for eight hours, the mechanics would fix the car. It'd fix everything that was wrong with it. And if you have a good mechanic, like you have a good team working for eight hours every night, that car will probably last you for the rest of your life, right? Like everything's going to be repaired every day. And every day you're going to essentially start with a brand new car, right? A car that's just as capable as it ever was. Well, if you take half of that time away from those mechanics, they're not going to get to everything. And things are going to start falling through the cracks and your car's going to dilapidate. And it's going to fall apart sooner. Now, how much sooner? I don't know what's going to break. I don't know. I mean, everything really, you know, it's not just, I don't just mean that as a glib. Oh, it just gets our body ready for tomorrow, our brain and body ready for tomorrow. There's literally repair, like there's literally flushing out toxins, building up nutrients, building up nutritional density inside of the cells and end the areas around the interstitium around the cells. It's repairing damaged tissues. It's digesting. It's your immune system functioning. It's creating the appropriate categorizations for emotional events. It's converting short-term memory into long-term memory. It's working with disparate information that you've learned throughout your life and learning how to connect those things. It's, you know, it's learning. It's getting, it's essentially anything you're trying to get better at or at least maintain is being maintained and improved while you're sleeping. So if you short that, there's nothing I can say, just like if you say, well, I'm only going to work on my car a third as much as I should to maintain it. I don't have a solution for that. I mean, it's like, and it's sad, I get it. I mean, it sounds like, you know, she's probably in a situation where she needs that job and she really has very few of any alternatives to that job. But the fact of the matter is she's not sleeping enough. It is going to predispose her, increase her risk of all diseases. It's going to increase her risk of dying early from any cause. Chronically sleep deprived people, chronic insomnia acts, people who chronically use sleeping aids, which is really the same thing as an insomnia act because you aren't really getting sleep. You're being drugged into unconsciousness. And shift workers all look very similar, like people who consistently work night shift and outside of their circadian clock. It's about 12 to 16 years less life. And that's just the statistical average. Not saying that's definitely the case for her, but I'm just saying if you're looking for the science of it, that's the category you're falling into. Is that for night shift people? Is that what you were suggesting? Or people who you said 16 years less life, that's for shift workers? That's for shift workers as well. It's for people who consistently work outside of their circadian rhythm. Because when you should be asleep when you're awake and vice versa, you aren't getting all the repair. It's like you're taking half of your repair crew out if you're sleeping during the day because you have organs that are functioning as though they're awake. So your whole body isn't doing its full repair. I'm sorry to interrupt you, Kirk. Is the natural circadian rhythm when the sun goes down and when the sun comes up? Is that the human being, natural circadian rhythm? Or can it actually be that we can get our circadian rhythm onto a schedule where we wake up late afternoon and we go to sleep late morning? So circadian rhythm, I mean, really doesn't, it's not a very discreet, well it is a discreet word, but it doesn't really mean a whole lot. It just means about a day, right? Circa, about dia, so circadian rhythm just means about a day rhythm. What most people don't know about that is that our circadian rhythm is completely independent of the sun. If you put human beings down into a cave and to the bowels of the earth where they have no sense of time, the male circadian rhythm is slightly longer than 24 hours and the female circadian rhythm is slightly shorter than 24 hours. And so over the course of about a week or two, you'll be completely out of phase. So what we're using the sun for is to entrain our circadian rhythm. Instead of being 24 hours and 36 minutes, we make it 24 hours or vice versa. Whether it's male or female, we're adjusting it to the photo period of the day. Of course, we are animals that don't see well at night. We aren't great predators, obviously, unless we work in groups and have a bunch of tools and weapons. So we evolved to be the safest time for us to exist during the day. We're hugely visually guided and our behaviors and understanding of the world is primarily visual. So we can't escape that. That's how this machine is designed and essentially, you can think about it. What we can do today is just what I said about putting people in a cave because I can put bright lights in my eyes. I can put these bright man-made lights that have plenty of blue light saturation. I can put that in my eyes at midnight, 2 a.m., 3 a.m. and I can go crawl into a really dark, cold space during the middle of the day. I can trick my circadian rhythm into not being aligned with the sun, but my circadian rhythm is essentially just free-flowing at that point. I'm going to circle around every couple of weeks, maybe every month, and be right on schedule. Then I'm going to cycle off again. I'm going to cycle back on again because my circadian rhythm is essentially in free-flow. Yeah. Let's go to a viewer question right now. We have Andrew who's watching us live on YouTube. Andrew says, well, I think Andrew's got a little bit of political talk in here, which we might skim over. He's saying, thank you for all you do and the videos through the fake epidemic, I mean pandemic, LOL. So we'll just skip over that. We don't want to make any commentary on that, but thank you for your comment, for that part of your comment. What is your opinion on dental devices for obstructive sleep apnea? I hate my CPAP machine. Yeah, I find no surprise everybody hates their CPAP machine. It's probably Mother Nature's best or the humankind's best birth control device. It really just seems kind of ludicrous on its face to say, well, here's somebody who's having difficulty sleeping. Let's put this mask on and strap this to their face and see how they sleep then. It can be lifesaving, obviously. It can have huge health benefits, but what I found in my practice over the course of, since I started working with the seals on sleep and back in 2009, what I found over and over again is that most people can get off of sleep, off of CPAPs, because the reason that they have sleep apnea is not necessarily anatomic or neurologic, it's physiologic. And so there's things like your neuromuscular resting attention, like how much neuromuscular attention do you have in a resting state? That's largely controlled by hormones. So in optimizing your hormones, a lot of times you can create more resting tension and the muscles that are collapsing your airway. Body positioning, sleeping on your side, dental appliances, definitely. Just to keep your jaw out a little bit, keep your tongue out of the back, losing weight, not drinking alcohol. There's lots of things, increasing exercise, there's lots of things that you can do to get off of CPAPs. I think maybe I have one guy who we really tried to get off of CPAP and we couldn't, but I'm talking about like one out of 50 or 60. I think most people can get off. I'm going to take a quick break and turn my air conditioner on. Yeah, go for it. We're talking to Kirk Parsley. Let's announce a winner here. We actually do have a winner of a competition that we ran on Instagram. So we do have an Instagram giveaway winner here and we asked someone to post a comment and our Instagram winner is someone by the name of Jordan with the Instagram profile of atJFish and Jordan's comment was, I wish I could enter this contest with a funny caption, but I'm just thankful this stuff made its way into my life. I outed my lifelong sleep difficulties at a family party. My friend at KJ Garcia one dropped a few Doc Parsley packets in front of me and said I had to try it. I did not realize just how generous this gesture was. Not only did Kyle part with multiple packets of this valuable product, he gave me the cure for my sleep ailment. Doc Parsley sleep remedy put me to sleep immediately when I wanted to sleep. I've always wanted to be an early riser, but always struggled to wake up after not falling asleep until the early hours of the morning. I've witnessed how this product can change my life. I've had many productive early mornings since using it. I might have to part with my gym membership to be able to fit it into my budget, but it would be worth it. So congratulations to our Instagram giveaway winner Jordan with Instagram profile at JFish. We will put Jordan in touch with sleep remedy. Congratulations Jordan. You will be getting your prize. So congratulations and thank you for entering. That's a great testimonial and I really appreciate that Jordan. So if Jordan can get on with Megan, M-E-G-A-N, Megan at docparsley.com. Not only did he win this contest, but we're just going to go ahead and give Jordan a year's supply. He can get it every month for free. So you don't have to cancel his gym membership. It's lovely. Thank you so much Kirk and congratulations to Jordan. Well played. There you go. Everyone's a winner. All right. So if you're watching live now, post a question down below if you have a specific sleep question that you have for docparsley here. Anything relating to sleep? How many hours sleep do you get? Why don't you go ahead and post that in the comments? What questions do you have regarding your sleep? Go ahead and post that in the comments. If you're watching on the replay later on, go ahead and post your sleep questions in the comments and either I will get to those later on and answer them or docparsley will answer them also. Dawn says nice. We've got a question here from JaRico on Facebook who asks, what causes sleep paralysis? Maybe you could just explain what you're familiar with, what you know about sleep paralysis and what causes that. Yeah. So sleep paralysis is actually supposed to happen, right? So obviously, it's just a really quick recap. The real definition of being asleep is that there's a barrier between you and your environment, meaning that you aren't paying attention to your environment. Obviously your eyes still work, your ears still work, your nose still works, you can still feel, you can still move. Your body still works. Just why you can turn on the lights. Lights don't make noise like they do in the movies, right? You just turn on a light and somebody's in a dark room, you turn on a light and you can wake them up. Why? Because their eyes are still working. Their clothes, they can still see through that. They can hear an unfamiliar sound. Even if they live in a fairly noisy environment, they hear an unfamiliar sound. That's enough to trigger their, so you can wake up because all of your senses are still working. There's a period of sleep called REM sleep, which is by and large where most of the cognitive benefits of sleep. So things just like we were talking about earlier, your memories, your emotions, making durable pathways out of new information, comparing that to old information, just basically rebuilding the fuel sources of your brain for the next day. Really, your cognitive functioning, balancing neurotransmitters and neuropeptides, all that stuff is happening by and large during REM sleep. But what we know about REM sleep is that you are actually working with those thoughts and memories. So any experience that you've had, anything that you're thinking about, anything that you're combining new information with old information, that's all happening during REM sleep. And in order to prevent you from actually acting that out, which would be very dangerous and counterproductive to sleep, during REM sleep, you're actually paralyzed. It's in the lizard brain down, like barely above the brain stem. It's like down in the lizard brain to basically shut down your motor activity. It's shutting down the motor cortex of your brain so you can't actually move. Now when you have an imbalance of neuropeptides, when you have some anatomical shifts, when you have maybe some pharmaceuticals on board, when you have and keep in mind that sleep deprivation in itself can change your brain chemistry so much that you can start running into neurological disorders, essentially, which is what's going on with sleep paralysis is that people's awareness of their environment is coming back into play, right? They're becoming more aware of their environment again and maybe fully aware of their environment. But the brain stem still says, oh, you're in REM sleep, and so you can't move. And that's a very scary feeling for people. We know that when people are chronically sleep deprived, obviously, in SEAL training, we go weak without sleeping. Lots of military and things like that go through these really sustained sleep deprivation periods. And then, of course, there's things like chronic insomnia and narcolepsy and all this other stuff. And we know that when your brain chemistry starts suffering from inadequate sleep, you have all sorts of functions like this. Things like you can go directly into REM sleep. You can close your eyes. And before you even really think you're asleep, you're already having dreams. And sometimes you could be having terrifying dreams. And you're essentially in REM sleep and you're paralyzed already. And you've only closed your eyes like 10 seconds ago. And then you can have probably what this person's talking about is that you can actually wake up. Your senses are awake and your motor cortex is still shut off. But that's a complex sleep disorder. And that's something that I would work with, like a board-certified sleep specialist for. I wouldn't necessarily encourage drugs as the first opportunity there. But there's so many questions to ask to figure out why is it specifically affecting you? Or can we figure out why it's specifically affecting you? But it basically all comes down to optimizing lifestyle. It really doesn't matter why things are happening to me or to happening to my clients. If I can figure out some aspect, either nutrition, exercise, stress mitigation, or sleep, if there's something in there that's glaringly off, that's the first thing to fix. And then let's see what's happening. Let me ask you a question about the impact of light at night on our sleep. And obviously, you're aware that we help people block artificial blue light at night with our Swanee's blue light blocking glasses. I'm representing here with this lovely lady wearing her Swanee's. How impactful or how compromising is artificial light at night, whether it's from a screen on your computer, whether it's from your smartphone, whether it's your microwave light, or the bathroom light, or the kitchen light, or the refrigerator light, or the speedometer light in your car, or Donald's golden arches along the freeway as you're driving along at night? How much of an impact does that light at night have either on our sleep duration or our sleep quality? I'll answer the question in a broad sense of the explanation of how it impacts it. What is the mechanism of it? To the degree that it affects the individual depends on the individual. It would be like saying, how much impact is there in eating an ice cream cone? Depends on who you are. How much impact is there to overtraining one day? It depends on a lot of things. I don't think we could quantify it and say, oh, this many minutes or that many minutes, but it's really important to realize, I think people have the general idea, but I think it's slightly misunderstood. The way we evolved to be on this planet is when the sun went down, 100% of the blue light went away. There is no place to get blue light because there's no sun. That doesn't make you go to sleep. That doesn't even make you secrete melatonin. That changes some ganglion in the back of your eyes that then sends pathways into your brain and the suprachiasmatic nucleus being the master clock. That gets information that, hey, the blue light's gone. Let's start getting ready for bed. Let's start getting ready to sleep. There are hundreds, if not thousands of neurochemical changes that are going on. One of the major ones is, of course, once the suprachiasmatic nucleus gets stimulated, it has a circuitous pathway back to the pineal gland and it starts secreting melatonin. Melatonin doesn't actually make you go to sleep. It's like the initiator of all of these chemical changes in your brain. It takes three to three and a half hours to get your brain ready to go to sleep. When we look at hunter-gatherers that live today that have never been exposed to electricity and you look at how they live, and if you've ever gone camping and not used a bunch of artificial lights or anything like this, most of us have experienced this ourselves, but when we look at tribal people who have never been exposed to electricity, they fall asleep three to three and a half hours after the sun goes down because that's how long it takes to get ready. Every time you put blue light in there, you're affecting those pathways. It doesn't matter where the blue light's coming from. Obviously, the more blue light, the more of the effects, the longer the blue light, the more of the effect. I don't think it's reasonable in today's day and age to say, I'm going to block 100% of blue light three to three and a half hours before I go to sleep, but things like your glasses and the programs you can put on your computers and your phones, these are all decreasing the blue lights. They're decreasing the impact. To the degree they're decreasing the impact, I can't say. I don't know that there's a way to measure that because we would have to sample people's brain chemistry and not a lot of people are going to volunteer to drills in their head to have their brain chemistry measured during these things, but it's critically important. If you think about it, I told you your senses, you basically quit paying attention to your senses. That's the effect of GABA. That's what the sleep drugs try to emulate is GABA. It slows down that neocortex. What we think of when we think of the human brain is that big wrinkly mess like that part that makes us the smartest animal in the world, that slows down and just quits paying attention to the environment, but it's the chemical changes from the blue light that releases the GABA that produces those pathways to make you quit paying attention to your environment. Once your brain chemistry has changed enough and you aren't paying enough attention to your environment, you will be in what we call sleep. Those are the only two things you need for sleep hygiene. You can override it by putting blue light in your eyes and you can override it by paying attention to your environment. If you get in a really stressful and you start banging out loud music or you start having a lot of fun or working out, you could be blocking 100% of blue light exercising like a madman and you've overridden the pathway that's slowing down your brain. Really all there is to do is just think about what would have happened 2000 years ago when the sun went down. Behave like that to the best of your ability. That's really what sleep hygiene is. You can parse that out into billion little sound bites and specifics, but that's really all there is to sleeping. I have suggested at times that the mass production of the light bulb in the early 1900s was one of many significant shifts in human beings' sleep patterns. The idea of being, of course, prior to that, we lived our time at night time by candlelight, by natural flame, which has been shown not to disturb our melatonin production, but then all of a sudden with the invention of artificial light, let's call it, human beings' behaviors have now changed. We're staying up later and we're now staring into something that does or has been shown to compromise our ability to get that three, three and a half hours' preparation for sleep each night. Is that a fair summary, do you think, that like with the invention of the light bulb in the early 1900s, we started to see a shift in human beings' sleep patterns? Not the light bulb, yes, but the real problem was rural electrification. Once everybody had light bulbs is when society became screwed. That, of course, coincided perfectly with the Industrial Revolution in which we then started having mechanized productions and people could work 24 hours a day. You could have shifts of people come in and keep your factory or your plant going 24 hours a day. And people, as for survival, since people weren't hunting and gathering as much and they were more using money to buy food and supplies, they needed to go make more money and how do you make more money? Will you work more? And there's not great, because sleep medicine itself is only like 70 or 80 years old. And for the first 20 years, it was really, I mean, it was really rudimentary. But what we can do is we can look back through journaling. And when you look at Victorian journaling right before the Industrial Revolution, just leading right up to that point, the average American spent nine and a half hours a night in bed. That was the average across the year. So it was probably a little more in the winter, a little less in the summer. But I mean, that was just normal because of the light saturation and the ability to engage in other things and lack of radios and television and all sorts of other stuff. And so people just naturally got sleepier. And after the, I don't know, it wasn't very long, six years, seven years, it's in that book Lights Out. They covered this story. But I want to say it was within like less than 10 years for sure, but maybe closer to five years after sort of the initiation of rural electrification, the average American went down to like 7.8 hours in bed. And that was in very, very short amount of time. And just since I've been geeking out on sleep in the last 11 or 12 years or whatever, the average sleep when I first started this, the average American was spending 6.8 hours a night in bed. And now that's down to 6.2. And that's time in bed. That's not time to sleep. Yeah. We're talking to Doc Parsley. And if you are just joining us, or you've been here a while, you can actually get 10% off with Doc's sleep remedy by using the code SWANIC, that's SWANWICK. And we're going to put up a link there in the comments that you can use. And if you would like to try or use Doc's sleep remedy, which is an all-natural sleep supplement, and you'd like to get 10% off, use the code SWANIC. And we'll put that link up on the page in just a second. We've got another question here. Got questions coming through on Facebook and on YouTube. Rod asks, what's the best way to deal with insomnia? And then Will on YouTube is asking, hey, Doc, serving in the military, sometimes working nights until 1 or 2 a.m. only to wake up a few hours later. How can I prevent or at least mitigate the effects of an inconsistent circadian rhythm? So yeah, the best way to deal with insomnia and how to prevent an inconsistent circadian rhythm. Well, fortunately, those two questions are highly related and the answer is pretty similar to both of them. So I'll make an assumption here. By far the most common form of insomnia is what we call psychophysiologic insomnia, which means that essentially that means that you can't sleep because you're worried that you might not be able to sleep. So it's actually stress hormones. And as we talked about earlier, fight or flight is the exact opposite of deep sleep. Nobody ever falls asleep during a car crash or a fist fight or like something that's stressing you maximum. You can't fall asleep because your stress hormones are super high. And as I said, when you're in deep sleep, that's the lowest your stress hormones will ever be. And they need to be that low for all of the normal physiological things to happen during deep sleep. And then over the course of the night, they gradually creep up and they get to a point where they're high enough to wake you up if you don't have an alarm clock. And then they creep up a little further until about midday and then they start dropping down again. And at some point they get lower than the level that wakes you up. And that's a level that allows you to be asleep. Now, what we what we run into with just stressful lifestyle and just a lot of the way society is designed today, I mean, just Jesus is watching the news is enough to stress anybody out, much less, you know, add in traffic and, you know, time schedules and homeschooling like all sorts of stuff that's getting to people these days. And we have an excess of stress hormones. Well, I just told you that there's a point in the day where your stress hormones are low enough to allow you to go to sleep. What if you don't ever get there? Right? What if you're just running like halfway towards fight or flight all the time? And you're just like, you're running with the doubles maybe levels of stress hormones all throughout the day, they're never going to really be low enough to get you to get to sleep proper. Now, what usually happens with women is that they get in bed and they can't fall asleep at all because they lay in bed and it's kind of the first time they've allowed themselves to be with themselves and think about all the things in their life that that need to be thought about, or that they just feel like need to be thought about whether they do need to be thought about or not. And women have a difficult time falling asleep. Men tend to fall asleep quite easily and then wake up a few hours later. And the reason for this is because there's something that's called sleep pressure. And sleep pressure is a buildup of a molecule in our brain called adenosine. And adenosine basically tells our brain it's essentially like, I hate to use the word toxin, but it's essentially like it's a molecule that's signaling to your brain. We've been up for too long. There's all this pressure. We're slowing down the brain. We're trying to get you to get ready to go to sleep. And that's, you know, if you've ever stayed up for multiple days and you know that feeling of just like being able to lay down on, you know, gravel and cactus and fall asleep in the middle of the day just because you're so exhausted. Well, you didn't get any of that blue light, like all the stuff that we talked about, you didn't get any of that. So how did you fall asleep? Well, it's because you have so much adenosine built up in your brain. And adenosine is just simply the breakdown of ATP. ATP, adenosine triphosphate, that's the energy source every cell in our body uses. And men have more lean tissue in about the same size brain. So I'm 250 pounds. If I'm next to, you know, 125 pound woman, our brain size is maybe, maybe a small like two to 3% difference in brain volume, right? Like the brain sizes just aren't don't vary nearly as much as the mass. And so I produce way more adenosine than she does. And I have way more sleep pressure. So even if I'm stressed out of my mind, I have so much sleep pressure that I just fall asleep. And then I wake up a couple hours later. Because one of the first, one of the things that happens in your first sleep cycle is you flush all the toxins out of your brain, including adenosine. And you start repairing the adenosine and making the adenosine into ATP again, which is an energy source. And then you're completely able to be awake. So the way to deal with that. If you go to my website docparcy.com, there's I actually have a PDF, a free download on this. More detail than I would have time to go into. But basically what I do is I tell people to draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper like this, you know, and then one side you write your to do list on the other side, you write your to worry list. The difference being your to worry list, there's nothing you can do about it, but you just want to make sure you don't forget to worry about it. So you put that on there and your to do list, take it out as far as makes sense to you. If you're somebody who plans six months in advance, then do it for six months. If you plan six minutes in advance and do it for six minutes, whatever to do list to worry list, make sure that everything that could possibly stress you out is on that sheet. Now when you get ready for bed, you make yourself this pact that the best I'm ever going to be at handling all the stressors on my on my list is when I met my physiologic peak and when am I at my physiologic peak after I've had a good night's sleep when I'm well nursed and well rested and I wake up in the morning and I get the cobwebs out of my brain. I'm the most capable I'm going to be for the next 24 hours. This is my peak. Why would you want to handle stressful things when you're not in your peak? If you have a choice, do it then. There's a few little other idiosyncrasies to that and that's why I'd recommend downloading the PDF and you get all the little details or stuff about your alarm clock and relaxation techniques. There's more to it, but just to keep this conversation short enough, that's the general, that's the gist of it. Get rid of the stressors with a pact in your mind at least that although the stressors still have to be part of your life, you're not going to deal with them until you're at your peak. We've got another question here from Dawn who's asking about intermittent fasting and sleep. But before we get to that question, I wanted to ask a question. If we are at our mental peak and presumably our physical peak first thing in the morning, how do you choose between exercising first thing in the morning, doing physical activity, and focusing on maybe work related things that you're wanting to overcome, those things that you drew up on your list before you went to sleep that are causing you stress? First hour, first two hours of the day, should be putting our mind to work on seemingly stressful things or should be putting our body to work and then move into the mental exercises. From the pure physiologic standpoint, do the mental activity early in the day. When I say you're at your peak for your list, that's when your prefrontal cortex is working as best as when your stress control is going to be as best, your creativity, your focus, your attention, all of that's going to be at its peak after you're well rested. Your physical peak as far as strength and endurance, that type of physical performance, that's actually later in the day. As I said, you wake up with some cortisol and it creeps up and the period of the day where it's at its peak right before it drops down, which is somewhere between 1.30 pm and 3.30 pm, that's actually where the majority of world records are set in athletic competitions because that's when you're physiologically at your peak. Of course, there's social things around exercising in the morning and there's disciplinary things around exercising in the morning and there's metabolic benefits to it. If you're somebody who's disciplined enough and you have the opportunity to focus your cognitive attention, the first four or five hours of your day, then go to your physical performance goals. Then the last half of the day, you're winding down, but you can go back more towards the cognitive things that are less stressful and require less attention because your attention gets worse throughout the day and your stress control gets worse throughout the day. That's the messy answer to that. Certainly, just to use me as an example here, if I look at yesterday, for example, I actually got a lot of work done in about a one hour to 75-minute stretch late at night, which ordinarily I don't do, but it was a Sunday night where I am. People in my home had gone to sleep. It was deathly quiet. Then I went on to my to-do list. I'm talking about, I started probably about 9.15 at night and I went through to about 10.30. I got more work done in that 75 minutes than I had in, say, the four hours that I had done where I was thinking about work or being interrupted and having some things happen earlier on in the day. That would seem to contradict this idea that the first thing, time in the morning, is the best. I know that I have had unbelievable concentration spurts late at night, which seems peculiar given that the first thing in the morning is when we know we're at the top of our clarity. Why would that be? Is there any kind of physical medical explanation for that, Kurt? Depends, again, on what type of work you're doing. The type of mental activity that requires creativity can actually be enhanced with a little mental fatigue because you get rid of some of the left brain logical strict stuff and you start allowing better communications between the hemispheres of your brain, the more fatigued you get. Something like that could be there, but you also have to remember that there's also- I'm answering this from a physiologic, geeky scientist, pipettes and needles kind of answer, but there's all sorts of social issues in that. If you wake up in the morning and that's the most stressful time of your day, if you're under 15 time constraints for the first four hours of your day and you have to get up, you have to do this by that time, get to the gym, do that, get your kids to school, get to work, do this. You're better able to handle stress during that period of the day, but you're also under more stress at that point of the day. Then if you're somebody who winds down and calms down throughout the day and then the last few hours of your day, you could actually be at a really low stress state relative to where you are during the day. Being in a low stress state enhances your cognitive performance. If all things were equal, if there were no time of day that's definitely going to stress you out more, then your lowest stress in the day would be immediately upon waking and then you would gradually build up stress through the day. Of course, that's not necessarily the case. You could have a lifestyle where the vast majority of your stress is in the morning, in the morning hours. That doesn't change the fact that that's still when you're the most capable of handling that stress. Thank you. We're coming up to the end of our time together here. Let's race through a quick fire round of these three remaining questions. Dawn asks, do you have any research on direct correlation between A1C fasting glucose levels and hours of sleep? I would have to go back through my files to pull that out. You could go to PubMed and look up fasting blood glucose, insomnia, pre-diabetes, insomnia, diabetes, insomnia. It's a really simple concept. The only animal on the planet that sleep deprives itself on purpose is humans. No other animal does this. Other animals sleep as long as they need to be sleep. The only time they will be sleep-deprived is not by choice, is when they're starving or being preyed upon. If they're being pursued, they will wake up earlier, stay awake later to try to get further away from their predator. If they're starving, meaning they don't have access to as much food, they need to travel further to find more food. They will, again, wake up earlier, they will go to sleep later. Also, when they're sleep-deprived, just like when we're sleep-deprived, one of the side effects of sleep deprivation is a loss of the prefrontal cortex, the simulating machine, the social gait for us, but for other animals, it's like they stay away from things that could be dangerous, things that are novel that they're not quite sure of. But if they're starving, they become more impulsive, just like we become more impulsive if we're starving. And so we know scientifically that when the cue for these animals sleep-deprived themselves, and the same thing for humans when they're nutritionally deprived, it's actually a change and it's the rate of blood glucose change in the brain. It doesn't matter what the absolute numbers are. You could be diabetic and it could be going from 400 to 300, but if it goes super fast, that's perceived as starvation and that will trigger evolutionary pathways in your brain to behave as though you're starving. And then that spikes your stress hormones and that makes you wake up. And if it doesn't make you come all the way awake, it puts you at a lot lighter level of sleep because your stress hormones are higher throughout the entire night. Nicole Fonaro on YouTube asks, is the dosage for sleep remedy one size fits all? No, nothing really is right. It is probably 85% solution for 85% of the people. The ratios of nutrients and the concentration of nutrients that I put in there, I developed over working with the seals and just trial and error, just like, let's take more of this, less of that, and we just figured it out over the course of a year. If you're a lot bigger or if you have a more nutritional deficiencies, you might need more. I've seen really petite women, especially if they're 50 plus and they're really petite. I've seen a lot of those women do just fine on half a serving. One of the guys I work out with is a 275 pound former NFL player. He uses two packs every night and that's just how much he needs. For most people, for 85% of the people, it's 85% of optimal for 85% of the people. I totally made those numbers up, but that's ballpark. Final question here, Kirk. We have Valentin Gentile. Apologies if I mispronounce your name. I'm not sure if it's Valentine or Valentin Gentile or Gentile as a Facebook user. How to stop taking what I think is a stress relief drug? I'm not going to pronounce this correctly. I'm sure Zangsyletic. A friend of mine has been taking it since 8 years old, is afraid to have huge health troubles if she suddenly stops. My impression of that question is maybe someone's taking an anti-depressant or an anti-anxiety pill. Yeah, that's an anxiolytic. It's usually a benzodiazepine. It's usually something like Xanax. How to stop taking that is basically you have to get rid of the daytime stress. Obviously, getting good sleep at night makes you have fewer stress hormones during the day. That will improve your overall stress the next day, but then you need to really focus on stress mitigating tools. Again, like that PDF that I talked about on my website, that talks about things you can do to decrease your stress around bedtime and while you're in bed and if you wake up in the middle of the night, all that. The same things that we all know. One is nutrition is key to keeping stress hormones in play. Some exercise or activity, if you're not an athlete, it doesn't have to be exercise, but you need to be active. Mow your own lawn, wash your own car, like that type of active, take the stairs instead of the elevator. That stuff definitely weighs into it. There's no getting around that fact, but then of course there's meditation, there's mindfulness, there's breath work, there's Tai Chi, there's yoga, there's float tanks, there's heart math, there's all sorts of devices and gadgets you can use, but driving down the daytime stress is how you get rid of the anxiolytics, but also getting better sleep means you're going to have less stress hormones. The unfortunate reality is that when your stress hormones are high, you sleep poorly. When you sleep poorly, you have high stress hormones the next day and so it's a self-propagating downward spiral. I would focus on getting the sleep down first. That's going to give you a lower basal level of stress hormones during the day and then really figure out what stress mitigating tool is best for you. Yeah, and I'll leave it with that. Yeah. Dr. Kirk Parsley, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for your amazing questions on YouTube and Facebook, for all those people who did post a question. If you're watching this on the replay many days from now or many weeks or even months from now, please do continue to post your questions and we will endeavor to get your sleep-related questions answered as soon as possible. Just a reminder that if you would like to use the discount code and get 10% off with your sleep remedy, which is Dr. Parsley's own all-natural sleep supplement, then you can use the code SWANNIC for 10% off and we'll put it a link down below in the comments for you there. Dr. Parsley, Kirk, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you and your guidance here today. All right, man. I always enjoy catching up with you, man. It's a good time. Thank you for having me on. Of course. Great to catch up with you too.