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How Sleep Affects Our Lives and Why It's Vital with Dr Kirk Parsley
Season 1 · Episode 211

How Sleep Affects Our Lives and Why It's Vital with Dr Kirk Parsley

Pushing The Limits

September 2, 20211h 52m

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Show Notes

We live in a fast-paced world, with more everyday demands. And we know that we need good health to keep up. Nutrition, exercise, and mindfulness are often hailed as important pillars. However, there is something even more fundamental for better health—sleep. Sleep ensures we can actually perform. With better sleep, we'll be living better lives. But, how many of us actually prioritise sleep?

Dr Kirk Parsley joins us in this episode to explain how sleep affects our lives. Poor sleep can significantly change our bodies and performance. He also shares that we can achieve good sleep through lifestyle changes. A better life is not about taking more supplements or using gadgets and tools; it's about creating new and better habits.

If you want to know more about the science of sleep and how sleep affects our lives, then this episode is for you.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:
  1. Learn how sleep affects our lives and why it is so fundamental to our health.
  2. Understand that it's more important to change our behaviours and lifestyle rather than depending on supplements.
  3. Discover the ways we can create the right conditions for better sleep.

Resources

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Episode Highlights [03:28] How Dr Kirk Started Working on Sleep
  • Dr Kirk used to work for the SEALs. Later on, he enrolled in the military's medical school.
  • After getting his degree, Dr Kirk became the manager of a sports medicine facility for the military. Here, he worked with other medical experts.
  • Those in the military will usually lie to healthcare providers so they won't get excluded from work, but they tend to be more honest with Dr Kirk because they have worked with him before.
  • After testing for vitamin deficiencies and adrenal fatigue, Dr Kirk realised that many of his patients were taking Ambien, a sleeping drug.
  • After learning more about sleep, Dr Kirk realised that every symptom his patients were presenting could be explained by poor sleeping.
[17:31] Sleep's Various Cycles
  • With a sleep drug, you are just unconscious and not sleeping.
  • Proper sleep needs to go through a repetitive pattern of deep sleep at the beginning of the night and then REM sleep by morning.
  • The different cycles are important since they affect our bodies in different ways.
  • Sleep can help boost your immunity and memory! Learn more benefits in the full episode.
[20:12] How Sleep Affects Our Lives
  • If you don't give yourself time to recover, sleep pressure can accumulate and have progressively worse effects.
  • If you go to bed with high stress hormones, this can worsen your sleep. Poor sleep then leads to higher stress levels, and the cycle gets worse.
  • People who get poor sleep age faster, not just in appearance but also in their physiology.
  • Poor sleep can lead to protein structure breakdown, decreased blood supply, aged tissues, and more.
  • As we age, we also face the problem of not repairing as fast. This is how sleep affects our lives.
[23:56] The Foundation For Better Health
  • We are often taught the basics of health are sleep, nutrition, exercise, and stress management.
  • However, these pillars cannot function without sleep as their foundation, emphasising how sleep affects our lives.
  • For example, exercise becomes counterproductive when you're sleep deprived because you're not recovering.
  • Poor sleep can also change your insulin sensitivity and gut biome, which changes your nutrition levels. Because of how sleep affects our lives, it should be our priority.
  • Sleep deprivation is the fastest way to break someone down, this is why it's used as an interrogation technique.
[28:35] How Do We Sleep?
  • We need eight hours of sleep a night.
  • Make your sleeping routine simple. The more complex it is, the more likely you will fail.
  • First, convince yourself that sleep is important.
  • We are all born to sleep, and we don't need to learn how.
  • Before electricity, people used to fall asleep three hours after sunset. Tune in to the full episode to learn more about the neurochemical process of sleep.
[35:36] Creating the Right Conditions for Sleep
  • During sleep, our senses still work, but they don't pay as much attention to external stimuli.
  • For our ancestors, the sunset will lead to decreased blue light, decreased temperature, decreased stimuli, and increased melatonin.
  • Better sleep is just creating these conditions in our environment.
  • If we take melatonin, we should be careful to take only small amounts.
[39:20] Melatonin Supplementation
  • Some have argued that melatonin supplementation does not downregulate our brain receptors, but there are no definitive studies on this yet.
  • In fact, measuring melatonin is difficult due to its quantity and concentration in each part of the brain.
  • It's okay to take melatonin supplements but not in physiologic amounts.
[45:15] Can We Reverse Aging?
  • You need to understand your genetics and what ratios will work for you.
  • While good habits and supplements can improve your overall health, we don't know if it undoubtedly reverses age.
  • Our bodies are more complex than we think. Shorting yourself two hours of sleep can change over 700 different epigenetic markers.
  • We can only describe biology. We don't know how to manipulate it most of the time.
  • Dr Kirk also shares his experience with hyperbaric oxygen therapy in the full episode.
[1:03:36] Paradigm Shifts in the Medical Industry
  • There is a lot of dishonesty in both the media and the medical industry.
  • Many doctors and medical experts have been silenced on potentially better cures, especially during this pandemic.
  • Western medicine is effective in treating the sick, but it doesn't keep people from getting severely sick in the first place.
  • A lifestyle change is more important than taking supplements.
[1:12:22] The Importance Of Behaviour Change
  • People often don't want to work on their behaviour because taking medicine is easier.
  • We also need to be aware of how the food industry is tapping into our addictive mechanisms to keep us eating more.
  • Caffeine consumption can also ruin our sleep. More than 200 milligrams can give the opposite effect of staying awake and alert.
  • Learn exactly how sleep affects our lives, together with caffeine and sugar consumption, when you listen to the full episode.
[1:19:40] Widespread Impressions on Sleep and How It Affects Our Lives
  • People have grown to believe that sleep is for the weak and lazy.
  • This belief also impacts our children, especially since they are still developing.
  • Losing two hours of sleep can decrease testosterone and growth hormone by 30% and increase inflammation by 30%, among others.
  • Dr Kirk delved into researching how sleep affects kids after giving a lecture for American kids overseas to professionals in the school system.
  • Kids' brains are still developing. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that allows us to simulate things, experiences a shift during adolescence.

[1:26:34] How Sleep Affects Our Lives as Kids

  • Dr Kirk delved into researching how sleep affects kids after giving a lecture for American kids overseas to professionals in the school system.
  • Kids' brains are still developing. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that allows us to simulate things, is formed during adolescence.
  • Furthermore, adolescents also require more sleep because of a shift in their circadian rhythm.
  • Requiring kids to do more with less sleep interferes with their development.
[1:31:40] How Sleep Affects Our Lives When We are Sick
  • A new field in medicine called chronobiology is studying how sleep deprivation precedes any psychiatric disease or psychological flare-up.
  • An Ivy League hospital managed to get their patients off medication by regulating their circadian rhythm and chronobiology.
[1:34:34] It's More Than Switching Things On and Off
  • Medications can be difficult to get off because they have too many side effects.
  • For example, most antidepressants are not just working on serotonin. Instead, they affect several neurotransmitters as well.
  • Physiological doses are artificial and can cause you more trouble.
  • Learn how sleep medication and affects GABA receptors that slow down the brain when you listen to the full episode.

[1:41:17] Dr Kirk's Sleep Remedy

  • Dr Kirk discusses how cavemen took around three hours after the sun went down to fall asleep. In the present day, what can people do in those three hours?
  • To fall asleep, stress hormones need to come down due to lifestyle.
  • Dr Kirk's Sleep Remedy involves getting the proper ratios of substances.
  • His product comes in the form of tea, stick pouches, and capsules.

[1:46:27] Dr Kirk's Final Advice

  • Change your environment by decreasing blue light and stimulation.
  • Learn to slow everything down.
  • Just like how you slow everything down to get a kid to sleep, so should you do the same for an adult.

7 Powerful Quotes

'You aren't actually sleeping when you're on sleep drugs. You're just unconscious. Your brain is dissociated, but it's not sleep.'

'Often, if you're sleep-deprived, more is worse for sure. You don't really need to do any exercises. You just stay active until you've recovered, and then you can exercise again.'

'Insulin sensitivity is decreased by 30%, just by losing two hours of sleep. One night with two hours of sleep. So you go from sleeping eight hours of sleep to six. If you're pre-diabetic, you're waking up diabetic.'

'Even though I'm known for sleep, the hardest thing for me to coach people to do is to sleep.'

'The most sleep-deprived years are the most horrible years of the brain development.'

'Get rid of the blue light. Decrease the stimulation. Lower your body temperature. That's sleep hygiene.'

'Part of lowering stress is just slowing down your thinking. You can't work on your computer until 9:59 and get in bed in 10 and think you're gonna be asleep.'

About Dr Kirk

Dr Kirk Parsley was a former Navy SEAL who went on to earn his medical degree from Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda in 2004. From 2009 to 2013, he served as an Undersea Medical Officer at the Naval Special Warfare Group One. He also served as the Naval Special Warfare's expert on sleep medicine.

Dr Kirk has been a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine since 2006 and consults for multiple corporations and professional athletes. He gives lectures worldwide on wellness, sleep, and hormonal optimisation. He believes that many diseases and disorders are unnecessary complications of poor sleeping habits. We can achieve the highest quality of life possible by changing this habit problem.

Interested in Dr Kirk's work? Check out his website.

You can also reach him on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and email.

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To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Full Transcript of the Podcast

Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by www.lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Well, hey everyone! And welcome to Pushing The Limits. This week, I have another amazing guest for you. I managed to get some incredible people. I have Dr Kirk Parsley with me. He is an ex-Navy SEAL, and also a medical doctor. A little bit of an overachiever, this one. He spent many years in the SEALs, an incredible man. He also was involved with the first sports medicine rehabilitation centre that was working with the SEALs, an incredible expert on sleep. And that's what we do a deep dive into today. We also talk about hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We also go into areas about the current state of the medical system, one of my favourite topics. And I hope you enjoy this episode. It's really, the most important thing is around sleep.

Sleep is something that all of us, I think, are underestimating its importance. And that this is the biggest lever, not food, not exercise, not meditation, not mindfulness, not anything else. Number one of all leverage points is sleep. So how the heck do you get enough sleep? What is enough sleep, and how to get it is what this episode is about.

Before we head over, I just want to remind you we have Boost Camp coming up. This is our eight-week live online program. There, Neil Wagstaff and I, my business partner and longtime friend and coach are doing. And we're going to, if you want to come and hang out with us live every week and learn everything about upgrading your life, basically, your performance, how to optimise all areas of your life, then we would love you to check the information out, head over to peakwellnessco.nz/boostcamp.

On that point, if you're also interested, come and check out our flagship program, which is our epigenetics program, where we look at your genetics, and how to optimise those specifically, all the areas of your life: your food, your nutrition, your exercise, your mood, and behaviour, your hormones, all these important areas, specifically to your genetics. One-on-one time with us and help us to understand everything about your genetics. It's an incredible platform and amazing AI technology behind us. And we'd love you to check that out.

Go to peakwellnessco.nz/epigenetics. Or reach out to me if you didn't get that. We will also have the links down in the show notes, if you want to just click over to that. Or you can just head over to my website, www.lisatamati.com. And hit the work with us button for our programs listed on there as well. So without further ado, now over to Dr Kirk Parsley.

Well, hi, everybody! And welcome to Pushing the Limits. This week, I have a superstar, who is a good friend of Commander Mark Divine, you may have heard previous weeks on my podcast. We have Dr Kirk Parsley with us today. Welcome to the show.

Dr Kirk Parsley: Thank you. I feel very welcome and happy to be here. I'm still here. I'm happy to be sharing this airspace with you or whatever it is sharing.

Lisa: I'm really super excited. I've heard you a number of times on Mark's show and just thought how hefty you're on because you're such an expert. We're gonna dive into a little bit into your background, but you're an absolute sleep expert. So I'm really keen to help my audience with their sleep, and their sleep patterns, and all of that good stuff. But before we get into that, we were just chatting about genetics and endurance. So, give us a little background. You've been a Navy SEAL. You've been in the military, in the naval military. So give us a bit of background on yourself, personally.

Dr Kirk: Yes. So ironically, I actually dropped out of high school. I was a terrible student my whole life, didn't have any interest in school. And after you don't do well for long enough, you just convince yourself that you can't do well. And so you're just, 'I'm just done. I can't do it'. I was always very physical, very athletic. Just fortunately, genetic lottery, I won, just be an athletic and strong guy. And it came pretty easy to me. But I worked hard at it because I didn't do school work. So when I dropped out of high school, to join the military and do the hardest training in the world. And that was what the SEAL training was supposed to be, as the toughest training in the world like, 'Well, I'm gonna go do that.' So I went to do that.

This was a way long time ago. This is 1988. So, it was long before anybody knew what SEALs were. They didn't have the notoriety they have now for sure. And when I would come home from the Navy and tell people as I was a Sealer, like, 'What do you mean, you work for SeaWorld or something? What do you do?' Kinda. So, I went through SEAL training, I would say I made it through SEAL training, I became a SEAL. That was pre-9/11, obviously. So we didn't have the combat that the SEALs of this generation do. So it's not really comparable. We were still mainly working in Southeast Asia doing police work and training other militaries.

I did three deployments. It was really the same thing over, and over, and over again because there was no combat. So you just did the same training, and then you deployed, and then came home, and you did the same training. And of course, I was like, 'Maybe, I'll go do something else.' And I thought I would be—I was dating a woman who would become my wife. She was getting a master's in physical therapy. And I was reading her textbooks on deployment to make myself a better athlete. And I thought, maybe I could be a physical therapist. And so I started working, I started volunteering in a physical therapy facility in San Diego, called San Diego Sports Medicine Center. And it had every kind of health care provider you could possibly imagine. And this building, it's just this healthcare Mecca. It's the most holistic thing I've ever seen to this day.

I decided pretty quickly, I didn't want to be a physical therapist, but I don't know what else I wanted to do. But I got to follow the podiatrist around, and acupuncturist, and massage therapists, and athletic trainers, and conditioning coaches, and the orthopedist, and the family practice, and the sportsmen. I just got to follow them around and see how everybody worked. And a group of young doctors there, who were probably only five or six years older than me, and they were saying, 'Well, you should go to medical school.' And I was like, 'Pump the brakes, kiddo. I didn't even graduate high school. I'm not getting into medical school.' And then the senior doctor overhears the conversation. He comes out of the office. And he says, 'Kirk, the question isn't, "Can you get in?" The question is, "Would you go if you've got in?"' And I said, 'Of course, I'd go.' So, well, there you have it. So, he sort of shamed me into it/

I studied hard and got really good grades. And then when it came time to apply for medical school, this was pre-Internet, so you had to go to the bookstore and get your book review and look and see what schools are competitive for. And when I was going through one of those books, I found out that the military had their medical school. The military was a closed chapter in my mind. I'd done that. That's something that I figured I'd always do in my life. But it was never meant to be my whole life. And so I had done that. I was, I figured I was done. But I was already married and had kids. And I was like, 'Well, the military will pay me to go to medical school. Or I can pay someone else to go to medical school and my wife can work while we're in medical school.'

I made enough to support my family and go to medical school for free. And then to pay off in the military's, they'll train you to do anything. You have to give them years of service and your job. So once you finish your medical training, you have to be a doctor for the military for eight years. And so I figured, 'I'll get back to the SEAL teams, I'll go pay something back to the community that helped me, was hugely formidable in who I became in my life.' And went back to the SEAL teams, really well-prepped to do sports medicine and orthopedics. And I knew quite a bit about nutrition, and performance, and strength and conditioning. I was pretty sure I had the exact pedigree.

When I got there, they had just gotten the money to build a sports medicine facility, which was actually their vision was exactly what I told you that I worked in in college. That's exactly what they wanted to build. I'm like, 'I got this.' So they put me in charge of building this out. And I was a significant part of us hiring everyone we hired. So we hired our first strength and conditioning coach, our first nutritionist, our first PT, our first everything.

We built our own sports medicine facility. And then orthopedics was coming through every week, and they had to do rounds there. And we'd have pain rounds, pain management rounds come through. We had an acupuncturist coming through. And we hired all these people from the Olympic Training Center, and professional sports teams, and the best colleges. And so, we had all these brilliant people who knew way more than I did about what they do.

Lisa: So you went from there to there.

Dr Kirk: Yeah. And so at that point, I was the dumbest person around, right? Because we had all these experts in every little niche that I knew this much about. We hired experts who knew that much about. And so in the military, when you're the dumbest guy, they put you in charge, right and say, 'Well, you manage this,' right? And so, I'm managing all these people who know more than I do, however that works. But my office was in this facility that we built.

The SEALs are a lot like professional athletes in that you put them on a bench, so to speak, right? Because they're injured, they need some help. So they can't work. It's the worst thing. Worst thing. So when they see a health care provider, they just lie because they don't want to be—

Lisa: They don't wanna be taken out.

Dr Kirk Parsley: They will take money out of their pocket, and go into the city, and find a doctor to treat them so that the doctor at work doesn't know, so they don't get put on the sideline. But because I was a SEAL, and there were still a lot of SEALs at the SEAL team. It was close enough to my time. There are still a lot of SEALs at the team who I worked with, and I trained with, and deployed with. And so they knew me. And I had a good reputation. And so they trusted me, and they come in my office and they say, 'Let me tell you what's going on with me.'

They reported this litany of symptoms that didn't have any pattern that I could recognise. And so they were saying that their motivation was low, that they're very moody, that they couldn't concentrate. They're super forgetful. Their energy was low. Their body composition was shifting. They felt slower, and dumber, and colder. None of them were sleeping very well. They're all taking sleep drugs. They had low sex drive. They had a lot of joint pain, a lot of inflammation. And I didn't have the slightest idea. I'm like, 'And I know it sounds like you're obese and 65. But I'm looking at you and you're not. So I don't know what's going on.'

I just started testing everything I could possibly test. I tested literally 98 blood markers. They were giving 17 vials of blood. Now just shotgun approaches, test everything, and see what's abnormal. And I started seeing some patterns. And they had really low anabolic hormones, so the DBTA, and testosterone, and dihydrotestosterone, pregnenolone. All of that was low. They really have high inflammatory markers. They really had poor insulin sensitivity for how healthy I knew they were, and how well they ate, and how much they exercised. But it's still within the normal range. But it wasn't. Everything was in the normal range. But everything that should be really high was just like barely in the normal range. And everything that should be really low, it's just barely inside of that range.

They didn't have a disease. And I was a medical doctor, so I had learned how to treat disease, then they didn't have disease. So I was like, 'I don't know. What am I going to do?' So that led me to having to train with outside providers. And fortunately, at that time, the SEALs did have the reputation. They'd already done all these amazing things. This was in 2009. So, I think they'd already shot Bin Laden and at that point. So I could call anybody, right? I'd watch somebody's TED Talk, read their book, I'd see them lecture. And I'll just call them and say, 'I'm a doctor for the West Coast SEAL team. Could I come train with you? Can I consult with you? Can I ask you some questions?' And everybody was generous and said, 'Absolutely'. So I get to learn a lot really quickly.

I take a lot of leave from work and just go sit in these guys' clinics for four or five days. And just pick their brain, go see patients with them, and take notes, and learn. And then I just call them every time I have a question. And I just got to learn really quickly. It's like this team of experts who knew everything about the alternative world.

I was trying to treat people for adrenal fatigue. And I was trying to treat people for vitamin and mineral deficiencies, which are obvious from what was going on. And I couldn't quite figure out what it was. And about 100 patients into it, and probably after 30 guys came in, I could have told everybody, they could just sit down. I'll tell you what you're going to tell me. I could have just just route it off; it's so similar. And about 100 guys into it, embarrassing that it took so long, but I remember this guy telling me that he took Ambien every night. What do you guys call it? Stilnox, I think, right?

I was married to an Aussie, so I know a lot. I mean, I know you're not an Aussie, but I know a little bit about your world, as in your language. And I remember putting a note in the margin, 'Seems like a lot of guys take an Ambien.' Then I go back through everybody's records, 100% of the guys who had been in my office were taking Ambien. So I thought, 'Well, maybe that's an issue, right?' So, let me go look at the side effects of Ambien. And it was a fairly new drug. And the pharmaceutical industry, they get to cherry-pick their data. So they were like, 'Oh, it's the safest drug ever. There's nothing, no problems.' And I'm like, 'I don't quite believe that.'

Unfortunately, like every other doctor in America, I didn't know anything about sleep. I never had a single class on sleep in medical school, didn't have the foggiest idea what should be happening. I knew what you called a mechanism of action on this drug, which means molecularly what does it do. Well, it binds GABA receptors and has an effect called GABA analog, and benzodiazepines are the same, things like Valium. And so that's about as much as I knew, Well, what is GABA doing? What is GABA supposed to do? And then you can't really understand that without understanding what's actually going on in sleep.

Then, I had to learn about sleep physiology. And what's supposed to happen during sleep? And what are the normal shifts and changes? And what does that do? And if that doesn't happen, what effects do you get? So after studying quite a bit, I figured out the general Occam's razor principle of the thing with the least assumptions is, literally, every single symptom that these men told me about, could be explained by poor sleep.

Now, I didn't think that it would be, right? I wasn't naive, but it could have, then, right? So if this was definitely the most powerful thing, because being a Western doctor I wanted to give them Cortef and raise their cortisol. I wanted to give them testosterone and raise their testosterone. I wanted to get like, I wanted to give them medication to improve their insulin sensitivity. I wanted to just go in there and do it. But I couldn't do that, right? Because you can't give SEALs medication that they're dependent upon. Because then, what if they go out on the field, and they don't have their medication, they can't do their job and it's a waste. So that puts people on the bench, that disqualifies people. So I couldn't do that.

I had to figure out, well, what else can I do? So like I said, sleep seemed like the unifying theory. So let me see about that. And this was right around the time that everybody was catching on to the important vitamin B3. And that was associated with poor sleep. So, I tested all my guys. Every one of them had low vitamin B3. So I'm like, 'Yeah, I'm going to give them vitamin B3. I'm going to be a hero. Everyone is gonna love me. I'm the best doctor ever.' And it helped a little bit. But it wasn't everything.

Like I said, I had this epiphany with this sleep drug. And once I learned enough about the sleep drug, you aren't actually sleeping when you're on sleep drugs. You're just unconscious. Your brain is dissociated, but it's not sleep. Because sleep has to have, as one of its criteria, you have to have this predictable sleep architecture. You have to be going through these sleep cycles that take you through these different stages. And a particular pattern is repetitive, and it's primarily deep sleep in the beginning of the night, and almost exclusively REM sleep by morning, and you have to do that transition.

If you don't do that, then it's not sleep. It can be partially sleep, if you're just getting poor sleep. But I was having these guys do sleep studies. And they were coming back with 99.9% of their sleep study being stage 2 sleep, which is just the transition. It's what we call a transitional sleep phase. So it's not deep sleep or REM. So they weren't really getting any of the benefits of sleep. And of course, that's an oversimplification. They're obviously getting something, or they'd be dead. But we don't know what they're getting.

That's all we know is that healthy sleep does this, and when you go through these cycles, we know these things happen. Like when you're in deep sleep, we know that's when you're the most anabolic, and you're secreting your anabolic hormones like growth hormone, and testosterone, and DHEA is being ramped up, your immune system's being ramped up. We know this happens. And then we know in REM sleep, what's going on in the brain: the physiological changes, forming more durable neural tracks, that neurological memories, shifting things from working memory into long term memory, pruning off useless information, these little buttons that grow on the side of your nerves that are starting to bud new information. You're like, 'I don't need that.' You clean up all that. You get rid of weak products and you get the brain working better.

The whole purpose of going to sleep tonight is to prepare myself for tomorrow, right? Whatever I do today, that's what my brain and body are gonna think it needs to do tomorrow. It's gonna use today as a template to try to make me better tomorrow at doing what I did today. And if I don't get enough sleep, if I don't get to restore, I still have to do tomorrow. And how do I do that? Well, I do it the same way you do anything. I'm stressed out. I use Marinol and a bunch of cortisol and DHEA. And I start robbing all my nutrients for my cells. My blood glucose is going up, I'm getting fuel sources that way, epinephrine and norepinephrine stimulate my brain and my tissues to be able to get energy where there's really no energy there. And then I'm going to bed with these really high stress hormones, which are supposed to be low when I sleep, and then I'm trying to sleep with high stress hormones. Then, I get worse sleep. Then, I need more stress hormones tomorrow. And that's what breaks people.

In fact, when you see somebody who doesn't sleep well for even six months, they look so much older. 'Why does he look old? That doesn't make sense. Is it just because they're tired? Is it tired old?' But if you think about it, you're born into this contract. You're born into this contract; you can't get around. It's just like you're born knowing you're going to die, 100% certain you're going to die. There's also this other contract that certainly is your body ideally worked for about 16 hours, and it needs eight hours to recover. That's the way it works. That's what you're born into. There's small variations there. But obviously, you can't get around that.

If you don't get those 8 hours, you didn't recover from those 16 hours. And so if you think about it logically, obviously, when you're a kid, you need more sleep. So it's not a great example, when you're really young. Kids actually sleep a lot more than eight hours by and large, but you see them actually getting better every day, right? They're growing. They're getting smarter. They're getting more coordinated. You can see that every day. But if you think about, say, like, once you hit 25, and your brain's fully formed, and everything's static. If you could recover 100% every night, and wake up the next morning as good as you were that other morning, you wouldn't age, right? There would be no aging because you would have recovered 100%.

Lisa: It's very important, yep.

Dr Kirk: Everything that you're deficient in, if you're missing 10%, you're going to age that 10%. And if you're missing a little more, you're going to age faster. So when you see people who haven't been sleeping well for a year, they are literally older because they've been recovering less and less every night. So yeah, there's a breakdown in their protein structure. There's decrease in their blood supply, their peripheral vascularisation. Their tissues are aging. There's a buildup of waste products that aren't getting out, and that's toxic. And that's damaging the mitochondria and forming more senescent cells, and all these other things, they're building up. And every marker that we have, even genetic marker, when you look at your children and linked methylation on the genes. Every marker, they look older. And then when you look at them, they look older. That's why.

That's really what aging is. It's really just the absence of being able to recover 100% every night. And as we get older, we just don't repair as fast. And that's, unfortunately, when most people quit sleeping as much. And now that's double whammy there. You're getting twice the aging effects that way. And there's no reason to sleep less when you're old. It's typical, but it's not something you have to do. I've had 84-year-old women who haven't slept more than 4 or 5 hours in 20 years, and I get them to sleep eight hours a night.

Lisa: I've got one over there who's rustling around, walking around behind me. She's 80 years old, nearly. Hey, mum. And she's struggling with sleep in the early morning hours. And therefore, you know her memory and things. So I want to pick your brain on that. Can I just slow you down a little bit because we just covered a ton of ground here.

Dr Kirk: You just asked me about myself, and I just couldn't stop.

Lisa: No, but you were on an absolute roll. So I didn't want to interrupt you because there was so many things, but my brain's just going like, 'There's so many questions!'

Dr Kirk: That was just meant to be an overview.

Lisa: That was an overview. Now can we dive deeper into some of the weeds because now I understand why you've become, classically, the sleep expert because obviously that was the biggest leverage. In other words, this is the biggest leverage point that you see. When we think of the SEALs, we think of the SEALs as being these gods of amazingness that can do everything. But what you're saying is like these guys are pushing their limits: endurance, and in fatigue, and all things like that. And so they're going to be the Canaries in the Gold Mines in a way because they're going to be coming up against the limits of everything.

For you to say, as an ultra marathon, so I've come up against the limits in certain ways, like with sleep deprivation. And I sort of understand some of the things now that you were talking about. So you've ended up finding out that this is probably the biggest leverage point in anybody's life, basically, for their heal

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