43: Unlocking the Power of Sleep with Former Navy SEAL & Doctor Kirk Parsley

[00:00:00] Michael Kummer: Um, I would argue that when you try to become a SEAL, sleep isn't probably one thing that you get a lot of. Would that be a fair statement?

[00:00:06] Kirk Parsley: I remember being shocked once I learned a lot about sleep. I remember being shocked that the medical community didn't take it any more seriously than they do, right?

[00:00:14] They all suffer from the same mistake, right? I mean shift work is literally deadly. It takes 12 to 14 years off your life.

[00:00:20] Michael Kummer: For maintaining your health, it's literally all sick care, you know?

[00:00:24] Kirk Parsley: Yeah. I agree that western medicine is mis is misnamed. Um, they, they aren't healthcare providers, they're disease care providers.

[00:00:32] Michael Kummer: You know, what you said is then interesting. What does it mean in terms of napping during the day?

[00:00:37] Kirk Parsley: Yeah, was the sun going down? Right? There's some nerve cells in the back of our eyes that have nothing to do with vision. Uh, they just sense blue light. Plenty of blind people can have normal circadian rhythms.

[00:00:46] For this reason,

[00:00:47] Michael Kummer: you are listening

[00:00:48] Kirk Parsley: to the

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All right, Doc Parsley, I appreciate it so much, uh, you joining the show. Um, I understand you are a retired Navy SEAL, you're a medical doctor and you're a business owner and, um, I assume, uh, pretty busy.

[00:01:52] Um, and you've realized, you know, along the way that sleep is important. I mean, in fact. Um, I would argue that when you try to become a SEAL, sleep [00:02:00] isn't probably one thing that you get a lot of. Would that be a fair statement?

[00:02:03] Kirk Parsley: Yeah, I mean, I, I probably, honestly, I probably chose two of the worst professions, right?

[00:02:08] Uh, yeah, the, uh, medical training has a ton of sleep deprivation in it too. You know, pulling call like every other night or every third night, staying up for 36 hours in a row, you know, working late, getting up early. Medical school is very similar. Um, of course, SEAL teams don't really, well, It's better now, uh, but when I was a SEAL, you know, you only, the only reason to sleep is because you're too weak to be doing what you should be doing, you know, and, uh, and, you know, of course we have Hell Week where, you know, it's kind of a notorious part of SEAL training where you go weak without sleep, so, uh, yeah, I chose, I chose really two terrible professions for sleep, um, but in my defense, I didn't know about sleep when I started either one of them, so, it was a while before I knew how important sleep was.

[00:02:56] Michael Kummer: Right. Um, wouldn't, wouldn't you think that, you know, those [00:03:00] who set up, you know, those environments know about sleep, especially in the medical field, I would, I would, but even in the military, I mean, anything really that's high performance, you would, you would think that people know that sleep is important to perform, right?

[00:03:12] You know, I never,

[00:03:13] Kirk Parsley: I've never thought about it. like this. It just popped in my head when you said that. Um, I remember, I remember being shocked once I learned a lot about sleep. I remember being shocked at the medical community didn't take it any more seriously than they do, right? Uh, and you know, I do a lot of lectures to special, you know, to special interest groups, sorry, you know, so like law enforcement or DOJ or whatever, DOD, but I also, Uh, talk to, uh, like, all first responders, but to include hospitals, right?

[00:03:40] So, like, ER, physicians, um, and all that, and they, they all suffer from the same mistake, right? I mean, shift, shift work is literally deadly. It takes 12 to 14 years off your life. Um, and, and I remember always going, um, Man, I can't, like, the military I understand. That's antiquated, like, they're just trying to build big tough men [00:04:00] that are more lethal than everybody else, um, and there's not enough education in that training system for them to get it.

[00:04:06] Um, but when you just said that, I started thinking, you know what? I didn't know anything about sleep after I graduated medical school. Zero. Nothing. I never had a single class on sleep. So, now that I think through it, Neither has any other doctor. Right. And so, why would they understand how important sleep is, right?

[00:04:26] And, and then once they do, they're already in a system that was designed by people who didn't care about sleep. And now the, now you have to redesign the whole system, right? Or fight the whole system, which, that never works. So, you gotta You got to design a superior system and make the other one obsolete is the only way you can get rid of systems But that's a long time in the making but but I would say in the last You know, I started lecturing on this in like 2009 because of the problems I was having with the seals And at that time I was the like I was the only one [00:05:00] Out there talking about sleep and performance.

[00:05:01] There are a few people talking about sleep and overall health and longevity and But, you know, we, we had guest lecturers come to the SEAL teams and so we had guys like, you know, Rob Wolf coming in and, uh, Chris Kresser and John Wilborn talking about fitness and Kelly Starr talking about mobility and, um, Dave Grossman talking about the psychology of killing and like, so we had like these New York Times bestsellers who were on the kind of speaking circuit and a lot of them had podcasts.

[00:05:29] Uh, and then when they heard me talk about sleep and performance, they were like, Oh my God. Uh, you need to come on my podcast, and then they started inviting me to lectures and things like that, and that, uh, to do lectures at symposiums they were at, and that's kind of how I became the sleep guy, I mean, I, uh, I, I can go over the story of like, you know, why I learned what I learned, but, you know, it was never anything intentional, it just, it was just kind of something I, I was forced to do by the environment that I was in.

[00:05:54] Michael Kummer: Right. You know, one of the, and it's funny that you say, you know, you'd never had a, a lesson, [00:06:00] you know, in sleep as part of medical school. I mean, the same applies to nutrition, the same applies to so many other things where I'm like, yeah, what exactly are doctors for, you know, besides being drug dealers, you know, there's not really a whole lot that you can, you know, Get from them in terms of, you know, improving your health, um, or maintaining your health.

[00:06:17] It's literally all sick care, you know?

[00:06:20] Kirk Parsley: Yeah, and yeah, I mean I, I, I, I agree that Western medicine is miss, is misnamed. Um, they, they aren't healthcare providers. They're disease care providers. So, uh, they're, they're help, they're providing care for your disease. Um, and, uh, sometimes the diseases. Curable, uh, oftentimes it's something chronic and they only know how to manage the symptoms essentially.

[00:06:45] Um, I mean obviously an orthopedic surgeon, you break your bone, he can fix your bone, that's, you know, done. But, you know, you know, diabetes or obesity or, you know, some sort of blood disorder or whatever, um, You know, even depression, [00:07:00] anxiety, all these things, it, Western care doesn't really work for it. It kind of manages the symptoms.

[00:07:05] And I think that's because, uh, the pharmaceutical industry really owns the medication, the medical education. I don't like, I know I became a doctor for good reasons, right? Like altruistic reasons. Like I, I, I genuinely wanted to be like this really smart guy who could help everybody improve their lives and be better.

[00:07:27] And like, I want, like, I wanted to know the answers, like how to solve the. people's health problems and make their lives better. And I say 99 percent of people who go to medical school do that. However, um, you know, medical school selects out for education, right? So, and, and the educational system is built around obedience.

[00:07:48] So, you know, the, the, the better, better little boy and girl you are in school, the more likely you are to make it into medical school. I'm an anomaly is that I didn't even graduate high school. I got terrible [00:08:00] grades my whole life. I was always a discipline problem. Uh, and then once I went to the military got kind of got my act together Then I went to college and kind of started all over and I wasn't obedient I just understood the game and I played the game enough to get into medical school Um, but you know the pharmaceutical industry and I don't know if this was masterminded, you know Like anything you probably Cap and peas at a time, but you know, the pharmaceutical industry, uh, when they, when they, and again, I think they started out for the right reasons most of the time.

[00:08:31] It's like, well, there's this really bad disease and there's no solution for it. So let's see if we can figure out something, like some kind of intervention we can make that will help people. Um, and then they pay, who do they pay to do the research? They pay the, like, the researchers at the medical school, right, so, so then the, you know, the doctors that work in research, they're researching these drugs, and then when they go to teach their medical classes, they're excited about what they're learning in [00:09:00] their research, and they're teaching the medical students about this research of this drug and how well this works, and then that just You know, cycles on and on and on and on.

[00:09:08] Um, and you know, uh, COVID was a big, uh, wake up call for any doctor that thought, uh, they had autonomy or that they were trained to think because, uh, those of us, those of us who thought freely and, and spoke freely, I got in a lot of trouble then, you know, I, I was banned from Twitter for 18 months. I was banned from most of social media.

[00:09:34] Uh, you know, the, I, I'm under review for the medical, uh, one of my, I have multiple licenses cause I do telemedicine all around the world or all around the country. I mean, um, one of my, my medical license in California is under review because I prescribed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine during COVID and that's a no, no.

[00:09:52] And I wasn't allowed to do that, even though it's been proven and it was always the right answer. And. And anybody who was honest with themselves would have [00:10:00] known that it was the right answer. It was pretty obvious at the time. We're getting way off topic, but anyways, yes, diseased care model. It's not a healthcare model.

[00:10:08] Yeah.

[00:10:09] Michael Kummer: All right. Um, let's switch gears maybe and talk about sleep and, and, Maybe starting with the circadian rhythm, you know, probably a lot of people have heard the term, they kind of know that there is some sort of clock inside of all of ours, you know, every cell in the body has like some sort of circadian rhythm.

[00:10:25] What's the circadian rhythm? Why is it important? And what happens when your circadian rhythm is out of whack?

[00:10:31] Kirk Parsley: Yeah, your circadian rhythm can never be out of whack. Just your sleep cycles can be out of whack, like when you're choosing to sleep. Right. So, um, circadian rhythm, like, like most Uh, biological terms, like job security words, we're just trying to sound smart.

[00:10:46] Circa means about, dia means day. It's about a day rhythm, right? But, uh, and for men it's slightly longer than 24 hours, for women it's slightly shorter than 24 hours on average. Um, but basically, You know, everything in the world [00:11:00] is fractal, in my mind at least, is how I see things. You know, you look at the Bohr model of the atom, and it looks a whole lot like a solar system, and the solar and galaxies look a lot like solar systems, and the universe looks like a whole lot of galaxies, and it's like Uh, Yeah, there's a lot of fractal systems in the world and, and we're just a fractal system.

[00:11:18] There's this, this animal talking to you. This technology that smarter animals than me and, and invented. Um, I'm, I'm made up of 30 trillion cells and every single one of those cells are doing the exact same thing. They're doing the exact same thing that I'm doing! They're Taking in oxygen. They're taking in nutrients.

[00:11:37] They're doing work. They're producing waste products, right? I'm just a bigger version of that So every cell in my body is doing that and every single cell in my body has a circadian clock in it And it does different things when it's asleep than it does when it's awake Mm hmm, and I'm not saying your cells go to sleep, but they go into the sleep cycle like this cycle that we call sleep That's [00:12:00] the time they do different things.

[00:12:01] So obviously the the trigger for sleep sleep uh, aligning our circadian rhythms is the sun. Like we, we evolved on this planet with that being the only light source for 149, 900 years out of the 150, 000 years we've been around, right? So, um, most of our lives, most of all of, all of human species, we've used the sun as our cue.

[00:12:24] And so we evolved on this planet to be optimal on this planet, right? Every evolutionary change was selected out for us to be the best human we could be on this planet. Uh, and of course, about 150 years ago, we thought we got too smart, and like, we're smarter than the planet now, and we can do whatever we want to.

[00:12:41] And, like, we can stay up all night because we have light, we can work during the night, and sleep during the day, and we can eat stuff that's not even food, and we can never work out, and drive everywhere instead of walking, and whatever. Um, and, you know, it's to our detriment, but Um, you know, how we, the cue [00:13:00] for us to go to sleep, um, you know, was the sun going down, there's some nerve cells in the back of our eyes that have nothing to do with vision, uh, they just sense blue light, plenty of blind people can have normal circadian rhythms for this reason, um, and when those, when the blue light goes away, and my guess is because the sky's blue, that's why, that's why we evolved that, right?

[00:13:21] Uh, so the, so, uh, the blue light goes away. That triggers this pathway in my brain, kind of this long circuitous thing, most people have heard of the SCN, super catastrophic nucleus, it's like kind of the master clock where all the stuff starts. Once we trigger that, it leads back to a pathway to the pineal gland in the back of my brain, which secretes, and which is a hormone almost everybody's heard of.

[00:13:44] Um, And then once melatonin secretion starts, that initiates, cascades, multiple, you know, hundreds of biological shifts in your, in your brain, biochemical shifts in your brain. Um, so melatonin doesn't really make you sleep. It [00:14:00] initiates the cascades for sleep. And if you don't, if you don't, if your brain's not working right, and, or if you have nutritional deficiencies, or if you're really stressed, whatever, and you, you overcome that.

[00:14:10] So, um, melatonin gets secreted. Uh, one of the big things that happens then is GABA. Capital G A B A, gamma immunobutyric acid, that gets secreted, um, and that slows down our brain and makes us quit paying attention to the environment. Really all, uh, measurable sleep is, is there's a lack of awareness between me and my environment.

[00:14:31] So I'm not interacting with the environment. Of course, my eyes still work, my ears still work, my, like, everything still works. My brain's just not paying attention to it, and I'm not reacting to anything. Um, And then, the other side of that is when I wake up in the morning, somewhere around the time the sun comes up, uh, that bright light in my eyes further reinforces that circadian rhythm, so that now I'm sleeping when my cells are doing the work of sleep, of me sleeping.

[00:14:57] When you do shift work, and you work during the night, [00:15:00] even if you go home and sleep eight hours, uh, you haven't Nobody shifts consistently at 12, like 12 hours out of phase, um, once you start shifting out of phase, it just kind of keeps cycling, you know, I think of it like a, not like a cartoon strip or, you know, uh, like it, it, it just keeps cycling, um, And so, sleeping when, when you're supposed to be sleeping is the most beneficial time to sleep, right?

[00:15:25] Um, when you're, when you're sleeping when you're not supposed to be sleeping, plenty of your cells could be doing the work of the awake you. Um, while your brain is like, I'm asleep. Uh, and, and vice versa. So, um, we know that shortens lifespan. Um, we, the World Health Organization has classified that as a type 2a carcinogen, which is the same as cigarettes.

[00:15:47] Uh, which, which means that we're really sure this causes cancer, but we can't research that because it would be unethical to give people cancer. So, uh, that's what type 2a means. So it it's [00:16:00] carcinogenic.

[00:16:00] Michael Kummer: Um, you know, what you said is then interesting. What does it mean in terms of napping during the day?

[00:16:06] Because that's clearly a time where you're not supposed to be sleeping, right? So is it beneficial to nap?

[00:16:11] Kirk Parsley: There's, there's two different conditions for napping. So if you're napping because you haven't slept enough, um, that's critical that you do because, um, you know, like I said, basically you're born into this contract where it requires about eight hours of sleep to recover from being awake 16 hours, being awake is actually catabolic.

[00:16:33] I'm actually damaging myself. I'm causing inflammation, waste products. Talk about my cells producing my neurons, uh, aren't able to flush those waste products very well. that happens during deep sleep with the glymphatic system when that flushes out. So I'm really, my brain's kind of the master driver of how much wakefulness I can maintain.

[00:16:54] If I, if I sleep six hours instead of eight hours, well, the whole point, the whole point of me [00:17:00] sleeping tonight is to repair. So like I said, being awake is catabolic. When I work out, I actually damage my muscles, right? If I go to the gym, if I exercise, I'm weaker after I finish that exercise. If I've done any exercise worth doing, I'm weaker, right?

[00:17:16] And the only time I get stronger is when I go to sleep. That's the anabolic phase, right? That's the time when my muscles repair, and they repair in such a way that it can do, I can do tomorrow better than what I did today better, hopefully. And then I have to prepare. So there's repairing, which is, that's the immune system basically fighting off microbials, but also the immune system's wits.

[00:17:38] What's repairing your muscles, what's repairing your tendons, your ligaments, whatever kind of damage you've done to yourself during the day. Um, and of course flushing out your waste products, flushing out the glymphatics in the brain, but just lymphatics the rest of your body, you're flushing out of these waste products.

[00:17:53] Um, and when I don't sleep, uh, 16 hours after I've been awake, [00:18:00] I'm damaging myself. Every hour I'm awake after that, I'm damaging myself. So, When I damage myself, I'm, what I'm causing is that, those waste products building up in my brain are causing chronic inflammation. They're causing inflammation. If I do that all the time, it's chronic inflammation.

[00:18:15] And what my, what my brain will do is lay down beta amyloid proteins, right? To kind of wall off that chronic inflammation. It's much like Atherosclerosis is chronic inflammation in your blood vessels and your immune system gets tired of fighting and it lays down calcium, like puts a brick wall there and said, okay, we don't need to fight this inflammation anymore.

[00:18:38] Your brain does the same thing with proteins, so tau proteins and beta amyloid plaques, we call them. Those are signs of damage, right? Uh, because you're, you're putting, you're putting protein down where a synapse could happen or, you know, where, uh, glymphatics could be flushing out or, so you're, you're kind of damaging yourself, um, so the best solution to that, right after, so let me [00:19:00] finish that thought, so, um, I, first I repair and then I prepare.

[00:19:04] The second, like the second half of the night, um, the second half of my sleeping, I'm like restocking the shelves essentially, I'm putting nutrients back where they need to be, I'm ramping up neurotransmitters that need to be like, I'm preparing myself for being awake tomorrow. Right. And that takes eight hours, whether you like it or not, it's just like, just like you're gonna die.

[00:19:24] Nothing you can do about that. And it takes eight hours to recover from being awake 16 hours. That's just it. I mean, you can fight it all you want, put butter in your coffee and put, wear blue blocking lenses. I don't care. Do whatever the hell you want to do, but you still need eight hours of sleep. So if you choose to sleep six hours instead of eight hours, you've, you've chosen to to cut short your reap, your repair and your preparation by 25%.

[00:19:48] Um, and the way you compensate for that is the stress hormones because you're not prepared. You're not ready for the day. And so you use stress hormones. You use your adrenals to make yourself ready. [00:20:00] So to get back to your question, um, when I have underslept, the faster, the sooner I can sleep, the more I can sleep.

[00:20:10] the less long term damage there will be. So just like if I broke my leg and I just said, nah, I'm too busy to deal with it. I'm just going to run around until it heals. I'll probably have some leg problems for the rest of my life, right? But if I immediately go to the doctor and I get it x rayed and it's said if it needs to be said, and then you put a belt as you know, cast on and a bone stimulator and we repair it perfectly.

[00:20:33] A year from now, I won't even remember which leg I broke. It'll seem so normal. But if you did an x ray, you'd still see damage, right? There was some damage in there. Now, if I never went to the doctor and said, I'm going to deal with it, that damage would look a whole lot different. It'd be a whole lot worse.

[00:20:45] And so that's kind of the same thing. So I recommend naps, um, to all, all people who under sleep and an interesting motivator. People are just choosing not to sleep. Uh, like shift work is different. Obviously, People commit crimes [00:21:00] at night. People have heart attacks at night. Like, like, whatever. We have to have shift workers.

[00:21:03] That's the way the world works. But if you're just choosing not to sleep, if you think, well, I'm gonna get up at 4 a. m. Because Jocko said so and I'm gonna go work out and I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna be ahead of everybody and I'm gonna get more work. Think about it this way. Since the whole reason for me to sleep tonight is repairing, and preparing.

[00:21:20] If I could do that a hundred percent, if I could completely repair everything and completely, if I could completely repair everything and I could completely repair, make sure that everything was there for me to do the next day, I would wake up exactly the same every day, which means I would never age. If I cut that short by two hours, I'm aging 25 percent faster.

[00:21:39] There's, there's just no way around that. Um, and that, my belief is that's why shift workers and chronic insomniacs die 12 to 14 years younger, you know, that's, that just makes sense, uh, that's about 25 percent of your aging, you know, you're, uh, you're kind of growing until about [00:22:00] 25 and then you're aging after that, you know, um, and so the other occurrence, uh, to use naps, um, um, Because we live in a society, you know, because we live in a world that we weren't really designed to live in, you can overdo it, right, we can definitely overdo it, especially, especially mentally, so we can get up and pound our coffee, whatever, take our Whatever stimulants people are taking now, or nootrobics, whatever, and we can ramp ourselves up and do a ton of work.

[00:22:29] Um, and we, we exhaust our brains. Like, we, we literally outperform our brain's ability to recover during the day to, like, make everything balance. And you, and you can feel, like, a big, what we call sleep pressure, like a big drive that I need a nap. Uh, if you nap, uh, somewhere between, uh, you know, 15 to 20 minutes, that will restore your creativity.

[00:22:51] Creativity. So if you're in a job that requires creativity, if you're a writer, or any type of artist, or musician, obviously those types of things, [00:23:00] even, obviously some business people need to be super creative with the way they run their business. Um, a short nap in the day, doesn't matter how many of those you do, you could, like, you take a 20 minute nap, three times a day, you'll restore your creativity.

[00:23:11] If you sleep somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes, you'll actually restore your creativity and cognitive functioning. Your cognitive function, your cognitive functioning declines, starts declining after about 1 p. m. Uh, that's kind of the peak of your cortisol curve, somewhere around one to two. And then your cognitive performance will start declining.

[00:23:30] A short nap will improve that, can get you back to normal, maybe get you another two or three hours of, um, what we call executive functioning. So that's problem solving. You know, it's like choosing multiple paths, it would be math, it would be organizing, scheduling, those types of things. Um, and then a complete sleep cycle.

[00:23:49] Uh, and we can talk about what that means specifically, but, you know, stage 1 down to stage 4, cross 4, back up through REM cycle and done, that's one sleep cycle, that's 90 [00:24:00] to 120 minutes. Uh, so what the research has shown is that as long as you don't do more than one sleep cycle during your day, uh, as a nap, uh, it doesn't interfere with nighttime sleep.

[00:24:13] As long as you're waking up, uh, no closer than three hours to your bedtime. So you can't take a nap, you know, from eight to nine, uh, and then, you know, expect to go to sleep at 10. That won't work. Yeah. Yeah. But if you, if you finish, you know, if you take a nap from five to six, like great, like, you know, you, you'll, you'll still be able to sleep at 10 o'clock.

[00:24:34] No problem. Um, and actually this book right here, Don't take a nap, uh, by Sarah Mednick. Uh, Men, yeah, Mednick. She, she's a researcher at the college I went to, uh, undergrad in. What that does is it, it has this little wheel on it, right? Uh huh. And you, and you put on there, like, what time you woke up. And then the yellow, green, and blue is like different, different naps.

[00:24:58] So I want some [00:25:00] REM, I want some sleep, I want some slow wave sleep. Um, If you put on there what time you wake up, it'll tell you what time of the day to sleep to get your optimal. So if you want to improve creativity, you want to improve, uh, function. If you're an athlete and you want to repair, uh, now another really interesting thing is that, so when we learn something and, uh, there's a whole lot of detail going into how somebody's prepared for this.

[00:25:25] Um, and, and I'm happy to talk about it if you want, but it's kind of how we know how much sleep you need is this research. Uh, but when we, we do with something called sleep adapted. So. That means that you've basically slept as much as you need to sleep for about a month. And then we can test you, uh, say, come to the lab at 8 o'clock tomorrow morning, and I can teach you something new, like, uh, you're going to type with your left hand only, or, you know, whatever, or teach you, what, anything, uh, playing an instrument, or we can do something that you already do, so, like, athletic skills, or [00:26:00] test you with things that are related to your job, whatever, and then say, come back tonight, um, and I want to test you again before you go home, and so you come back at like 7 o'clock tonight, and we test you again, you'll, you'll be worse than when you left training, because that knowledge decays.

[00:26:17] But with no additional training, you go home, you go to sleep that night, you come back the next morning and you test, and you'll be better than you left training the day before. Right. Because of the consolidation learning during REM sleep. Right. So, this is fascinating, and it's in this book, uh, all sorts of variations of this, but basically, teach somebody a skill in the morning, have them take a nap in the middle of the day, and then they come back in the evening, and they test just as though they've gone home and gone to sleep, and then they go home and go to sleep, And then they come back even better the next day.

[00:26:51] And so I've worked with, uh, UFC fighters who, um, you know, maybe they're a wrestler, they're a grappler and they're fighting someone who's a big [00:27:00] striker. And so they want to really, they only have eight weeks to get as good at boxing or kickboxing, whatever they're going to do, like they only have eight weeks to like really cram in as much as they can.

[00:27:09] So what they'll do is come in the morning, uh, come in the morning and train. They'll take it out. I'll come in the afternoon. They'll train. I'll take it out. I'll come in the evening and train, go home and go to sleep. They get four days of learning in one day. So, naps are, naps are super powerful tools, in other words, if you do them right, if you do them right, now if, like I said, if you're just sleep deprived, you should do a nap just for brain health, just because it's gonna decrease how much you're aging, it's gonna decrease how many stress hormones you're, you're using, uh, like how much of your energy is coming from stress hormones, um, and it'll just increase your overall performance,

[00:27:43] Michael Kummer: so.

[00:27:44] How do you nap? I've never been able, unless I'm sick, and that happens, doesn't happen very often, fortunately. I cannot nap. I mean, there is no way on earth where I could say, you know what, now I'm gonna go lie down and, you know, make everything dark, put on an I. M. S., what have you, white noise, you know, the whole [00:28:00] shebang.

[00:28:00] I cannot, I do not fall asleep during it. Well, here, here's

[00:28:04] Kirk Parsley: Here's some good news to that. Um, if you can, if you can meditate to a point where you get in theta brainwave state, which takes a lot of practice if you're just regularly meditating, if you use something like a muse to train yourself, you can, you can learn that in like a month.

[00:28:21] You can be able to get yourself there. If you, if you do that type of meditation for those same periods of time, You get about 80 percent of that same benefit. All right. Which is actually at home. Um, okay. So I used to use something called Holosync. I used it for probably 10 years, uh, and it was dialed beats, right?

[00:28:44] So it had a different, the background frequency and each year was different. Um, and what, and it was a 300 Hertz difference, right? Or, or. A three hertz difference. Sorry, three hertz difference. So, that, that's basically a delta brain wave. So, your, your [00:29:00] ears, just like your eyes, like your eyes are always filling in the blind spots, your ears try to fill in the audio spots, right?

[00:29:05] It's like, it doesn't make any sense. Like, this is a little off than that. Uh, and it's not really even anything you can pick up. It was like, rain, it's like white noise essentially. Um, but there was some frequency in there and I used that as a meditation tool, but I always fell asleep with it. But basically, um, what, what the, uh, what the inventor of that technology says is like, you're ready for the next level when you can stay awake after listening to it for an hour.

[00:29:32] And I was like, ah. So, um, that, that was, uh, I did that when I was starting, uh, the sleep supplement. I had just gotten out of the Navy, uh, and I started, I was, I, I had a brick and mortar for a year and then the seals kind of harangued me into making the sleep supplement and I said, all right, well, I'll step out of clinical practice and I'll just do consulting, uh, private consulting for a year, uh, and I'll get this supplement company off the ground and then, You know, I'll go back into practice, [00:30:00] like brick and mortar practice as that's 10 years ago, but, and I'm still doing private consulting and running a company.

[00:30:06] Um, but, uh, I, I, I mean, it was just, uh, obviously like, you know, it's like starting a business, like it was just a super stressful time. Uh, and I had, I still had a ton of patients because that's the only way I was making any money. Obviously I wasn't making any money off the sleep supplement the first several years.

[00:30:22] Um, and so, uh, I, I did that every day for an hour for, for a week. Probably four years like I was like legit and then and I used it off and I've used it off and on ever since but but that that was Definitely a big cognitive booster. I could tell I could tell and any day I missed it was obvious

[00:30:43] Michael Kummer: How do you how are you supposed to feel?

[00:30:44] How are you supposed to wake up when you had a good night's sleep? How are you supposed to wake up? Yeah, is it, are you supposed to be like full of energy, jump out of bed, or is it normal to be, to take a while to get out, or does it vary, or is there any, what are the indicators that I slept well?

[00:30:59] Kirk Parsley: Uh, the [00:31:00] indicators that you slept well is really your performance throughout the day, how you feel throughout the day.

[00:31:04] Uh, waking up in the morning is not, some people, it's just never going to be easy to wake up in the morning. Like, that's just not the way you are, right? So, um, you know, when we, When we studied, uh, sleep, sleep duration, basically, they did it, it's something called a bunker trial, and they, and they put college students in these bunkers, World War II bunkers, uh, with nothing but, they had nothing but a, a bed and a bathroom in it, um, and they said, they locked them in a room, this cold, dark room, there's no light in the room, uh, and this is in the 60s, so there were no cell phones or anything like that, and so, um, They, they lock them in a room for 14 hours a day, they let them out for 10 hours a day.

[00:31:45] Um, and then they ran this experiment all through the summer, just to see what they could find out about sleep. The average person slept 12 and a half hours when they started. And then over the course of weeks and maybe sometimes over a month, they [00:32:00] gradually slept less and less and less until they were sleeping eight hours a day.

[00:32:04] That's where that number comes from. That's what, that's how we came up with that. Now, and that's an approximation, right? Like give or take 30 minutes. It was kind of where most people fell out. There's always outliers, you know, there's always people, uh, who need significantly more. There's almost never somebody who needs significantly less, but yeah, so seven and a half hours is probably about the minimum that anybody will thrive on.

[00:32:24] Yes, so, uh, those eight hours weren't the same eight hours for everybody, right? Because there, there, there are sort of natural genetic larks and genetic owls. There are people that wake up in the morning, I find these people very annoying, uh, they wake up and they're full of energy and they want to chat and they're like, we're all ready to exercise and I got music on and I'm like, Dude, just settle.

[00:32:49] Like, you know, give me, give me some time to wake up. Yeah. And, and it's just, it's just different types of people. You know, it's just like people have different personalities. People have, you know, [00:33:00] different shifts. Uh, and the, the people who, who naturally wake up early. Uh, what's happening is their cortisol is spiking sooner.

[00:33:08] So when you go into deep sleep, uh, what we call slow wave sleep cycles, um, stages three and four, theta, delta, whatever the hell you want to call it, it's slow wave sleep cycles, it's deep sleep. When you're in deep sleep, that's the most anabolic time in your life. That's when all your anabolic hormones are being regulated, and that's when most, like, 98 percent of all the anabolic activity that day is going to happen during deep sleep.

[00:33:28] And that's just the lowest stress hormones you will have at any time in that 24 hour period. Uh, now, cortisol is the one we usually use. It's a big molecule, it's in the blood a long time, so we, the way we can measure it. So the, the lowest it will ever be is during deep sleep. Um, and deep sleep is primarily early in the night.

[00:33:48] So the first sleep cycle is 80 percent deep sleep. The next sleep cycle is 60 percent or 50 percent deep sleep. And the rest is REM, right? And then the, well stage 2 and REM. And [00:34:00] then every sleep cycle, you'll do about 4 to 6 sleep cycles depending on how long they are during your 8 hour sleep. Every sleep cycle is progressively more REM and less deep sleep.

[00:34:10] And so what's happening is your cortisol is coming up throughout the whole night. So after you finish your deep sleep, so probably after your second sleep cycle, the cortisol starts coming back up. And with no light, no noise, no heat change, nothing to wake you up, living in this bunker, you wake up eight hours after you've been asleep.

[00:34:32] So what wakes you up? It's cortisol. So if you're somebody who P. If you can sleep whenever you want to, and you're an owl like I am, probably I would feel best if I slept from midnight to eight, but the world doesn't work that way, so I sleep from ten to six, you know, because that's just better for my life.

[00:34:53] Um, I would probably wake up a lot more awake, um, or I know I would, uh, but people who are, [00:35:00] you know, large, they're going to wake up early anyway. They sleep from 10 to 6 and they jump out and they're bubbly because they're ready, like their cortisol is already where it should be.

[00:35:08] Michael Kummer: Yeah. Gotcha. Um, how much time do you, do you think we could spend in those restorative phases of sleep combined?

[00:35:15] Let's say we sleep eight hours, ideally. How much of that time, percentage wise, do we need to, as far as we know, spend in deep and around sleep combined? Yeah,

[00:35:25] Kirk Parsley: um, the answer to that is not, not super clear because sleep, Sleep medicine is so, so, uh, young that sleep medicine has only been around about 60 years.

[00:35:35] Um, uh, like a really, really good polysomnograph where we can actually tell for sure which stages of sleep you're in. That's only been around like 40 years. Uh, so we already, we already had the industrial age and we already had, Crap food, and we already had, you know, rural electrification, and everybody had lights and all that stuff, so what we think is ideal based on, you know, [00:36:00] 40 or 50 years ago, uh, going back only that far, it's about a third, so a third deep sleep, a third REM sleep, and a third stage two, transition sleep is also called, yeah, but we don't know, like, they, they've done some sleep studies on, uh, hunter gatherers, there's, There's a surprising number of hunter gatherers in the world.

[00:36:21] I don't know if you're aware of that, but there are like hundreds of thousands of people who have never seen electricity in their life, um, and they still live like we lived a hundred thousand years ago, um, and they have done some sleep With those guys, but not, uh, not that. They haven't done like polysomnographs.

[00:36:36] They've used actigraphy and things like that, and like, tried to figure out when they're going to sleep and when they're waking up. And it falls right aligned with what we think. So, I'd be interested to see if those, if those people are a third, or if they're 40 and 40 and like 20 percent transition, or like, I would, I would believe it if they hardly had any transition sleep.

[00:36:58] Um, And the [00:37:00] problem with, that's a good point, a good time to bring up the point that the problem with using, uh, drugs to help you sleep, um, the Z drugs and the benzos, so things like Valium and Xanax are, uh, the Z drugs like Ambien and Lunesta, um, um, Those decrease REM sleep by about 80 percent and then they decrease deep sleep by about 20 percent and alcohol does the opposite.

[00:37:27] So, like when I was working with the SEALs, you know, they were using, they were taking more than they should because they're SEALs. So, like if one's good, two's better, three's great, I'm a SEAL, like I can handle anything, right? Um, And then they're usually drinking a couple of cocktails to help them get sleepy too, and so when I did sleep studies on them, their sleep studies came back 99.

[00:37:48] 9 percent stage 2 sleep, like transition sleep. They're getting no REM and no deep. And, um, and knowing as much as I know about sleep now, and even then, what I knew about sleep, I don't even know how [00:38:00] they lived through it. Like, I don't even know how they survived, you know, much less maintained the lifestyle of a CEO.

[00:38:04] Like, I, I don't know how that's possible. Right. So, yeah.

[00:38:08] Michael Kummer: At the bottom there, really, is those, those, you know, especially prescription sleep pills. AIDS, they're no good. I mean, they, they're not gonna, they might, they might knock you out, but they're not gonna get you the sleep that you need to find a point.

[00:38:20] Kirk Parsley: Yeah, they, they, they actually do cause sleep, right? Uh, they, they cause unconsciousness. So, um, you know, if I hit you in the head with a baseball bat and you fell on the ground, nobody would go, oh, he fell asleep, right? He'd be like, he's knocked unconscious. And that's what sleep drugs do. They knock you unconscious.

[00:38:35] They're, they're dissociatives. So, um, yeah. Yeah, I talked about melatonin starting that cascade and then GABA slowing down our brain. All the sleep drugs are, they're chemical. Analogues are like, uh, you know, they're trying to simulate GABA, but because people are having sleep difficulties, they're trying to make a molecule that has a much bigger effect than GABA.

[00:38:57] So like benzos, like [00:39:00] Valium and Xanax, those have Those molecules have about a hundred times the effect of one GABA molecule when they bind a GABA receptor. The Z drugs have about a thousand times that. So all this doing is just dissociating your brain, it's making you not pay attention to the environment, but what the research showed, and you know, the FDA, when people, when the pharmaceutical companies apply, for, uh, approval of a drug.

[00:39:26] The pharmaceutical companies do the research and they give the FDA the research they want to give them, right? And they don't give them what they don't want to give them. And until they get sued or investigated because their drug might be causing some problems, then they have to give up all the research, which they, which was happening right around the time.

[00:39:43] I was working with the seals and all the seals were taking Ambien, which was kind of one of the major problems I was dealing with there. Um, and nobody knew that there was anything wrong with it. Um, but. People were, uh, basically shutting off their neocortex, which is that part of our brain that we think of when we think [00:40:00] of the human brain.

[00:40:00] It's that wrinkly, has all the little cracks, and it's kind of crescent shaped. It sits on the midbrain, right, what we call the lizard brain, which is, you know, Survival, you know, it's, you know, uh, mating and eating and sleeping and fighting. And, um, and so the, the survival midbrain, which said I'm in charge cause this is all gone.

[00:40:22] And so people were taking Ambien and going out and picking up prostitutes or going down stairs and eating all the. Cakes and like eating all their kids junk food or going to casinos and gambling away their life savings. Mm-Hmm. and coming back and getting into bed and having no memory of it whatsoever.

[00:40:40] Um, and so when the pharmaceutical companies had to give up their data. What it showed was on average, you fell asleep 13 minutes faster and you slept 37 minutes longer, but you decreased REM by 80 percent and deep sleep by 20%. So it was a net loss. And all it did was knock [00:41:00] people out. It just dissociated them.

[00:41:01] Um, Uh, I, I remember having a conversation with a woman. I mean, it's probably two hours long, uh, right, right before, uh, right before bedtime. And then, um, the next day, I, we brought something up to continue that conversation. She had no idea what I was talking, like, no idea what's over. I was like, we talked about that right before you went to bed for two hours and she I don't remember any of it.

[00:41:28] And she was taking Ambien. I had a, um, a nurse friend of mine, like our sons were on the same football team, uh, youth football team. And she told me, her doctor gave her Ambien, and she got up in the morning and went downstairs, and her house was completely in disarray, there was all this stuff in the kitchen, so she thought somebody might be in her house, and she ran upstairs, and she called the cops, and they came, and she finally figured out that it was her that had done that on Ambien, and she'd gone down and like, cooked a bunch of macaroni and cheese, and [00:42:00] ate all the cupcakes, and like, whatever, and then went back to bed and had no memory of it, so.

[00:42:05] It's not sleep. It's just not sleep. And in fact, when you look at the data, uh, so people who have chronic insomnia, um, which technically is, uh, over six months. I don't, I don't think this data is true for that. These are really long term insomniacs. So, you know, a significant portion of their adult life, they have had trouble sleeping.

[00:42:28] Uh, again, like the shift workers, they die 12 to 14 years younger. Um, people who take Ambien chronically, also die 12 to 14 years younger. I don't think the ambient has anything to do with it, right? It proves that the ambient is not causing any sleep. It's not helping at all, right? Yeah.

[00:42:47] Michael Kummer: So, you know, maybe then shifting gears into, into supplements, you know, GABA, melatonin, and some of the things that you have in sleep remedy.

[00:42:57] Yeah. I mean, melatonin is a [00:43:00] hormone, isn't it? Yep. Isn't there a My, my limited understanding of, you know, of, of, of the endocrine system is that there is always, or very often a feedback loop, you know, you lose an exogenous hormone that stops producing it or produces less because it's already there.

[00:43:17] Absolutely. Yeah. How does that work with consuming melatonin? Um, how is dosage maybe, you know, affecting all of this and should I, is melatonin a good thing? Um, or is that something you can take for a while, but not a long term solution? What's your take on all of that?

[00:43:32] Kirk Parsley: Right. So, um, so a couple of different scenarios, right?

[00:43:37] Um, and if you are, if, if you're taking your supplement, so with all the technology we have today, with me being able to look at your epigenetics and your micronutrients and You know, look, evaluate for toxins and heavy metals and look at your blood work and your hormones and Measuring your your brain waves like there's so much stuff I can do now that [00:44:00] I can come pretty close to saying like here's the ideal way for you to live your life like to Sleep exactly this much and eat this and exercise like we can come pretty close to say that's ideal and then in reality Somewhere around here like this is what you can actually do because you have other responsibilities other than Right?

[00:44:15] And so we supplement in between there, right? In that gap, we supplement. Um, and that might be a gadget, like, like you, like a, whatever, I can't nap, so I use this muse design device to help me meditate better, so I can't, right? So that's part of the supplement. And then, and then nutritional supplements, I believe, should just be nutritional supplements.

[00:44:33] So these are things that are normally in your body, right? This is, Ordinarily there. And just because of the way modern society is, or maybe your lifestyle, your lifestyle specifically, we, there are things that people tend to have deficiencies in. And then the other thing to remember is that a lot of nutrients that are in your body are stored intracellularly and then they come out when they're, they can come out when they're needed.

[00:44:58] Um, and that [00:45:00] has a lot to do with those physiologic changes. So when I said, you know, the blue light. Blue light decreases and melatonin gets secreted. We don't fall asleep right away, right? It's not like the sun goes down and you, you pass out. It takes about three hours for all those changes in your brain to happen.

[00:45:17] Um, and then about three hours later, you feel really sleepy, right? And so what happened is, Melatonin got secreted, that led to GABA, that slowed down the brain. The sun was the only, was the only, uh, source for heat. And so, the environment got colder, and you got colder. And you, you're, you're a bad predator, you're, you're, you're a bad match for almost any animal in the world, right?

[00:45:39] Like a raccoon can kick our butts pretty easily. Um, so you would tuck away in some sort of shelter because you're very vulnerable when you're a slave. You can get eaten by an animal, so. You know, the sun went down, you got in your little shelter, you maybe had a fire in front of you, you talked for a while, you didn't get involved in the environment, you got colder, and you fell asleep.

[00:45:58] And it takes, like, if people go [00:46:00] camping and don't use electric lights, they'll realize, like, that, that's, that still happens to this day. Problem is, nobody spends three hours getting ready for bed anymore, right? Um, and a lot of those nutrients, like I said, are being released from your cells to be in the bloodstream for the brain to make decisions.

[00:46:16] changes. Um, and so what I did with my supplement is, uh, is I, you know, I just learning sleep physiology and how melatonin is made and what triggers it to be made and all that other stuff. Um, what normally happens in those three hours? Well, um, you know, tryptophan gets converted into melatonin. So tryptophan becomes 5 needs both magnesium and vitamin D3 to convert into serotonin.

[00:46:44] Serotonin becomes melatonin. Melatonin, like I said, is the initiation of sleep, but from the time the sun goes down until you wake up in the morning, your brain only secretes about 6 micrograms of melatonin. So you don't, you don't want a [00:47:00] whole lot of it. And when you're

[00:47:00] Michael Kummer: talking about taking melatonin over the counter supplement, it's probably not a good idea.

[00:47:06] Kirk Parsley: Right. Yeah. I mean, I've seen 50 milligram capsules of melatonin and I'm like, I don't know, but And like you're talking about, um, exogenous hormones very often, almost always, uh, affect your endogenous production, like your normal production of it. So if I give you testosterone as hormone replacement therapy, uh, and I give you 300 milligrams a week, your testicles on average make about 75 to 120 milligrams a week.

[00:47:41] So I've given you three. four times what you need, 100 percent of your testosterone production is going away. There's bread. It's, it's over. And, and testicles can atrophy, so you won't get that back. Uh, whereas like, uh, a lot of hormones you can get back, but test, you know, testosterone is one of those you can't get [00:48:00] back.

[00:48:00] So if you take melatonin and that's called a, what we call a supraphysiologic dose, which means there's, no way that would ever happen without exogenous, uh, you know, without exogenous hormones. Um, so if you take a one milligram capsule, let's say, and even if you only absorb, uh, you know, let, let's say you absorb half of that, right?

[00:48:25] Um, well, you still have, And sort of immediately, you have way more of that hormone than you need for 6 hours, right, or for, I'm sorry, like 10 hours, right, from the time the sun goes down until you wake up, 10, maybe 12 hours. So you've overdosed, and when you overdose, um, we've never been able to prove that it decreases melatonin production, because the only way to do that really is to measure inside of somebody's brain.

[00:48:52] You know, because the gut produces melatonin as well, and so it's hard, it's hard, but like if we said actually in the brain, we can't prove that. What we have proved with animal studies though [00:49:00] is that it down regulates melatonin receptors. Which is exactly the same thing, right? Because you have this hormone floating around, it needs a receptor to bind to, to do its work.

[00:49:10] So if I put a milligram of melatonin in your brain, immediately, well your brain's smart, and it's like, well I don't need all these receptors, right? There's, 500 times more melatonin than I need right now. So I'm going to not make so many of these receptors. And now if I take that melatonin away, I have to wait for all my receptors to come back before my normal melatonin is adequate.

[00:49:31] So in my supplement, I put two micrograms in there. I'm hoping that one microgram of that will get in your brain and that will be an initiation. So it like initiates the cascade. And then I have the tryptophan and the 5 hydroxy tryptophan and the melatonin, sorry, the magnesium and the vitamin D3 to help you make more melatonin.

[00:49:52] You have to keep making it through the night. Like nothing in my product lasts more than say three hours or something and then it's all gone consumed or in your [00:50:00] bladder. Um, and I just help. Help to initiate that cascade as if you had spent three hours getting ready for bed like I'm kind of pushing everything that way And then I put GABA in there because GABA is supposed to be slowing down your brain.

[00:50:15] That doesn't cross into the brain very well. Um, so I put an amino acid called L theanine in there. Uh, which is just normals. It's in your body anyway. But it, it, it, uh, enhances the effects of GABA. So it makes GABA work better. It doesn't, it doesn't increase the GABA, but it makes GABA more effective. Um, and then just recently, kind of, I'd say the only, Uh, kind of trick I did in that, uh, was, is I, I've added phosphatidylserine recently, and that's because of research that shows phosphatidylserine decreases cortisol production.

[00:50:49] And the reason most people don't sleep well is because their stress hormones are too high. And so I put, and it's, it's, you know, it's a small amount, um, it's probably an inadequate amount for a real [00:51:00] insomniac, uh, they probably need to take additional phosphatidylserine. Um, But that, so that's the reason I do what I do.

[00:51:07] Um, if there was something else I could put in there that I believed worked, I would. Um, and I, I keep up with the research. There's all sorts of herbal things that are supposed to help. I know nothing about that, and I'm, I'm never going to. Like, it's just, it's not a field I've chosen to go down that rabbit hole really deeply.

[00:51:27] Um, But I, I believe that those ingredients I mentioned, I think those are the only things that truly help with sleep or cause if there's anything else I would put them in my product. So any one of those ingredients will help. Vitamin D3 deficiency, it's ubiquitous. I mean, 95 percent of the country is probably deficient.

[00:51:45] That alone will improve your sleep. Magnesium deficiency, really, really common. That alone will help your sleep. A little tryptophan, just like, you know, Thanksgiving turkey, like a little bit of that will help. A little bit of 5, uh, [00:52:00] 5 hydroxy tryptophan will help. Some GABA will help. So you can take any of those things individually and they'll, they'll all work.

[00:52:06] Um, and I've, I just worked out with the SEALS kind of the combination that I, that we figured out to be the best and we kind of figured out the right dosage and it, it took, you know, lots of months and hundreds of guys to figure this out. Um, but was trying to get them all off of Ambien and they were all addicted to Ambien.

[00:52:24] They've been using it for years. And so I had to give them something. I couldn't just say suck it up, buttercup, you know, it was like, uh, you got to give them something. And so. You know, we just figured it all out and I gave them a handout of like, here's all the things you need to buy and this is way before Amazon Prime and so they had to go around to all the different health food stores in town and buy these and this came in like 120 and this came in 30 and this was a liquid and that was a powder and that was a capsule and that was, and, and they were just like, man, can you just make something for us?

[00:52:55] And I'm like, no, I don't know how to do that. Like I'm a doctor. What the hell do I know about that? But they [00:53:00] finally talked me into it. So. Uh, and the whole intent was just to make that and sell it back to the SEAL teams. And then that would just be a little business to do its own thing. And then 10 years later, I'm still running it.

[00:53:10] It's, it's been a really successful business and the SEALs still don't buy it. I mean the individual SEALs buy them, but the SEAL teams don't buy it from

[00:53:16] Michael Kummer: me. Right. All right. That's, that's, uh, I really like, you know, the, the explanation of the melatonin and, and, and also knowing how much is in your product.

[00:53:26] Uh, because everything out there, I mean, pretty much everything out there is milligrams, you know, and yeah, you know, and it's a, obviously a huge difference. Um, yeah. All right. That's, that's good to know. Now, uh, one, one last thing, sleep tracking. Yeah. What's your, what's your take on sleep tracking? Is it worth it?

[00:53:43] Are the trackers that are available to consumers accurate enough? Does it, are they accurate enough to establish trends at least or see trends rather than individual, you know, readings? Yes. What's your take on that? So, you know, my,

[00:53:58] Kirk Parsley: my, [00:54:00] my business, like my real business, uh, as, as a doctor is I do private consulting and I do annual, annual health programs, the kind of annual health makeovers for usually guys in their 40s and 50s, you know, kind of want to get, get their mojo back.

[00:54:14] Um, And there's some, there's some guys that love electronics and gadgets and they want to measure everything. They want to, they want to, you know, a CGM and they want to check their ketones and their blood glucose and they want to wear a tracking and or a ring and test their heart rate variability and all that.

[00:54:32] I'm like, go for it dudes. Like, but don't, if it's stressing you out, don't try it. Like if it's like, Data collection for the sake of data collection is useless, right? So if you, if you have difficulty sleeping or if you just, if you just want to find out like how your sleep is going and, and reassure yourself that you're sleeping enough, just track it.

[00:54:52] Like you just need to track it. And so I have some clients who don't like any of that stuff and they just journal. So they write down. They get in [00:55:00] bed, they write down how they feel, like how they felt all day, if they noticed anything extraordinary, like anything out of the ordinary about their day, what time they went to bed, and they write down what time they wake up, and they go to bed the next night and do the same thing, and then, and we figure out trends.

[00:55:17] So uh, you know, when we do a real sleep study, keep in mind, society was already broken when this technology came across, uh, and we put, you know, all these electrodes on your head, We have a strap around checking for your breathing. We got your pulse going. We have your pulse ox going. Um, you know, we have actigraphy to see if you're moving.

[00:55:39] We have things to see if your eyelids, if your eyes are moving around for REM sleep, all that stuff. Um, and we combine all that into the histogram, uh, which is like stage 1, time, 4, 3, 2, 1, uh, REM sleep and those sleep cycles I was talking about. Um, And that's what these devices are [00:56:00] trying to simulate, but what they're doing is they're taking a few data points out of all that data that we have, like we have robots where hundreds of thousands, millions of people have done histograms, or have done a polysomnograph, and so we, we can say, well, when their pulse was doing this, and when their, you know, pulse ox was doing this, and their movement was doing this, They tended to be in this level of sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep, whatever.

[00:56:24] Um, and so they're developing an algorithm that's making assumptions off of big databases of polysomnographs. So they're not accurate a hundred percent for sure. And even a polysomnograph isn't accurate a hundred percent for sure. So. I think it's a useful device if it's not gonna stress you out and you just want some basic data, but I would also journal with it or some sort of tracking of that because what I very often find, it doesn't matter if they're wearing an Aura or Garmin or an Eye Watch or Apple Watch, whatever you call it.

[00:56:58] Um. Or a [00:57:00] whoop band or whatever they're doing. Um, almost always their ideal sleep, when they feel the best and when they perform the best isn't at their a hundred percent score. Right. It's like maybe it's 80% or maybe it's 90%, sometimes it's 70%, but it's like, figure out what you're doing, like when you feel really good.

[00:57:18] Mm-hmm. And you've got some journaling in there like, well, today was awesome. I did a PR on this and I felt great. And I had tons of energy and you see 10, 10, 10 or 20 of those over a couple of months. And then you look back and you go, Hey, every time it's happened, my sleep score has been between 70 and 75.

[00:57:36] All right. So that's your number. So don't get hung up on the algorithm, but you know, if you don't measure something and. By some, by some way. If you don't measure it at all, then you can't change it. Right. Because you don't, you don't know what's going on. So, if you're trying to previously measure it some way, but like I said, anything from a journal to a polysomnograph every night would be okay.

[00:57:58] Like, whatever you like. [00:58:00]

[00:58:00] Michael Kummer: Alright, cool. Well, I appreciate it. Um, We're going to have all of your, obviously your information, but also the sleep remedy, including a discount code that is yet to be determined in the shout outs. So if you just say it, you just say

[00:58:12] Kirk Parsley: what you want the discount code to be, and that's what it'll be.

[00:58:16] What's that? I'm code

[00:58:17] Michael Kummer: primal shift. Primal shift. That's what it'll be then. All right, cool. That'll be in the shout outs. Um, and this episode of yours. Okay. Very good. Well, I appreciate your time very much. I'm looking forward to trying the supplements myself. Um, and doing some journaling and sleep tracking to see how, um, if it changes anything.

[00:58:35] Well, again, thank you very much. All right. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. All right.