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032 - Sleep & Skill Acquisition w/ Dr Kirk Parsley
134 Plays1 month ago
What if everything you've been told about "grinding" and "hustling" has been undermining your potential?
Former Navy SEAL & physician Dr. Kirk Parsley reveals why elite performers are radically rethinking sleep. Drawing from his groundbreaking work with military operators, Doc Parsley exposes how chronic sleep deprivation sabotages the very neural mechanisms responsible for peak decision-making and skill acquisition. You'll discover why those crucial hours of deep sleep are literally rewiring your brain for expertise – and why sacrificing them is equivalent to training and operating under the influence of alcohol.
Doc Parsley's Stressless Sleep Guide: docparsley.com/captains-and-coaches/
Old Bull Training Program - 7 Day Free Trial: https://bit.ly/old-bull-train
#SleepOptimization #PeakPerformance #AthleteRecovery #DecisionMaking #CognitiveHealth #NavySEALDoctor #SleepScience #SkillAcquisition #ElitePerformance #SleepForAthletes #NavySEAL
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Transcript
The Impact of Sleep on Athletic Performance
00:00:00
Speaker
you're getting stronger while you're asleep your endurance is increasing while you're in sleep and you're actually getting smarter you're actually learning and you're acquiring your skills and something that's fascinating i find this one of the most fascinating thing in the world and i've done it with some mma guys right so you get an mma guy who's a wrestler and he's going to fight a striker he's got eight weeks it's like i got a I've got learn how to box in eight weeks, right? I've got to really spun up on that.
00:00:26
Speaker
So what's the what's the best possible thing for him to do? Well, it's not trained 24 hours a day, right? because Okay, so he needs to rest. How much does he need to rest? Well, as much as he needs to rest. So what can we what what else can we do?
00:00:37
Speaker
Well, let's build in a little recovery. Let's build in a little. So you train in the morning. You take a nap. You consolidate memories. You come back, you train in the afternoon.
00:00:49
Speaker
If your day ideal and you're the right kind of person, you could possibly get... And you're professional athlete. And you're professional athlete and your life's laid out that way. You could possibly take two naps a day and get three days
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:58
Speaker
of training. Welcome to the Captains and Coaches podcast. We explore the art and science of leadership through the lens of athletics and beyond.
00:01:05
Speaker
I'm your host, Texel Wilkin, and today we are joined in studio by Dr. Kirk Parsley, former Navy SEAL-turned-physician, sleep specialist, and author of the book, Sleep to Win.
00:01:17
Speaker
In today's conversation, we'll explore how sleep deprivation hijacks our decision making and compromises the prefrontal cortex. We'll discover why sleep isn't just about recovery. It's where our bodies and our minds integrate the day's learning into the lasting skill acquisition.
The Importance of Sleep for Cognitive and Emotional Health
00:01:34
Speaker
Get ready to understand why the world's elite performers prioritize sleep as their secret weapon for cognitive clarity, emotional regulation, and accelerated skill development.
Dr. Kirk Parsley's Journey from SEAL to Sleep Specialist
00:01:45
Speaker
Now, let's hand it off to Dr. Parsley, who helps us raise the game. Ready, ready, and hooray. We have a lot in common, Dr. Parsley. Welcome to the show. I'm grateful for you to come out to Dripping Springs.
00:01:56
Speaker
It's not a far drive for you. Yeah.
00:02:03
Speaker
But we went to the same high school, yeah same birthday. Yeah. So you had a different experience, though. You were a part of a winning Katie Taylor football team.
00:02:13
Speaker
Well, three out of four years. Three out of four years. Yeah, yeah. I believe you were on the last team to actually beat Katie Tigers. Yeah. And so i had ah I had a high school coach that was on that team as well. Okay. Yeah.
00:02:25
Speaker
uh coach powell know if you know a billy powell billy powell yes i do know billy powell well how about that yeah that's funny and and he has a sister like a year you're too young than him yeah don't don't dan dana powell yeah so he he was he was an electrifying personality yeah i can't repeat some of the quotes that he gave us yeah but that that high school ball coach speak yeah one of the stories that we tell Like when me and my guys get together.
00:02:50
Speaker
Really? Yeah. That's so cool. I haven't, it's the first time we've discussed that all the years we've met each other. It just popped in my head. The, um, um So from Katie, you jumped right into the military.
00:03:01
Speaker
Yeah. So speak to us about that transition from just small town living yeahp way back when into. all right. what What is our next step for you and just that thought process? yeah So, i you know, i wasn't really much of a student um my whole life. Yeah.
00:03:19
Speaker
You know, had a lot to do with the conditions of the home life, you know, um the kind of a bad, abusive home life. So ah all my the only time I had any fun was at school. So like I wasn't interested in school. So did really poorly after four years of high school. I was a sophomore by credits with a one point one GPA.
00:03:41
Speaker
And none of my friends like that I'd gone you know from third grade to senior with none of none of them knew that I wasn't on part on class in class with them. So um when they all graduated, i just drifted away to the military. Right. Which ah was always my plan.
00:03:59
Speaker
um it wasn't always my plan to be a seal because being a seal wasn't the thing back then like there's no celebrity status that nobody really knew what seals were and uh my the boxing coach in uh in my town that i trained with wasn't the marine recruiter and so it just kind of assumed i was going to go marine recon because heartbreak ridge movie had come out and that was cool and so force recon was like a cool thing and then this documentary came out about navy seal training It wasn't so much about being a SEAL. it was about Navy SEAL training. It's about bloods. um And it was a a video documentary, like 60 Minutes, called 48 Hours. I don't know if you remember that.
00:04:38
Speaker
So they covered the first 48 hours of Hell Week. and ah And yeah they just kept saying, toughest training in the world, toughest training in the world. to And it's like, well, I want to go do the toughest training in the world, right? Because, you know, the old adage, if you're going to be dumb, you better be tough. And so, like, I was pretty sure I was dumb because I had been getting decent enough since I was in third grade.
00:04:58
Speaker
So, yeah, I was tough. Like I like, you know, I, I didn't, I liked to do tough, hard things. And so I, I wanted
Addressing Health Issues in SEALs
00:05:04
Speaker
to go do that. And, uh, yeah, I, I, uh, waited for the Marine recruiter to go out of town and I went and met with the Navy recruiter and I, and hey I joined up to be a seal.
00:05:15
Speaker
Uh, really honestly, not really knowing what a seal was like it. I just knew the toughest training in the world. I wanted to go do that. So, um, uh, it's fortunate enough to make it through, you know, a a lot of guys don't, a lot of really good dudes don't for kind kind of reasons beyond their control. So there, you know, there's definitely some fate and chance involved in that.
00:05:33
Speaker
Uh, and, uh, I, I was lucky in that respect and I, you know, and I obviously had, the right grit to get through as well. And so made it through that. um Then, that you know, they give you this what they call a dream sheet.
00:05:45
Speaker
It's like list where you would want to go of all the SEAL teams. Like what's your first choice all the way down to your last choice, right? there's at that moment I realized I didn't know what a seal was.
00:05:56
Speaker
And I was like, well, I guess I already live in California. So I'll just choose the ones here in California. Not, not really knowing any difference. Right. yeah And so, ah so I chose the ones in California and I stayed in California.
00:06:10
Speaker
um And then, know, we had the Gulf war breakout, but that was kind of a, yeah Really a nothing burger. um and then so we was really like you kind of six years of training, doing the same training trips with different guys and red over and over and over and over again. um and it was cool. A great place to spend your twenty s you know getting like you know Learning how to... yeah and Coronado. and Then traveling the world to... la out ah scuba diving, skydiving, shoot machine gun and blow things up and, know, drive sand rails and, you know, cool stuff. So but, you know just decided, yeah I'd kind of done it. yeah Well, ah you know met a girl.
00:06:50
Speaker
Yeah. started thinking about marriage and kids and all that other stuff. So I said, well, i'll get out and I'll go to college. And I really was thinking, in you know, like athletic trainer, strength and conditioning coach kind of thing. Way back then. Wow.
00:07:03
Speaker
Yeah. And then thinking like maybe a stretch school would be like a PT because the girl I was marrying was in PT school when I met her. And so that was like way up there. That was like for an academic, right? Not as fun. Yeah. Yeah. and i was like, wow, maybe. And so ah so to get into PT school, you need 2000 volunteer hours.
00:07:20
Speaker
which is like... That's a year of full-time work, two years of half-time work, right? That's a lot of volunteer hours. yeah So was like, all right. And I was thinking about, of I think it was Fresno State had an entry-level master's.
00:07:33
Speaker
So I was like, I had to go to junior college because I didn't have a high school diploma. And so ah i yeah I skipped over that. just i got a GED and to join the Navy. um And so I started volunteering at San Diego Sports Medicine Center.
00:07:46
Speaker
okay And within about a week, they hired me to be a PT aide. which meant, you know, I E-STEM and ice and massage and stuff like that. And then, ah you know, kind of decided I didn't really want to be a PT. no After about six months of that, I was really almost doing what the PTs were doing, just kind of supervised. And I was like, don't really think that's it for me.
00:08:08
Speaker
um And because of, you know, because I'd been a SEAL, ah you know, that time gap and then, you know, it's, you know whatever year or two into college, like ah the doctors that I worked there were,
00:08:19
Speaker
with San Diego Sports Medicine Center had like every kind of health care practitioner related to sports you could think of. um And so i you know I got to see everybody's job, you know, um and and we had strength and conditioning coaches and trainers and massage therapists and acupuncturists like you can you name it. We had it.
00:08:37
Speaker
And these doctors were about my age, you know, they're like two years older than me. And they're like, oh, you should go to medical school. And I'm like, yeah, I'm like, right. Yeah. We have pump the brakes there. Right. Like, you know, I didn't graduate high school.
00:08:50
Speaker
And they're like, they're like, and, and this guy, Lee Rice, who owns the practice, he overhears this conversation and he says, he says, Kirk, the question isn't, could you get in The question is, would you want to go right you could get in?
00:09:04
Speaker
was like, of course I want to go. And he's like, well, I mean, you really got to try don't you? So I really kind of got guilted into it. And was like, yeah, I mean, I'm kind of being a coward. You're right. So I'll try to get into medical school.
00:09:15
Speaker
um So I did well enough to get into medical school. um yeah Like anything else, there's a yeah there's a scale. you know theres There's a gradation of like how how good of a school you can get into based on your grades and all that. So when I started looking through review books to figure out like what schools I was competitive for, given my GPA and my MCAT and all that.
00:09:37
Speaker
um That's when I found out the military had their own medical school. And I was already married, already had a kid, another kid on the way, and they were going to pay me to go to medical school. So the other way around.
00:09:48
Speaker
And i you know, my wife wouldn't have to work. And I was like, and kind of hard to pass that up. Right. So I figured I'd get back to the SEAL teams, um be able to get back to the community that really probably saved my life. Yeah. like Completely shaped me as ah as a man, I think that that community. And so I thought, yeah, that'd be a great, you that'd be a great way to,
00:10:09
Speaker
ah you know kind of go full circle on all that. And so I did. and i yeah I got back there. um yeah The way military funding, big bureaucracy, you know they apply for something, it gets granted, the money comes whenever. So 10 years later, you get the money for the project that you you know you started 10 years ago.
00:10:28
Speaker
And so they had just gotten the money to build the very first sports medicine facility ever for for the West Coast SEAL teams. Right when I got there as their doctor and they're like, well, given your background, right, you should you should supervise the build out of this and hire all the people. And i was like, perfect. So that's what I did. But then, of course, you know, we got people from the Olympic Training Center and professional sports teams and D1 colleges and.
00:10:54
Speaker
Like we just got amazing people. So then I was by far the dumbest guy around, right? Because I say want yeah i didn't have any of this training, right? I had only done like one year of residency. yeah This is the way the military kind of breaks up. You do one year and you go out and you do like a general practice kind of tour and then you come back and finish your residency.
00:11:11
Speaker
And so I had one year of residency. And so, you know, I had all these, had ortho rounds coming through and pain rounds coming through. and you know, and we hired PTs and athletic training, exercise physiologists, nutritionists, not So, and then they're like, so when you're the dumbest guy around in the military, they say,
00:11:29
Speaker
yeah in You're in charge. Okay. so you supervise. Right. And so, so now my job was to supervise this clinic, which really gave me no real job to speak of. Um, but it was like, there's a, there's like a true physical therapy rehab and what we call a bridge gym, which is guys who weren't quite ready to get back to the team, but they were, they're beyond this. Right.
00:11:50
Speaker
So they'd work with their, you know, with their coaches over here. And then between those two were four offices and mine was one of those offices. um And SEALs are, you know, they're a lot like professional athletes. And I know you know a lot of them. and And the worst thing you can do is put them on the bench. Like by far, that's the worst fate. So when they have to go talk to their doctor, they usually say, I'm great.
00:12:11
Speaker
Everything's fine. I got no problems whatsoever. um But because I'd been a SEAL recently enough to where there were still a ton of guys there that I had trained with and deployed with. um I obviously had a good enough reputation. guys trusted me and they came in the door and they you know come in my office and close the door behind them and go, Hey man, let me tell you what's really going on with me. Right.
00:12:32
Speaker
And they started complaining. It's like this confluence of, of, uh, of symptoms that's now and in the medical literature has now been dubbed the operator syndrome.
00:12:43
Speaker
Okay. I was calling it the seal syndrome because I was working with seals, obviously. ah And I like alliterations, I guess. Uh, so, you know, it was, it was basically what you would think of if, if, you know, if I was sitting across from 55, 65 year old man, who's 30 pounds overweight and really hadn't really hadn't taken care of himself since he quit playing college sports or whatever. Right.
00:13:06
Speaker
Um, so, you know, they had yeah poor insulin sensitivity, they had high inflammation. these are the things I found lab wise. Right. right you know, poor insulin sensitivity, high inflammation, high oxidation, low anabolic hormones, right? Low testosterone, low DHA, low DHEA, low IGF-1, like everything anabolic low, everything catabolic high.
00:13:26
Speaker
me um And they're complaining of, you know, lack of ah lack of lack of motivation, lack of concentration, lack of like just ability to pay attention. like yeah Like they're giving the lecture and they can't pay attention to the lecture that they're giving, right?
00:13:43
Speaker
um They leave their house four or five times every morning because they keep forgetting something, get in the car, I i forgot my bad job, I forgot this, and yeah walk in a room, can't figure out why they were there. um the get there They're working with the strength and conditioning coach. We hired Josh Everett. right ah We had a great nutritionist. like they They had great programming, great coaching.
00:14:03
Speaker
And they're like, I'm working, I'm doing everything they're saying. I'm getting fatter, I'm getting weaker, I'm getting slower. um And my mood's not there. I'm snappy, I'm moody. i you know, I cry on commercials. I snap at my kids. I'm a prick to my coworkers and I just don't know what's going on. and you know, being a Western trained physician, I knew how to recognize and treat diseases and they didn't have any diseases. Right.
00:14:28
Speaker
And i was like, don't really know, but we'll figure it out. Right. We'll figure it out together. So, uh, so I just said, Hey, go to the hospital and get all these labs drawn.
00:14:40
Speaker
And what I literally did was I sent them to do every lab that I knew how to interpret. Okay. So just like shotgun, there's 98 lab markers, 17 vials of blood. And, uh, they go get this lab set done, came back and I just look at it and I just started looking for trends.
00:14:55
Speaker
Um, and so interestingly enough, the, the seal community already knew that they had a problem with testosterone and, uh, the leadership's belief was, well,
00:15:08
Speaker
guys abuse steroids when they're younger and it interferes with their ability to make testosterone later, right? Well, that's not exactly true, right? Depending on how long, they'd have to abuse them for a really long time for that to be affecting them 15 years later, right? Right.
00:15:24
Speaker
um And they're doing all sorts, you know, so and it would have been smart enough population to know how to recover. So and plus, I knew a lot of the guys personally and like, you know, the guys who do this kind of things, right? Like, you know who they are.
00:15:39
Speaker
And there were guys in my office that I know for fact never took steroids. Like, I know they never did. And they had the same problems everybody else did. And ah I was like, I don't really know. um There was, you know, we'd all heard of like shell shock and combat fatigue and stuff from other wars. Right. And this was 2009. So they've been in war for like eight years. And i'm like, well, maybe it's something like that. Right.
00:16:03
Speaker
So I start trying to look up, well, what is combat fatigue? What is shell shock? and Nobody ever really figured that out. So I'm like, That didn't really help. Catch all. ah Yeah. I'm like, okay, so let's see. What else could it be?
00:16:14
Speaker
um And so I just said, well, to have to start looking kind of outside of Western medicine and just look, you the functional integrative medicine kind of component. And the first thing that kind of struck me as being a possibility was adrenal fatigue, which is, you know, that's probably misnamed. It should be, you know, called something else. but but But there is a condition that, you know, that describes, right?
00:16:39
Speaker
um and so i was like well let me so let me see you know what's going on what i can do with that so i started doing things to help guys reach recover from adrenal fatigue um which there's not a whole lot you can do but the things i could do i was doing and there was some success maybe 30 40 improvement with maybe 30 or 40 of the guys not not huge um and then you know the way the still teams work is like if you help a guy word of mouth and he's really like, Hey, you should go talk. Right. And so within within a month I had, you know, hundred, 150 guys come in my office, sit there and tell me the exact same story. So similar that I thought they were coaching each other. Right.
00:17:20
Speaker
And, uh, and it wouldn't be beyond them to do that. which That would make sense. They were, they were sharing in confidence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so they're, but they're telling me like the same story over and over again. and it And at one point, it just kind of occurred to me which I'm sitting there talking, and it's embarrassing how many people it took me to catch on. I mean, it was a lot of people, dozens of people who had been in my office before I kind of caught on. Like, it seems like everybody's taking Ambien. It seems like almost everybody in here seems like he's taking Ambien. So when that dude leaves, I go through my files.
00:17:50
Speaker
Every single guy who had been in my office was taking Ambien. And I was like, huh. again, western train your sleep Western trained physician. Take this. I had not had a single class on sleep in medical school. So I didn't know anything about sleep that they didn't know, that anybody else didn't know.
00:18:05
Speaker
um And i yeah I took pharmacology and i knew that you I knew what sleep drugs were. I knew that they were GABA analogs and they worked like GABA. What did GABA do? Hell if I knew, but like that's what I knew. i had my bullets memorized.
00:18:19
Speaker
And i was like, all right, well, let's see what I can find out about that. Now, what I did have going for me was that you know like Like I alluded to earlier, the SEALs had started developing their kind of celebrity status. And so i could talk you know i could watch somebody's TED Talk or see somebody lecture or read their book and just call them up and be like, hey, I'm the doctor for the West Coast SEAL teams. I'm having these problems. I you know i saw you lecture, whatever.
00:18:43
Speaker
Could I come train with you or could I run patients? Could I consult with you? and And so I got to learn a lot really fast. And so I said, well, I'm going to learn i' go to learn about sleep and and the sleep drugs. I'm going to learn what the sleep drugs might be doing to sleep. But at first, I need to understand what the hell sleep is so that I can understand what the sleep drugs might be doing to them and figure out how that might be playing a part.
00:19:03
Speaker
Well, now I think the general population knows that all your hormones are balanced while you're asleep. Nobody knew that. Nobody knew that. I remember telling the leadership of the SEAL teams and literally getting laughed out of the laughed out of their office. going Like only 15 years ago. Yeah. And they're like, doc, you need to go back to medical school. That's ridiculous.
00:19:21
Speaker
I'm like, no, really, really their testosterone is low because of their poor sleep. And they're like, yeah, whatever. Right. um And so, know, I got to learn a lot about sleep. I learned what sleep drugs actually do.
00:19:34
Speaker
Of course, sleep drugs don't cause sleep. They cause unconsciousness. They destroy the actual quality parts of sleep. You know, most people know you have like deep sleep and you have REM sleep and then you have like this intermediate stage two sleep.
00:19:45
Speaker
And there's supposed to be certain portion proportions and ratios of that. And there's a timing of all of that. And we call that sleep architecture where it looks a certain way, follows that. And then we know what's going on in each one of those stages. Right.
00:19:58
Speaker
Well, if you take a drug like Ambien, which falls into the category of a Z drug, um and also benzodiazepines, things like Valium and Xanax, um those are also GABA analogs.
00:20:11
Speaker
but So if you take drugs like that, what they do is they destroy about 80% of REM sleep and about 20% of deep sleep. And if you drink alcohol, that's 80% of deep sleep and 20% of REM sleep. So if you do both... Oh, no.
00:20:25
Speaker
Every SEAL that I sent for a sleep study came back 99.9% stage two sleep. No deep sleep, no REM sleep. Wow. Now, as true to the medical literature, ah they should be dead and that shouldn't have worked, right?
00:20:38
Speaker
ah if if you If you read what's supposed to happen when you're asleep, like, well, you couldn't survive that. was like, well, they've been surviving it for eight years or whatever. So you can survive it. Let's figure out what we're going to do about it, right?
00:20:49
Speaker
Right. so um So I said, well, let's get off of Ambien. see Let's just see what happens, right? um And of course, they were taking Ambien because they couldn't sleep. right So I had to come up with something to give them instead. I couldn't just say, I'm going to take your Ambien away and go sleep anyway.
00:21:06
Speaker
um So I went to like really traditional like PubMed, Cochrane database kind of just very traditional medical things like what supplements actually help with sleep. And at that point, I knew enough about sleep to understand why ah supplement would help.
00:21:21
Speaker
And so I came up with like six different supplements. And then i worked with, you know, probably 100 seals helping me figure it out. And I just told him fled like we're going to figure out a combination of this that works. I don't know what that combination is. i don't know how much to give you. We're going to figure it out.
00:21:37
Speaker
So over the course of a few months, I mean, it's great because they they're super motivated. They would journal, they would wearables were starting to come around um and and you know they they're tracking their sleep and they were coming in every day and they're telling me what they're experiencing and they were giving me feedback. And so we figured out kind of the right combination.
00:21:55
Speaker
And then we figured out the brands that seem to work the best. And then I just gave them a handout, man, a piece of paper like, hey, go buy this. pre-Amazon Prime. so guys had to drive around to the various health food stores.
00:22:06
Speaker
um And they'd go get all this. And then they started sleeping without drugs and minimizing their alcohol, taking alcohol further and farther away from bed and trying to drink less alcohol and just really prioritizing their sleep. And that, and the biggest component of them was that I educated them, you know, that their testosterone and growth hormone and like all this stuff that they know is going to make them perform better. All that's happening while you're asleep.
00:22:31
Speaker
And so if you don't do this, you aren't going to get that. And so that was enough motivation for them. um And of course they're in, they're in miserable pain because ah it's not a real estate job. And they tried everything. Yeah. And they've tried everything. And so, um so we started doing that and it was huge. I mean, it was like an 80% solution for probably 80% of the guys.
00:22:50
Speaker
yeah. I mean, literally I had guys, you know, total and free testosterone like triple and quadruple, right? ah Go from a you know, go from an HSCRP, a mark a marker for inflammation to go from like 34, which is ridiculously high. It's like, you know,
00:23:06
Speaker
do you have some kind of disease that we don't know about like 34 is a high number they go from 34 to like to unmeasurable uh just in the course of you know six weeks eight weeks something like that testosterone triple quadruple igf1 triple quadruple oxidation was going down like and then i And I was giving them some supplements during the day, like DHEA.
00:23:27
Speaker
was giving them some zinc citrate to kind of prevent conversion of testosterone into estrogen and giving them pregnenolone, which is another precursor to sex hormones and and and cortisol.
00:23:39
Speaker
And and i I had guys just like PR-ing. Like I had guys in their 40s coming and telling me like, hey, I PR'd this workout, this O-course, this CrossFit workout, like raised whatever they did, whatever they're into.
00:23:53
Speaker
And like, and I don't mean I PR'd it for my 40s. Like I PR'd it for my life. Like this is the fastest and strongest I've ever been. And I was like, Wow, that know that's impressive. um that That wasn't everybody, but you know but there there were some cases of that. So I was like, wow, that really worked.
00:24:07
Speaker
um And then what I figured out maybe my last year there was that that other 20% of the solution that I didn't have was ah TBIs. okay um Because when I went to medical school, traumatic brain traumatic brain injury, right. so when i When I went to medical school, um you know the the definition of a traumatic brain injury was that you had to be physically hit in the head with something and you had to lose consciousness.
00:24:32
Speaker
If those two things didn't happen, you didn't have a TBI. um But what we subsequently learned over the years, um and actually the biggest breakthrough for this, unfortunately, was one of our SEALs committed suicide. oh man. And he was medic, just like the NFL guys. He was like,
00:24:50
Speaker
um shoot myself through the chest left to note like i want my brain studied and ah probably you a lot of people have heard of like beta amyloid plaques in the brain they're like markers for their markers for like neurological disease um and they grow as you as you age and if you have neurological disease you have a lot more of them it's kind of you think about like calcium in your arteries When you have chronic inflammation, your body tries to wall it off.
00:25:16
Speaker
And in your arteries, they put calcium up and then you have a calcified plaque. In your brain, they put up this beta amyloid plaques. like So you have inflammation in your brain and your brain's like, let's put a protein wall around it and then we don't have to mess with it anymore.
00:25:28
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Well, it's interfering with your brain function, obviously. um And so this guy had shot himself through the chest to have his brain studied. And unlike NFLs and boxers, like who tend to have like spots up here and spots back here from their coup counter coup, his entire brain was riddled with these things and like multiple layers of his brain.
00:25:48
Speaker
And they're like, wow, that's strange. What caused that? And then the succession of this, they started doing autopsies and taking ah and looking at other people's brain slides and finding this over and over again. and And then somebody's like, well, let's see if we can figure this out. So they built this completely transparent skull out of a plastic that had a density approximating bone.
00:26:09
Speaker
And then they built a brain underneath that layer by layer. with materials that was closer to you matching that density. So like the Dura layer, then you have blood vessels under that and you have gray matter, which had a different density than the white matter.
00:26:24
Speaker
And you have fluid vesicles in there and they built a very, very realistic brain. And then with high speed photography, they're they would film this thing. They put off a blast wave in the room next to it.
00:26:37
Speaker
And so just like when you've seen a blast wave in a movie or whatever, you see everything, everything moves, right? All the wind blows, dust, trash, cars, rock, trees, wood,
00:26:48
Speaker
Well, everything moves at a different rate, depending on how heavy it is, how dense it is. That's what happens in your brain. So we'd watch this brain wave and it would come through and you watch the whole brain wiggle. But the dura moves at a different rate than the blood vessels on the right hand, then they were great. And and so it's sheared and it caused things to tear off of each other. And so that's why we had this brain like completely covered everywhere. There was an interface between two different densities. You're full of these beta amyloid plaques.
00:27:15
Speaker
like okay well that's probably a really big problem so now so now we just assume that tb like all seals have tbis right um because what we found through the research that it only takes about 1.1 g's of force to cause a very very mild tbi nothing you would never nothing you'd ever pick up on but you and you can get that from the acceleration changes on the roller coaster right that's that's how little that insult is but that's a very very minor one Well, if you're in a room, a concrete room, and you're shooting an m four every every round is 35 Gs.
00:27:49
Speaker
Wow. And then you got three other guys in the room doing that, you're doing that thousands of times a day, right? And we have, you know, whatever. You have hard parachute openings, three or four Gs. You have, you know, ah fifty I think a.50 cal on the back of a Humvee is 65 Gs. Wow. For every round.
00:28:04
Speaker
ah Our anti-tank weapon, the Carl Gustav. 200 Gs for the guy shooting it, 300 Gs for the guy spotting it, right? And we have 50 cal sniper rifles, and i go all this stuff. yeah And so it's just, okay, everybody has 10,000 TBIs.
00:28:19
Speaker
as Also, you do compatibles and you do fast roping and you fall off the stuff and you hit, and it's like, okay, every SEAL has multiple TBIs, just like every football player and every pugilist. Yeah.
00:28:31
Speaker
And so so when i when I finally got out of that that work, I retired from the military and went into private practice. ah kind of left this void. for And the SEALs were like, well, what are we going to do now? Because like they're not replacing you with you. They're replacing you with...
00:28:46
Speaker
jail blow doctor who doesn't know anything that you know need a mentor or no people didn't it's just like a turn no it just it's just the nature of the military it's like your time's up you're one of a million employees it's like here stamp you're gone um right and so i just said well you guys just keep calling me and i'll i'll figure it out so um so in the beginning i was just i my deal with the seals was i Like I will do everything that I've always done for you, but you're just going to have to pay for your labs. you're going to have to pay for your medications. to have to pay for your supplements. I can't, I can't prescribe within that system anymore.
00:29:22
Speaker
And, uh, and then I just never charged them for my time. and And then over the years, lots of foundations have come up and now the foundations will actually pay for all of those guys to get all that treatment. And I, and I still don't charge for my time.
00:29:36
Speaker
And i o and I let them, you know, i I do everything, like everything they need. and And I work with all the tools now. And so now as SEALs are getting out, they spend a year with me and we work on their TBIs and their hormones and their chronic pain and all this stuff. And and I'm doing everything, doing the you know, hormones and peptides and supplementation and nutrition and sleep and hyperbarics and psychedelics if they need And like, you know all of the all this stuff.
00:30:01
Speaker
And we're getting them ready for their next career because guys are, You know, are retiring at 40, 42, 43 years old. And, you know, up until 10 years ago, they just assumed, you know, they're going to be living in the fifth wheel somewhere, drinking a bottle of whiskey a day you know, making it another 10 years, maybe, you know, and no real plans to go into another career because they were so broken, so beaten down. yeah you know, and, uh, the average seal who, who spends a full, who who does a full 20 years, I want to say the average seal is like 13 surgeries.
00:30:35
Speaker
And then how many TBIs on top of that and how many other injuries that weren't surgical, um, tons of chronic sleep deprivation and chaotic sleep and all this other stuff. And, and, uh, really hard to go out and compete with 25 year olds in some new field that you don't know much about. and, and so that, yeah, so that's, that's what I spend about 70% of my time doing. And then, uh,
00:30:57
Speaker
And then I treat private clients that I charge a lot of money, like high net worth people. I'm like, hey, you're you're paying for me to treat all these seals too, because they can't afford me. So like you like I take five private clients, you know give them probably 100 hours a year.
00:31:10
Speaker
um And then... ah do big health makeovers for those guys. Those are guys who traded their health for wealth for 30 or 40 years. And now they have, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. They don't care about the money and they just want to be like a division one athlete again or something. And you say, well, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll move in that direction. Yeah. yeah We'll, we'll, we'll get you a lot healthier.
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah. And so that, that's sort of the story. Time out. Every so often I receive messages that remind me why we created the Old Bull program. Today I want to share Kevin's story with you.
00:31:41
Speaker
Not just because it showcases physical transformation, but because it represents what's possible when training evolves beyond just sets and reps. Kevin recently reached out with a message that captures the essence of what we're building.
00:31:55
Speaker
Here we go. Hey Tex, this is Kevin from Old Bull. Just wanted to shoot you a quick text to say I'm really digging the program and seeing great results. Made a few dietary tweaks, upped my protein for one, but through the training I've been seeing more muscle and strength gain with infinitely less pain in the process than probably any other point in my lifting career.
00:32:18
Speaker
I recently got together with some friends I hadn't seen in a couple years and every one of them made a comment about how they've never seen me looking bigger or stronger than I do now. Appreciate the program and what you're doing to make it excellent. Here's what really matters. This isn't about quick fixes or unsustainable programs.
00:32:37
Speaker
Old Bull engineered for the experienced lifter who values longevity as much as they do intensity. We're talking about intelligent progression that respects your embodied signal while constantly pushing your boundaries.
00:32:51
Speaker
If you're ready to transform your training into something more sustainable, more intelligent, and ultimately more impactful, the Old Bull program is your path forward.
00:33:02
Speaker
Click the link in the show notes and take control of your strength journey today. Awesome. I learned a few things here. And now the people you're working with, they they are leaders. They know what they know.
00:33:14
Speaker
yeah And they're very confident and respectful of that. But you now have to step in and make some behavioral changes. Right. Right. so how how do you assess them behavior wise yeah outside the labs to determine, okay, here's behavior one, two, three, we're going to have to wrestle all on that one right to get them in a direction to truly accomplish what they want. Right.
00:33:36
Speaker
So the seals are easy because I'm like, you know, Part of the brotherhood. They trust me. I trust them. They're obviously very motivated guys, so they wouldn't be and they wouldn't be SEALs. yeah um ah so those guys, yeah there's there's a little resistance to a few things here and there, especially things like mindfulness. you like When you start trying to get them to control their stress, like, yeah, we're going to have to change some behaviors around this.
00:34:00
Speaker
um You got to start them off slow. yeah you can't You can't start them out with crystal bowls and chanting and things like that. right They're going to they're gonna have to ease into that. But the seals are pretty easy. They're pretty motivated.
00:34:11
Speaker
um they're At this point, they're pretty educated. by it like If they're coming to see me, they've they've probably known. They're ready. They know who I am. They've known they've known about me for probably five or 10 years if they're coming to see me.
00:34:22
Speaker
um So that's not a tough one. Now the other guys, yeah, that's that's a big problem, especially there there seems to be this trend and like the wealthier you are, ah the more certain you are that you know more than everybody else and that you're better than everybody else at what you do.
00:34:38
Speaker
And therefore, you're probably better at what they do. And so ah there's there's a lot of there's a lot of humble pie in there. um i i I have a very, very elaborate ah screening process. I don't I like i don't don't work with you just because you have the money like you have to prove to me that you're willing to change and that you're ready to change.
00:34:59
Speaker
um And i've i have an extensive questionnaire on that. And then I do like about an hour long Zoom call with them to figure out if there's somebody I can work with. um And my very first criteria is if you're not willing to spend eight hours a night in a bed, aren't working together, like period.
00:35:17
Speaker
And that surprisingly, half the people will say no. I'm like, wow, I was like, no, I don't have time for that. I'll say, OK. and and this And I say this as a joke. ah it's a bit high It's a bit of hyperbole, but I've tested it to almost this this extent where I could say, okay, I want you to eat nothing but kale for a month.
00:35:40
Speaker
and I want you to exercise for three hours a day. And I want you to meditate for an hour a day. And I don't want, all right, and just list out this ridiculous check, check, check, all this.
00:35:53
Speaker
And I'm saying, I want you to sleep eight hours a night. They'll be, whoa, whoa, were not I don't have time for that. I'm like, all right, well, I'd rather sleep. Don't exercise three hours a day. Then exercise 30 minutes a day. and yeah Put those extra two and a half hours into your sleep. Right.
00:36:06
Speaker
nice um Nice. And and they'll all they'll all do that. Right. And what it is, ah it's getting better over time. Like when I first started, so 15 years ago when I first started doing this, not nearly not nearly as many people knew nearly as much about sleep as they do now.
00:36:22
Speaker
They didn't understand the importance of it. And, you know, America has this idea that if if you're a hard charger and a go-getter and a successful person, then you're somebody who pushes past this luxury of sleep, right? And like, you don't really need to sleep. Like you can you can push it. You can do five hours and get up earlier and work harder than everybody else. And like, that's how you're going to succeed. And so programming people out of that is tough.
00:36:48
Speaker
um But it's, like i said, it's getting less tough now. But like over the last 15 years, more people come to me already realizing that how important sleep is. And so now it's pretty much a motivation of like most, for some reason, the magical number seems to be about so about seven.
00:37:05
Speaker
Like they're like, I'm willing to spend seven hours in bed. But not eight. But not eight. i'm like okay, wellre we're go we're gonna do seven, and if you don't get to age, then we're gonna be done, right? right So so there the contract is breakable on either side, right? If they aren't happy, if I'm not happy with them, not happy with me, we can we can break the contract.
00:37:24
Speaker
um But that that is the toughest one. What I've found the key, and you know this for me to coach, the key to it is education, right? So once people understand why they need to do things,
00:37:38
Speaker
and you attach it to their goals. Right. So the first thing and i have them do is I say, i want you to put and want you to go to Google Scholar or PubMed, like something credible, put in sleep and whatever else you care about.
00:37:53
Speaker
i don't care. Like fitness, strength, making money. leadership yeah relationships communication whatever sleep and that and read until you're convinced that sleep is the most important thing that you that you can do for yourself and then once guys get there then it's really just a matter of like coaching a little bit of behavior the biggest thing is getting stress out of people's sleep um and then convincing i do get a subset of the population who have continued to work out their age groupers they do triathlons they do
00:38:25
Speaker
ultra marathons, they maybe compete in CrossFit games or kind of things or jujitsu or something like that. So they are people who are competitive, um but they still think that they can push past their need for sleep and go train. And so the next biggest hurdle is like, if you aren't recovering from your workout, there's no point in working out. So if you aren't sleeping enough, you shouldn't be working out.
00:38:50
Speaker
You should be active because there's some metabolic benefits to being active during the day, but you shouldn't be so active. Like I define exercise as like, i'm I'm engaging in the level of activity that is designed to improve my performance or something. Right. So I'm pushing past my current capabilities in order to get better or something. That's exercise.
00:39:10
Speaker
Being active is just like, I'm just going out there and being active. I'm moving. I'm walking. I'm taking the stairs. I'm washing my own car. i'm moving my own lawn. Right. I'm being active. ah But like, and and even like light working out, you know, sitting on a,
00:39:23
Speaker
you know, 20 minutes of zone two cardio, that's active, right? That's not exercise. But like, I want to go get better at something that's exercise, and you're not going to get better, right? Because you get better while you sleep, you get worse while you're training. i And I have to have to convince them, you know, convince them this, but you say, when you if you go to the gym, and you do anything worth doing in the gym, do you come out of the gym weaker or stronger?
00:39:47
Speaker
Weaker. Weaker. You broke everything down. Right. So you're weaker. When you going to get stronger? When you sleep. So if you aren't sleeping, why are you going to the gym again? That doesn't make any sense. you're You're already weaker from yesterday's workout. And now you didn't sleep enough to recover from that. you're going to go work out again. Like, how's that going to work? Now you're going to recover two days and one night. Like, how's that going to work? um So that's the next biggest hurdle.
00:40:09
Speaker
um And then the nutrition... Really, I don't have a whole lot of problem with that ah because i I just think nutrition is very, very simple. Like I don't get into nuances and I'm like, you know, eat single ingredient food, eat the food that your grandparents called food, you know, eat meat, fruit, nuts, vegetables, seeds. Like I'm not like I'm not to get into all the little nuances.
00:40:31
Speaker
If you think you like if you have some issues, Break it down to like the most basic food first, like eat meat. Yeah. And then start adding some things and figure out if that's a problem. You know, darey if see if dairy is a problem, see if certain nuts are problem, whatever. But for the most part, it's just like I tell them, I don't care how many calories you eat. If you're eating steak and vegetables and...
00:40:50
Speaker
you know, whatever, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and um grains even. i don't care. Like, I don't think grains are necessarily evil. They should be controlled. um If you're eating like that, eat as much as you want. I don't care how much you're going to eat. And nobody's going to get obese on that. And everybody's going to lose weight if if they want to lose weight. Right.
00:41:08
Speaker
um And then yeah the the final piece, um i I find ah say in the last five years, pretty much everybody I come to is already doing some kind of mindfulness practice.
00:41:22
Speaker
And i and i I think stress is the most important component of health. right yeah One of the primary benefits of sleep is decreasing stress. The lowest stress hormones you will ever have in any 24-hour period is during deep sleep.
00:41:35
Speaker
By far, right? Or just magnitude lower than any other time. And if you don't get enough sleep, like the whole point of going to sleep tonight is to repair my body from everything I've damaged and overused today. And then to repair, right?
00:41:50
Speaker
I'm going to repair and then I'm going to prepare, right? So I'm going to prepare by restocking neurotransmitters and glycogen stores and vitamins and minerals and whatever. And might like i'm goingnna I'm going to repair 100% and prepare 100%.
00:42:02
Speaker
If I could do that, I'll wake up exactly the same every day. I'd never age, right? Because I'd be 100% prepared That's not possible. So it's 99.999% whatever. But all right. And so if I do that and I do that really well, then I'm pretty damn ready for tomorrow. And in fact, if I go to the gym today and I say i do more bench press than my muscles are capable of doing,
00:42:24
Speaker
my brain and my body tonight are going to use that as a template to say, well what do we need to be able to do tomorrow? And they're going to make those muscles stronger so that the next time I do that, I'm going to damage myself less. Right. And that's how I'm going to get progressively stronger. So I'm going I'm going to repair and prepare to be able to do that again tomorrow.
00:42:41
Speaker
So if I'm doing that, I could actually technically get a little better. i can get a little stronger, a little more endurance, a little more fit. Um, I'm still aging a little bit, But like i said, if I could do it 100%, I wouldn't age at all.
00:42:54
Speaker
So if I choose to sleep six hours instead of eight hours, I'm choosing to age 25% faster and I'm choosing to repair 25% less and I'm choosing to prepare 25% less.
00:43:05
Speaker
And how does my body compensate for it? right Tomorrow still comes. If I sleep six hours or eight hours, sun comes up at exactly the same time, all my responsibilities are still the same still there.
00:43:15
Speaker
How does my body, how do I compensate? I release stress hormones. And stress hormones are catabolic. Stress hormones break you down. Stress hormones age you. Stress hormones, like people know if you drive around in traffic, you have more heart attacks. Why?
00:43:29
Speaker
Stress hormones, right? People with stress cases, they have heart attacks. They know it. ah Have you ever seen that video, you have you ever seen that picture of that, probably like a 19, 20 year old kid who went to world war, world war two is like 1940.
00:43:43
Speaker
nineteen forty There's like 1941 and then like 1944. And like, he looks presidents to 30 years older. I mean, he looked, you look at me like, Oh, that guy's about 35. You see him like three years earlier. He looked like a 19 year old kid.
00:43:57
Speaker
um And so stress ages you. um And so ah a lot of people are catching up on that. And so like the mindfulness training doesn't seem to be nearly as hard to get people to do, but I say, Stress, best mitigator or sleep, best mitigator of stress, right?
00:44:12
Speaker
ah Because like said, my stress hormones are the lowest. And then to the extent I can completely prepare myself, I should wake up with relatively low stress hormones. yeah The more stressful my day is, the more the stress hormones are going to be, right?
00:44:23
Speaker
So i want to get some exercise in there. There's some physiologic benefits to exercise that will reduce my stress. I don't want to stress my GI system out my body by eating crappy food. So that will control my stress. And then I do some sort of mindfulness training, which, like I said, seals, a lot of seals, lot big, tough, hairy,
00:44:42
Speaker
chested frogman, aren't going to want to do meditation or something like that. So you start them off simple and you say, you can't tell them why, but you know, you start them off simply and you Hey, you know, for the next week, I want you to do everything you can with your non-dominant hand, right? Brush your teeth, eat, open doors, do everything you can with your non-dominant hand.
00:45:00
Speaker
And then, you know, the next week, I want you to, every time you stand up, I want you to think about, do you have more weight on the balls of your feet or the heels your feet? And as you walk, are you hitting your heel more or your toe more? Which is going first? and i want you to keep journal this and let me know.
00:45:15
Speaker
And then i do, depending on how they respond, I could, I mean, I can do six weeks of that. I can just keep adding things to it. And at the end of it, I say, so now what you've done is mindfulness training, because all I did is make you think about the moment. Mm-hmm.
00:45:27
Speaker
If you're thinking about right now, you can't be worrying about the future and you can't be dreading about the past. And be thinking about the past is depressing. Thinking about the future causes anxiety. So mindfulness is really like focusing on the now. If I focus on the now, I'm focusing on what I have control over and that lowers my overall stress hormones. yeah And stress hormone is it it is a 24 hour load that matters.
00:45:49
Speaker
So if i don't if I don't get good, if I sleep six hours instead of eight hours and I wake up with 25% higher stress hormones, I'm starting my day with 25% higher stress hormones. I'm also starting my day with a less prepared body and a less, more importantly, a less prepared brain because this prefrontal cortex where I get all my willpower, decision-making, problem solving, all of that in my prefrontal cortex, that area is the most impaired by stress. So I'm starting out with a poor functioning brain.
00:46:17
Speaker
which is gonna lead to anxiety, which is gonna make me more stressed out just doing my normal things because I know this isn't functioning as well, right? I'm aware of it. I'm aware that my decision-making isn't that great. Why can't I think of this? Why can't i remember this? Why can't I solve this?
00:46:29
Speaker
Why am I feeling stressed? Why am i feel thinking about being stressed is stressful? Like, why am I stressed? I'm gonna be stressed about why am I stressed? And now my stress hormones are gonna progressively go higher and higher. Now, when I go to sleep, my stress hormones need to be lower than the level of stress hormones that wake me up in the morning.
00:46:46
Speaker
But if I started with 25% more and I had a stressful day, and then maybe I went and said, I'm going to go do some really high intensity training because I'm going to push past this tiredness I have. And now I'm going to put even more stress. Now I'm going to go to bed. I'm going try to go to bed with three times the stressful ones I should have.
00:47:04
Speaker
and um'm yeah And even if I stay in bed for eight hours, my stress hormones never got low enough for me to get the high quality restorative sleep that I need. Yeah. So it's all about stress, man. it It is all about stress. So two notes on that. I like the the mindfulness.
00:47:18
Speaker
So I've been working through processing how to teach teenagers to become more self-aware. Right. So if it works on a seal. Yeah. It's going to work on it. Yeah. same same type of thing. Same type of thing.
00:47:29
Speaker
Yeah, so I do like those little things. And ah as from a coaching perspective, leading teenagers is stressful. For sure. So now, helping them become more mindful, it's less... I told you that 15 times. Right. Now we put in a position.
00:47:47
Speaker
And then... Plus, it's so damn important. i mean, you're teaching a teenager, like, this could be a lesson that... will carry them the rest of their life like this one moment, right? And the importance of you can't lose your cool because now we got the risk of leaving coaching scar. Right. And if, if it's not going well at home, coach, you're that opportunity to be a respected leader.
00:48:10
Speaker
And then we just betrayed that trust. The only positive male role models I had my entire life were my coaches. Exactly. So then when they, and what they said, it's stuck, yeah good, bad, yeah in between. So those moments are important.
00:48:25
Speaker
So now Within ah the stressful mind of a coach, we're curving behaviors. It's seasons are long grinds. Right. And then we get high intense moments in games where we got to make decisions on the fly. Right.
00:48:37
Speaker
So speak to us on how sleep to... to ah deprivation impacts that cognitive function. You said it's all front. and So now how how does it affect it and what we can prepare for during the sleep before pain? So the the easiest way to think about it is to think in extremes, right? So like I said, when you're in deep sleep, you're not paying any attention to your environment.
00:49:02
Speaker
their everything Like all your senses still work, right? Your eyes and ears and nose and like everything's still working. It's just your brain's not paying attention to it. So you've kind of taken yourself out of the world and you don't have to worry about any of that stuff out there. So lowest stress hormones, highest anabolic hormones, right? That's when your body's repairing and fighting off infection, repairing, you know, repairing the muscles you've damaged, repairing the tendons and ligaments you've strained, whatever, rebalancing your other hormones, partitioning your fuel, all that stuff. So all that great stuff happening during deep sleep.
00:49:34
Speaker
um The opposite of deep sleep is fight or flight. right So fighter you have the the autonomic nervous system. You just think of it as automatic. it's It's controlling the things that you aren't thinking about, your heart rate, your blood pressure, skin temperature, body temperature, digestion, all the things you don't have any physical control over really. right um And when we maximize that system, we maximize that system for survival. Right?
00:50:02
Speaker
And so if you think it's easy again, easy to think in extremes, you try to think of like a thousand years ago, some little hunter gatherer going down to wash their clothes at the river and they catch an orange, black and white stripe pattern in the periphery of their eyes, right?
00:50:17
Speaker
That's a tiger, man, right? What matters at that moment is getting away from the tiger. Nothing else matters. Your laundry doesn't matter. That doesn't matter. Like nothing matters. Can you digest the food in your stomach?
00:50:29
Speaker
Who cares? right Can you fight off the infection you have going? Who cares? right Nothing matters. And in fact, higher level thought will slow you down. So your prefrontal cortex, this part that makes us the smartest animal on the planet,
00:50:43
Speaker
completely shuts off. So if you, like you, everybody's been in some sort of fight or flight. Just imagine you, you get in a car crash, you get in a fist fight, you get in a gunfight. And then somebody asks you, hey can you quote a passage from the Bible? Do you know your phone number? I mean, like you, like you cannot think because thinking is too slow.
00:51:05
Speaker
So you need to be able to react. So once you go into fight or flight, your body marshals 100% of your resources to get away from that threat. That's all that matters. So digestion stops, like any any anything, immune system function, all of that's decreasing.
00:51:21
Speaker
reproduction, nothing matters. All that matters is getting away from that. So blood pressure goes up, get more blood everywhere. Blood glucose goes up, give me more energy. Pain threshold goes up.
00:51:33
Speaker
my brain As my brain shuts off, my reflexes get faster. I get more reflexive, like like an animal that doesn't have higher level thoughts, I'm reacting. So I can tolerate more pain, I have more endurance, I have more strength, I'm thinking faster, or and I'm reacting faster, I'm moving faster,
00:51:49
Speaker
and
00:51:52
Speaker
I'm essentially a superhuman version of myself, right? For that purpose, right? And you've seen it on cop shows where dudes scale eight-foot barbed wire fences and flip over and run and like do these amazing feats of things. How are they doing that?
00:52:07
Speaker
They are the superhuman version of themselves. So why don't we run around like that all the time? Because you're eating yourself, right? You are you were burning yourself down to get away from that. And like you're using 100% of your resources to get out of that threat because like I said, nothing else matters apart from getting away from that threat.
00:52:23
Speaker
So this part of your brain is just not working. So dial that down and say, okay, I got 25% less sleep than I need. I need 25% more stress hormones to get through tomorrow. Well, I'm 25% closer to fight or flight, right?
00:52:38
Speaker
So I've impaired my prefrontal cortex. And now because my prefrontal cortex is impaired, I know that somebody is presenting me with a challenge that I probably deal with every day.
00:52:48
Speaker
But today I don't really feel like capable of dealing with it and Why is that? And now I'm going to get self-conscious about that. And I'm going to start thinking about why. And now I'm taking myself out of the moment. And I'm worried about what's the future consequences of me making a bad decision right now instead of thinking about the decision I need to make right now. And now I've injected more stress hormones.
00:53:05
Speaker
And now I have a worse front and prefrontal cortex. We call it the executive functioning. You can just think of that like what would an executive of a business do? But, you know, it's like a higher level. It's problem solving.
00:53:18
Speaker
Robert Sapolsky calls it the simulator, the the which I think is a great phrase for it. We're the only animal on the planet that we know can do this. And what the simulator simulator means, just like a flight simulator would be for a pilot.
00:53:31
Speaker
is you and I can both sit here and we can think of five or six different solutions to a problem and we can simulate them in our brain and go, well, if I did this, what would be the neck would be the likely outcome? And I can think through that and I can jot down some notes and, now you know, give me three, four minutes, I can consider that pathway, consider that pathway. And then out of those five pathways, I say, you know what, this one seems to be the most optimal.
00:53:53
Speaker
that's an That's an executive level functioning. That's things you don't do well when you're stressed out. And so whether or not you let that epithet flow, whether or not you say that harsh thing to that kid, whether or not you cuss at the coach or you cuss at the ref or you throw your clipboard or like all of that is actually an executive functioning thing, right? Because you take this out.
00:54:20
Speaker
In fact, The reason we know what sleep drugs do, a little aside, ah when when pharmaceutical industry applies for a patent for a drug, they do the research.
00:54:31
Speaker
And then they give the FDA the research they want them to have. want them And they hold on the research. They don't want the FDA to have. And they say, you know what? We pinky swear it's all the same. Now, once they get sued, they have to show all of it.
00:54:43
Speaker
And once they show all of it, then we usually find out, well, one quite grossy as you're pulling it. So that had happened with the Z-drugs right around the same time I was working with the SEALs. So I found out like what they actually do.
00:54:55
Speaker
And one of the one of the big things that they do is they dissociate your brain. So GABA actually slows your brain down, right? Part of the normal functions, you decrease, most people know this, you decrease the blue light in your eyes.
00:55:07
Speaker
That leads to a trigger of melatonin. Melatonin is an initiator, starts a bunch of things going. One of the things that it does is it releases this neuropeptide called GABA, which slows the brain down and makes your senses pay less attention to your environment, like we said. And at some point, you quit paying attention to your environment altogether, and that's really what being asleep is.
00:55:25
Speaker
And your body temperature comes down a little bit. So GABA analogs act like GABA. Well, the way the pharmaceutical industry works is they're like, well, hey, if there's this there's this receptor here and this GABA molecule goes in there...
00:55:38
Speaker
and then it pulls it into the cell and has this effect, and that's an effect of one, we'll just call that the baseline, that's a one effect. What if we do this molecule and it has 10 times the effect, or 100 times the effect, or 1,000 times the effect?
00:55:53
Speaker
Then that works better, right? Now we have a super GABA. And that's the way the pharmaceutical industry thinks, right? So it's a trick. And that's what the Z drugs do. So a benzo, like Valium or Xanax, 100 times more powerful than GABA.
00:56:07
Speaker
A Z-drug, 1,000 times more powerful than GABA. And so what does it do? Completely shuts down your neocortex. And so what was happening, guys guys were, guys and gals, but more guys, taking Ambien and going out and doing...
00:56:23
Speaker
Primal behavior, right? Which is Fighting, fleeing, fornicating, like risky behavior. So they would like people who lived in Vegas as legendary. There's thousands of people in Vegas go to the casino, gamble away their entire life savings, go home and go to bed.
00:56:41
Speaker
get up the next morning, have no recollection of ever going to the casino and they've lost everything. Or they go pick up a prostitute or they go to an all you can eat buffet and they eat 25,000 calories. Right. And it's primal behavior. It's like you think about like what would a caveman act like if you didn't have a higher order, if there was no social responsibility and you were just taking what you wanted, what would you You'd be you having sex, you'd be eating food, you'd be doing things that are fun and risky, right. And exciting.
00:57:09
Speaker
And, and that's essentially what we're doing. And when we shut down this prefrontal cortex, and so the more impaired your brain is with stress, the more likely you are to do stupid things like that. And in fact, like dieting, calorie restriction, that's a stressor that leads to increased stress hormones.
00:57:24
Speaker
And there's, There's legions of research that shows you will do dumber, more riskier things when you're on a diet. You're 10 times more likely to have an affair if you're on a diet.
00:57:36
Speaker
Wow. Just because of stress hormones. And if you're tempted to flip your boss off or tell him what you really think of him, stress hormones are your enemy, right? And so you're because you're impairing this prefrontal cortex. So in your position, being a coach...
00:57:51
Speaker
And that damn kid is doing that again after you've told him 15 times and you want to grab him by the scruff of the neck and yell at him. Shake him. Right? You're much more likely to do that. And even if you don't do that, you're still thinking that way. You're still not thinking clearly. Right.
00:58:06
Speaker
yeah Yeah. That I like that. And even just being aware that this could happen. Right. State keeps you, helps keep you in that frontal cortex or just think of it as a yellow light.
00:58:20
Speaker
and So different ways that I've approached that because it's been ah ah an interesting season for us. And then in lacrosse, if you get a penalty, You go man down. So it's not like football where they keep 11 guys on the field. Now it's going to be five versus six. So call it disadvantage.
00:58:38
Speaker
I coach defense. So if one guy makes a mistake yeah early, i would go try to coach the behavior while he's in the penalty box like hockey. And then I was neglecting five dudes.
00:58:49
Speaker
Right. So now it's like, okay, I'm going to let this situation cool off. Keep my attention on the five guys that are doing their job. Yeah. And then revisit this conversation before they go back into the game. Right.
00:59:02
Speaker
So this creates some space for me personally. And the the high, ah you know, intensity, temper, whatever the kid so now we can get some space between that before a coaching moment yeah well and the best thing for him is to know is you know for you to coach him to know how to settle himself down while he's doing that when he's over there settling himself down he's getting in a much better position to be playing and a much better position to be coached right and like something we coined in the seal team was box breathing yep everybody everybody knows about it now uh some people call it four by four that's just four seconds but um
00:59:40
Speaker
When I was talking about the the balance of the autonomic, and and ah autonomics so you have the parasympathetic and the sympathetic. We talked about the sympathetic as the fight or flight. Parasympathetic, we call the rest and digest.
00:59:51
Speaker
This is kind of simple and it rhymes. ah But, you know, just think of that. Basically, there's a like that's anabolic, that's recovery, that's relaxation. You know, you're parasympathetic when you're sleeping, you're parasympathetic when you're laying around, you're parasympathetic while you're digesting your food, you're parasympathetic while you're sexually aroused, right? You know, like pleasant times in your life, that's parasympathetic.
01:00:10
Speaker
And most people know about no heart rate variability, right? So all heart rate variability is, is you know, without without your nervous system at all, without your hormones at all, your heart would fire, right? As long as you had a blood supply, there's a node in your heart that'll fire about 40 beats a minute, right? okay You don't need any external input, um which is why you can replace people's hearts and you know you're cutting all sorts of nerves and stuff that affect their heart and they can still get their heart rate up. Well, are they doing that? right so um So when when the sympathetic gets involved, and you get a little what we call tone, right? Just thinking like musical tone, like you turn up the tone, it's louder.
01:00:46
Speaker
ah you get a little sympathetic tone in there. Well, that speeds your heart rate up. So like if if if i if I check your pulse and I really check it for 60 seconds and i write and i and youre your pulse is 60, your heart didn't beat on the second, every second. and sometimes a big Sometimes it went a little before the second, sometimes it a little after the second. And that's heart rate variability, right?
01:01:09
Speaker
So a pulse of 60 is just like, well, you know, anywhere from... 7 tenths of a second to 1.3 seconds, my heart's beating in there and that's averaging out to 60 over a minute.
01:01:21
Speaker
Well, if you have a lot of sympathetic tone, well, then sympathetic tone is pushing on it. So not only is it faster, but it's more regular because the sympathetic tone is causing it to fire. If I take sympathetic completely out of it, um my parasympathetic tone can put a little bit of beat in there. And if I take that completely out of it, then just the node's beating So the fact that there's variability just means, well, there's a balance between these three things going on. And so what we figured out in the SEAL team, and we did it with what they call CQC, close quarter combat. So it's like what you think of the shooter trains going through the houses, clearing all the rooms. and
01:01:55
Speaker
um Most stressful thing you do because when you're in close proximity, you're shooting real bullets. And obviously, if you're in war, people are shooting back at you. And so it's it's a very dangerous thing to do. um And accurate, like, you know, the difference between, know, this matters all of a sudden with a bullet, you know, mean it's like accuracy super, super important.
01:02:15
Speaker
Efficiency, you, if you go to the wrong place, you might get shot by your guy, right? Or you might get shot by the bad guy because the guy who was going to shoot them can't shoot because you went there, right? So you have to, it's very choreographed. It's a very technical skill.
01:02:28
Speaker
um And it causes the most stress in young SEALs because, when you go into a SEAL platoon, there's like four new guys and then everybody else has been there for yeah multiple yeah all deployments. Those team dynamics are fascinating. And so you got all these young guys and they're like, they're trying to live up to the expectations of these guys and they're going through and they're training side by side with guys who've done this 50 times and they've never done it once in their life.
01:02:51
Speaker
um And they're expected to keep up. Right. um And so that's a stressful thing. And what Eric Potter actually was a psychologist we're working with who figured it out. And I think you've met him before. Yeah. Um, and he, and he tested out and he, did and he was, uh, you know, seals are fit and water people. So i think, I think he was doing six, six by six, you know, six seconds, but, uh, six, six second inhalation.
01:03:17
Speaker
Um, There's some theories that if you do it through your nostril, it can ah can activate the vagus nerve more, which is parasympathetic. I don't know if that's true or not. I feel like it's kind of wishy-washy, but it doesn't hurt. Might as well. um So you inhale for six seconds, you hold for six seconds, you exhale for six seconds, you hold for six seconds, and that's a box.
01:03:38
Speaker
Two minutes of that increased heart rate variability by 30% and decreased heart rate by 10 beats per minute on average. And you could predict roughly a 30% improvement in performance with that decrease of heart rate variability because you're clearing out this. You're getting the stress hormones out of the brain. They're allowed to think. that right and Well, I'm going to install that. Yeah. So I'd say weilityy when you get in your penalty box, your job is to box breathe.
01:04:06
Speaker
And I don't care what the hell you think about. I don't care what else you're doing. All you're going to is box breathe while you're in there. yeah And we'll talk about everything once you get out. And they're going to come out of there a calmer, you know, more, more ready to function kid. Yeah. That's, I mean, why i like the, the teenage population, teach them these lessons and then hand them off to military or college athletics.
01:04:27
Speaker
Yeah. When we went and visited damn neck, Luke and I got to, to be in the back of the, the kill room oh okay at night. ah So it was all dark and we got the night vision on. yeah And, uh,
01:04:39
Speaker
Yeah, it was awesome because they were using live rounds and we were just the the the two guys in the back going through it. yeah You could hear a pin drop. The dudes were on. It was an amazing experience. I was stressed and I was in the car. Exactly. Yeah. yeah Imagine those being your peers and you being a new guy. and like Yeah. Oh, yeah. Because if you're unsafe, it's like, hey, you know what? You made it through Bud's good on you, but we can't. with it We can't work with you anymore. This was like six. Yeah. Yeah. You're damn near. You got the super seals and the all that. And then the the coolest part was the like they watched the film, the breakdown. And so we just got to observe them coaching each other.
01:05:15
Speaker
Right. And like you couldn't tell who was ah yeah like higher up or more experienced because the way they were interacting. Yeah. that That is the great thing about the SEAL teams is that it is it is the highest form of meritocracy I've ever seen.
01:05:28
Speaker
Because you can be yeah can be relatively new and just be exceptionally good. people will listen to and your opinion matters as much as the guy who's been around three times as long as you but you're like you're on par performance wise you're on par right i mean there's obviously there's a hierarchy for certain things but like you know people listen to guys who who do well Yeah.
01:05:52
Speaker
Yeah. It's, it's cool. Uh, I've heard you speak on this and I just thought of it for learning new skills during sleep. And I think this is important for, ah coaches to understand middle school, high school, college, whatnot, because it's the expectation. If i if I teach you something,
01:06:12
Speaker
you're going to learn it because I told you it right now. Right. That's not how skill development works. could so introduce this world of learning skills through sleep. Yeah.
The Science of Sleep Stages and Memory Consolidation
01:06:20
Speaker
Yeah. So you, um so just like when you go to the gym, you get weaker. Right.
01:06:25
Speaker
When you go to sleep, can get stronger. Same thing with acquiring new skills. So you can study, learn all day, be taught lessons. it's And it's in your what we call your working memory, or your short term memory.
01:06:36
Speaker
The longer you're awake, the more that decays. So if you learn something 6 a.m., and you go to bed at 10 a.m., you've forgotten a lot between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. So what you're going to be able to consolidate that night is not nearly as good as if you would have learned that at 9 p.m., right?
01:06:53
Speaker
Which is why they tell you when you're in school, whatever, do your work and then review your notes right before you go to bed, right? Not in a stressful way. Don't don't don't don't don't don't build up a whole bunch of stress before you to bed.
01:07:05
Speaker
But like try to do your work, give yourself a break, some time to relax, and then just like review it. quickly before you go to bed so that you remind yourself of everything you learned in in that day. So ah the the first stage of sleep is the deep sleep. You go from stage one, it's just like the pre-sleep. Stage two, we call it the transitional sleep.
01:07:24
Speaker
ah ah Stage two has something called spindles and K-complexes in there. and And basically, these are just like kind of big blasts of electrical activity, um which are causing a transition, right? So it's it's transitioning you from, you know, ah the stage two down into deep. It's transitioning you from stage two up into REM, right?
01:07:46
Speaker
and And really what we're why I'm saying up and down is brainwave speed. So the the slower the brainwave, the deeper sleep. REM sleep is actually a higher brainwave frequency than being awake right now. Right. So it's and you have to go through these phases. There's other stuff that's involved in that. But you go into deep sleep. And like I said, that's when people probably most people have heard of glymphatics now.
01:08:10
Speaker
which is discovered like one year before I went was and started doing this at the seals. And that's ah basically when the structural neurons of your brain retract and they allow the cerebral spinal fluid to flow through and it gets rid of waste products and you flush out that.
01:08:24
Speaker
And then your brain starts measuring through your bloodstream and starts measuring all of your hormones. And then your brain responds to how many hormones you have and say, oh, we need more of that. And so then your pituitary will secrete a pro-hormone or pre-hormone and then your endocrine organ will produce that hormone.
01:08:37
Speaker
Until your brain's like, okay, that's that's where we want it. and then And then we're cool. And then we can, all right, now we move on to REM sleep. Now, when I go through REM sleep, I'm going to rehearse and think about everything that I've thought about and done that day.
01:08:51
Speaker
So if I'm playing lacrosse, I'm going to think you every i'm gonna say everything that coach told me is going to go through my head during REM sleep and multiple times as I go through REM.
01:09:02
Speaker
And then during that REM sleep, I'm going to actually decide whether or not that's important or not. And if it's important, when I come back down stage two, I'll get this little spindle, this little pop of energy, and that will convert that into my long-term memory.
01:09:18
Speaker
And once something's in my long-term memory, and take it back through REM again. Now I get to go, well what else do I know about that, right? Because I put this in a certain place in my brain that makes sense to me. And where that is, that's that's beyond anybody's understanding point.
01:09:33
Speaker
It makes sense to me. But now, the more I think about it, you say, you know what, that's kind of like this. And yeah it kind of seems like it's just related to that. And then the more ah the more times I consolidate, the more times I think about something and decide I'm going to hold on to it, that we it forms what we call a more durable connection.
01:09:49
Speaker
So you think of it like you have a road and trail across your backyard, but your dogs follow that road and then you follow your dog and maybe got a horse and you and then you can take your side by side down.
01:10:00
Speaker
Right. And you eventually have a super highway and it's all going to place. So that's what we call a super durable connection. And then that's a way that you're most likely to think and you're going to and you're going to be able to access that that information really quickly.
01:10:13
Speaker
um As opposed to some things like we've all done this where you're like, oh, I know, I know, I know, I know that. And you think in like this circuitous, this total labyrinth of you can't even explain where your brain goes and and you come up with it. But you did this around your brain instead of this, like this super it was like, bam, it's right there.
01:10:31
Speaker
Right. Like you can you can get from here to California without ever being on a highway. It's going take a while. There's a lot of turns, and right? So it's kind of the same thing. So you form this really durable pathway and then you start connecting it to other information and now you really know it.
01:10:44
Speaker
So this happens a lot with language courses and higher level math. So you'll study. and you'll be working on a problem you just can't get it. Like, I just can't figure out how to say that. I just can't figure out how to solve that problem.
01:10:57
Speaker
And then you go to sleep and you wake up and most obvious thing in the world. You're like, oh, geez, why couldn't i think of that? Now, part of that could be you're retired, your brain was fatigued, right? You didn't have it, right? But there's also a big component of that. It's like you actually put that into a more durable pathway and you connected it to other things you know. And now it's actually quite simple thing and quite obvious thing too.
01:11:17
Speaker
If you don't sleep well, If you don't get REM sleep, you don't get high quality of sleep, that doesn't happen nearly to the same degree and potentially it doesn't happen at all. And what's even worse is like when I'm rehearsing something in REM, my emotional conditioning of like my emotions like my emotions I went to bed with, my emotions during the day while I was learning it, they're gonna impact whether or not I think that's important or not And if i and if i don't if I decide that it's not important, we do what we call pruning.
01:11:48
Speaker
So you think about the spring when you have all the little buds start to come off of the stem. It's exactly what it looks like under an electron microscope. You look at a neuron and there would be this little bud coming off and you you know, I don't need that.
01:12:01
Speaker
Now that that's not even possible. You're not getting that back until you get taught that again. Now you have to go back to that whole lesson again. Whereas if you go, well, maybe it's kind of important and you can, you know kind of, kind of, what's wrong with it you go no, that's really important. And then every REM cycle, you're doing that.
01:12:16
Speaker
And then actually, you know, over time, I mean, that's what makes people expert in their field, right? ah thank They're thinking about the same things all the time as they're thinking about it from different, like me as a doctor. like yeah, I mean, i I can talk to you about, say, like testosterone, but I have like 16,000 different examples of different ideas I've had and different impacts I've seen and different ways to manage it because I think about it all the time. And then I go to bed at night and I rehearse it. And now probably every thought in my head is somehow related to testosterone or sleep really, you right? Like sleep is the most, like I can relate anything in the world to sleep, right?
01:12:53
Speaker
um and and that's and And that's where ah true learning is actually happening while you're asleep. Just like you're getting stronger while you're asleep, your endurance is increasing while you're in sleep. and you're actually getting smarter, you're actually learning and you're acquiring your skills.
01:13:07
Speaker
And something that's fascinating, i find this one of the most fascinating things in the world, and I've done it with some MMA guys, right? So you get an MMA guy who's a wrestler and he's going to fight a striker.
01:13:19
Speaker
He's got eight weeks. It's like, all right, I got to learn how to box in eight weeks, right? I've got to really spun up on it. So what's the what's the best possible thing for him to do? Well, it's not trained 24 hours a day, right? because Okay, so he needs to rest. How much does he need to rest? Well, as much as he needs to rest.
01:13:34
Speaker
So what can we what what else can we do? Well, let's build in a little recovery. Let's build in a little. So you train in the morning. You take a nap. You consolidate memories.
01:13:45
Speaker
You come back, you train in the afternoon. if you
Physical Memory and Emotional Release
01:13:49
Speaker
If your day is ideal and you're the right kind of person, you can possibly you're professional And a professional athlete. And your life's laid out that way. You could possibly take two naps a day and get three days of training.
01:13:57
Speaker
Wow. So here's this this research exists. ah and And it's very robust. So if I teach you a skill, if I say, hey, come over to my house tomorrow, 6 a.m., I'm going to teach you skill.
01:14:08
Speaker
And then 7 o'clock at night, I want you to come back, and I'm going to test you on that skill. So we're going to like learn how to type with your left hand or something, just something you've never done before. It's just something random.
01:14:19
Speaker
and teach you how to do going practice it for an hour. So for 6 a.m. to 7 a.m., you're going to practice it. 7 a.m., I'll test you. We give you a score, like 30% efficiency, proficiency.
01:14:30
Speaker
You come back at 7 p.m., you're not 30% anymore. no You're worse. You're like 20%. Here's something really interesting. No more training. Even if you don't come back and test, go home and go to sleep.
01:14:42
Speaker
Come back tomorrow, 35%. Right? Take nap. Right? take a nap This has been proven. Train six to seven, take a nap at noon. Come back and train, 40%.
01:14:54
Speaker
Go home and go to sleep, come back the next morning, 45%, right? And you actually get better without the additional training because you're rehearsing in your mind and you're consolidating things. So if you can build that in um and that's that's not it doesn't have to be a very yeah long nap. The more the more creative it is.
01:15:13
Speaker
So actually interesting. I have fighting falls into this because it's a cre is the creativity of movement. It can be a pretty short nap, like 20 minutes. ah 15 to 25 minutes, kind of you'll get you'll get some good consolidation.
01:15:28
Speaker
If it's something complex like math, memorization, like something super structural, you're more like 40, more like a 30 to 45 minute than that. But if you can do a full sleep cycle, so you go from stage one sleep down into deep sleep, travel across time, come from deep sleep, back up to do a little REM sleep, come back down to stage two again.
01:15:49
Speaker
That's one sleep cycle. That's 90 to 120 minutes. If you get a nap that long, you get the full benefit of sleep, right? So you get muscle repair, all right higher anabolic hormones, lower catabolic hormones, flushing out toxins, waste products, and you get the memory and you get the creativity. So you get the benefit and you can actually, yeah if you if you can design your life that way, and if you train hard enough and and you're young enough, and it gets harder and harder as you get older to do this. But if you're young enough and you train hard enough, you could,
01:16:22
Speaker
realistically get two 90-minute naps in a day and you could get essentially four days of training in a day where you're actually not only getting smarter more and better and craftier at what you're doing but physically stronger because we do actually store you know a lot of our movement doesn't actually go to the brain like we thought it, like we used to think it is, you know? um and And we, ironically enough, we learned from horses because horses have like a walnut sized brain, but they're incredibly smart animals because their, their brains all over their body yeah and their fascia, right? In between their fascia layers. And we as surgeons used to think, well, that's just something you dissect to get through, to get to where you're going. That's meaningless stuff.
01:17:04
Speaker
um And then when imaging got good enough to be able to, see the fascial planes in a human turned out to be the exact shape of the meridian system that the Chinese figured out thousands of years ago and where they put their acupuncture needles and they're stimulating the fascial planes because there's neurons in there.
01:17:21
Speaker
And so you actually hold some muscle memory in there. so lot of your movement does actually occur down there. and The memory of that movement does occur down there. Yeah. That's what animals are shaking off when they get attacked and whatever. They're trying to shake out that, that they're moving this fascial plane and trying to try and defuse the energy of those nerves to keep the trauma from being stored in them.
01:17:39
Speaker
Yeah. Can we get humans to shake it off? Is there any research Rolfing. Rolfing? Yep. ah If you do like really soup, deep really deep tissue massage, you'll get,
01:17:52
Speaker
big badass Navy SEALs break down crying or crack up laughing or or like just these huge emotional releases for reasons they do not understand. have no like I have no idea what just happened, but I just had like this huge emotional release.
01:18:08
Speaker
So we we can do it. It's not, I wouldn't call it like a scientific level at this point. Like it's ah that's a very intuitive skill. It's more in line with say like an acupuncture,
01:18:19
Speaker
A guided, maybe guided meditation, more like a kind of a psychedelic type of thing. It's like there's there's some internal intelligence going on and it's definitely going to take somebody really intuitive to kind of help you do that.
01:18:33
Speaker
Yeah, I did. ah But it does work. Yeah, I had an experience for John's charity. I volunteered to raise $20,000 and get my chest wax. yeah Like the 40-year-old virgin? Like the 40-year-old virgin.
01:18:47
Speaker
oh Yeah, we filmed and captured it. And I was just overwhelmed with emotion. like Oh, my gosh. Uncontrollable. yeah so you're probably about as hairy as that guy ah yeah that's why they they came up with that idea for uh so we raised if we did me it would have raised a nickel because you're gonna plug both of those hairs yeah so in the name of charity i had my uh fascial release you know was painful i love also you also got tased for that was we had to one up the waxing
01:19:18
Speaker
So then it was Tay's text. So I had the wax text. And then the next year, it's like, let's raise $25,000.
01:19:27
Speaker
We know why men don't live as long as women. we're yeah We're dumber. We are really dumb. Like, we do this stupid shit. oh yeah yeah I would take the... tae I'll take 10 tases over the wax. Oh, I imagine so. Man, that was ah a lot of release.
01:19:42
Speaker
ah So we've touched on a lot of the the cool factors I want to get into and the importance and then how even... just bringing awareness to our negative sleep can then help us make better decisions because we know we're not going to be in the best right ah place.
01:19:58
Speaker
But then that skill development... I think that's huge for coaches to walk away from. So now but in line with that, and you've got three kids, how do you now, even though it's coming from dad, right like how are you helping frame to a teenage kid with the importance of
Managing Sleep for Children and Teenagers
01:20:17
Speaker
sleep? Yeah. Because the draw from phones, video games, or just, you know, chirping, hanging out.
01:20:23
Speaker
Yeah. It's just, well, fortunately, like my, Yeah, my kids are all adults now and now that now they now they actually listen to me. like It's amazing how much smarter I've gotten in the last five years or something. like I was such an idiot. They could hardly stand me five years ago. Now I've learned a lot.
01:20:40
Speaker
um But ah yeah know when they were young, it was it was purely just a very unpopular discipline thing. And I just said, like the rules in my house was that none of my kids had any electronics in their rooms.
01:20:54
Speaker
um they could take their notebook, computer, phone, whatever in the room to do homework. But any other time, like if you're on your phone, if you're on your computer, you're out in the living room, you're in the kitchen, you're in the dining room, you're sitting on the back foot porch, whatever.
01:21:09
Speaker
And then all electronics went into the kitchen I don't want to say 9 PM was our rule. Your phone went on a charger, your computer went on a charge or whatever. and And there was, there was no access to that.
01:21:20
Speaker
Um, very unpopular. However, ah yeah my My boys will tell you, yeah and and i know they'll tell you this because ah cause i've actually I've actually heard them say this, and and one of my sons actually did some writing, did some mad copy for us once, and he wrote an email about it, and he's like, you know, a lot of people would think that having a Navy SEAL dad, I would have been...
01:21:44
Speaker
low crawling and, yeah know, doing 4 a.m. runs and all that. said, what I really heard the most about was sleep. And, and, and, and it just, I mean, it just worked out. I mean, um by, by,
01:21:57
Speaker
By chance, coincidence, perhaps. ah But it just worked out that the most formidable years of my of my kids was the years that I was learning that. um And then, of course, you know, Cole and Cole wanted to be big and tough and strong and he wanted to be a Division One football player. And so he was going to listen. Right. Anyway.
01:22:18
Speaker
Um, my older son, not so much. He wasn't so much into that, that type of stuff, but he, but he did listen, cause he did want to, he did really want to do academic and, um, very, very academic, intellectual kid. And he did, he had some goals in that area.
01:22:34
Speaker
And I could tell, know, and I could just coach him on that and say like, Hey, this, this is why this is how you learn. And this is how you get stronger in this. And, and I built it around sleep. Now, unfortunately the school systems are set up to where kids can't get enough sleep. Like they just can't, the most sleep deprived people in the entire world or in the Western world, because we, we deprive ourselves,
01:22:55
Speaker
to make money right because time is money that kind of came on with henry ford and the invention of the light bulb right um ah once time became money people started shorter changing themselves than that and then once we had a rural electrification and all these capabilities to do things at night when the rest of the world's sleeping like it just it added on local i'm gonna i'm gonna get ahead i'm gonna get my work done i'm gonna i'm gonna do better i'm gonna start my side hustle whatever and so we deprive ourselves as a culture But then we had this ridiculous system, you know, we've gone forever about the the perils of the of the education system we've built, but um we have this ridiculous system that's like, well, that needs to start before the parents go to work.
01:23:37
Speaker
That's the only way the system works, right? Because otherwise we can't get the kids, we got the buses, we got to... So kids need to get up even earlier and parents need to get up even earlier to get the kids to school.
01:23:49
Speaker
Well, what happens during ah adolescence It's not that teenagers are lazy. Once you start getting around adolescence, you actually get a phase shift, right? So you know there's there's this circadian rhythm of like when you feel like when the cells in your body think you should be awake and when the cells in your body feel like you should be asleep.
01:24:05
Speaker
And that's basically, it's roughly a 24-hour cycle. We use the sun to fine-tune that. um And you in you you have owls and larks. you have people that just perform better at night and they just need to go to bed a little later and they wake up a little later and you have people that really fall asleep early and they like to get up early and grinded.
01:24:24
Speaker
ah And evolutionarily, you know, and you could never prove this. You know, it's a post hoc analysis, but it kind of makes sense. But, you know, being asleep would be the most vulnerable time for a human. So if you lived in a clan or a tribe,
01:24:38
Speaker
And yet these guys who stayed up two hours later and these guys who woke up two hours earlier, well, now there's really only four hours where everybody's kind of you know at at risk. um Obviously, if we could have evolved to sleep less, evolution would have favored that. So probably eight hours is as low as we could get it, right?
01:24:55
Speaker
um and And that's just the way it is. I mean, 16 hours of wakefulness requires eight hours to recover from. That's just the way it goes. um So ah what happens in adolescence, unfortunately, is that you get a phase shift towards the owl, right? And so kids need to, like once once like, it's really kind of right around when puberty starts, right? It's it's a brain and endocrine thing, and which is just an acceleration of growth. And that acceleration of growth coincides with this night owl kind of phase.
01:25:27
Speaker
And so now you have teenagers that put them in bed at nine o'clock if you want to, but they aren't going to sleep till midnight. Like it doesn't matter. Like that's what's going to happen. And then if they got to catch a seven 30 bus, well then they got to be, so no way your kids get in six hours, six and a half hours sleep.
01:25:42
Speaker
And how much sleep do teenagers need? Two to three hours more than the adults. So the most sleep deprived people in the entire world are teenagers and, and Western Westernized teenagers in the school. so um Unfortunately, the prefrontal cortex that we talk about ah our simulator, our decision maker, our executive skills, like the thing that makes us who we are, shapes our personality, how we communicate, how we understand the world, how we think about the world.
01:26:11
Speaker
That area of our brain is accelerating its growth then. And males, it's not fully formed up until like maybe 25 years, late as 25 years old. Women, it's a few years younger, but you're talking about from like 13 to your early to mid 20s where you're really forming who you are. And that's the most sleep deprived, and we are sleep depriving kids, causing them to have more stress hormones.
01:26:33
Speaker
Then we're given them these little impulse seeking devices, right? Which is stressful, right? Because ah people think of stress hormones as like anxiety.
01:26:44
Speaker
No, stress stress hormones keep you alert in proportion to your environment. When the tiger comes out, man, you need a lot of stress hormones, right? Because you need to be as alert as you can possibly be. But, you know, you're laying around on your couch reading a book. You don't need so many stress hormones. But you want to pay attention to something. You want to read. You really want to concentrate on something. You need to be more alert. And so your stress hormones go up. So they um there's actually benefit to having ah little control over your stress hormones and being able to increase my focus on something I want and then relax and let my stress hormones come back a little come back down a little bit like this, right?
01:27:19
Speaker
Well, I'm depriving myself of that capability as a teenager because I'm waking up with stressful moments out of this world. I'm in a world I really don't understand. I'm trying to figure out where I fit in the world. High school is stressful enough. Now I'm going to add some sports and activities and competition and that.
01:27:38
Speaker
And i'm probably eating crappy food, which is also stressful for my body whatever. And we are just, we're malforming these kids' brains. And those stress hormones being high while our kids are trying to sleep are affecting their hormones as well. And I think this is another reason we kind of have this.
01:27:55
Speaker
masculinization of women and feminization of boys. I mean, it's like, I mean, we all know, like the 20, the 20 year old boy now is not the same as the 20 year old boy when we were 20 years old, right? Like it it's, it's gotten different.
01:28:08
Speaker
And that's, it is food and its environment, this light saturation and it's computers and it's, but it's sleep is a big component of it too, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it, It's and unfortunately our kids are suffering the most from our choices.
01:28:24
Speaker
This has been proven, i mean, unequivocally. And I hope that RFK does something about this. There is an organization called Start School Later. It's a nonprofit. It's been around for about 15 years and they've been funding research for decades.
01:28:39
Speaker
um And they took private schools where they had control. And they said, hey, can we start school later? And it wasn't here, just like 45 minutes, an hour. I think maybe they went up to an hour and a half once.
01:28:55
Speaker
um And they would take five or six schools all all over. not These schools don't communicate all over the country, but private schools. um Start school 45 minutes later, an hour later, something like that.
01:29:07
Speaker
Lowest truancy the school's ever had. Lowest disciplinary problems the school's have' ever had. Highest GPA the average student had ever had. fewer sports injuries than they'd ever had.
01:29:19
Speaker
And every single school who did this, every single team they had had the best record they'd ever had.
01:29:29
Speaker
And you can, and this has been presented to Congress many times. And the argument is, well, the the busing, the bus system, like we got to have the buses come at this time. and There's some funding and rules and regulations and things. And this, this is the only time we can do it. It's like, okay, so we're,
01:29:46
Speaker
We're just going to destroy the next generation of kids for for busing. That's what we're doing. Wow. ah But i have heard I have heard that that that that organization, um i don't know those people well, but I'm friendly with the people who who run that organization.
01:30:01
Speaker
um And I have heard that they've they've already got ah RFK's ear and they' are talking about they and they're talking about abolishing the Department of Education, which we take a lot of that pressure off and we might actually see some of that.
01:30:13
Speaker
And ah I guarantee you, if our kids started school at nine o'clock and got out at four o'clock. I mean, because there's so much slop in school, we know we could make the school day, we could make the school day short. They could probably still get out at three and start at nine o'clock if we really wanted to do it. Right.
01:30:29
Speaker
um I guarantee you we'll we'll see we see huge transition in kids. Disciplinary, but also just the level of functioning, the level of functioning that you'll come out of school with. Right.
01:30:43
Speaker
um Because, yeah, I mean, We're causing them stress by sleep depriving and we're causing them stress by their food quality. We're causing them stress because of the socialization of being a teenager in the school system. And then we're giving them the social media, which is a form of stress. School now comes home. Yeah.
01:31:00
Speaker
Bullying. Yeah. And you're paying attention to it. Like I said, that's raising your stress hormones, even if it's not negative. Right. And you have people talk about dopamine rushes and oxytocin. And I'll yeah, okay. therere All the neuro hormones. Yeah. that All that's involved.
01:31:12
Speaker
But anytime I'm paying attention, Anytime I'm enhancing my intention, enhancing my focus, I'm enhanced i'm increasing my stress hormones. And that's really the biggest reason not to do social media before bed.
01:31:25
Speaker
There's not so much light in your phone, right? Like that's ah that's a component, but a teenager is still going to be able to sleep just fine, getting that much blue light in their eyes. But the mental games that are going on with the social media, comparing themselves to people they don't know, seeing some girl kiss the boy, that yeah whatever like yeah whatever, like whatever social games are going on in their head, that's the real problem.
01:31:51
Speaker
And now they're going to go to bed with that. And that's still available. And if that phone's in their room and they're gonna be like, you know, let me make sure, you know, I just gonna put this one thing out there, right?
01:32:03
Speaker
um And you know and my, like my oldest son, i mean, he's he's just a very, very intellectual, really well-behaved kid. and And during the summer, I let him have his phone his room.
01:32:20
Speaker
ah that all my kids have their phone in the room. and i would And back when we used to look at our phone bills, ha and i looked and I was looking at my phone bill for something, I couldn't remember what it was, and I saw him texting at 3 a.m. m Oh, man.
01:32:33
Speaker
And I would have, I mean, you could have knocked me over with feather. I mean, I wasn't upset with him in slightest bit, and like because, you know, whatever, it was summer and the rules were off and he could do what he wanted to, but I just would have never expected that. And and I just talked to him about it, and I was like...
01:32:46
Speaker
was like, hey, I'm not upset at all, but and like what were we you doing up at 3 a.m.? He's like, well, I wasn't, but I woke up and I was thinking about this and I just wanted, you know, and I kind of had this argument with my girlfriend. I just wanted to see if she was awake right? And I was like,
01:33:02
Speaker
wow, all right, that's real, that's real, you know? Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, no electronics in my room, blackout shades. Yeah. Yeah, we we do do a 6.30 a.m. practice, but when I don't have practice, then it's just right no alarms, sleep till I need.
Stress, Aging, and Military Insights
01:33:20
Speaker
Yeah. Now, and the beautiful thing about kids is, like, you know, we've all been kids, and we know i mean I mean, i went I went through SEAL training, right? i went a week without sleep and I'm physical all day, running around with boats on my head, running miles, climbing, doing obstacle courses and like yeah doing all kinds of physical things.
01:33:41
Speaker
You can do a lot when you're young. doesn't make it a good idea, but you but you know you can compensate. And so it's not, ah i I think the the sort of metabolic physiologic stress, because you know a kid can actually go to sleep and wake up better, right? Like we talk about the ideal for an adult would be, we could wake up the same every day and not age. Well, a kid actually goes to sleep, you know, ah ah a teenager needs like 10 hours of sleep.
01:34:10
Speaker
Uh, younger kids need even even more. Uh, so you take like a 10 year old, they go sleep for 12 hours. They wake up taller and smarter and faster and stronger and happy. I was like,
01:34:22
Speaker
ah you're actually improving while you're asleep. um So if you, if you demute that, it's like, well, they're just not improving as much. Right. Whereas like you do that to us and it's like, we're decaying a lot faster. Right.
01:34:35
Speaker
Right. Like you said, presidents or, you know, the guys, guys you guys who go to war, people have stressful jobs, you see it like people do look older. You know, I just had actually my, my buds class reunion,
01:34:46
Speaker
35 years. All right. Man, that made me feel old. i yeah I went through training at 19. So I'm like 35 years ago, man. ah ah you know And most of the guys in my class retired from the SEAL teams.
01:35:00
Speaker
And they look a lot older than I do, right? Because, you know, I only did six years as a SEAL. And then I, you then I did medical school and whatever. So it's like just not nowhere near as hard and taxing of a life as those guys.
01:35:13
Speaker
and And, you know, these are guys who are just like me. Like they're just as theyre just as disciplined or more disciplined. they They still work out. They still try to live right.
01:35:25
Speaker
And they live very old for their age, you Yeah. So, well, you've done amazing things for the SEAL community.
Support for Veterans and Sleep Innovations
01:35:34
Speaker
yeah And ah I've heard your mission before, just doing everything you can to give back.
01:35:39
Speaker
So where can people continue to learn from you and then check out what you're doing with Dr. Farsley Sleep Remedy? Yep. So if they need a solution there. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. so the the combination of supplements that I came up with with those guys, yeah.
01:35:54
Speaker
really, they just harangued me into making a product out of it because it was a pain in the ass for them to have to go buy six different things and travel with it. And so, I made that into a product really with the intention of selling it to the, to the SEAL teams and just, you know, it being a little side business, I didn't really care to make any money with it. And then got hooked up with Rob Wolf and it turned out to be ah decent little civilian business. And I still don't have a contract with the SEAL teams.
01:36:18
Speaker
Uh, it's been, uh, 11 years, 12 years time at this point. um But yeah, the the no tricks in there. It's just, like I said, it's the it's truly a nutritional supplement. It's things that you might be deficient in that could be interfering with your ability to sleep well.
01:36:32
Speaker
um And that's Sleep Remedy is the name of the product. And that's the ah URL as well, sleepremedy.com. Or if you do go to doc, docparsley.com, that Sleep Remedy are kind of the same. They share technical things I don't understand, but there it's basically the same kind of site there. um Yeah. And if you want if you want to if you want to help out ah with the mission with the SEAL teams, um I'm involved in a lot of foundations, but the one i'm the most involved with is called the Seal Future Foundation.
01:37:03
Speaker
um And so if if you want to go there, there's um you know there's opportunities in there to donate. There's opportunities in there to go to events. You know you can you can pay to go to hunting events with seals and do golf tournaments and do kind of cool cool guy things. And they they have fundraisers and galas and you can donate.
01:37:25
Speaker
equipment or time or expertise, mentorship, we or whatever. if If you want to help out, we're always looking for help. Boom. Boom. There you go. colonel Thanks for coming up. It's rip. Yeah, man.
01:37:37
Speaker
Appreciate And another episode. Bye. Bye. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Captains and Coaches podcast. If you like what you heard here today, be sure to like, subscribe, rate, and review.
01:37:48
Speaker
If you want to learn more from Doc Parsley, be sure to click the link in the show notes for a free sleep guide download. There's also a percentage off of a sleep remedy. You can find it in there.
01:38:01
Speaker
Click that link in the show notes. Thank you again for tuning in and helping us raise the game. Bye.