Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine
Episode 41: The Vital Role of Sleep with Tara Youngblood
Unlock the secrets to better sleep and enhanced well-being with Tara Youngblood, the pioneering force behind Chili Sleep. Learn how Tara transformed personal grief and the challenge of her husband's night-time overheating into groundbreaking sleep solutions like the ChiliPad and Oolah systems. Through her deeply moving narrative, discover the pivotal role that sleep plays in emotional resilience, memory consolidation, and physical recovery. Tara's journey from personal loss to scientific exploration offers invaluable insights into the transformative power of quality sleep.
Travel back in time as we trace the evolution of sleep from flexible, environment-tuned routines to the modern, rigid eight-hour schedule. Our discussion highlights how today's sleep trackers, like the Whoop, have revolutionized our understanding of sleep stages—REM, light, and deep sleep—and their critical roles in our health. Tara shares practical tips on optimizing deep sleep through consistent sleep schedules and the strategic cooling of the body's core temperature, making sleep quality a focal point of our conversation.
Explore the fascinating connection between sleep and temperature regulation, particularly as we age. Tara explains how cooling therapies and maintaining a cool sleep environment can enhance sleep quality for teenagers, military personnel, and the elderly. From hormonal changes to the impact of modern lifestyle factors, this episode covers a comprehensive range of practical solutions. Tara also introduces the benefits of integrating cold therapy and strategic naps into daily routines, illuminating how these practices can reset our circadian rhythms and support overall health. Don't miss this enriching episode that promises to change the way you approach sleep.
Unlock the secrets to better sleep and enhanced well-being with Tara Youngblood, the pioneering force behind Chili Sleep. Learn how Tara transformed personal grief and the challenge of her husband's night-time overheating into groundbreaking sleep solutions like the ChiliPad and Oolah systems. Through her deeply moving narrative, discover the pivotal role that sleep plays in emotional resilience, memory consolidation, and physical recovery. Tara's journey from personal loss to scientific exploration offers invaluable insights into the transformative power of quality sleep.
Travel back in time as we trace the evolution of sleep from flexible, environment-tuned routines to the modern, rigid eight-hour schedule. Our discussion highlights how today's sleep trackers, like the Whoop, have revolutionized our understanding of sleep stages—REM, light, and deep sleep—and their critical roles in our health. Tara shares practical tips on optimizing deep sleep through consistent sleep schedules and the strategic cooling of the body's core temperature, making sleep quality a focal point of our conversation.
Explore the fascinating connection between sleep and temperature regulation, particularly as we age. Tara explains how cooling therapies and maintaining a cool sleep environment can enhance sleep quality for teenagers, military personnel, and the elderly. From hormonal changes to the impact of modern lifestyle factors, this episode covers a comprehensive range of practical solutions. Tara also introduces the benefits of integrating cold therapy and strategic naps into daily routines, illuminating how these practices can reset our circadian rhythms and support overall health. Don't miss this enriching episode that promises to change the way you approach sleep.
Welcome to the your Lifestyle is your Medicine podcast, where we do deep dives into topics of mind, body and spirit. Through these conversations, you'll hear practical advice and effective strategies to improve your health and ultimately add healthspan to your lifespan. I'm Ed Padgett. I'm an osteopath and exercise physiologist with a special interest in longevity. Today's guest is Tara Youngblood. She is the creator and inventor of Chili Sleep. She is an international speaker on the topic of sleep and has authored the book Reprogram your Sleep. She is all over the internet, but you can follow her on Instagram at the underscore sleep, underscore geek.
Speaker 1:Now today we talk about everything sleep, why it's important, how it changes as we get older, why it changes with menopause and, of course, why temperature is such a key player in modulating sleep. Now, full disclosure. I've been using Tara's OOLA sleep system for about three years. Put simply, it's essentially a water-cooled or heated mattress topper. For me, this has been an absolute game changer.
Speaker 1:See, I don't like using AC when I sleep, but I live in the tropics and it gets pretty hot at night. Regularly, my room temperature is between 85 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit or 30 and 35 degrees Celsius, and when I first moved here, I don't think I even slept through the night for about a year because of the heat, and this changed when I got the cooling pad and now I sleep wonderfully. I didn't know Tara before this podcast, so I'd actually researched and bought the system independently of her, but this was a really great opportunity for me to sit down with the inventor of the product that I've tried and tested, and we're going to learn a lot about the science of sleep. So, tara, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Speaker 1:Before we get into the science of sleep, I want you to tell our listeners a little bit about your journey with sleep and with the ChiliPad and Oolah sleep systems.
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of it starts with my husband sleeping too hot. My husband and I came up with this product together. Very hot sleeper was constantly putting pillow berms to try to keep the heat on his side and not overheat myself. His uncle invented the waterbed, which is more than 50 years ago now I think 53 years ago, and so a lot of it was how can we stay cooler at night, how can I keep him from overheating and myself in exchange for also overheating? And so that's where it really started. When we invented it we didn't actually know that the science really kind of backs up all those temperature parts of why we need to sleep cooler. It was really about just being more comfortable. It turns out that the science of it backs that up.
Speaker 2:I went through a personal journey where, when we lost our youngest son, you know, grief and depression was a really big part, and that is really tied to sleep. I do a lot of work with PTSD veterans. Anyone that has mental health issues automatically has sleep issues. Those are so tightly together, and so for me, my journey to figure out sleep and the science behind sleep really came from. How do I solve my own sleep issues and figure out a way to make sleep easy and achievable.
Speaker 2:At my worst, I was very sleeping maybe one hour a night, not really well and that pretty much leaves you like being drunk all the time. You know you're in a fog and it's just not any way to live, although there's lots of people in the world that do, and that's part of my mission is to help people find a way back to sleep. We sleep well as babies even though it's sometimes difficult to get a newborn to sleep. They do sleep really well and we know how to sleep. They do sleep really well and we know how to sleep as humans. We just forget, and sometimes we have to relearn that, and so that is part of the book to reprogram your sleep and to find your way back to how can sleep be something that's easy and achievable so you can have a great life?
Speaker 1:Wow, okay, so from your personal tragedy, you've basically gone on this journey and invented some tools that benefit the rest of us to help us sleep better. Yeah, okay, can you tell us why is sleep important? Because in this definitely North American culture, to some extent European culture as well it's like yeah, I'll sleep when I'm dead, I got stuff to do. Tell us why that mindset perhaps isn't optimal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, unfortunately evolved to not process our day in real time. So your memories, any emotional things you encounter during the day, you actually don't process that very much. And that's really when you see people with mental health issues, ptsd. They didn't process it at the time, we're not designed to do that. All of it kind of gets put in a holding pattern and then at night, when we dream, when we sleep, we process that. And so deep sleep, REM sleep, have different purposes and they process different things.
Speaker 2:But throughout the night and over the course of two weeks, after any event, even just having lunch with a friend, you're going to process whether that's something you need to keep, whether you need to throw away. Oftentimes you know you won't remember what you had two weeks ago for lunch. That's pretty normal because your brain decided it wasn't important to keep. But just like keeping the clutter out of your office, if you were to never put any files away or file anything on your computer very quickly, it would get cluttered and your RAM memory would get full, and so that's what happens to us with sleep, and every single system recovers during sleep. So you heal. So not just your memories but everything inside your body is resetting when you sleep, and so that clutter happens, not just with memories, but your spinal fluid actually comes up and it cleans your brain at night. So the plaques that cause Alzheimer's and cognitive design decline as we age. All of that builds up If we don't sleep, if we don't get deep sleep in particular. A lot of those physical functions are cardio systems, all of them phatic systems. None of that does what it's supposed to do at night and then you don't feel good during the day. So you figure every disease of the elderly is attached somehow to lack of sleep. In particular, deep sleep has a big impact, and so if you want to have that sort of longevity, I call it health span. We picture those nice commercials of those financial planners that say plan your future, have a great retirement, but if you don't have your cognitive self, if you don't have your health by the time you get to that spot, what good is saving all that money? You should really plan to have a health span. That kind of goes in parallel with planning financial stuff, not to say you shouldn't still budget, but you should budget health as well. So sleep is one of those important budgeting parts of your life, even though it may take away from your day. You still have to budget good time to sleep and catch up, and there's a lot of ways.
Speaker 2:As a human body, we're really pretty flexible with sleep. We weren't designed to sleep just eight hours. It's the big myth of. It doesn't have to be one segment, it doesn't have to be at night. There's ways to get around that. That's part of that. Coaching I've done for athletes is it is about getting the right amount and the right quality and quantity of sleep, but it doesn't have to be really restricted. Our bodies are pretty flexible. As long as we budget that time for sleep and give it what it's supposed to have, we can still have a great healthy life. It doesn't have to be a buzzkill.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's interesting because I've heard or actually seen charts where it's like, you know, zero to six year old should have this much sleep, 10 to 13 year olds this much, and so on, and for my age, you know, mid 40s, with they're saying that you should budget seven to nine hours sleep. But I mean I almost find that impossible to stay in bed for seven to nine hours. And you're saying it might not be that that sort of cut and dry, there's a bit of flexibility in there. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's really interesting. You know we get some of these preconceived notions. Sleep, in particular the eight hours, actually came from the start of the industrial age. So if you track sort of the history of sleep and like different descriptions with it, you know even in earlier writings Europeans you still see it in Spain a lot they still have kept sort of that later dinner around nine o'clock, then they'd go be social till one o'clock. They'd have first sleep, second sleep, they'd have naps. They'd sleep longer in the winter and less in the summer. They would be very flexible and in tune to that environment, to when it's better to sleep.
Speaker 2:But when we industrialized we had factory and factory workers and we wanted them to be there and we wanted them to be on time and we want to have this work week thing that started to form and so that's where eight hours started with. And then when you look at sort of those time parameters, when they say seven to nine hours for the longest time for sleep, and it makes sense because it's hard to figure out when someone's getting great sleep. We've got great trackers and things like that now, but when they first started out the only way we knew someone was getting sleep was when they were physically asleep, and so when you're in bed for seven to nine hours, then somewhere in there, even if you're having a really crappy sleep, you should still get enough to be good, and so that's a big part of if you're going to sort of let go of the time, then you really need to start talking about quantity in terms of the quality of sleep and the different types of sleep, and making sure that you have a balanced approach. But that's really similar to physical fitness. Even diet, you know so much has evolved from that. It used to be the food groups and like now they look out of like maybe the food group pyramid wasn't all that it was supposed to be in the 1950s. Um, you know when they're, you know, pumping out processed food and said this is what you're supposed to eat. Um, a lot of that has evolved, and sleep is kind of doing the same thing. So we need to evolve, to think in terms of what's good for us.
Speaker 2:Who are your ancestors, how did your ancestors? Sleep Is probably a more accurate place to start with what is a healthy spot for you than actually, you know a certain amount of time. A lot of studies have shown hunter, gatherers actually slept closer to that six to seven hours and it may have again shifted if there was seasonality of like a little longer winter, a little less in the summer. But a lot of it didn't have anything to do with the number amount of time, it had to do with when they retired, they slept.
Speaker 1:Okay, and you've mentioned a few things that I would like to unpack. One you mentioned REM sleep and deep sleep, so I'd like to know what those two things mean and if there's a ratio. And also sleep trackers, because I used to wear a thing called the Whoop and I was a big fan of my Whoop, which told me about deep sleep and REM sleep, and I no longer wear it just because I had a year of data and I feel like I've pretty much dialed myself in. But for our listeners, I want you to tell them about deep sleep, rem sleep, different phases of sleep, if possible, and then how trackers can help us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so sleep, you know the best way to think about it and this is where you know the trackers. You have to find balance with the trackers is sleep is really about this. You know frequency of your brainwaves. That's actually the most accurate way. If you're in a sleep lab, they'd hook you up to, I think, 63 different sensors way, if you're in a sleep lab, they'd hook you up to, I think, 63 different sensors and you know a lot of them on your brain. And it's really about measuring the, the frequency of your brain. And so rem sleep almost looks exactly like you're awake. You picture that sort of just the first below.
Speaker 2:Technically, there's a hypergogic sleep that's right above rem sleep. That's the first five minutes of the sleep in the first, uh, last five minutes, and it's a really special time for sleep if we have time at the end. It's one of my favorite sort of unknown sleep facts. It's super fun to talk about that, that type of dream state that is hypergogic sleep, um, but rem sleep is, you know, you're going to do a lot of that's when you remember your dreams more. If you wake up from rem sleep, you're going to remember your dreams. They tend to be more emotionally charged um, and so this is where, if someone does have mental health issues, they spend a lot of time in in REM sleep way, uh, not in balance with deep sleep, because they can't get that deeper sleep. Their sort of thinking brain um keeps going Um. So if you slip below that, there's sort of this ribbon of sleep called light sleep. That's kind of in between REM sleep and deep sleep, um and it. You still dream there, but it's probably the least documented type of sleep. Again, rem was the first one identified because it's rapid eye movement, um. Light sleep you're kind of sinking deeper and then beyond that is deep sleep, where your brain wave is in its sort of slowest state. Now this is really where you recover the physical part that I was talking about. Your brain gets washed, you're a lot of your physical systems are resetting and cleaning and scrubbing scrubbing the system out, um, and so that's when it's tends to be the slowest Um.
Speaker 2:You do move through sleep cycles and again, if you track your sleep it will not look pretty like this, but if you look at hypnogram it's about 90 minutes cycles, um, and the first half of the night you're going to have more deep sleep and then the second half you're going to have a higher percentage in REM sleep, um, but it doesn't look pretty like that when you pull up your sleep tracker, I get it. Everyone's like I don't see that on my sleep tracker. I'm in and out, is that okay? However, you sleep is generally okay, um, and that kind of transitions into the sleep trackers. So for sleep trackers, I have a love hate with them, similar of I've tried almost all of them over the years, um, the latest product I have does tie to a sleep tracker, but it's in real time and it ties to an outcome. So it's adjusting temperature, um dynamically while you're asleep. And so there's some things that I changed with that, because sleep trackers tend to be about 60 accurate and the reason is they're really checking heart rate variability. That's the easiest thing to track unless you have sensors on your head and brain, and no one likes to sleep that way. It just isn't any fun. Um. Again in a sleep lab, that's what they're doing. It's. It's not a great way to sleep, um. So the heart rate variability you're going to have to discount that accuracy a little bit, especially when it comes to deep sleep, um.
Speaker 2:But if you track it over a course of a year or six months or a chunk of time, you will see trends that start to emerge. And so I wouldn't beat yourself up. And if you're looking at it and say, well, I'm had a crappy sleep last night but I feel fine, you know, sleep is similar to diet, where you can have a day where you diet, you're like, wow, I should have lost 10 pounds today Cause I was, I was dieting, I hardly ate at all. And then you're like, no, that's not how it works. Um, but over the course of three days or a week you can track your weight and you'll see changes. And again, you're looking for that trend. Sleep is really similar one night to one night ratio. And you pull it up and you say that was terrible.
Speaker 2:Sometimes that's true, but generally how you feel in the morning, a sleep journal can actually be just as accurate as that sleep tracker.
Speaker 2:If you in the morning say I did the following things yesterday I had a great sleep, I woke up and I felt great.
Speaker 2:Or I did this yesterday I drank and I was overheated and I stayed up too late, or whatever you did that, threw it off, take notes of that and track that every day for a month and you'll probably get a similar trend that starts to pop out and when I may not be as pretty as a sleep tracker in a graph, but it'll be very similar and it's just takes effort to do it. Um, but that's really sort of my love hate with them. It's, it's just takes effort to do it, but that's really sort of my love hate with them. It's good, and if you want to improve your sleep, having some measurement or guide is is really helpful to be able to look over the course of it and rather than I don't remember how I slept two weeks ago, is that a good thing or a bad thing? But treat yourself like a science project when it comes to sleep, like anything else, and if you track your information and track your data, any of those are going to work. You just need to look at it over time.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and there was that study that came out where they put people into a sleep lab and let them sleep for eight hours, but woke them up and said you've only been sleeping for five hours, and then tested their cognitive abilities versus the people who'd slept for five hours, but they told them that they'd slept for eight hours, and it turns out that if you think you slept badly, if you were told you slept badly, your cognitive performance declines, and so that was one of the negative aspects of those sleep trackers is that if you're constantly checking your stats and it says you've had a bad sleep, you actually may exhibit the symptoms of a bad sleep even though you had a good sleep, and so, for me, that was one of the reasons where I was like okay, do I need to renew my subscription to Woot for another year?
Speaker 1:No, I've pretty much figured out that eating a big meal before bed or exercising too late, those things affect my sleep, and so now I know and I've also heard, though, that the hours before midnight are more important than the hours after midnight.
Speaker 2:Is that a so a lot of it is tied to your circadian rhythm and we um, we've sort of briefly talked about jet lag, um, before we we hopped on cause I know you have travel coming up, um, but your clock is your clock and so that is your body clock and it's more than just sleep. It's going to be when you have your highest blood pressure. It's going to be, you know, if you're all of those regular things that you do, all of that happens to your cognitive best. You'll probably have heard of morning person or a night person, and that's where that timing kind of shifts. So it really is less about before midnight, but actually the first two to three hours of sleep. If you have a regular sleep hour that you go to sleep, that helps sort of get your body in the groove. But those hours of deep sleep are hard to catch. So if you catch those in the first half of the night, and that's because your core body temperature, everything is geared to getting that deep sleep, because your body does know it's important, um, and so those first two to three hours, um, your core body temperature is going to try to drop two degrees, which doesn't sound like a lot, but when you think about running two degrees hot as a fever. How awful that feels. Your body is trying to work two degrees hotter than it's supposed to be to do all that cleaning stuff. It likes it cool to do cleaning, um, and so that first, two to three hours of sleep when you decide to stay up two hours later, from wherever that is. Some people go to bed at midnight, and so if you go to bed at midnight, it's still a midnight to two is the important part. If you go to bed at eight o'clock, it's still the eight to 10, you know kind of thing. So it's really important to think about it, as the first couple hours of your regular routine are really important.
Speaker 2:There are ways to catch up on that. You can gear naps towards getting deep sleep, and I can tell you some of the tricks. And when you can do that. Um, after lunch, the siesta actually is is built in.
Speaker 2:You do drop a little bit of temperature there as well, and so people that work night shifts, we actually reverse that for them, and so the second half of their sleep we'd get them deep sleep by cooling the temperature for the second half, and you can get someone with a night shift schedule to have a really pretty good sleep during the day If they kind of gear their deep sleep during the second half of their sleep for them, um, or that siesta time, but that first part of the night that you fall asleep, whatever that schedule is, and or right after lunch, those are your two big windows for getting that deep sleep, because your body's already sort of geared to do that. It's going to drop its temperature a little bit and kind of be looking for cooler, better sleep for that deep sleep and it's it's just the unicorn of sleep, it's great sleep but it's hard to catch. So if you really think about planning for deep sleep remedy generally happens um, pretty well without too much planning okay, so we so.
Speaker 1:So the first two hours of sleep, regardless of when they are, is when that deep sleep happens, and I asked you whether there's a ratio between the REM and deep sleep or whether it's just a sort of a quantity thing. Is there some statistics or numbers around that?
Speaker 2:If you throw out the total amount of time, and time is helpful in this of, like you know, trying to find some balance between that um. You know, some people can get by and feel just fine with, like that, five hours of sleep, and so it is a little bit of a three to two um, the more deep sleep. But if you're sleeping for nine hours it doesn't have to be quite as much that. So it does shift a little bit. So if you're sleeping on that shorter end of five to six hours, you know it's, it is much more of a, like you know, not quite a half and half um kind of scenario. It's probably a little bit more deep sleep because you're not sleeping as long. But if you're hitting that seven to nine hours it's a little closer to half and half Um. That's where it's a little bit of a shifting scale Um, and as you move um throughout your lifetime, that will shift a little bit too.
Speaker 2:Um, it gets harder. Deep sleep is harder to get as you get older Um, and so your body is going to need a few other things. That's where temperature can be a big help for the elderly. Their regulation of temperature is not as great as when we're younger, and so that creates some problems, um, which is why oftentimes you see them falling asleep or taking naps in the afternoon. Their body is trying to still get that deep sleep wherever it can. So it's a little bit of a shifting scale. As long as you're thinking about it dynamically, half and half is a good way to go. Sorry, that's a sorry long answer, but it's. It's not an exact science no, that's fine.
Speaker 1:I wanted to see if I can pin you down on a ratio there or a number. Now you've mentioned temperature a few times, and this is where you know where your products come in, so tell us how important temperature is when it comes to sleep people talk about light a lot.
Speaker 2:I think again, that was the easy thing for people to measure, um. But there's been a lot of great studies again on hunter-gatherers. We didn't go to sleep as hunter-gatherers. The moment it got dark we did start to wind down, but we'd sit by the campfire, we'd be. You know, that social part for us humans as herd animals is really important. So light is a factor and it can be more, more of a factor again for some people. Some people if they have light right before they go to bed, that's where the blue light blocking glasses is really helpful. Other people, it's less of a factor.
Speaker 2:But temperature has this really unique role in how it dynamically talks to your brain and so it we unconsciously pick up temperature. It's not a conscious choice. The hypothalamus, which is in charge of all of those involuntary things like breathing, heart rate, all those things we don't have to think about to do, temperature actually communicates in the language of your hypothalamus, which is what's really powerful. When we are able to use temperature with someone with mental health issues like I talked about, where they're just in REM all the time and they can't get to sleep, or, as you get older, cooling them down at the right amount at the right time can also help an elderly person get sleep, which they wouldn't be getting as easily, and so we can kind of bypass that prefrontal cortex that I was spinning I couldn't get to sleep. If you cool your body before sleep, you can kind of trigger that process by cooling your body.
Speaker 2:It actually and Clifford Sapir out of Harvard was the one that discovered it, he called it sleep switch, so I can't claim anything about that, other than he, he discovered it.
Speaker 2:But that sleep switch is triggered by temperature, and when it does trigger, that's what releases melatonin and starts the whole sleep process. And so that lowering of temperature is really important, and we see it. You know it's tied to the environment that we evolved in for thousands of years, and even if it doesn't cool down a lot and you're super hot climate it still cools down as the sun goes down, even a few degrees, and that few degrees is enough to say, okay, it's time to start getting ready for sleep. And so it is. It is the power of that sort of unconscious language that I love about temperature, because there's a lot of parts of sleep that are tied to what we're thinking about, what we're stressed about what was what went on in our day where we are, and so to have something that kind of bypasses all the things we can do wrong about sleep and help us get a better sleep, that's really what I love about it and what's so powerful about it.
Speaker 1:So tell me a little bit more about the sleep switch. Is it just melatonin that the temperature triggers, or is there anything else?
Speaker 2:Hormones really are the language our body speaks, and so the release of melatonin itself actually then triggers a lot of the other sleep processes. That's what sort of starts us to slow down and and starts really manually changing our mode. So there's, you know, there's a synthetic um system where you're going to move from being sort of call it that fight or flight, amped up, whatever that is, to more of that recovery, healing mode. We're digesting food differently, we're doing everything differently. All of those shifts start to happen. Our cardiovascular system, every single system, is affected during sleep. So, um, they sort of trigger in different orders. Like I said, when you hit deep sleep, one of the first things is your spinal fluid does clean your brain, um brain, and clean the plaques out of your brain. So there's a whole sort of order of systems that it starts to trigger.
Speaker 2:But the melatonin as a hormone kind of moves then throughout your body and starts triggering all of those systems to say, oh, okay, we're, we're out of awake mode, we're now starting to relax.
Speaker 2:And that's where, if you do take melatonin for like jet lag, um, you know you are replacing a hormone.
Speaker 2:That should happen, so use it in a way that is like to help as a tool. Uh, you know, using it or using it on kids every night, um, as the thing I really try to warn against, because you know it is a helpful tool, like anything else, like caffeine is a helpful tool, but if you, that's the only way you can wake up, but that's also not good. So we want to, we want to find a way that our bodies are doing what they're supposed to do, um, and then sometimes, if we need tools like caffeine or melatonin to kind of uh, amplify or help us when we're traveling or or have extenuating circumstances, then we use them for that purpose, but not on an every night thing. So if you have to use a drug like melatonin to sleep every single night, then you really need to start thinking about how do I get myself off of that? How do what are the different habits I can change, because your body should do it all by itself.
Speaker 1:I actually have some clients and friends who have different, different stages of their life where they have trouble sleeping. I know some people who give their children 12 year old, 13 year olds melatonin to sleep, but coffee to wake up in the morning. So I'd like you to talk to me about, possibly, what's going on there. I know you're not a medical doctor, but you obviously have a lot of experience in this. And then the second and third groups are menopausal women, who struggle to sleep, and then, as you mentioned earlier, people who get older. Their sleep tends to deteriorate as well. Can we look at those three groups?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know I have four boys of my own, so worked through teenager and teenager sleeps. You know, teenagers, so much is going on in their bodies and, again, in addition to the regular sort of healing and fixing that adults do, they're changing. They've got all sorts of hormones going through there and so they actually need a lot of sleep. A lot of schools are not always great about giving them the right time. They're on their phones a lot these days, which, again, that isn't helpful. It's kind of ramping them up when they should be winding down. But they do need a fair amount of sleep. Um, if they're not sleeping, melatonin can be again a good tool. Um, but a lot of what happens, and you see that, with the sort of rise of ADHD, any of those actually the side symptoms that are very low on the list if you look at that, but they tend to run hot. So it um, I have two of my boys have ADHD and they both run hotter because of it. Um, and so, again, your temperature is one of those first things. That's wonky. The first thing when you're not feeling well, you tend to run a temperature or have that gets thrown off, and so, um, same thing with hormones throwing your body off. Um, puberty, all of those things are kind of it's a rollercoaster ride and kind of it's a roller coaster ride. And you know it's the same as when we talk about menopausal women. It's a similar kind of thing that's going on. Actually, it's just a reverse kind of thing, but it's still. These hormones really mess with our thermostat and so the cooler they can sleep, the dark rooms, making sure that they have really great deep sleep. Again, they really need that deep sleep to stay healthy. There's so many. There's such a rise in suicide rates. I've worked with a lot of the military bases. It's really, really scary. But young people testosterone in particular, is something that when you don't get enough sleep, we're seeing a lot of young men with very low testosterone levels, especially in the military, and a part of that is just this lack of sleep. Your hormone production is not correct. So even if they're 25 and they should be sort of at the peak prime of that, they're low testosterone and when that happens, actually don't have energy. They have mental health issues, unfortunately causing suicide rates to rise. It is a real problem. They're using, in that case, some red light therapy and some trying to get more sleep are the two things that go hand in hand to help improve that. So I would say, as a teenager, if they are really struggling, red light therapy is actually a really interesting way to help improve mood and feel better, as sort of an alternative.
Speaker 2:And when we talk about the reverse temperature to sort of cooling to sleep, your body wants to warm up, to wake up, and so a lot of times we aren't warm enough in the morning. So take a warm shower or um or workout first thing in the morning and that actually will warm your body up and it has a healthy release of cortisol that goes with it. That is a replacement for that caffeine. That's sort of the body's natural way to feel energized in the morning is when we wake up and get sunlight first thing. You know, just picture like if you're on your own in the wild, survivor kind of thing. You wake up in the morning the earth is warmer than it was when you were sleeping a couple hours ago. We want to warm up, we want to get sunlight. Those are the natural alternatives to that caffeine in the morning and what happens in the elderly yeah, similar kind of thing.
Speaker 2:You know the hormone productions and you see it in menopause. That's, you know, part of the elderly. Yeah, similar kind of thing. You know the hormone productions and you see it in menopause. That's, you know, part of the transition. Men also will have lower testosterone. It's not talked about because there's not as many visible symptoms and signs as there is with menopause.
Speaker 2:But all of us, as we age, that hormone production changes, our schedules change, our metabolism changes and with that back to that temperature part just gets a little bit wonky and so we tend to want to stay warm because we tend to feel colder all the time. And so what happens is a lot of times they go to sleep too hot because they've wrapped themselves in blankets. They use heating pads. It's one of the hardest parts is heating pads are cheap and so they'll heat them up, but they don't have good sensitivity to how hot they've gotten. Sometimes they even burn themselves because they still they just want to get so warm. But getting warm again in that first half of the night is actually not helpful for anybody. They don't have to be like super freezy cold, as, like my football players, you know, my linemen want to be super cold. They don't need to be that cold, but they do need to be below 98 degrees. So you want to try to get, even if it's 90 degrees, something that's allowing that core body to still drop for the first part and it. Once they get used to that, they actually will get much better sleep and you'll see a lot of the other health metrics improve, and that's the same.
Speaker 2:We did a study for menopausal women and being able to sleep through the night actually meant less hot flashes, less symptoms during the day. So it wasn't just less hot flashes because you were sleeping cooler and you just didn't heat up as much. That allowed you to stay asleep. But the purpose of sleep again is to heal. So you had less symptoms during the day as well as at night because you were sleeping better.
Speaker 2:So the power of sleep to reduce symptoms wherever you are in your life is just extremely powerful. So again, how do you budget your time? Making sure you sleep means you're going to have much better days and whatever you're dealing with, cancer treatments work with people with that. Again, all of the chemicals that people put in their bodies for chemotherapy and radiation and all of that for cancer also messes them up. But the better sleep you have, the less symptoms they will have and the better they will feel. So, across the board, whatever is, whatever stage of life you're in, picture that sort of sleep importance, cool to start and warm the second half, and when you do that your body actually really does know what to do.
Speaker 1:Yes, and you mentioned this, the language of the body as hormones, and I love that phrase, because when we get up in the morning, we want that cortisol spike, we want to get, like you said, get warmer. So the hot shower is a great tip, getting out into the sunlight and, as I understand it, that cortisol spike in the morning suppresses the melatonin, which then actually sets us up to sleep better in the evening. So a good night's sleep starts in the morning.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's back to that sleep switch picture like a light switch. The harder you can have it like a flip on and a flip off, the firmer that like window is on on and off, the better it is, cause we I often in my talks about sleep we'll use a balloon. But the mechanism of sleep is kind of like a balloon and it fills throughout the day and we want to deflate it all night and we want it to be like a squished, flat little balloon and then it starts the day to fill it up. But we want that completely filled. If you have one of those sort of just rubbery, half-filled balloon things, that's when sleep begins really hard because your body's like well, I don't know if I should be filling or emptying, I don't know what that's supposed to do. But the harder that sort of fill and release can be, the better it is for sleep, the crisper you'll feel on that sleep outcome.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, let's talk about the invention you made the, the chili pad or the ULA sleep system. For me it's been a game changer because I'm in a hot country and getting the temperature more good. My temperatures drop has been difficult because I don't like sleep with AC, so I actually use a combination of cold, a cold tub. I converted a freezer into a cold tub and and and your product as well. So tell us a little bit about how it works, maybe some examples that you've heard of or you've used it with teams or whatever that shows us how it can drop the temperature of the body.
Speaker 2:It works like a radiator for your body. If you think about your sports car I like sports cars, so and dealing with a lot of athletes, it's a good analogy that seems to work with them is that you need to cool that engine. And so when your engine is revved up and it's working hard and it's healing your body, doing all the things it's supposed to do, it needs to stay cool to do that work. Just like you want to stay cool when you're working out, you want to stay cool for that sort of peak healing time in the first part of the night. You want to stay cool for that sort of peak healing time in the first part of the night. And so the Uler you know Doc Pro is the new one. So if you see that those are the same, but what it does is it circulates water underneath you, like in a radiator kind of pattern, and that circulation of water is actively pulling heat off of you.
Speaker 2:I talk about it as a heat siphon. So you want to remove the heat from this scenario. And again, in a hot climate you may not be under a blanket, but a lot of us will put a blanket over a big proponent of weighted blankets, because it helps from a mental health perspective. But once you put a weighted blanket on, it's even worse. You're hot and you're under the blanket and you're basically making a little oven for yourself. So you would, you know, call it 37 degrees Celsius or 98 degrees Fahrenheit. You are a little oven underneath there and so you're trapping that heat in. So, while it feels good to cover up, from a safety, vulnerability perspective, mental health perspective, it's actually trapping the heat that you're trying to get rid of. And so what this does is it go under your body and it pulls the heat off that scenario. So you can just cool the amount you want to and you can set the temperature. Um, like I said, um, my NFL teams you got big linemen, um, even some of the baseball players and your professional athletes, even my women's cyclers they all run hot, um, because of their metabolism, and so they're all going to sleep really cold. They're going to set the ruler down in, like you know, the 55, 60.
Speaker 2:And we can talk about sort of the impact of ambient temperature on that. The cool it can get cooler If there's some ambient temperature. It's about 15 to 20 degrees difference. So if you're in a hundred degree or, you know 42 degree room you're not going to get it down to eight degrees Celsius. There is sort of a benchmark on that from a you know heat sink and what its capacity is to do. But if you think about you know, the cooler you are and the cooler you can train your body to sleep, the better it is. The physics of it is, you know, beyond the healing part, and what triggers is entropy, is a combination of heat and temperature, and that's really how we measure the age of the universe and it really is. Is sort of this, this broader sense of the more we can take heat out of our scenario, the more we can keep our bodies cool. There's just less impact. Back to that race car engine the cooler it can stay, the better it's going to run. The longer it's going to run, the less problems it'll have, and so cool therapy.
Speaker 2:I love that you mentioned your cooling tub, big proponent of being able to cool your body. Not everybody likes the idea of, you know, cold plunges, but it is so good for our bodies to, to cool off, and especially again in the evening. Um, it's one of the big sort of hacks. If you're traveling to, at least take that cold shower, cold tub if you can do it, even get some ice from the ice machine and and really cold plunge. If you're having a hard time falling asleep, start with even just cool wash cloths on the back of your neck or your head or trying to cool off that way, maybe ease into it that way, but the cooling ability to to reset our system there's actually the name is super corny for the study it's called let it go after, but it is all about that you can reset your circadian rhythm almost entirely by doing cold plunges.
Speaker 2:So over the course of a few days they only did it for a week, but it completely set someone whose circadian rhythm was completely a mess. They had a disorder where they couldn't get regular sleep. Their circadian rhythm didn't know what time was up and down and back to jet lag. If you're not sure what time is up and down and your body's confused, cold plunge will tell it it's time to go to sleep. A warm shower and sunlight's going to tell it it's time to wake up. So make sure that those parts of those habits can stick when you travel or reset it. The power of that again, that unspoken language for your body, is very clear and it goes right to the core of that clock and that unconscious, involuntary system says okay, let's reset. Cold is going to do that.
Speaker 1:Exactly, our physiology is sort of based on the physiology of what came before us right with evolution and those single cell amoebas. All they have is the sunlight, the chemicals that surround them and the pressure, but also hot and cold, so our physiology responds to those things as well. Cold, so our physiology responds to those things as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the melatonin system is the same. I often show in a talk a marine worm, this like nasty looking marine worm. It still has a melatonin system that works on the exact same principles as us. So no prefrontal cortex, no brain, no habits about sleep, no, how many hours a day it's supposed to do it. It doesn't know any of those things and it still gets great sleep because it knows when it gets dark and cold it should go and release melatonin. So again, the system is not super complicated, it goes. It's a very old, primitive system. Sleep. So it you know, know the basics and you know sleep.
Speaker 1:So with sleep, you've mentioned the cold being important. You've given us a solution for getting colder in the evenings with your machine, but also with cold showers and ice and things like that. But I've heard you talk about the three pillars of sleep. Can you expand on that just a little bit?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know, I think, when, again, when I started coaching sleep, of how can I translate into what's important in sleep.
Speaker 2:You know, I think, when, again, when I started coaching sleep, of how can I translate into what's important in sleep. And you know, when you talk about light and temperature, that's your environment and the environment you sleep in, again, as I just said, is very primitive and it makes sense. But the other two pillars are also really important. One of them is your mindset, and that does play a role in how you sleep. I often talk about it in terms of managing stress. So we talked about good cortisol in the morning, but a lot of us have stressful lives, even though we're not being chased by lions. For the most part, our bodies are still geared to respond to a lion that could show up at the water hole at any time, and so when we stay in a constant state of stress, our bodies are then stressed out all the time and we need to be able to shut that down and reset that. Um, and one of the things that came up a lot during covet is like but I'm trapped in my house, what am I going to do? It does take a lot of time or a lot of effort to reset that cortisol stress monster. Even just 30 to 60 seconds of breathing or quiet time. You all go to the bathroom, uh, on average six to seven times a day. Close the door, sit in there, take a minute for yourself and reset whatever that looks like for you. There's so many different versions of that online that you can pick whatever voice, whatever sounds, whatever, whatever that looks like, but play it on your phone if you need to. Um, but take 30 to 60 seconds once a day and it will reset that cortisol. So by the time you get into bed at night, you're not dealing with this big mountain, huge monster of like. Okay, I'll let it build up all day, and now I'm laying in bed and I'm all stressed out and I can't do that Worst case scenario. At least plan it before you go to bed a half hour hour before bed, go for a walk, do something that like winds it down, so that by the time you get to bed your body really is geared for sleep. So when you climb in your bed you're not ramped up. Don't count that the action of getting into bed will wind you down. That's why that sort of mindset pillar is really important to manage and be mindful about what is the state of mind a half hour before I want to go to bed. Do I need it? You know sort of do an intervention with myself and calm myself down, whatever that looks like for you. So when you do go into bed, you're you're not battling this huge mountain of stress that does make it hard for your body to overcome that and then still try to get to sleep. Um, so that's why that's really important and again, try to manage it throughout the day, because it's so much easier than trying to figure it out right before you go to bed. Um. And then the other one is behaviors, and that this one really goes into. You know you can manage it.
Speaker 2:Um, the doc pro has enough capacity that even if you have a lot to drink, you're going to increase your metabolism. You can be too hot. Try to sleep cooler to compensate for that, but a lot of times when you drink at night the big, you know you may fall asleep. A lot of people used alcohol, especially during the pandemic, as a way to sort of unwind. Unfortunately, it increases your metabolism as your body basically tries to work out that poison. Um, which is good, um it, um, it's super fun, but it's not going to help you sleep. It's not going to help you get that deep sleep.
Speaker 2:So, you know, if you are going to drink, try to sleep even cooler.
Speaker 2:If you are going to drink, and just the temperature on your ruler or doc pro um, or try to sleep cooler. Or maybe take a ice plunge. Um, you know, try to not eat right before you go to bed or work out right before you go to bed. If you had a hard time falling asleep, if you're a night person, that's less of an effect than if you're a morning person. But you know, keep in mind of the behaviors you do are going to have an impact on your sleep. You can't just sort of have a big fight with your spouse and then expect that you're just going to roll over and go to sleep. Some people may, but if you're not that person, make sure that if that, whatever happens in your day, that you find a way to bucket it, put it aside, do whatever you need to do and again, once you learn what are those things that do trigger bad sleep, know that you have to manage those and tidy them up before you budget your time for sleep. Yeah, 100%, with my whoop when I was tracking this.
Speaker 1:I noticed that if I read, I have an online magazine. It% With my whoop when I was tracking this. I noticed that if I read, I have an online magazine. It's called the Week, and I find it entertaining. I like reading it, but it's it's short, sharp pieces that give you news from all over the world. And if I read the Week on a device, admittedly, but if I read it the week before I went to sleep terrible sleep, but I could read a book on my device with my I have blue light blocking sunglass glasses as well I would sleep just fine, and so the difference between a sort of stimulatory uh input before you sleep and a non-stimulatory input was huge for me. And I've also heard people talk about the opposite of cooling when they go to sleep, but taking a warm bath when they before they go to sleep. So they trigger a cooling effect. That doesn't work for me, but have you seen it work for people?
Speaker 2:so that is absolutely me. It's changed a little bit because as I've gotten older, uh, again I'm in that sort of menopausal window window, so that's shifting for me. But again, I always had a warm-up to fall asleep. And still um would oftentimes with my uler. I would warm up the bed while and still um would oftentimes with my ruler I would warm up the bed while I was reading um getting ready for bed, and then set it to cool Um once I was to go to sleep, like, okay, I'm going to sleep now, so I'll set it to cool, and it would take about 20 minutes to get cool. So it worked out pretty perfectly. Um.
Speaker 2:But you know there's definitely different profiles. You'll see that for some people there they'll actually peak their peak temperature for the day will be right before they go to bed and then they'll go down Um. Other people don't have that same peak Um. And again, when you warm up, you know people will say putting socks on your feet. What you're doing is you're warming up your extremities, so you're actually creating a different circulation effect. So that also helps to sort of trigger doing it.
Speaker 2:We're all so different as humans. People say what temperature should I set it at? It's the hardest question because we are all so different your metabolism, your age, your gender, all of those things even for females, what time a month it is may all have an impact on what that temperature is. So it's not really one temperature is going to rule us all and really you have to think about what is comfortable for you and most of us you know.
Speaker 2:Go back to how did you grow up, what were the temperatures when you were growing up? And a lot of that will still be where you as a good place to start, because when we were children, a lot of those sleep notions were set and so whatever habits we had as a kid and when someone's really got messed up sleep we often start with okay, well, what did sleep look like when you were eight or 10? And when did you go to sleep? How did it work? And then work forward from there, and then we can always adjust once we've reset it and we know what pattern is supposed to look like. But if, in doubt, there was a pattern in your life at one time, for most people, figuring out what that is, going back to that starting there is usually a good place to start and that'll give you that sort of jumping off spot I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier, that first stage of sleep.
Speaker 1:You said a word I'm not familiar with oh, igogic sleep.
Speaker 2:Yes, so it is a fabulous thing actually. Um Thomas Edison, um here there's even pictures of him doing it. So the first five minutes of sleep is when you kind of go limp like it's right before. So he would hold two steel balls in his hands. You Google it, you'll see pictures in black and white of him laying on his workbench. He couldn't solve a problem, he'd get stuck in whatever that is and he'd put the two balls in his hands and then he'd lay down to fall asleep. And when he fell asleep the muscles would release, the balls would hit the floor and he would wake up and wait about that five minutes.
Speaker 2:What's magical about that is when you fall asleep you're basically it's kind of like I don't know if you ever watched the matrix, but all of the all of the rules of the world go away. So all of your preconceived notions, anything that's holding you back consciously if you, the laws of physics don't apply, kind of kind of thing. If you're going to fly like Superman, it's going to be during this type of sleep, because it's it's really freeing and it's great for problem solving. Um salvador dali, a lot of um you know famous artists have used it um. Over over time, this is going to become this sort of magical dreamscape.
Speaker 2:This is the type of sleep um usually at the other end, when, before you wake up, that's when you can trigger lucid dreaming. Um, I don't know if, uh, you've played around with that um, but that is similar. You know where you can steer your dreams. All of that can happen during this sort of magical time of've evolved to be able to solve complex problems, and so our brain designed a time and sleep that allows us to free think, be open-minded as much as possible, and we get it every night. It's just about whether we want to use it or think about something difficult before you go to sleep and then let your brain turn on it.
Speaker 1:Wow, I've never heard that phrase before, but interestingly, when we treat people with osteopathy, there's a style of treatment called craniosacral osteopathy and you put your hands on someone, you treat them very gently and for me, when I have the treatment done within maybe a minute, I'm in this dreamlike trippy state and I'm sort of aware that something's happening. But I'm also like in a parallel universe and a lot of my clients describe the same thing and it doesn't happen when you necessarily just lie down, but it's something to do with having the person's hands on you, maybe triggering a sympathetic state. But I feel as though we can put people into that hypoglottic state quite quickly using cranial osteopathy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really what like an LSD treatment. I know they're using a lot of those sort of you know treatments now for PTSD and mental health to kind of put them in that state. It is an amazing state. That's where lucid dreaming is often most found. Children will do it in response to stress, and so the best lucid dreamers that did it sort of by accident. Often it's a trauma trigger for their brain as a way to try to work through trauma, and those drugs basically trigger that same type of state where you can kind of be outside of yourself to kind of look at that emotion and handle it. And so it's interesting to me that we evolved to have the ability to work this out, and so it is just sort of a powerful part of again what we can do as humans to get past whatever's been put in front of us. We have that amazing tool.
Speaker 1:Okay, we're coming to the end of the podcast now and what I'd like you to do is just give us some top, you know, top five or top three recommendations for sleep that someone can use, not necessarily if they have your, your machines, but just in general. Give us the top five things and I understand you might repeat what you've already said.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, you know, I think first and foremost is back to you have to respect sleep. You know we all want to stay up late or go with friends or or travel or do whatever that is, but the the importance of sleep throughout our lifetime cannot be said enough. That's the super soapbox, um kind of part. So, whatever it is in your life, find a way. Um, power naps are a thing now. People are allowing much more time, or even accepted at work to take a power nap for 20 minutes. Um, you know, find your sleep, find what works for you. We all have different ways to sleep. Find a way to do that.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, the number two is sort of that stress monster. Find a way to manage the stress in your life. Um, it makes sleep a lot easy. Um, the lack of sleep plus stress is what leads to autoimmune diseases, cancer, all of those things are in our bodies and we're genetically, you know, have a disposition to whatever that is. But you combine lack of sleep and stress and whatever that's going to present your body is going to come out. That's like surefire way to get it. So the surefire way to prevent that is stay not stressed and get sleep, and you're on a great track to sort of prevent all of those diseases from coming into your life.
Speaker 2:You know, and I think another one is just the environment that you sleep in is really, really important. Dial that in, get it to be a habit, one of the most popular things with our traveling and it's hard because you think of, like a again, big football players, professional baseball players none of those guys will. You think lavender pillow spray would be the most popular thing that I have gotten them to use. But your sense of smell is the one we haven't really talked about very much, but it's extremely powerful. As a baby it's really important. And then we kind of forget that the sense of smell is so important. But if you train your brain that a certain smell is what is going to smell like home, feel like home. Even in a hotel room where they've got who knows what other smells going on in there, that pillow spray often can trigger you to sleep. It feels like home. So train your brain to sleep.
Speaker 2:So, whatever those habits are, even if it's pillow spray, allow yourself to hear some noise. That helps when you're traveling, because it's never super quiet in a hotel room either. But whatever those are, train your brain. It's very trainable, just like working out. You just need to practice. And when you practice having great sleep, then you can achieve great sleep wherever that is. But it is a practice just like working out. You'll get good at it if you know what those triggers are for you and be able to repeat it. And the more flexible they are like lavender pillow spray that you can travel with the better, because then it helps when you're on the move too.
Speaker 1:Okay, you're quite the serial entrepreneur as well. Can you tell us what's coming in the pipeline in the Tara Youngblood design department?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, I've just filed a new patent I'm working on. It's a passive cooling technology, and part of it is my passion for around the world, even the Uhler and doc pro have very low energy profiles. The latest one was able to work even on solar panels, so people could still get cooling at night. But I still want to achieve a passive cooling with no energy requirement. So if you're camping or you don't have access or there's energy, you know burnouts or times in which they're blacked out altogether, you can't get cooling actively to do that. So that will be coming by next summer. Really excited about that. But so keep your eyes on that.
Speaker 1:There's some fun new ways in which we can stay cool to sleep because, again, you have to be able to sleep anywhere anytime, and I want to make sure the whole world can sleep well, exactly, and that that's the sort of product I think will be really useful for where I am, where we do have occasional blackouts at night and, uh, the, the machines can switch off, but if there's something that doesn't need um power, then that's fantastic. So you mentioned keep your eye open for that. Where would would people keep their eye open? How do they follow you? How do they find you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm on all of the handles, as you call it. You can always. Actually, terrayoungbloodcom is my website. You can always go there. I have a blog about whatever's coming, but it'll be. I don't know for sure, because we're in talks with some major manufacturers of mattresses, so some will be built into mattresses and then there'll be toppers. But it'll always be available on Amazon, I'm sure. So I don't have a sense on where you can purchase it yet, because we're still in that very early stage of getting it manufactured, but it's coming soon.
Speaker 1:And where would people find the Ula and the Chili Pad and those kind of things?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that one's on sleepme all right, sleepme, that's it sleepme, sleepme can't get more simple. I fell in love with the url because it just seems so simple. But it is people like, almost that's too simple. I'm like I know, but it's sleep got me, sleep for me excellent.
Speaker 1:Well, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. I've learned a lot and hopefully our listeners have learned a lot as well.
Speaker 2:Great Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:This is the end of the episode of your Lifestyle is your Medicine podcast. Thank you so much for joining me in my conversation with Tara. Now, if you'd like to support the show, the best thing you can do is to subscribe on Spotify and Apple podcasts so that you can be notified when the latest episode comes out, and I'd be very grateful if you'd be able to go onto your podcast app and consider giving this a five-star review so I can get this information out to more people. Additionally, if you're watching this on YouTube, please leave a review or a comment below. Remember, if you want my direct help, especially when it comes to a whole body approach to back pain or scoliosis, go to my website, edpadgettcom, subscribe to my newsletter and drop me a message via the contact us link so I can help you make your lifestyle your medicine.