My 9-Step Evening Protocol for More Happiness and Better Sleep

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That's our show today is an evening protocol. My evening protocol is aiming to create a calm, positive mood and to prepare me to sleep and get me ready for the next day. Sleep is hard for me. It's hard for me to get the machine off. You think I talk fast? Imagine the voice inside my head. It's going twice as fast. And so I need to go to bed so I have proper sack time to actually get these hours. Now, I had a six part morning protocol. I have a nine part evening protocol. I'm not insane, I promise you. But the truth is that the more that you structure your life, the more that you're in charge of your life. You will have a better night. You'll have a better sleep architecture. You'll go to sleep more quickly. You'll wake up more refreshed and you'll be happier. Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks, your host. The objective of this show is to use science to help you build a happier, better life. And that's what I do for a living. I teach the science of happiness at the Harvard Business School and I write for the Atlantic how to build a life. I call them every Thursday on the basic science of happiness and how you can use it. This show is intended to give you a lot of knowledge, but also to be really practical. A few weeks ago, I had an episode on the morning protocol, the six science-based steps that I put together in my life to give me a better, more productive, happier day. Actually, less unhappy because it's designed to give me better mood management. And one of the things that bothers me in my life a lot is when I wake up in the morning and don't feel so good. This six-step morning protocol was really popular. So more than a million people actually watched that show and I'm really happy about that because I've been hearing from people ever since about how they're using the morning protocol and tailoring it to their own needs because now everybody's the same to be sure, but it's a baseline, it's a jumping off point that a lot of people are finding to be really practical. I love that. Thank you very much for doing that. And I want to pick up on that theme today because a lot of people asked me a question after that. We got a lot of comments from that and the comments for many people said, so thanks for the morning protocol. What do you do at night? That's our show today, is an evening protocol. What you can do to end your day using science in a very methodical way to give you the best chance of getting a good night's sleep, but also to go to sleep in peace, to have a better chance at ending your day as happy and healthy as you can possibly be. So that's what we're gonna talk about today is the evening protocol that I put together. And I'm gonna go walk through it. I had a six part morning protocol. I have a nine part evening protocol. I'm not insane, I promise you. But the truth is that the more that you structure your life, the more that you're in charge of your life. You wouldn't want your finances to just be all over the place, not with any rules. You wouldn't want your business to be that way either. You should treat your life with the same seriousness that you do your business or your finances. And that means having certain rules, not that you never break them, but knowing what the parameters are so you can live your best life. And that's what we're really talking about here. Now, as always, when you think about something that you wanna talk about, when you've got questions for me, if you've got feedback on making this show better, this is still a new show, please write to me, OfficeHoursatArthurbrooks.com that's displayed on the screen right now. And while you're at it, by the way, subscribe to my newsletter. This is a really popular newsletter. A lot of people, hundreds of thousands of people are getting this newsletter now. You can get that at www.Arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter. And it usually follows the same themes, but in a different kind of depth because it's the written words. It's not very long, it's usually about 500 words, 400 words. So you can read it really quickly on Monday morning and start your day with a little bit of happiness science. Maybe you've got something to talk about around the water cooler. Promise you, when you're talking about science and you become a happiness teacher, everybody's gonna wanna have lunch with you. 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Now you remember that I told you that in the morning protocol, that the morning actually starts the night before. The biggest mistake that people make in their morning protocol is not having gone to bed in a timely way. And so what is this business about going to bed? What is, how do we do that better? That's what the evening protocol is really all about. Now I'm gonna talk to you a whole lot about what the research says in both neuroscience and behavioral science and a couple of other literatures as well as always consult the show notes. I'm throwing tons of academic research into that. If that floats your boat like it does mine, then man, we're in the same intellectual boat, love it. Go to the show notes and you can actually find on PubMed and other sources where you can get these articles and read them if you want, if that's what you like. I certainly love that stuff. I'm doing that all the time. Also on the show notes or at my website, you can find a PDF of the nine part protocol and we're gonna send it out to a lot of people. It's gonna go out automatically to the people who get my newsletter but you can download it as well. So that you don't really have to take so many notes. You can read about this stuff and structure your day and work with that as your basic guide. All right, so let's get started. How does the end of your day start? In the answer, well, the first question should be when does the end of your day start? And the answer is dinner. That's when the end of your day of starting is at the beginning of dinner. Now, people always ask me, because I'm so into health and fitness and wellness, but also just the biology of what it means to be an effective person. And I take my diet really, really seriously, what's the best time to eat dinner? Now, you have to decide that, but the basic truth around this is a long time before you go to sleep. And you've heard lots of people talk about it. You've heard Huberman talk about this, Peter Atia talks about this, Gabrielle Lyon talks about this. And I know for a fact that I've been looking at the data that a lot of you who are watching this show, listening to this show are also fans of theirs. So you've heard them talk about the fact that it's important to have space between your eating and your bedtime. And there's a whole bunch of reasons for that, more on that here in a second. But for me, I like to eat dinner at 6 p.m. I know, I know. And it gets crazier, I know that's early. I'm married to a Spaniard. And friends, if you've been to Spain, you know that 6 p.m. is like, hey, just finishing lunch? The midday meal and going back to work, it's a nighttime culture. And I lived in Spain for a long time. And Esther and I have been together for three and a half decades. So this was hard for her. And it was actually kind of weird for me. When I first moved to Spain, I was eating dinner at 10 or 10 30 at night. And it was, oh man, it was wiping me out because I actually had to work in the morning. And now I actually understand the biology behind why it was so problematic. When we first moved to the States, we immigrated to the States together in the 90s. And Esther was really uncomfortable with this, that we eat dinner so much earlier, but she accustomed herself to it because she's really into health and fitness as well. And she figured out that an early eating time is much better for her. So I strongly recommend, just as I recommended in the morning protocols, podcasts that you change your chronotype. And that means being more of a morning lark than a night owl and having a feeding schedule that sounds like I'm talking about your dog, that actually fits that. So eating dinner and eating dinner, not close to bedtime and eating dinner a little bit earlier so you can go to bed earlier. I'll talk about that in a second. 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Now, why is it important to have a lot of space between mealtime and bedtime? You all are very sophisticated. This is a very sophisticated audience on this stuff. So you already know this. There's two big reasons. You do not wanna have a high blood sugar level when you're trying to go to sleep and you don't want your digestion just cranking through a meal when you're doing this. It's gonna mess up your circadian rhythms. It's going to interfere with your sleep architecture. It's gonna be harder. Sleep latency is gonna become a problem. That means it's gonna take you longer to get sleep. All of those things are actually going on. You don't want to actually be processing a great big, hard to digest meal. Eating farther away from bedtime is a really good part of the protocol, very important part of this basic scheme. Don't eat too close to bedtime. I recommend three hours. You know, most people, I mean, Gabrielle Lyon has talked about this an awful lot and really, really well, three hours. Is a kind of a good rule of thumb. And now you already know what time I go to bed. Cause I eat a sixth. All right, second thing, alcohol. This is, I mean, you have to make your own decisions about this, but you know the basic rule. If something makes you high, it's neurotoxic. A euphoric substance is neurotoxic. And I'm not an absolutist. I'm not saying that you should never actually use something that's mildly euphoric. You shouldn't get bombed. I mean, obviously, you're a responsible person and what that is doing is that you're usually numbing negative emotionality or you're treating boredom. And both of those are, that's a kind of a dangerous way to do both of those things is treating anxiety or boredom with a substance. But you know, a lot of people think it aids in digestion to have a little glass of wine, whatever it happens to be. You got to make your own decision about that. But I don't drink, actually I don't drink alcohol. I don't drink any alcohol. I did as a younger man. I was a musician. I think I said in the morning protocols that I thought I was a night owl. It turns out I was just a musician who drank too much. I don't drink now. And it's been super important for my dopamine production in the morning that I not spend my dopamine at night. You'll stimulate your dopamine. If you're drinking a bunch of alcohol before you go to bed and you're gonna be in a trough when you wake up in the morning, which is one of the reasons that you're not just, you drink a lot, that you have a hangover that feels crummy physically, but you also feel crummy emotionally. And that's because you don't have enough of this anticipation of reward hormone. It doesn't feel like life has purpose and direction to you because you're in this dopamine trough because you stimulated it so much the night before. Okay, now I'm not talking about getting drunk, but once again, the real question is, should you have any alcohol in the latter part of the day and as part of the evening protocol? I recommend against. There's a lot of research on this. I'm gonna put a pretty interesting paper. And look, it's just, this is as basic a paper as you could possibly get this from 2019. Alcohol and sleep related problems in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. This is straight up. And this is really, it's a meta-analysis of what the best research says. It's hard to fall asleep and your sleep is worse. If you've got alcohol in your system, your sleep architecture is not gonna be as high quality and sleep latency is, you actually fall asleep probably more quickly, but then you'll tend to wake up after an hour or after two hours because of the way that you're processing the alcohol. So you decide, but that's my basic recommendation. Okay, here's a real no-no caffeine. Now, the older you are, the more you shouldn't drink caffeine. That might seem paradoxical, but there's a lot of research showing that you've metabolized caffeine more slowly as you get older. And boy, oh boy, do I ever see this. I've been drinking serious coffee since I was in about eighth grade. As some of you know, I grew up in Seattle on the north side of Queen Anne Hill. I used to walk to the only Starbucks in the late 70s when I was getting addicted to the demon bean. And I could drink coffee all day and go to sleep when I was a kid. And when I was a young man, and I remember drinking a venti dark roast at three o'clock or four o'clock in the afternoon, man, I do that now. I'll be out cleaning the garage in the middle of the night. It's not gonna be good. And the reason is because the half life of caffeine it tends to be, take longer when you're older. The metabolic process for the caffeine molecule, it just slows down as you get older. And so the result of it is that I don't drink any caffeine after late morning at the latest, usually mid morning. And these days, I can process usually about 400 milligrams of caffeine pretty effectively. And I'd use it neurotropically. As you all know, in my morning protocol, I use caffeine not to wake up, but rather to focus, which is why I wait two, two and a half, sometimes even three hours. And I know some people are like, ah, I can't do it. Yes, you can. Once you get used to it, you won't go back. Why? Because you're gonna probably avoid the mid afternoon crash if you drink your caffeine after you've cleared the circulating adenosine in your brain. If you wanna know more about what I'm talking about here, refer back to the morning protocols. If you haven't seen that, I talk pretty deeply about the use of caffeine and how I as self-administered to give myself the best possible and most productive and happiest day. Okay, but no caffeine at dinner. And by the way, some people are so sensitive to it, they drink decaffeinated, they can feel it. I don't know if that's true, but I actually don't like it. I don't enjoy it. Tea has it in there. And one more thing, dark chocolate. Careful, I mean, you're not that much of a sensitive flower, but you will feel dark chocolate, particularly if you're eating 80% cocoa. And so I recommend staying away from caffeine anytime later in the day and certainly after dinner because you're probably gonna pay the price. And even if you can go to sleep, it's gonna, once again, it's gonna mess with your circadian rhythm, rhythms of sleep architecture. Okay, now dessert. This is a hard one, man. This is the one that kills me because I got, I have a ferocious sweet tooth. The sweet tooth, by the way, interesting literature suggests that it's mostly genetic and there are populations in different parts of the world that don't have a sweet tooth as much as others. And I didn't quite know that, but I did an international experiment. I have two biological kids, Esther and I have two biological sons and our daughters adopted from China. And our sons are just like, they'll gobble down the sugar and I just can't get enough of it. And my dad, you know, he would be, my dad was in his fifties, you know, eating bags of candy corn. I kid you not. I mean, we're talking, this is mainline stuff. And so I thought that this was just like cultural, but our daughter has never really liked the sweet stuff. She likes the savory snacks, the crunchy, salty stuff. And almost certainly she has a genetic proclivity being of a hand Chinese ethnic background. And so there really is a genetic tendency toward that. And for sure. So I'm blaming my dad for my ferocious sweet tooth. It's his fault, right? Love my dad. We used to like split bags of candy corn. I wish you, I miss my dad so much every day. I love my dad so much. He died 23 years ago. And when I eat candy corn still the day, I'm like, dad, this is for you. All right, other people do that with beer. But here's the problem. This has a pretty substantial impact on obviously on your blood glucose levels when you're mainlining sugar like that. And that will interfere with sleep. It just will. Now it's hard for me to not do that. And the truth is that I get the munchies at night too, but what I want is sweet stuff. And I have to find a way to kind of satisfy that. But the habit matters a lot. If you're in the habit of munching, eating ice cream, having a big dessert, and then munching on cookies and all that between mealtime and bedtime, probably it's because your willpower is ground down and you actually have a bad habit. When people ask me about how to get fit and lean quickly, generally speaking, I talk about find your two worst habits and break them. For me, for the longest time, it was munching sweet stuff after dinner, and believe it or not, waking up in the middle of the night and eating. And it's like, that's a really bad idea. That's gonna screw up your sleep, don't do that. But I did that for a long time and I had to break those habits. The first one's harder because I crave the sugar. I want it, you know? And I've got the munchies, et cetera, et cetera. So I have to be really careful about that. That's hard. But that's made a big difference in my life since I've actually been able to get more of the sugar out of me. Okay, caller one wins court side seats to tonight's game. What? I won floor seats? You did. I've been calling for 13 months. Wait, Chris? Yes, I finally did it. What are you gonna wear? Men's warehouse. They've got today's looks for any occasion and I need to look like a celebrity. Don't wanna stick out. 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For my health, I mean, for my LDL cholesterol profile level, I mean, I wanna make sure that I get a good lipid. And by the way, at some point, I'll talk about this in this show. The LDL cholesterol number is not enough to know. You need to know about the particle number, and the size of those particular particles, which is gonna do for placking in your arteries, which is what we're really worried about in this case. And I found that my exams started coming back way better when I just cut out the processed sugar. And now I'm able to sit at between 6.5 and 7% body fat all the time, which is low, but I'm just naturally lean, and I feel good when I'm doing it that way without any loss of muscle mass, because I stay at a very high protein level across all of my meals, trying to get up to 200 grams of protein a day. So anyway, more than you wanted to know, but that's why I recommend being real careful about the sugar. Okay, that's the biggie. I'm not gonna go into as much depth than the other eight steps, or this podcast would last, you know, five hours, and you don't want that. Step two, go for a walk. My old buddy, Selva Stefano, who is one of the co-founders of Mind Pump, which is by the way, a great podcast, go watch. It's one of the most popular fitness and culture podcasts in the world. Consistently good. I've been on it a whole bunch of times, and the guys who run that podcast are great friends of mine. And Selva Stefano always talks about how important it is to walk for 10 minutes after each meal. Why? Because it blunts the hyperglycemia, the blood glucose spike that you get. You mean you eat and your blood glucose goes up. It's supposed to, but you want to blunt it so that it's not just, I mean, there's a whole lot. I mean, Ben Bickman has done a whole lot of stuff on this, on many, many podcasts that maybe some of you've seen. If you want to know more, go watch his stuff, authoritative science of blood glucose spikes, and actually the effect it has on some people, some people more than others to be sure, but it's good for all of us to blunt it after we eat. And as Selva Stefano has noted in his work, a 10 minute walk is really, really good for that. I do walk after my meals, but I especially like to do it after dinner. Esther and I, we walk, we try to walk for 30 to 40 minutes, actually after dinner every night when I'm home. And I'm on tour half the time. I see some of you in person when I'm on tour. I love that, but when I'm home, man, I'm home, and I don't work after dinner. I'm about my marriage and my family after dinner. And this is a sacred time, is that walk. Good, I'm blunting my blood glucose spikes, but it's also really good for a lot of other things, mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual. To begin with, it enhances, it gives you, it bolsters your circadian rhythms, especially if you walk after dinner and you see the sun go down. Remember in the morning protocol, the Brahma Mahorta, the creator's time, first thing in the morning, if you're walking outside when the sun is coming up, you won the day. And there's all kinds of neurobiological benefits to that same thing if you see it on the other side of the day. Walk after dinner and watch the sun go down. It's gonna really enhance your circadian rhythms. You were evolved to see the sun go down and to have your day wind down with the sun. And it's really interesting to research on the circadian rhythms and how they would change with the seasons for people before the advent of electrical light. And what you'd find is that people, if you grew up in Kansas in the 18th century or the early 19th century or something, you probably slept 10 hours a night in the winter and six hours a night in the summer. And the reason for that had everything to do with the fact that your body was moving with the sun. Your body was absorbing that. And that's actually in a way a super healthy thing to do. And I'm not gonna live that way. I can't sleep 10 hours, there's nothing I could do. But I can actually get some of the benefit of that by watching the sun go down. And if I'm outside, so much the better. Mild exertion after you eat for the blood glucose spikes is important. But it's also really good for both physical and mental health. Ambulation is really good for mood management. I've talked about this in two podcasts now. Walking is one of the best things that you can do to lower depressive symptoms and to lower anxiety. A really good thing to do is just the ambulation. We're an ambulatory species. I mean, one of the ways that Homo sapiens became a really effective hunter was just by walking after the stag until the stag would run and then get worn out and you just walk up to it. I mean, that's how people would just walk your way to dinner is the early hunting technique. And the result of it is that we're made to do it. It's ergonomically really, really sound. Not everybody can walk, obviously, but most people actually can. And they think, I'm gonna be out of shape unless I'm deadlifting, doing a PR on the squat. Not, uh, not, uh, I mean, good, more power to you if you're doing that, but maybe we'll have a podcast at some point about whether you should be doing that when you're my age. You should be walking if you can. And that's really, really important, that mild exertion. Now, what about a full blown workout after that? I actually don't recommend that as part of the evening protocol. Some people can only work out when they can work out. Okay, got it. But if you can choose, I really recommend first thing in the morning for all the morning protocol reasons for mood management, creativity, for, you know, the way that you're actually trying to maintain your circadian rhythm, such that they'll work for you in your productivity and creativity and your mood. The opposite is true for the evening. It actually will, generally speaking, if you have extreme exertion in your workout routine before you go to bed, it will probably interrupt your sleep or it will for a lot of people. It'll raise your body temperature, it'll do a whole bunch of things that you don't want as you're getting ready for bed. It'll also, you know, raise your blood pressure and your pulse, et cetera, et cetera. And it takes a while to get back to normal. It takes a while to get back to homeostasis. For years, people told me I needed a newsletter. So I started one and then stopped it and started again and used all kinds of different platforms that weren't really a set until I found KIT. The newsletter that a lot of you get today, more than 150,000 of you, as a matter of fact, you get that on KIT. It's a newsletter platform that finally meets all of my needs and I can't say enough good about it. It's been a game changer for my work, as a matter of fact. They have all kinds of great tools, have made it easy to start the newsletter, to grow the newsletter, to connect with my audience. There's a creator network that integrates everything, where I need it so I can understand it, and most importantly, so I can implement it with my team. My newsletter is good today because of KIT. If you've been thinking about launching your own newsletter, you should do that, but you should use KIT. It's been a game changer for me and it can be for you too. They offer a 14-day free trial, no credit card, which is nice, and if you upgrade, they'll even migrate your list for free. So hit the link below, kit.com, and start your newsletter. So that's another reason to go for the walk as opposed to hitting the weight room. The third reason is actually what the Glucose Spike does. A big Glucose Spike is bad for your sleep, but it's also not great for your mood as you go to sleep. You don't want your blood glucose spiking because it creates, let's say, a hotter, hedonic state, which is just the way that we behavioral scientists say that you're more emotional, and because psychology is biology, you know that. And so having a lot of digesting something and have your blood glucose really high is not that great. So walk it off. Now, what should you be doing while you're walking? Now, it depends on whether you're alone or you're with somebody. I'm always with my wife. When I'm walking after dinner, I'm always with my wife. Now on the road, I'll take a walk after dinner if I can, unless I'm giving the dinner address, which is a lot of what I'm doing when I'm on tour. We hold hands when we walk all the time. This is an important principle, believe it or not. There's a bunch of good biology behind this. There's some really interesting research from researchers at a couple of universities at Utah. This is gonna go into the show notes. It's a pretty involved paper on this, but basically what it showed is that when people hold hands, when couples in particular hold hands, it affects the, it lowers stress. It affects the autonomic nervous system in a very beneficial way. And it's an interesting paper because what the scientists are doing is they're looking at the pupil size, which is a really good way. You can't, it doesn't matter what you say about your stress, but your pupil size always tells the story. And as soon as people, as a couple starts holding hands, they de-stress. It's a really good de-stressing technique. I strongly recommend that. But here's something else to be thinking about. I can't save every relationship, but I can save a few. And there's two big mistakes that couples make when they've been together for a long time, two big mistakes. Number one is they stop making eye contact when they talk, and number two is they stop touching. Now there are other mistakes that they make, squabbling over money, adultery, yeah. Don't do that, obviously. But two easy fixes for your marriage are number one, when you're talking and you should be talking, you're always staring at each other in the eyes. Why? Because that elicits oxytocin. A neuropeptide that functions as a hormone that is the intense, it's even called a love molecule by some neuroscientists because it's the hormone of bonding. This is how we know our kin. You get a lot of it when you're staring into each other's eyes. Now it's interesting because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you have more circulating oxytocin and you're feeling closer to your partner, you want to stare at them more in the eyes and the more that you stare them in the eyes, the more blood oxytocin starts to circulate, you start a virtuous cycle. That's really important. The second is touching and couples stop touching. It's the most amazing thing. When you first meet, you can't keep your hands off each other. You want to just be physically connected. Why? Because every major religion says that you're fusing. You're one flesh, man. And I'm not just talking about, this is not just adult content here. I mean, it's like, it's attached. I want to be attached. I can't not touch you. And after a while, I got it. You know, the kids drove you crazy and you were busy at work all day and you get home and you forgot to unload the dishwasher and you might be avoidant. It doesn't matter. Touch, touch, touch, touch, touch. We hold hands all the time. This is our rule that we're always holding hands. And our kids are like, you're like a couple of teenagers, mom, dad, fine, I'll take it. Always be holding hands. More on this in a second. But here's the rule, A-B-T for your relationships. Always be touching. OK? You don't have to be doing public displays of affection. You don't have to make people uncomfortable. But always be touching when you're together and when you're talking, always be looking into each other's eyes. OK, step three. And again, they're going to start getting faster, I promise. Number three is take your vitamins. Now, people ask all the time, what should I take? Because I'm an insomniac. And something like 25% of Americans suffer insomnia on a very regular basis. And a huge percentage of Americans, I've seen it all over the place, as high as 20% of people take prescription sleep aids. And I get it. I mean, you want to get a good night's sleep, and you've got a busy life. And you might not have really great sleep hygiene because of the way that you're living. Or you might live in a city, and it's loud, and it's chaotic. Or your life just might be a dog's breakfast of stress. And so by the time you hit the sack, and you've only got seven hours until that alarm clock is going to go off the next day, it better be lights out, not just in the room, but also inside your head. So a lot of people are taking a lot of sleeping pills. But people also ask, what can I do short of that? And the reason you might want to be short of that, because the truth of the matter is that anything is not over the counter. Anything that will really knock you out, a pill from the doctor, it's most likely addictive and can be dangerous. This is common sense. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm not saying don't take your medicine. I'm just saying that you've got to keep your eyes open. If you need a prescription for it, if it's a scheduled drug, then there's a reason for that. There's a reason that they don't just sell it at the CVS over the counter. It's because it's addictive and dangerous. And that means it's not something you should become really dependent on if you can really avoid it. So people say, what should I do instead? And they'll say, should I take chamomile tea? Should I take valerian root and all that stuff? For me, that's like eating an apple. Are you kidding? I'm a bad sleeper. And you give me a cup of chamomile tea and like, hey, this is great. Nice and warm. Yeah, I'm probably going to pee three more times tonight. Fantastic. Thank you very much. The one thing it didn't do is make me sleepy. Your weeds are not going to knock me out. Sorry. There is some stuff, however, that I found that has a bunch of new research behind it that is really more effective. What has the most support these days is magnesium, usually in the form of magnesium glycinate. That supports the neurotransmitters that are involved in sleep regulation and also can relax muscles. Also, Rhonda Patrick was a fantastic podcast. A lot of you are listening to her show, love her show. She shows in her work and her research that most people are magnesium deficient. Most people just aren't getting enough of it. So you'll be meeting your magnesium needs and you'll also be giving yourself a little sleep boost if you're taking it within about an hour, hour, hour and a half, two hours of when you go to sleep. There's less support but worth trying for some other things. Zinc has got some decent support behind it because it supports melatonin production, more melatonin in a second. Vitamin D, a lot of people are deficient in vitamin D, a big percentage of the population. So taking vitamin D, and by the way, when you take vitamin D, make sure it's got K2 in it. So D3 plus K2, so you can absorb it properly. That tends to aid in modulating your circadian rhythms. L-theanine, a lot of people ask about that. That increases GABA, which is the neurotransmitters. The most important inhibiting neurotransmitter that says time to relax, time to go to sleep. All of the Z-drugs and benzobazopine drugs work on the GABA receptors. In other words, if you're taking actual prescription knock you out drugs, they're working on these GABA receptors. And L-theanine in a kind of gentle way works on those receptors as well. It works on serotonin, dopamine, and also lowers norepinephrine, which is an excitatory hormone produced in the adrenal glands. That has a little bit less support but it's really, really worth trying. Again, experiment, experiment, experiment. You're your own lab. If this stuff works for you, that is fantastic. And one of my kids swears by magnesium and zinc and D3. That was often put together in a supplement back in the old days called ZMA, I think, which was zinc, magnesium, and D3, all in kind of one pill. You can part it out, do it however you wanna do it. I'll put some of the show notes about that. A nice piece that came out last year in 2024 called Current Evidence on Common Dietary Supplements for Improving Sleep, and that was in the SAGE Open Nursing Journal, so it's worth looking at. Melatonin. A lot of people like melatonin. I sometimes take melatonin, especially when I'm trying to change time zone. And I'm changing time zones, at least one or two time zones almost every week, because of my travel schedule. And hope springs eternal, but I gotta say, I've seen research suggesting that up to a third of the population doesn't actually get benefit from melatonin. I'm afraid I'm in that third. I've even seen higher estimates of that, as a matter of fact, but I always try. And the melatonin gummies are kinda tasty, and I'm looking for my sugar fix, man. Maybe that's what I'm doing. I found out something here about myself. Here's the problem. We tend to take it, well, a lot of the brands actually don't have the melatonin that's advertised. Sometimes they'll have 10 times as much or none. And so you gotta get a really, really reputable brand if you're gonna be taking this. The second thing is that we have a tendency to, according to a lot of people I really respect, take too much. My friend, Peter Atia, he says that we're taking an order of magnitude too much melatonin. People take 10 milligrams of melatonin, or 15, or I don't know, a ton. And he says we should be taking way less than that. We should be taking way less melatonin than that. I'll put in the show notes something he's written about it on his website, titled, concerning finding some melatonin content in the over-the-counter supplements, sure enough. So you gotta decide what the safety is on that. Also put something in the show notes about the general safety of melatonin. You decide. Okay, so those are the supplements that you might take and you might consider. Step four, phone. Now I've got an episode on phone addiction and how to break it. Number one, it shouldn't be in your room. It shouldn't, not what room? Bedroom, shouldn't be in your bedroom. Your phone actually shouldn't be something you're looking at for an hour before you go to bed, and it shouldn't be in your bedroom. At all. I mean, it's really important. And there's two big reasons for this. Number one is the content of what you're looking at. Even if you think that scrolling is relaxing you, it's actually stressing you. It's actually increasing your stress hormones, and that's not what you want, obviously. Second is that you're getting too much blue light. Y'all know about blue light. The blue light inhibits the function, proper function of the pineal gland, which means it's gonna be cutting your natural melatonin production, which means it's going to screw up your sleep cycle. Gonna mess up your circadian rhythms and going to wreck your sleep architecture. Don't look at your phone. As a matter of fact, don't have it around you. It's not your alarm clock. You don't need an alarm clock from your phone. There's this thing on Amazon called an alarm clock. It's five bucks. Life changing device. Turns out it was invented a long time ago. It doesn't do anything except tell you the time and wake you up in the morning. I lock up my phone in a different part of the house. My friend, Cal Newport, y'all know his, he's got a great podcast too, but he teaches at Georgetown and computer science professor. He does really wonderful work. And he has this phone foyer method. When he comes into the house, he plugs in his phone in the floor of his house. And if he wants to check something, he has to go out there and look at it. You do you. What I do is I have a closet and a floor apart from my bedroom. That's where my phone goes an hour before I go to sleep. And so I have a real incentive to not look at it. And I don't. I mean, I've actually, again, habits, habits, habits. What you wanna do is you don't wanna be thinking about it with your prefrontal cortex. You wanna program the part of your brain that most neuroscientists say is the nucleus accumbens and that will make you automatically do something without thinking about it. And after you do this, an hour before you go to bed, plug it in in a closet downstairs, whatever, you'll break the phone habit and you'll sleep better. All right. Five, go to bed. No, remember, the morning protocol starts the night before. The biggest problem people have with a good morning protocol is they stay up too late. And here's this weird thing. Okay, I mean, people give me a bazillion excuses about why they sleep, they stay up too late. And sometimes they're legit. You know, my kids, I do shift work, totally get it. But by the way, your kids shouldn't be staying up that late either. As a matter of fact, I've got a question I wanna ask a little bit later. Somebody wrote in, I wanna talk about this, about kids and sleep. But don't procrastinate this thing. It's really important. There's a whole, there's a literature and psychology on bedtime procrastination where adults who can make decisions about their own lives, put off their own bedtime as kind of a rebellion against their inner adult. I know that's psychologizing it a little bit too much, but it's like your inner child is rebelling against your inner parent or something. But I've done this. I've done this like, I can stay up, I can do it. Why? Because I'm free, I'm a free individual. Like, yeah, you're also free to go do something stupid. And frankly, not going to bed when you need to go to bed is a stupid thing to do. You're not likely to be well rested if you're within six and a half hours of sleep. I don't care who you are. I mean, and I've written about this a lot. Maybe you'll do a future episode on happiness and sleep. I know a lot about this because sleep is a problem for me. Sleep is hard for me. It's hard for me to get the machine off. You think I talk fast? I imagine the voice inside my head. It's going twice as fast. And so I need to go to bed so I have proper sack time to actually get these hours. Now, don't freak out if you're not getting eight hours of sleep at night. Not everybody needs eight hours. That's kind of a fiction. And I've written about and looked at the literature on that a lot. I mean, the sleep scientists, you need to get the amount that you need. But if it's under six, you're probably underslept and that's going to have a deleterious impact on you. It also has long-term, really dangerous impacts on neurodegenerative diseases, et cetera, et cetera. Look at anything on the internet if you want to figure out about that from reputable sources. But you got to go to bed. Now, what does that mean? That means you don't take stuff late at night. I've changed my rhythm about that. I don't, especially when I'm home, unless you're the pope or the president, I'm not having dinner with you at eight 30 at night. It's just not going to happen. I don't like it. It's going to screw up my eating schedule. I'm going to have a big glucose spike when I'm trying to lie down. No doubt they're going to give me a delicious dessert and my willpower will fail. And I won't get to bed until it's too late, which means I can't start my morning protocol, which means at 4.45, I'm not going to be picking up heavy things and running around. No, I mean, it's like my work and my life are more important than that. That's why I go to bed at nine. And if you ask me to come to dinner with you late, don't take it personally, you know? By the way, you shouldn't be asking me to come to dinner at your house at nine. You should be in bed too. Okay, six. What do you do when you get first get to bed? Right? Now, it depends. Do you sleep alone? That's one thing. Do you sleep with your partner? I do. Every night that I can. When I'm on tour, by myself, but when I'm at home, I'm with Esther. And here's what you do first thing when you lie down. Put away the nonsense. So you're not looking at your phone because it's not in there. And you turn toward each other and you stare into each other's eyes for five minutes. Don't change your life. It's going to change your marriage. It's going to change the rhythm of your evening because you're going to get more blood oxytocin, meaning you're going to go to sleep happier. That's really important. You're going to go to sleep with more of a sense of wellness. Of meaning, as a matter of fact. And again, tons of research on that about connection or romantic bonding and calm and relaxation. And the fact that it's going to make your partner and your field unique and your partnership feel profound and like you're talking to God, et cetera, et cetera. Now, what if you're not, you're obviously not going to be getting this if you're sleeping alone. Although, actually, it's pretty interesting research from my friend, Paul Zach, at Claremont Graduate University. What you can get if you make eye contact with your dog. Now, gross, your dog shouldn't be sleeping up on the bed. Dog should be on the floor. But anyway, that's a, I'm not judging. Your dog actually gets a 56% oxytocin spike when you pet your dog and look at your dog in the eyes. There you go. And you get an oxytocin spike too because canines and homo sapiens were evolved in parallel. And so they mimic each other neurochemically in all sorts of really interesting ways. That's why some people will actually, you can go to your veterinarian and get a selective serotonin reuptech inhibitor in SSRI like Prozac for your dog. If your dog's depressed, then it'll work out your dog's brain because it'll keep more serotonin in the synapse for your dog. Because our brains are very similar in a lot of these ways. Because we over the past 200,000 years have evolved together. Okay, anyway, enough about that. Your cat, not so much. Your cat's oxytocin will spike by 12% with eye contact. So your dog actually loves you. Your cat tolerates you. There's the most obvious thing a social scientist has ever told you. Okay, so sustained eye contact is you make conversation in the last moments of your day. You're really, really gonna like how that affects your sleep, how that affects your marriage, how that affects almost everything. Actually, this oxytocin thing, let me make a side note about this. So the sustained eye contact with somebody, there's all these research, Art Aaron's research, he taught a psychologist at Stony Brook and stuff he was doing in the late 90s. You may have heard about this, where it was where people would fall in love with strangers because they would answer increasingly intimate questions and then stare into each other's eyes for four minutes. I'll talk about that at some point, because I'm gonna talk about the neurophysiology of falling in love. I'm gonna do an episode on that, because that stuff's super interesting. And when you understand that, man, your life, especially if you're dating and you're in the market to actually find your soulmate, this is really, really science that you can use. Science in the public interest for sure, because you'll get where you're trying to get a lot faster and a lot more effectively. But Art Aaron's work talked about how people just who just met and they're staring into each other's eyes will have this feeling like, I don't know, I feel like I just fell in love. It's the craziest thing. And it's true, this sustained eye contact, especially when you're talking about intimate things, just like you're an oxytocin pump, which is what you want right before you go to sleep if you're with your partner. But careful with this when you're not with your partner. And obviously you're not staring into somebody's eyes on the pillow, but who's not your partner? But at work, there are various estimates that suggest that between 30 and 80% of extramarital affairs start at work. And that's a big range, but 30 is still a lot and 80 is insane. Why? And the answer is because you're spending so many hours with somebody who's not your spouse and you get more and more and more intimate in your conversations and your eye contact with that person. And so careful with your heart and your heart actually, that window to your heart is your eyes. And the reason for that is not just literally what you're seeing was crossing the occipital lobe of your brain in the visual cortex. It's the neurobiology and what's happening. I mean, the hormones that you're stimulating in your brain as a result of that. You know, watch your gaze. It's important. Step seven, reading or being read to. Now, you're not reading on your phone. You're not reading on your devices because you can't afford the blue light for sure. That means you're looking at a book for sure. And reading is great for sleep for sure. I've done tons of research on this on how actually good it is. But it's also really good, by the way, reading before you go to bed because you absorb material in a different way. And you find that what you read in the minutes before you go to sleep is it leads you to absorb and retain information better, believe it or not, because it's actually, it's affecting your brain and you're going to process some of that information while you sleep. And I've done this for years and years and years. When I'm trying to crack a problem, I'll read a little bit of science right before I go to sleep because sometimes I'll wake up in the morning and have solved my problem. Okay. So what about being read to? Now, there's a really interesting study from 2024 on reading and listening to books actually and how it affects people. And listening to somebody reading has a specially good effect on sleep and on mood. It makes you happier and it makes you more relaxed. There's been no studies about actually being read to by a physical person, but if that's your beloved, it's going to be way even better than this study, which was actually, optimal books. Having your beloved read to you. And again, I don't have the clinical data on this, but let me tell you, when you have poetry or the Psalms being read to you and a feminine Spanish accent, right before you go to sleep, man, it's like narcotics, except safe. So what are the words that you're going to read? What are the words that you should actually, the last words that you should actually hear? This is step eight. There's a bunch of pretty interesting research on having a mantra before you go to sleep. Now, maybe you're counting sheep or counting down from a hundred. That's basically a mantra like thing, but you can make it more profound. And it is a pretty interesting work that I've actually found on Muslim populations of people actually reciting traditional Muslim prayers at night by memory as they go to sleep. And it really helps their sleep a lot. It's really good for their sleep architecture. I'll put that in the show notes. But people of all religions have always done that. They'll often pray as they go to sleep and have a particular passage that they like to pray and your brain will get used to it. This will become a habit and it will say to your brain, now it's time for me to go to sleep. For the last 15 years, I've been going to sleep on the traditional Eastern Orthodox Jesus prayer. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner. That's it. And just say it and say it. And that says to my brain, sleepy time. It's a really beautiful prayer too, for sure. Now, if you're not religious or you're not a Christian, that's not a meaningful prayer to you. You can create your own under the circumstances. And one that I recommend is for you, if you're completely secular, is to say, I'm grateful for this day and finish it in peace. I'm grateful for this day and finish it in peace. Do the first part in your head as you breathe in. I'm grateful for this day. And I'll the exhale and I finish it in peace. And you will finish it in peace. Having that mantra is step eight. And I strongly recommend it to you. We're almost done, but there's one more step. What if this doesn't work? What if you screwed it up? What if you did eat that, you know, huge pizza and a pie, you know, 45 minutes before bed? What if you had a big argument with your spouse and haven't made any eye contact in three days? What if things went south? Because they do, what should you do? Should you freak out? Should you beat yourself up? Should you say, I'm unworthy? No, you shouldn't worry about it. Because the last step is this, when things aren't perfect, you should disregard the imperfection and just do the best you can. The last step is nevermind. As you can imagine, there's a ton of research on this. A really nice paper called Surrendering to Thrive. Evaluating the psychometric properties of the state of surrender scale. Let go. Things didn't go well, they just let go. I'm gonna give myself permission to not freak out about the ways that I'm inadequate until tomorrow morning. Yeah, maybe don't go to sleep until three. Okay, nevermind. Let go. It's actually okay. Boy, this is hard for me. Boy, I am such a gripper on everything. But this is as, maybe this is the most important step of all for me, is to actually let go. And I recommend it to you. All right, friends, that's your nine-part protocol. And instead of actually going through these nine parts, go to the website and download the PDF because that's gonna be a lot more effective to you to actually go through these nine steps and putting them together in your own way, in your own life. You will have a better night. You'll have a better sleep architecture. You'll go to sleep more quickly. You'll wake up more refreshed and you'll be happier. You can do it your way, but let me tell you, my way certainly works for me. Couple of quick questions and then we're gonna, then we're out. Molly Hayes writes on email. Thanks, Molly, for this. What about rising early as a habit for younger people than adults? In other words, adolescents. What about sleep patterns, et cetera, et cetera? Because there's a lot out there about how school starts too early and how it's better if we can let teens sleep in a little bit more and their circadian rhythms are all choppy and messed up. And yet, yeah, I know that stuff. And it's important for us to be able to be flexible on these things. It might be that the Brahma Mahuta waking before dawn is inappropriate for your kid, especially if your kid has stuff to do the night before. But I have found, and the research suggests, that you can shift the circadian rhythm much, much better with adolescents than we typically do. Talk to the parents of swimmers who are getting up at 4.30 in the morning and their kids are dead tired and going to bed at night. They will do that if they have something that they're actually getting up for. And you can do a lot with their circadian rhythms more than we give ourselves credit for. The biggest reason that kids are so exhausted today is because they're looking at their phones because their phones are in the bedrooms. No phones in the bedrooms. That way it's gonna mess up their brains. It's not good. You know all the research on this, obviously. Blue light, stimulation, predatory behavior crawling through the screen of their phone when you don't have any supervision of it. Don't let it happen. Phones out of the bedrooms and your kids are just gonna sleep better. And they're going to not develop the habit of bedtime procrastination by the time they're living on their own. If you're lucky. This is on YouTube at Maryland's 6.043. Does Esther have a similar routine, my spouse? Especially the morning one, because this is a reaction to the morning protocol. Has she, is she getting up at 4.30 and working out with you at 4.45 and doing all the kind of routine that you've got? And the answer is no, not exactly. She gets up pretty early. She gets up before the dawn. She typically wakes up at six and then we go to mass together every day. The first thing that she does is she wakes up after I've worked out for an hour, taken a shower and then she goes to mass with me. And there's a couple of different reasons for that. Number one, she needs a little more sleep than I do. I'm real good at six and a half. I never sleep during the day at six and a half. She needs more. She needs closer to eight. And she knows that about herself. Second, she has lower negative affect, meaning that she doesn't need the same kind of strict morning protocol that I do because I have much higher negative affect, natural negative affect than she does. She also likes to exercise in the late morning. So she typically does that and she's got a Peloton and she lifts. She also, because of her different affect profile, she doesn't need to exercise more than four days a week. She's a superior specimen, let me tell you. And I'm pretty, I'm pretty jealous about that. But she does get up early. She doesn't follow the protocol as strictly nor as, it doesn't have the same level of insane rigor, let us say. Last, but not least today is Gail Raven by email. Thanks Gail. Hey, I'm a cheerleader. Yeah, that's great. Cause you, that she's referring to the affect profiles, your emotional profiles for your personality. That's in a previous episode. We'll put that one up so you can go back to that if you want. Any suggestions for those of us who wake up happy at six AM and really have a downtime in the afternoon and hers of affect, like feeling down and then perk up again after dinner and feel good again until it's bedtime. Yeah. I mean, I do have a suggestion on that, on an experiment for that. Remember what I talked about about caffeine. If you take your, I mean, this is contested research cause everything in neuroscience is contested. But Huberman talks about this a lot and I really believe him because I've seen evidence of this in my own life and I believe the literature that says this. If you take your caffeine too early after you wake up so that you're blocking circulating A2A adenosine in your brain, that circulating adenosine when you metabolism, the caffeine is going to go back into those slots typically in the early to mid afternoon. That's going to give you a crash, not just getting you sleepy. It's also going to make you feel down. And so if you feel a little depressed in the afternoon, you might be having a caffeine crash. Then when you go over to the caffeine crash, you feel good again cause you're a natural cheerleader. Here's what I recommend. Delay your coffee and see what that does. Delay your coffee to two to two and a half hours after you wake up and see whether or not that doesn't change the rhythm of your day. That might just work. Well, we're done today. Thank you. I know it's been a long one. I hope it's been a useful one and a meaningful one for you. Let me know your thoughts. Write to me at officehours at arthurburks.com. Like and subscribe. Spotify, YouTube and Apple. Leave a comment. I'll read it. I'll feedback. We do a lot of feedback on this show. Even if it's negative, we need, I want to know what you think. Thanks for watching one way or the other. And follow me on socials. You'll get little clips and all kinds of cool stuff that actually is not even showing up in the show. On Instagram, LinkedIn, all the other platforms, the platform of your choice. And order the happiness files to learn more. That's my newest book. Don't forget to patronize our sponsors. Thanks to them for making the show possible. And until next week, be as happy as you can be. And go to sleep tonight. Get to bed. See you next week.