99. Summit 14 - Mollie McGlocklin - Optimize Your Sleep

We have another awesome person who is going to share with you how you're going to figure out how to find the energy to do all this by being on top of your sleep, on top of your habits. Mollie, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Well, I had to get that off. I am doing great. How about you?

Awesome. Mollie is wicked smart, really, really detailed on things. She's going to use some big words that you or at least I don't know all the words, but I think I think what you're going to see is that she has a practical sense of how to really make sleep an ally and something that fuels your life.

OK, so I'm just going to share screen real quick. What are we going to be talking about in in this segment? We're going to be talking about sleep optimization, how to optimize your sleep in the twenty first century with the aim to transform your health, mood, productivity through technology, accountability and behavioral change. Those three elements are really what we aim to stand on from. Sleep is a skills or real ethos of how to make a difference with your sleep over the long term.

But first, who am I and why am I going to be talking to you about sleep? Who is this blond girl? What is her deal? Why is she so obsessed with sleep? Back story on me is that for many years of my life I was a bad sleeper, or that's how I thought of myself. I had a lot of labels. I am a night owl. I'm a short sleeper and also justified righteous about it. Listen, it's not a thing like you don't even need to worry about it.

I really had it that it was just a fixed way of being for me and there wasn't a whole lot else to say until I went through my own period of insomnia while traveling internationally. And I ended up at my lowest point going to the doctors in Croatia or one of the lowest points going to doctors in Croatia with Google Translate, How I can sleep and left with their version of Ambien. And in that moment, really knowing, OK, I got to really make a difference with this.

This can't be my life. That was sort of the inner dialog. And so began this whole quest to really transform my sleep. And in the process, what ended up happening was not only bring my sleep back to how it had been, which of shared was a separate, but actually bringing it to new heights that I had never known possible for myself from a quantifiable perspective. And then really what ended up happening was when I began to restore this area and bring back power to this part of my life, that it really felt honestly, again, like my rock bottom of my whole life, that I can't even do something as primal asleep.

What? So then by bringing that back, it really, really shifted my sense of who I was and what was possible, because it really felt like such a challenging thing and so I couldn't stop talking about it. And so a flash forward now. We have online courses, we have newsletters, we have podcasts, a weekly podcast release. We have all kinds of partnerships and collaborations and workshops and all kinds of things to really make a difference for people's sleep.

So while it was such a challenging period for me, initially ended up being one of the best things that could have happened. And so from that place, I'm also one of my other aims besides just the what to do and how to do it. I hope to also bring a sense of hopefully even enthusiasm, a renewed excitement, dare I say, in the world of sleep and what could be really possible for for you, no matter where you might be at your sleep.

Now, I know my stories may be one way of relating to sleep, but you even if you have it while I sleep, OK, or. Yeah, I've struggled with sleep no matter where you fall in the spectrum. My intention is that you'll leave with some real practical things to put in place with your sleep immediately. OK, so why sleep is so critical? I won't be belabor this point too much. I think many of us have a sense like I know sleep is important and probably get more and you might have varying degrees of intensity around that.

But just as a couple primaries are places to stand up, the why we have some fun stats here are people who get fewer than six hours sleep routinely are at higher risk for let's list it all diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cognitive decline, death from any cause. We're talking all cause mortality. And then some of the fallout as it relates to things like weight gain, cortisol or higher levels of cortisol, glucose instability, a number of things that we might not even connect to difficulties with our sleep.

And that was also part of my story was that when I was in sleeping leading up to that period of insomnia, I wasn't making these connections with things like an uptick in levels of. Diety and getting sick more often, a number of things I wasn't correlating with some of the management of my sleep and my health, so I want to then quickly. So assuming we're all on the same page, that sleep is critical. And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to put them in the chat.

But assuming we're all on the same page, that OK? Yeah, I'm in it. We need we need to up this area. So how and what do we do about it. So it's a skill. We have a couple of frameworks that we operate within. One is called a sleep tripod and it's workability between psychology, physiology and environment. And so if you're looking at each one of those legs, there might be one that pops out more for you, depending on where you're at in your life.

So sometimes very obvious. Someone just goes through a divorce. There's a death of a loved one, something very acute. But then probably what I see more often is I see that. But I also see just chronic stressors, a kind of low grade, whether it's anxiety, depression, different things that people are dealing with that might be impacting how they're relating to their themselves, their life, and then ultimately their sleep, just like low grade stress.

That's sort of president. We begin to think that that's how it is physiology then if there are changes in hormone production. So, for instance, women going through menopause, if there are kind of a nutrient deficiencies, a number of things that might come up if we were to do a more in-depth sort of testing panels and understand what's happening deeper, very common ones like low vitamin D, low magnesium be deficiencies, iron, thyroid issues. So a number of things that might be happening behind the scenes that are impacting your sleep results.

And certainly it's not an exhaustive list. As we know. There's a number of things that can fall into that category. And then also environment, which I would make the argument that many of us, even if we might think on environments pretty solid, that there are absolutely things that we can do to up level this, but not even just in the bedroom environment. But we're talking how you're living your days, what a number of things that can impact from the moment that you wake up that can affect your sleep.

So we'll talk about what those are. And but first, in that standing a bit in that element of our environment, but also how that bleeds into those other areas. The thing I want to present this to is this call out from the World Health Organization in 2016 that 90 percent of the time is of is the amount of time that the average person spends indoors, according to that stat that was pre pandemic. So it's likely that that number could even be even higher at this point.

But what does that have to do with sleep? Well, one of the second frameworks that we operate with, it is called circadian rhythm. Entrainment and entrainment is the synchronization or alignment of internal biological clock of your rhythm, of your biological clock. And so from that place, we're looking to really strengthen our circadian rhythm. Now, I certainly didn't know before I had my issues with my sleep that the answer and rhythm had a spectrum that existed with it so that you can either have a really strong circadian rhythm or weak circadian rhythm and that you might be oscillating somewhere on that spectrum.

But the truth is that many of us living particularly within the West and our modern society, are finding ourselves closer to the weak side of that. So from that place, there are a number of things that we can do to to influence that circadian rhythm. But before I get into that, I want to just to see if there's anything burning coming up here. Oh, yes, absolutely. 90 percent of the time indoors is huge. Completely. And so.

So why does that matter? What does that have to do with our sleep? Well, from this circadian entrainment framework now, if we are finding ourselves indoors, it's very much like we are becoming somewhat zoo animal like. Right. We're inside. We're not being exposed to the rhythms of nature, which for thousands and thousands of years really kept us on schedule to those rhythms of nature. And when we go outside of those rhythms, we find that there's a lot of upset that seems to happen for the body.

So what does that look like if we take you back to how life would have been run? And our understanding from ancestral knowledge is that we would have been sleeping outside with. Elements of nature, we would when the sun would rise, then the of course the light would be present and then the environment would warm up. So with those two things that light and then also temperature, timing would be two elements that would just keep us that would be an alerting mechanism for us to awake.

And that would also align really nicely with cortisol. So cortisol is meant to if things are really all functioning with a strong circadian rhythm, we'll have an uptick of cortisol in the morning hours. And so that would actually be a really good thing. So that would be a way for us to take on all the things that we got to do. It's like our natural inborn morning coffee that just is applied each morning and then you're able to take on all that you've got to take off.

And if we are not being exposed to that change in light, that change in temperature, we're devoid of one of those key mechanisms. And these are all known as zinc fibers, which is just stands for time givers. And one of the most important ones is this light. So with light and see if there's anything due to lack due to lack of live events and work night see video. And so the struggle is real. And at least if there's if it's any solace, we're not alone in finding ourselves really struggling with this.

So what are some of the things we can do? Well, if light is one of the top down, most heavy impactors of our circadian rhythm, then what we want to do is stand in the knowingness that the dosing and timing of our light and the type of light is going to make a profound difference on the setting of our master clock in the master clock is known as the suprachiasmatic nucleus is probably Wade Wade was mentioned. One of the things of some of these different words.

What are the words mean? It doesn't you don't have to know these words. It's more just knowing that there is this master clock in your brain that's directly connected to your eyes. And the reason that's important is that starts to have us begin to have more reverence for our light and the timing of our light and the type, because that tells our body what to do and when. So you get nothing out of what I'm saying. My hope is that one of the first things that you can begin really hopefully starting tomorrow, is that when you first wake up that you're aiming to get yourself outside outside of that indoor zoo like environment that is very static, often in its dosing of both lighting and temperature, and instead get ourselves outside and being exposed to full spectrum light, which sends a number of triggers that are separate from these indoor light indoor lighting that we're often exposed to.

And then, yes, 20 minutes a day of natural sunlight at the minimum camp people sleep cycles. Very, very good point. So sometimes you'll get confused on the when of that. So we want to try to anchor that. Earlier on in the morning, some of the guideposts will say things like before 10:00 a.m. Of course, this depends on your particular sleep schedule. That's kind of a blanket offering. If you are someone that's going to bed much later than average, we can sort of adjust that.

But you do want to aim to get as close to those rhythms as possible. But either way, no matter what you are, even if you're a shift worker, you might. I work with a lot of people with crazy schedules, work with a lot of poker players who have tournaments and all kinds of things like crazy hours. So we strategically time when they're going to be exposed to their light. But no matter what you got going on, you want to have that ideally within ideally the first couple hours of when you wake up and the earlier the better.

And then do know that while sun exposure throughout the rest of the day later on is valuable for a number of other reasons related to vitamin D, it's kind of more excitatory can be a nice way if you're kind of dipping in that afternoon to wake yourself up and that sort of thing. However, it doesn't impact your circadian rhythm as much as that first shot of light. So just being aware of that and then on the flip side of that light element is dark timing.

So obviously you can't have the light conversation without the opposite and which is that darkness. So you're aiming to have as big of a ratio as possible. So you want to have as much light exposure throughout the day, but then really post sunset. So whatever time sunset is for you and wherever you are, you want to aim to have a very, very dim lighting experience in your environment after that. And then, of course, total darkness for night.

And really, while we're not aiming to get neurotic or obsessive with any of the things that we're talking about today, I will say if there's anything that you focus in on, it's to get that invite. Robin Wright, your bedtime environment, so that it is having it is is fully dark as possible, even though it was a couple of little lights glowing, but no big deal, take the time to kind of cover those up and make a difference with that.

But it goes back to this conversation of the why, and that's because that will that ratio will really help to inform the body of what to do and when. So this we have available on our website that you get with we have weekly newsletters and all kinds of things that go into our podcasts and that sort of thing. But this is one of the things you do get to sign up. It goes in deeper of the optimized bedroom and it will have kind of a breakdown of what you have to look exactly like this.

But the point is that you're looking to optimize for some of those things that we know can make a difference with your sleep with me, just double check and see if there's anything going on and. Oh, perfect. Yes. Yes, exactly. I know. I was just in I was just traveling the last couple of days. I was just in Utah literally as of last night. And the space I was in had a lot of extra light coming in and I can measurably see the difference that it made on my sleep.

So really doing what you can to make a difference with that light is important. Now, what's the second part of that kind of hierarchy of the things that will influence your circadian rhythm is your temperature. So like we said in the in the example of living outside is that you the temperature would be higher throughout the course of the day. And that would make a difference for your experience, for your body's experience of what it needs to be doing and when.

And so you want to start bringing in a shift in that temperature in your space when if you do have control over your temperature. I know some people have challenges with that. If you do have to control, you're aiming to have it as cool as possible throughout the course of the night and as as warm as is doable for you and your environment throughout the course of the day. And having that real again, that ratio is what we're looking to impact.

But here is the interesting thing. So and this is where we start to get into all of these other things that can influence your body temperature, that might be outside of the ambient temperature in your environment. So a very common one I see is Mehiel timing that disrupts the quality of our or the ability to fall asleep and then the ability to stay asleep. So one thing that we suggest is known as circadian rhythm, our circadian rhythm, intermittent fasting.

And again, just another series of words that really just relate to aiming to eat within sunrise and sunset. Now, you might kind of wonder what for some of us in the winter time, especially, the sun is setting. Some is like four thirty or whatever it is. And we are aiming to still really eat as much as closely in alignment with that as possible. Now, I know that's not always in alignment with society and within what many of us think for our scheduling.

So I totally get it if you're not able to completely align with that at certain times of the year, but as much as possible even for that to be something you lean into and if you're tracking your sleep. So that's where we really lean into technology accountability, behavioral change, because that technology will have a start to get really connected to what makes a difference and when and how to choose and how and when it makes sense to choose a different line up to your day.

So say, do you have a really important meeting or what have you the following day? Being really mindful of the timing and type of your food can really help support an improvement in your sleep quality and quantity, which goes into that meal type conversation. And with that, what you want to do is start to really get connected to your your glucose levels. So I have a lot of clients where a continuous glucose monitors so that we can understand are they having crashes in their glucose throughout the course of the night?

Because that can be a very, very common reason for those wake ups throughout the course of the night. So also leaning into that text to help to understand yourself through this data can really often make a big difference for people. Movement timing is another one. So this one could be more like, OK, yeah, I can get that. Many of us might know that working out later on in the day could impact the quality of our sleep or our ability to fall asleep or stay asleep.

Just real quick, we have a call out about waking up several times a night, just up and take deep breaths to try to fall back. Back out. Yes, absolutely. So wake ups are probably one of the more common reasons that people come our way. And so with those, there's a No. Of reasons for wake ups, and I will say that that glucose conversation can be one of the top most or very in the list of common reasons that can fall in there.

And it can be shocking when people do invest in continuous glucose monitors to see, oh, my God, like, it just perfectly aligns. I know it's something to think about. And then there are many other common reasons for wake up that we probably have an idea, but maybe not fully connected to how much they really do impacts things like alcohol. Of course, having that added level wake up stage, see if you are playing with that caffeine timing, if many of us have it knowing that that could impact things.

But then also nutritional deficiencies, depression, anxiety, stressors, yet brain always being on twenty four, seven. Absolutely. All of those things can really, really, but they can also be measurable. That's why I think it's really important to lean into these pieces of text to track your sleep and your health because you'll start to see things like your heart rate variability shift. You'll start to see changes in your heart rate. You'll start to see your body temperature shift, respiratory rate, how you're breathing.

So we're not even today on this call getting into the conversation around more disorder's as it relates to sleep. So obstructive breathing, sleep apnea is all of that. But those are very, very real in creating a snowball effect where then we're having a poor relationship to our sleep and recovery. But so just real quick, with the movement timing, of course, we're aiming to have our movement more within the rhythms of nature as well to kind of align with the ancestral wisdom of probably not likely there's a big battle or something that we would be running around in complete darkness was you would do what you need to do during the hours of sunlight and then post sun set, then leading into more relaxation, connection and rest, that sort of thing.

I'm not proposing that we're going backwards to that. A clearly tech heavy in this conversation, too, but it's just something to look at from a blueprint now beginning to wrap up with some of these things. Social timing is a very common topic. So social jetlag is a coin, a term that was coined to explain when we would have consistent bedtime wake time ish throughout the course of the week and then the weekend comes and then there would be an uptick.

And we're going to bed early, waking up late. I know with covid, it's a little different. So I think we could use a new terminology like self created jetlag, some term of that nature. But what it really means is we can get on a flight, we can go anywhere. But now we're experiencing some of those same symptoms of jet lag because of the fact that our circadian rhythm has been so thrown off just by our management of our of our nights and our days.

Now, that timing kind of like what was in the one of the call outs about brain being on twenty four seven. Now, this one is one that I think could be a lifetime quest for many of us, is to really start getting connected to creating a two part system for a day where we have during the daylight sunlight hours, all kinds of activity, taking action on things that could be bringing stress in our lives. We're having those difficult conversations.

We're cognitively just really challenging the brain. We're doing all kinds of things, movement, meal, timing, all of that stuff. Right. But then in the evening, shifting over to a dim to darkness experience and then in alignment, we're fasting during that time for relaxation during that time. And how can we have a two part system? And presumably a lot of you might be entrepreneurs, I assume, and that's most of the people that I work with.

And so from that place, we can really be challenged to create that clear divide. So this one, I think, can be a really worthwhile one to dove into. And then just a couple more call outs real quick. At the end kernel, pharmacology is really just known as the science or the timing of drugs that we're taking that could also relate to those common ones. We spoke to caffeine, alcohol, THC, but then there's also supplements and then there's prescription medications and all kinds of things that could be impacting your sleep.

You want to do a real audit of what you're taking to ensure that none of those are negatively impacting your sleep. And then real quick, I want to say, if you only take away two things from what I'm saying today, please let them be these two things that light and temperature are going to play a massive role in that strengthening of that circadian rhythm. And this is not to take away we can step over that original framework that sleep tripod psychology, physiology and environment and assuming we're really working on those and have awareness and those then from training research.

In rhythm, you want to just make sure that you're getting their maximum amount of sunlight and daylight throughout the course of the day, particularly anchored in the morning, and that at night you want to lean into darkness. Melatonin is known as the hormone of darkness. And so its ability to be produced at its highest amount. You want to make sure that there's darkness present because that will definitely, definitely impact the production of that. If there is more blue, green and violet light in your environment that can throw that functioning off and in temperature you want during the day to get that body temperature up.

Even the fact that our thoughts can actually heat up our brain matter, which is a really wacky but interesting, fascinating concept. So that one even has those gadgets out on the market that are aimed to help cool down the prefrontal cortex from over thinking, from rumination, from stress, from anticipatory anxiety, all those things. So we want to be reallocating our efforts during the day to be getting to handling some of those things that might be really stressing us, working all that out and then shifting over to lowering body temperature in the evening hours.

So from that place, I'm just going to check in on this chat. Let's see. Oh, my goodness. Yes, great. So perfect. So I'm glad you guys are getting some value out of all this and the Solopreneur, and I love it. Oh, the arm locks. Yes. I always say that to the other clients that have dogs that they got to the walk, the dogs. They really went out telling you just because they know that sunrise, it's raining, it's whatever they are getting themselves out there and it starts to we're aiming to create this muscle of that.

We do this consistent things every single day. And the body loves consistency. So really leaning into that.

Awesome, thank you so much, Martin. One of the questions I want to ask. I wake up quite often in the night. It depends. Sometimes it's because my wife moves, removing the bed moves. So we're going to work on getting one of those beds. It just doesn't move as much. But in my case, like this week event coming up, something's on my mind. Normally I'm chill, but then, you know, ideas start popping in.

And I years ago when I was in my teens, I started doing meditation stuff. So because it used to take me like an hour, hour and a half to fall asleep. And then I could I finally figured out how to fall asleep. What do you find practical tips for a person that says, yeah, I've got a lot going on, you know, I mean, do I write it on a list and trust that I won't forget?

Because I know I have that also. Sometimes the moment I just get up, even though I don't want to put on my thing, but I'll just pick it up and type this, because if I don't type it and know that it'll be there tomorrow, I'll spend the next two hours, you know, got him to forget them and forget what usually happens when somebody gets up in the middle of the night and can't go back to sleep. And what can they maybe do about that?

Because I don't I would mention that, too.

Yeah, absolutely. Great call about the anticipatory anxiety, super, super common and rumination about the thing that just happened. So maybe for you tonight, like, did that go well? Did I do that then? We all got that. Absolutely. And so fantastic. Call it so what do we do about it? So one of the things that we listen to is called SETI Acceptance Commitment Therapy for Insomnia versus Sebti, which is common behavioral therapy for insomnia.

So ACTI is a bit of a softer approach and you're aiming to lean into acceptance when you do have, say, like those wake ups or difficulty falling asleep and the practicing without noticing all those thoughts and experiences that are coming up and then how from that place we can versus fighting it and why am I doing this is ridiculous. And that's kind of Chinese finger trap and that kind of going more and like resisting it then like the relaxation of it allows us to kind of ease out of that.

But I think it can also help to have some other strategies. Well, maybe I could certainly help me and so many other clients that are like, OK, that's a nice acceptance, but give me some actual things to do. So so some other things. So one thing you want to start noticing is what are those really repeated thoughts that are coming up each each night? Because often you might think, no, they're just totally different each night.

But it turns out that for most of us, they are very much in the same fabric. And so one of the things that I have my own kind of running list, I have a I have a Google doc of it. And it is just and it's surprisingly un creative. It's like 20 sentences that I say are all. So this is my flavor. I have like a good girl thing. So I'll be like, why did I say that?

Oh, my God, that was so stupid. Oh, they're going to think this blah, blah, blah, all of these things. And so and I write them out exactly in my own verbiage because we all have a particular way of saying it. You might have Suares in yours or whatever. You might have your your version. So you write that out because then you can spot it and it's a red flag for yourself. Oh, I'm doing that thing again for you.

So for me it's like trying to get it right. Like I might be strategizing about what's coming, upset about how it when all of that stuff and when we see that, then we can actually in the moment of noticing, oh, I'm doing that thing, then it frees us from that thing. So really starting to log that. And then I will say again, this could sound like a light one, but breaths so leading into the breath.

But I like to do it from a data perspective. So there's different tech like the leaf l i e f is one that will measure your heart rate and your HRB throughout the course of the day. And what those stressors so that you can literally see when you change your breath, you lower your heart rate. So there's a real cause and effect, not just like, oh, a nice idea. And that can often help me to be a place to stand, to get yourself back to sleep or to fall asleep.

Awesome, thank you, I know for me. The ability to get more on top of my sleep, just even the one suggestion that I took you gave me when we did the interview for the podcast of, you know, getting more dark, I mean, having the room be more dark. Yes. That's something that I used to parents and film makes fun of. I used to say, well, can you can you make it lighter is what it is.

And for me, that's a big deal. Maybe it's not for other people. Maybe some people can do it. But it makes such a difference that even the nights when I wake up and then go back to sleep and different things, I just know I'm able to do more. And I think for most of us, whether it's just having energy for family or friends or for work or for just the weekend, I don't want to sleep with my weekend.

I'd like to enjoy the weekend if I can. So while there's there's so much this and you did, you dropped a couple doozy words. So thank you for that. Just in case you people like Wade, Wade couldn't deal with a two syllable words. What's what's going on here? You dropped a couple there. So I feel I feel better about trying to soften those. That's so funny. Well, it is a fascinating area. You know, the topic of chronobiology is just fascinating in general.

So leaning into that, I think just really igniting an interest in this in this arena that is so crucial and foundational for health, I think is very exciting. So thank you for offering and allowing the forum to do that.

Awesome. Thank you. And just to to share with you all real quick, just it's in part of the give away stuff that she's sharing, her optimized bedroom. It's one of the things she has is an Opt-In really knows her stuff. This one has less of the big words, more pretty pictures. So, see, I'm going to help you with your marketing there.

Thank you. Yes.

Yes. And little numbers for different things. So, yeah. But really good stuff and some very practical suggestions. Thank you so much for coming out. Thank you for your follow up thing. For all the promo you've done. Just such a pro.. I appreciate you doing all this and I look forward to the next time we get to work together.

Oh, me too. I appreciate appreciate what you stand for and the big thanks to everyone listening and more to come. So thank you, Wade. I really appreciate it.

Awesome. Awesome. Rest of the week.

You too. Bye.