Digital Social Hour
5 Sleep Hacks to Boost Your Productivity Overnight | Dr. Peter Martone DSH #975
Fri, 13 Dec 2024
🌙 Unlock the secrets to better sleep and skyrocket your productivity! 🚀 In this eye-opening episode, we dive into 5 game-changing sleep hacks that will transform your nights and supercharge your days. 💪 Discover why your sleep posture matters more than you think, and learn how to hack your nervous system for deeper, more restorative rest. 🧠💤 Our sleep expert reveals surprising truths about melatonin, napping, and the hidden dangers of common sleep habits. Ready to revolutionize your sleep and wake up feeling refreshed and energized? 🌟 This episode is packed with practical tips you can start using tonight! From optimizing your sleep position to understanding your unique "sleep avatar," we've got you covered. Don't miss out on these game-changing insights that could boost your productivity overnight! 📈 Hit play now and join the conversation on better sleep for a better life. 🎯 Subscribe for more life-changing tips and tricks on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🔔 Your journey to peak performance starts here. Sweet dreams and even sweeter productivity await! 😴💼 #productivity #daveaspreysleeppodcast #howtosleepbetter #insomnia #nightroutine CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:23 - How Dr. Martone Got Into Sleep 04:19 - Sleeping Position and Health 07:53 - Proper Sleep Techniques 14:52 - Understanding Melatonin 18:47 - Benefits of Naps 22:02 - Making Up for Lost Sleep 24:55 - Sleep Posture Impact 29:19 - Best Sleeping Practices 31:12 - Cann*bis and Sleep 32:14 - Newtonian vs. Quantum Physics 34:22 - Pregnancy and Sleep 35:38 - Tips for Better Sleep 35:53 - Finding Dr. Martone APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [email protected] GUEST: Dr. Peter Martone https://www.instagram.com/drsleepright/ https://drsleepright.com/ LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What inspired Dr. Martone to focus on sleep?
All right, guys. Dr. Peter Martone here today. We're talking sleep. One of the top sleep experts in the world. Thanks for coming on, man.
Thanks, man. I appreciate it. And you're from New York. From Boston. Oh, from Boston. Yeah. East Coast. Let's go. Same here. New Jersey. Whoa, I could tell. I love East Coast. Nice. It's good. It's hard to beat. Totally different gig.
There are two lacks out here, man. We hustle.
Chapter 2: How does sleeping position affect our health?
Yeah, you're not lying. It's definitely a hustle. How'd you get into the sleep stuff? Well, it's interesting. I'm a kinesiologist and chiropractor. That's kind of my background. And I was working with patients at the time, 15 years, always had back pain. And I'm a competitive mountain biker. So I had herniated my disc in a little mountain biking injury.
And I reviewed about 3,000 x-rays and found that the problem with my back wasn't really my back at all. It was my neck. And it was because I lost the cervical curve in my neck and picked up rotation in my lower back, which I was helping my patients with for years. And I'm like, if it's my neck, I should be able to fix this. Why is it? When can I fix it? I've been getting it adjusted.
And I'm like, well, due to Davis's law, the only way to really stretch a curve back into the neck is with long. Like when you stretch, you want to stretch like for a long period of time, right, to get the maximum benefit. So you have short stretching, you know, where people bounce. But the most beneficial stretching is slow stretching over a long period of time.
Chapter 3: What are the proper techniques for better sleep?
And I said, you know, best time to do it is to force myself to sleep on my back and get my neck into extension. And I created a pillow that does that. And I started to sleep on my back. And after about a month of sleepless nights, but really focusing on my sleeping posture, my back pain went away. And I've never had back pain again since. Damn. So sleep posture is super important.
So when sleep experts talk about sleep, they talk about the vertical of sleep where, oh, keep your airway closed, or it's about breathing, or room temperature, and And they talk about all of these things that, yeah, maybe they help people fall asleep, but they miss a huge vertical, which is the structure. Your structure affects your function. Your neurology is housed within your spinal column.
And when you sleep on your side, and most people sleep curled up in a ball because they want to feel protected and safe. And when you sleep like that, you're destroying your structure. And what you don't realize is you're actually destroying your health. So yeah, man, sleeping position is critically important to being able to not just sleep better. Like I can fall asleep.
You can put a glass of water on my chest and it will be there. I do not toss and turn because my body is in a neutral position. And I get such sound sleep because of that. And then that's really what led me into the industry is I'm trying to help my patients need me less because they were always coming in with the same exact problems, neck pain, hip pain, adjust, adjust.
And I felt like an aspirin. But once I started to address the root cause of the problem, which is sleeping position, Things just changed, transformed. People were needing me way less. They were getting better. And then because their structure was improving, their neurology was improving, they were having less headaches, less digestive problems, less hormonal imbalances, and it just blew off.
All from good sleep. Wow. That's incredible. Yeah, because the average person tosses and turns 20 to 40 times a day, right? 20 to 40 times a night because their body is in pain. That's a lot.
You don't even think about that, but that's like two every hour. Every 20 to 30 minutes, somebody will move out of that position.
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Chapter 4: What role does melatonin play in sleep?
Damn. Yeah, I definitely do it too, to be honest. And you said you could look at someone and identify their sleeping issues? Mm-hmm.
Yeah, because... So if I... Like, my arm's straight right now.
Yeah.
Right? But if I want this arm to be bent, all I have to do is take an arm and hold it like this, and after a year, you'll have a bent arm, because tissue remolds based on the stresses applied. So the spine's like clay. It can be molded. The older somebody is, the hotter it is to mold, but... Think about your pillow. Think about how you sleep as a mold for your spine.
Chapter 5: What are the benefits of napping?
So when I look at you, your head shifted. So your head shifted to this side. Well, body posture adjusts to head position, which is the riding reflex, so your hip's going to go that way. So if the head goes this way and the hips go that way, well, then you're affecting the neurology up in the base of the neck. That's affecting your vagus nerve.
That vagus nerve is going to affect your ability to be able to get deep sleep because ultimately sleep is a nervous system problem. So within our culture, we are way too sympathetic dominant, right? So there are two systems in our body. There's a sympathetic nervous system, which is fight or flight, and then there's rest and digest, which is the parasympathetic nervous system.
And during the day when we're awake and surviving or we're stressed, that's the sympathetic state. You're not healing when you're in sympathetic dominant state. At night, the parasympathetic state is supposed to take over. That's when you heal. That's when you thrive. So it's survive versus thrive. A cell cannot be in growth and defense at the same time. You're either surviving...
in lieu of thriving. So at night, we need to be able to do this, be able to tap into our parasympathetic nervous system. But because we are all so anxious in these unsettling times that we live in, we live in this sympathetic dominant state, and that parasympathetic nervous system is like a weak muscle.
Chapter 6: How can you make up for lost sleep?
And we've never been taught that sleep is a neurology issue, so we don't know how to engage it. And when you can't engage that parasympathetic nervous system, you get heart palpitations, you get shortness of breath, you get digestion issues. Women will have hormonal imbalances and fluctuations in a major way. So when we started addressing these problems that night when people sleep,
It's changing the game. Wow. Yeah, changing the game. Dude, I had hard politicians for the past two weeks. The tilting of your head is giving you – and you also have digestion issues too. Yeah. Because with the heart palpitations is a low vagal tone. So you're also going to pick that up in your digestive tract and also your ability to take a nice, deep, smooth breath.
All of those are affected at the same time. Damn. Because it's all neurology.
Yeah, I never connected that to sleep, dude. That's crazy. I thought it was coffee.
No, it's – well, coffee – so coffee does this. So if you drink a lot of coffee, you're suppressing this tone. So it's even more important for you to get your sleeping position down correctly because if you don't, you're going to always have a weak parasympathetic muscle because it's like watering a garden, stepping on the garden hose.
When your head's tilted like this, you're stepping on the hose, so you're suppressing that tone. And you're never going to get good restorative sleep until we address that.
So you've got to sleep with your head straight up. Yeah, we can bust it out right here. I'll show you the position you need to sleep in. Yeah, we'll definitely do that. I'll get one of your pillows too.
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Chapter 7: What are the best practices for optimizing sleep?
Is it a body pillow or is it a... So the body works on specific laws, right? Yeah. And there's a law that's basically stated if you don't use it, you lose it, which means degeneration and atrophy will occur if you put your arm in a cast, right? The arm will atrophy. The joint will atrophy. So the body reacts to lack of movement or lack of stress with atrophy.
So if I want to atrophy my cervical spine, all I have to do at night is support my head. And then because you're supporting the head and there's no extra stress, you're going to deteriorate the muscles in your neck. Well, what's a pillow? A pillow defined is a support for your head. When you support the head and the neck at the same time, you're atrophying and destroying the cervical curve. Wow.
So when you sleep, this is when really it came back about 2000, I think it maybe was 2001, there was a movie called Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And the actors, when they came out of the room, there was a block of wood that they slept on in the room. And I'm like, holy mackerel, that would be so uncomfortable. But it wasn't for their head.
It was to rest their neck, and their head just hangs off the back of it. So if you, like a slinky, if you support the neck, but you don't support the head completely, and the head's about a quarter of an inch off of the bed, you're using the weight of the head to gently distract. a curve back into the neck, detentioning the pressure on the vagus nerve
Improving vagal tone, you're not just improving sleep, but you're improving digestive function. You're improving heart function. You're improving respiratory function, hormonal function. You know, everything balances out if we can get the world to understand that sleeping position is way more important than, you know, we're currently thought.
You know, we're thought, the research says, oh, sleep on your side because it's good for lymphatic drainage. Yeah. The study that was done, that they all reference, was done in 2015. That study was done on rats.
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Chapter 8: How does your 'sleep avatar' affect your sleep?
But there's a significant statement in there saying, although the best position for a rat is on your side due to glyphatic drainage, we understand that this was done on rats, but we're assuming that it's going to be the same for humans. So we're applying it to humans. the structure of a rat is way different than the structure of a human's neck.
It's a reverse cervical curve in a rat versus it's the total opposite curve in a rat versus a human. So you cannot use that study and extrapolate the best sleeping position because it was done on an animal that has a totally different spinal structure. So when we look at All of this research and people run with these things, they're not looking at the correct verticals.
So one of my verticals is, one of my number one truths in my anchor is that the nervous system controls everything in the human body. Can't argue it. That's what happens. And then number two. The nervous system controls everything. The spine protects the central nervous system. So the structure of your spine plays a critical role in how the nervous system functions.
So if we're teaching people to sleep in a position that is putting them at risk for tossing and turning 20 to 30 times a night, 20 to 40 times a night, how can that be good for somebody's sleep and spine? So as a neurostructural specialist, my focus is to get people to just –
fall asleep in the position i want them to they don't have to stay there all night they just need to fall asleep that way so we came up with this thing it's called the triune of sleep you start with the body in mind you put the body in alignment then you have the body and then you have the conscious brain the body all it wants is alignment it just wants it wants to be in alignment doesn't want to be in pain
The subconscious brain, all it wants is safety. And then the conscious brain screws everything up. So we just need to hand it off because when your conscious brain puts you to sleep, most people think, oh, this is what I'm comfortable in. You're not comfortable. You're mistaken comfort for safety. You feel safe.
Like when I grew up in Malden, Massachusetts on a busy street, when I was a kid, people would bang on the window. I'd be petrified to go to sleep. So I would put all these stuffed animals around me, curl up in a ball, and then I would be able to fall asleep. So you fall asleep when you feel safe.
So what we do is we put people in alignment, and then they go to drsleepright.com to take a sleep avatar test. And we tell them, what animal are you? Are you an ostrich? Are you a gorilla? Or are you an armadillo? And based on what animal sleep avatar you are, then we know how to create safety when you're in this position. And then we teach you how to get the conscious brain out of its own way.
Interesting. So what's the difference with the avatars?
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