In this episode 52 protocols
▶ 9:08 Avoid Bright Light at Night Behaviors “Because we talked about just how crucial it is to avoid bright lights between the hours of about 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., except when you need to view things for sake of safety or work and so forth.” ▷ 12:33 Use Red Light Devices Early in the Day Behaviors “So if you're going to use those products, and I'm not suggesting you do or you don't, but if that's your thing, you would want to use those early in the day. Who knows, you might even derive some benefit on mitochondrial function in these photoreceptors.” ▷ 12:41 Use Dim Red Light at Night Behaviors “But if you're thinking about red light for sake of avoiding the negative effects of light later in the day and at night, then you want that red light to be very, very dim, certainly much dimmer than is on most of those commercial products.” ▷ 13:35 Get Daytime Light Exposure Behaviors “You actually want a ton of blue light early in the day and throughout the day.” ▷ 13:35 Blue-Light Blocking Glasses Tools “You actually want a ton of blue light early in the day and throughout the day. So don't wear your blue blockers then, or maybe even don't wear them at all.” ▷ 20:35 Get Outside for Morning Light Behaviors “Best thing to do is to get outside. If you can, if you can't next best thing to do is to keep that window open.” ▷ 20:40 Prescription Lenses or Contacts for Outdoor Light Viewing Tools “It is perfectly fine to wear prescription lenses and contacts. Why is it okay to wear prescription lenses and contacts when those are glass also, but looking through a window diminishes the effect?” ▷ 24:03 View Evening Sunlight Behaviors “And I talked last time about how you can protect against that sensitivity by looking at the setting sun and watching the evening sun, even if it's not crossing the horizon around the time of sunset.” ▷ 33:22 Get Adequate Sunlight Year-Round Behaviors “I think everybody should be taking care to get adequate sunlight and to avoid bright light at night throughout the year, if possible.” ▷ 38:39 Exercise Behaviors “So that can be a powerful tool, but you still want to get light exposure because it turns out that light and exercise converge to give an even bigger wake up signal to the brain and body.” ▷ 38:54 Avoid Intense Exercise Late in the Day Behaviors “Some people find if they exercise late in the day, they have trouble sleeping. In general, intense exercise does that, whereas the kind of lower intensity exercise doesn't.” ▷ 40:51 Keep a Regular Meal Schedule Behaviors “If you happen to eat on a very tight schedule where every day, say at 8 a.m., noon, and 7 p.m. is when you eat your food, not suggesting you do this, but let's say you were to do that for a couple of days. After a few days, you would start to anticipate those mealtimes.” ▷ 42:04 Keep a Regular Exercise Schedule Behaviors “If you wake up in the morning and start getting your sunlight, you start exercising in the morning, or you exercise in the afternoon, pretty soon your body will start to anticipate that and start to secrete hormones and other signals that prepare your body for the ensuing activity.” ▷ 42:23 Keep a Regular Wake Schedule Behaviors “So if you get onto a pattern or a rhythm, even if that rhythm isn't down to the minute, you'll find that there's plasticity in these circuits and it becomes easier to wake up early if that's your thing.” ▷ 42:56 NSDR Behaviors “And there's this NSDR, non-sleep deep rest, that can be done without sleeping to improve rates of learning and depth of retention.” ▷ 45:44 Metronome Tools “You could do this by having a metronome, for instance, while learning something, playing in the background or particular music, and then have that very faintly while you sleep.” ▷ 45:44 Use Auditory Cueing During Learning and Sleep Behaviors “You could do this by having a metronome, for instance, while learning something, playing in the background or particular music, and then have that very faintly while you sleep.” ▷ 46:54 Wake During a 90-Minute Cycle to Remember Dreams Behaviors “If you want to remember your dreams better, if you're somebody who has challenges remembering your dreams, you can set your alarm so that you wake up in the middle of one of these 90 minute cycles, which toward morning tend to be occupied almost exclusively by REM sleep.” ▷ 47:14 Write Down Thoughts First Thing in the Morning Behaviors “Some people find that writing down their thoughts immediately first thing in the morning allows them to later, spontaneously remember their dream they had.” ▷ 49:50 Take Short 20-Minute Naps Behaviors “So NSDR, non-sleep deep rest, as well as short 20-minute naps, which are very close to non-sleep deep rest... NSDR has been shown to increase rates of learning when done for 20-minute bouts to match an approximately 90-minute bout of learning.” ▷ 50:21 Use 90-Minute Focused Learning Cycles Behaviors “We tend to learn very well by taking a 90-minute cycle, transitioning into some focus mode early in the cycle when it's hard to focus, and then deep focus and learning feels almost like agitation and strain.” ▷ 52:00 Clinical Hypnosis Behaviors “We provided links to two different yoga nidra, non-sleep deep rest protocols, as well as hypnosis protocols that are clinically backed from my colleague, David Spiegel... All those resources are free.” ▷ 57:55 Caffeine Supplements “Most of them include some form of stimulant, caffeine... Stimulants will allow you to increase focus up to a particular point. If you have too little alertness in your system, you can't focus. Too much, however, you start to cliff and focus drifts.” ▷ 58:23 Alpha-GPC Supplements “that increase, or, that are designed to increase acetylcholine, things like alpha-GPC and other things of that sort.” ▷ 59:56 Modafinil Supplements “or Armodafinil, which was designed for treatment of narcolepsy. So right there, it tells you it's a stimulant.” ▷ 1:00:08 Armodafinil Supplements “Armodafinil, I think, is the recent released generic version of this that's far less expensive... many of them have the potential for addiction, or it can be habit forming... So you want to approach those with a strong sense of caution.” ▷ 1:00:33 Ginkgo Supplements “Now, there are the milder things that act as nootropics. I mentioned some of them, like alpha-GPC. Some people like Ginkgo. Ginkgo gives me vicious headaches, so I don't take it.” ▷ 1:00:54 Magnesium Threonate Supplements “Magnesium threonate seems, among the magnesiums, to be one of the more bioavailable and useful for sleep... If you're going to go that route, it should be taken 30 to 60 minutes before sleep because it's designed to make you sleepy.” ▷ 1:02:07 Apigenin Supplements “One of them that I discussed at the end of the last podcast, I got a lot of questions about, it's apigenin... Apigenin... found in a lot of supplements designed to increase sleepiness and sleep.” ▷ 1:02:44 Passionflower Supplements “Other related things that impact the GABA system and increase GABA are things like passionflower... Apigenin and passionflower found in a lot of supplements designed to increase sleepiness and sleep.” ▷ 1:04:35 L-Tryptophan Supplements “I personally have tried taking a supplement, which was L-tryptophan, which is the precursor to serotonin... I fell asleep almost immediately... And 90 minutes later, I woke up and I couldn't sleep almost for 48 hours.” ▷ 1:04:41 5-HTP Supplements “Or 5-HTP, which is designed to increase, it is serotonin, basically... the sleep that I had with increased serotonin by way of tryptophan or 5-HTP was dreadful.” ▷ 1:15:13 Deliberate Cold Exposure Behaviors “But if you do the ice bath early in the day and then get out, you will experience a more rapid rise or cold shower... in your body temperature that will phase advance your clock and make it easier to get up early the following day.” ▷ 1:22:20 Get Onto the Local Meal Schedule After Travel Behaviors “When you travel and you land in a new location and your schedule is inverted 12 hours, one way that we know you can shift your rhythm more quickly is to get onto the local meal schedule.” ▷ 1:24:28 Eat Tyrosine-Rich Foods for Wakefulness Diet “First of all, nuts and meats, in particular, red meats, tend to be rich in things like tyrosine... those foods tend to lend themselves toward the production of dopamine and epinephrine and the sorts of things that are associated with wakefulness.” ▷ 1:24:55 Avoid Large Food Volumes for Alertness Behaviors “If we eat a lot of anything... your stomach, if it's very distended, will draw a lot of blood into your gut and you will divert blood from other tissues and you'll become sleepy. So it's not just about food content, it's also about food volume.” ▷ 1:25:15 Use Fasting for Alertness Behaviors “Fasting states generally are associated with more alertness, epinephrine and so forth.” ▷ 1:25:32 Use Carbohydrate-Rich Meals for Calm and Sleep Diet “Foods that are rich in tryptophan tend to be things like white meat turkey, also complex carbohydrates. So if you like, you can start experimenting with carbohydrate-rich meals for accessing sleep and more depth of sleep.” ▷ 1:25:58 Eat Low-Carbohydrate or Fasted During the Day for Wakefulness Diet “I tend to eat pretty low carb-ish during the day... And that meal is then designed to prolong my period of wakefulness into the late afternoon.” ▷ 1:26:23 Eat a Sleep-Supportive Dinner Diet “And then sometime around dinner time... I tend to eat things like white meat, fish, pastas, rice and that kind of thing.” ▷ 1:31:04 Time Meals to Shift Circadian Rhythm Behaviors “If you're eating early in the day, you're tending to shift your rhythm earlier so that you'll want to wake up earlier the next day.” ▷ 1:34:18 Track Morning Sunlight Timing Behaviors “It might be interesting, just a suggestion, to write down for each day when you went outside to get sunlight and when you did that relative to waking.” ▷ 1:34:18 Track Wake Time Behaviors “It might be interesting, just a suggestion, to write down for each day... the way I do this on my calendar is I'll write down that, I don't get exact about it. I might say, you know, I woke up at, you know, 6.15 and then I, so I'll put a W, 6.15.” ▷ 1:34:53 Track Meal Timing Behaviors “And then I'll put a little check at roughly the times that I eat my so-called meals.” ▷ 1:35:09 Track Exercise Timing Behaviors “And then you might just take note of when you exercised, just put down an E for when you exercise, weight training or aerobic exercise.” ▷ 1:35:16 Track Feeling Chilled or Hot Behaviors “And you might note when you might've felt chilled or cold, if you do, or you might've felt particularly hot, or if you woke up in the middle of the night when you felt particularly hot.” ▷ 1:35:23 Track NSDR Timing Behaviors “And then the last thing you might want to do is just write down if and when you did a non-sleep-deep-rest protocol, an SDR protocol, that could be meditation, that could be yoga nidra, that could be hypnosis.” ▷ 1:35:32 Meditation Behaviors “That could be meditation, that could be yoga nidra, that could be hypnosis, anything that you're using to deliberately teach your nervous system how to go from more alertness to more calmness in the waking state.” ▷ 1:35:54 Use Morning and Evening Sunlight Viewing Behaviors “You're going to write down when you woke up, when you viewed sunlight that might be in the morning, morning and the evening, or just the morning, hopefully it's the morning and the evening.” ▷ 1:37:29 Sauna Tools “If I take a hot shower or sit in a hot, or a sauna late at night, well then I get a compensatory decrease in body temperature and I sleep great provided I hydrate well enough.” ▷ 1:37:29 Take a Hot Shower Late at Night Behaviors “If I take a hot shower or sit in a hot, or a sauna late at night, well then I get a compensatory decrease in body temperature and I sleep great provided I hydrate well enough.” ▷ 1:38:45 Manipulate One or Two Variables at a Time Behaviors “Self-experimentation is something that should be done slowly, carefully... manipulating one or two variables at a time is really going to be best as opposed to changing a dozen things all at once.”