Myths About Sleep and How to Monitor Yours Easily | Ep. 68 | Body Podcast
Summary
Now and again we hear people talking about how important sleep is for our health and mental state. But…
Often that sound advice is overshadowed by the marketing messages from so called “entrepreneurs” talking about how they only sleep 4hrs and are outworking everyone. Huh?
I’ve studied sleep by reading real science and been monitoring my own sleep for years to figure out the truth.
Listen in to get hear the myths about sleep and how you can easily monitor yours with an easy tool I’ve been using for a few years with great results.
Get the sleep tracking device I mention in the show here.
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Hello, friends. Welcome toe. Build a business success Secrets Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon. See White. And today we’re talking about sleep. I always find it interesting conversations that go around entrepreneur forums and things like that online. And there seems to be this.
Maybe it’s not even entrepreneur forum’s. It’s this badge of honor in the United States that if you don’t sleep eight hours or seven hours or you get away with four hours, you’re the most productive person in the world and it seems like, yeah, there’s this badge of honor and all the science and conventional wisdom for myself over 20 plus years of being an entrepreneur.
And maybe, as importantly, just being a human indicate that you actually need more than four or five hours sleep. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t some people in this world who are multiple standard deviations away from the norm that get away with 2345 even six hours sleep. But for the vast majority of humans on earth and including entrepreneurs, you need to get seven plus hours of sleep, and I monitor all of my sleep with this device called sleep Tracker. It used to be called tomorrow Sleep tracker AI and it would.
I bought it when we got our tomorrow mattress and come to find out tomorrow. Mattresses went out of business, but now you can still get the same tracker and I’ll put it in the show notes. And I recommend it because it’s worked incredibly well. And the software company that has all of the algorithms that go into this device, er, actually right down the road in Santa Cruz, California and I spoke to them before. But you can buy a beauty rest sleep tracker monitor from Amazon, and I’ll put that in the show notes that you can check out and I recommend it. It’s the same technology. The interesting part that I really like about this thing is that this isn’t on your watch. It’s not on your phone. You don’t put it next to you. It’s actually a sensor that you put under your mattress, and it monitors your breathing, your heart rate, your respiratory rate, your different phases of sleep, and it keeps track of things without you having to turn something on and off or anything. It’s all automatic. It senses when you go to bed and it senses when you get out. And that just goes on the whole thing.
That I talked about a lot that you gotta make things easy. You gotta make things easy for yourself. You gotta make things easy for your customers. And this thing is just easy. It’s a sensor. You hook it up, it connects to your wife I Then it uploads. And then you get une email. Or you can check an app on your phone every morning if you want, and you’ll get a full report. I have it right here on my phone is called Sleep Tracker and I get everything from last night. So it will tell me my let’s take a look here. It’ll tell me Total sleep. Sleep score. Percentage of total goal. I have a goal of seven half hours. Deep sleep, light sleep. R E M. Sleep. What time I fell asleep. How many times I woke up, how long I was awake in bed? You really don’t want to just lay in bed? There’s the idea like, Hey, go decompress.
You really wanna get into bed and sleep, not get into bed, surf your phone or do anything else and probably a few other things or one other thing that you might want to do in bed with your partner. But other than that, between that and sleep, that’s pretty much what you want to stick to. And then I will tell you your efficiency, your heart rate and your breath rate, and it will monitored over time. It will give you a chart, and it will also give you some suggestions. Over the last seven days, your average amount of sleep has been trending upwards to your goal of seven hours, 30 minutes. Excellent. Keep the trend going. So it’ll give you things like this.
You reach 81 81% of your goal over the last seven days. That’s actually higher than that. My I was traveling for a few days and my dog was sleeping on that side. It can keep track of your animals and know that it’s different for sure. In this case, I don’t know what happened, I think, or maybe my wife was sleeping on my side of the bed while I was gone. Unless again, you get this beauty sleep tracker monitor, But let’s talk about statistics, so there’s this perception that people don’t sleep a lot. And on the site called Full Power, which is the software company in Santa Cruz, that is what people license for the hardware. They keep track of it, and they have, like, crazy 10 million nights worth of data, and they show up. They have a chart that shows you from 18 4019 to 2021. And as it turns out, people’s heart rates that’s interesting are the average actually above 60 which your heart rate is higher but interesting enough. It changes based on the holiday.
So on Thanksgiving, the heart rates were around 64 beats on Christmas Eve. They were around 65 over all of these years. Interesting enough. On Christmas Day, they were around 60 for 65 but in 2020 21 they were actually lower than in previous years. And that’s the case for all off comparing 1918 19 6020. So while it seems that during the coronavirus, everybody’s under a lot of stress, they actually had lower heart rates and sleep durations were higher during the virus thing that we’re hopefully on the tail end off than in previous years and most likely because we’re staying home. But if you think that you are this lawyer and that you are the norm because you’re getting 6.5 hours, I can assure you over 10 million nights that this data most people get seven half hours asleep and you really need 7.5 hours asleep.
Most of us humans and especially entrepreneurs, because as you increase stress levels, you need to rest. And if you’re exercising on top of that, your body needs to recover. And there’s multiple studies out there that show that if you’re sleep deprived after three nights, you’re basically walking around as if you’re drunk. Your mind doesn’t function the same way. And I felt that way, and I and very conscientious when I travel and that I’m short on sleep and I can feel it. My brain just isn’t a sharp. It’s not as quick, and that’s when I’m like, okay, I just need to start getting consistent sleep and you can’t make up sleep. You’ve probably heard that you can’t just sleep 10 hours now.
You can sleep 10 hours because you’re that exhausted and you will feel better. But getting your circadian rhythm back into flow and really building the energy instead of doing it’s sort of like a quick charge on your phone. You can get that quick charge, but it doesn’t last long versus a slow trickle charge that will be a stronger charge and burned down slower. So I thought that we should talk about sleep mainly because I was getting the sleep score and I saw it, and I was. I saw something on on a forum was like, Oh, this guy’s saying I only get four hours of sleep. I’m productive. The truth of the matter is that one is you do need more sleep and to is, if you really are productive, you should actually be able to get your work done in less time. Now I understand that we are growing our companies and that we have a ton of things to dio. But you really, if you plan, you should be efficient and if you focus, you could get those things done.
You’re never going thio catch up, so to speak, until you get to certain plateaus in your business. But saying that you could be efficient for 20 hours a day is absolutely absurd. Anyway, it’s You cannot do that day over day over day, so you might as well get into a sustainable rhythm. I always say this is a marathon building a company and running a company, not a sprint. And there will be times when you say you’re going to need to sprint. But then there’ll be times when you need to walk and recover, or sit down and take a look around and see what’s happening. Enjoy the view, so aim to get at least seven a half hour sleep.
Check out this thing. I’ll put it in the show, notes its beauty rest Sleep Tracker monitor. I’m sure there are other ones out. I like it again because it’s a sensor that sits under your mattress. You don’t have to do anything, and it just automatically records all this stuff and then you can see your trends. I’ve probably been using it for for your four or five years. I think now, and it just it just gives you that daily feedback and you could be like, Oh, man, you know I’m falling below 70 seventies. You really are shooting for 75 plus on the scale that they rate your your sleep and then you could make adjustments. And I promise you, when you start getting consistent, sleep in this way to the best that you can and you stay on a schedule, you’re gonna feel better. So give it a try and thank you, friends for tuning into the show.
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