Start Wellness Journey with Sleep

Tara Youngblood

Oh, thanks for having me.

Kashif Khan

We’re gonna talk about probably the most important topic, which, you know, kind of solves everything if you do it properly, which is sleep. And my understanding is that you have a pretty personal story like that drove you towards what you do. We’re gonna talk a lot about the work you do and how people can help themselves through that. But how did this sort of come to the forefront for you?

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, so, you know, sleep has been a part of, Todd and I together developed a product called the Chilipad in 2007. And so we started talking about sleep even early on. But for me, the problem was it worked pretty well, but I hadn’t figured out sleep yet. And then in 2008, we lost our youngest son Benjamin, and the grief, depression really put me into a spin and I really didn’t sleep at all. In my TEDx talk, I actually talk about the fact that it’s basically was the equivalent of being drunk. And even the CDC has benchmarked that kind of loss of sleep as the equivalent to driving drunk, they benchmark. When you’re exhausted, your crash rating is very similar to drunk driver’s. You know, it’s horrible. You literally have memory fog. 

You can’t figure out what you’re doing. You go show up in the grocery store and you’re like, what was I here for? What am I supposed to do? And you wander around like that. And at night I would not be able to sleep, it’s very lonely and only added to the depression. And once I started to learn about sleep, I really realized that comorbidity with mental health is that way for a lot of people. But for me, it was a pivot moment, we were at a trade show and we were selling the Chilipad. And I’m like, I’m exhausted, I’m not sleeping, how am I, here I am trying to sell a product and I don’t understand sleep well enough myself. And my background is in physics and really research in general. And so did a deep dive, how do we solve for sleep? There’s all sorts of different information about sleep. Sleep had been studied for a long time, but not really in terms of how do you get optimal sleep? What is the definition of success when it comes to sleep? 

And it turns out sleep is really different for different people, it’s different around the world, it’s different today than it was 100 years ago. It’s different when you define it through neuroscience, and what is defined as the sleep mechanism. It’s different when you look at the psychological approach and they talk about CBTI and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, and how do you manage mindset, behaviors and thoughts around sleep. It’s different for Chinese medicine, it’s different for Ayurvedic medicine, it’s different for, all these different approaches have a slightly different take on what it is. But once you start breaking down and look for patterns within the conversation about sleep, what emerges is actually pillars of sleep, and what are the influencers and what are the key languages of sleep? 

What are the ways to talk to your brain and your body to get sleep to happen? And so you sort of fast forward of 15 years of studying and deep diving on sleep, and you end up with a spot that sleep isn’t about eight hours, it’s not about some magical time when you need to go to sleep. Those are triggers and levers that you can use, but it doesn’t mean you have to have them. Humans sleep in multiple segments of sleep, polyphasic sleep, or first sleep and second sleep, is what Dickens called it. Over the years, and through evolution, we have slept at all different times. We have siestas, words for those naps in the afternoon. We have done all different types of sleep and humans can actually survive on all different kinds of sleep. What we do know is we can’t survive without sleep. So you can go longer without food than you can without sleep. And it’s so important to that on/off mechanism of how we heal, how we recover, and then how we live our lives. We can’t live our lives unless we have the off time. And that interval on/off is so much a part of how do we live.

Kashif Khan

There’s so much there, I feel like we need to talk for three hours. You know, one hour’s not enough, ’cause every single thing you said there, I feel like we need to dive deep. Of all the interviews that we’ve been doing, one thing that people keep coming back to like, hey, tell us your top three tips, tell us things we need to do, it’s always sleep. It’s one of the key. And it’s first of all, because it’s so important. Second, ’cause we’re not doing it properly. So whatever you call it, culturally societally, like whatever we’re doing today, it’s not happening for most people. So going back to the very first thing you said, and I’ve experienced this too, when I don’t sleep properly, it’s like, I can’t drive properly, the brain fog, why do we need sleep? What’s going on there that if we don’t get it, that’s how you feel.

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, so the mechanism of sleep is really derived to file memories, to heal, when you’re asleep, not when you’re awake. So whenever you do during the day, not that different than the cache in your computer or that sort of short term memory, things live in your short term memory until they’re determined how to be filed in your long-term memory, which is why over a two week period, you kind of file memories. You may remember what you had yesterday for lunch, but three weeks ago on a Tuesday, probably not. Unless there was some specific event that sort of ties to future outcomes. So you broke up with your girlfriend or boyfriend that last Tuesday, that might stick what you had for lunch that day. But otherwise, it’s probably lost to the sort of don’t really need that information. But the cycle of doing that happens during deep sleep and sleep in particular. 

The emotional flush of what you go through or don’t go through, all of those decisions are flushed through during sleep, that’s part of the dreaming process. And then you look at the healing of your cardiovascular system, your immune system, your lymphatic system, your brain actually doesn’t get washed at all or cleansed unless you’re in sleep. So when you go into deep sleep, you actually, your spinal fluid comes up and goes over your brain and washes the toxins out. So they’re now tying that lack of deep sleep or not washing your brain to the buildup of toxins that lead to Alzheimer’s and cognitive loss and dementia. So brain health is so tied to sleep. Traumatic brain injury, PTSD, all of those sort of brain problems will have a harder time sleeping, ’cause it’s just so tied to sleep.

Kashif Khan

So what you said about the brain washing is such a easy to understand and eloquent way to put it. And I don’t think anyone realizes that that’s happening, right? That this is the one time you literally are detoxifying your brain, if you think about everything else, but when does that happen? So going back to another thing you said, it’s different for different people, right? I remember there was a CEO I used to talk to, sort of a mentor of a very important Canadian company, and he would sleep three hours a night. And he said that, why would I want to do more than that? I will sleep when I’m dead, and we’ve all heard that before. But he seemed healthy. Like he didn’t seem so, is it because that’s what he needed or is it because he was slowly killing himself and he just didn’t feel it?

Tara Youngblood

There may be a combination of both. So just like we all know people, I have an aunt that I think was pickled and smoked, she drank vodka like water, and smoked till she was 98. It’s always easy to pull out the exceptions. My husband, caffeine is bad for sleep, we hear that all the time, five to 10% of the population, their caffeine receptors in their brain just don’t work the same as the rest of us. And so he can have a big black pot of coffee and go right to sleep. So it’s really important that we understand that we’re part of a spectrum, all sorts of ways. And again, from a DNA perspective, we know we’re a lot alike, but there’s those nuances that puts us in a spectrum and that bell curve that we’re all pretty familiar with, whether it’s prototype and morning person and night person, there’s extreme versions of that. There are people that just don’t need as much sleep as other people. And we need to make sure we separate that. Now there’s a lot of people that basically when you’re on, you’ve amped up that sort of stress response, you’re kind of in adrenaline mode. And if you don’t go out of it, you just keep yourself in stress. You can kind of forget that you need to have sleep and you just keep going, and you’re kind of pushing through. 

And generally what happens in those scenarios, if you’re not getting enough sleep, the perfect storm, call it, of lack of sleep and stress is what delivers every autoimmune disease, every disease in the elderly, cardiovascular disease, all of your disease states, almost all cancer, everything, all comes from a combination of lack of sleep and stress. And then, ’cause we have cancer in our bodies today, how we decide to use them or not use them, if your body’s busy surviving, it’s not healing, it’s not repairing, it’s not removing those cells, it’s not moving forward, it’s not healing. Lack of sleep and stress, will, depending on your genetic predisposition, will deliver whatever genetically you’re predisposed to, but it will deliver a disease, 100% of the time.

Kashif Khan

I think that’s over and over, when we’re dealing with people at the genetic level, meaning let’s find those genetic holes that need to be plugged, right? They’re complaining about a symptom, we’re looking for a system failure. When we plug that system failure, sleep is typically one of the first things they say it got better, right? Whether it was stress, food, environmental response, toxins, you know, whatever it is, relieve that load and sleep gets better, and then everything else gets better. We’ve seen this over and over again. I remember the first time we actually spoke, I met your husband Todd first. Then we got on the phone, I was eventually allowed to speak to the boss. One day. And I think Anna Marie was also there. And I had mentioned that we found genetically that there was sort of three categories of, I can’t sleep, can’t fall asleep, can’t stay asleep, sleep through the night, but don’t feel so rested when I wake up, is that the same thing that you’re seeing?

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, it is 100%, you know, that’s how it presents. And really to your point of plugging the holes on symptoms often fixes sleep. It’s a circle, it’s a cycle, like most things, they’re attached. So whenever you can fix something and get better sleep, then that better sleep is gonna present with less symptoms. So we see that in our menopause studies, or whatever your symptoms are, if you can get better sleep, it’ll improve your symptoms. And if you can mitigate the symptoms that are keeping you awake, you’ll also get better sleep. And the whole cycle comes together. But sleep is an important part of that cycle on both sides. And for most people, it is either you can’t fall asleep or you wake up in the middle of the night or that not feeling rested, and all of them are tied to sort of a predisposition. 

So with a few questions like you know, you can kind of get to, okay, that’s what’s the problem. And generally the fixes back to those pillars of sleep, what are the levers that fix those different things? There’s a fair amount of consistency. Now how far you push that lever all the way on or halfway or just barely on, those are the changes that we find person to person. But generally the same levers will improve falling asleep or the same types of levers will improve waking up in the middle of the night, the same types of levers are gonna improve waking rested. It’s just about how far into each of those variables you end up getting on an individual level.

Kashif Khan

It’s amazing, ’cause when I listen to you, it’s like you’re talking about sleep therapeutically, right? Like you’re dropping big words like menopause and cancer and heart disease and people don’t associate these things in general, I mean some are more knowledgeable and the word is out there more than ever has been before. But in general, that’s not a correlation people make. In fact, focusing on sleep is almost considered a weakness in our culture, right? Like, oh, you’re weak, what do you need to sleep for? Let’s stay up and party or whatever it may be, let’s work hard and then struggle, right? So outcome wise, I know that you you’re talking about therapeutic and all of that, but I I’m sure people are wondering, well, I do sound like that person that can’t fall asleep, I do sound like that person that can’t stay asleep. What do I do? What are the different routes?

Tara Youngblood

So everything about sleep, I believe, fits into the three pillars of sleep. How do you influence sleep? Number one is mindset. And that one is a bigger part of that falling asleep. Obviously when you are asleep, it’s harder to influence your mindset. But it still plays a role in staying asleep, it just has a smaller role. But mindset, this is where influencing your stress level, whether you’re meditating or journaling or just plain gratitude, getting hugs, reducing anxiety, all of those pieces fit into that mindset lever of how do I make sure I’ve optimized that for sleep? The next one is behaviors. And that’s kind of like diet and fitness and all the things we put into our day. Whatever is in our day, that’s gonna influence our sleep outcomes. Those are labeled as behaviors or habits. And how do we influence those to sort of turn on sleep at the right time and in the right way and really in conjunction with our life. 

So if you’re a shift worker, I get that all the time, or we coach a lot of professional athletes and like, I travel all the time. I play a baseball game and I’m done at 10:30 and I’m amped up, how can I have regular sleep? All of those behaviors are manageable, you just have to be able to know how to counteract them. So it doesn’t mean, you know, I hate the word sleep hygiene, ’cause it turns people off really fast. And they’re like, well, if this sleep hygiene thing is good, but if it’s gonna become why you don’t respect it or why you don’t wanna do it, then don’t think about it that way. Think about levers in ways you can influence sleep or even a ritual is better than hygiene for a lot of people, certainly young athletes that I coach. And then the last one, which I actually think is one of the most important ones. 

So sleep is really old. And when I mean that old, I mean down to the smallest organisms, have an on/off interval that is basically sleep. So your computer has to go on and off, when it doesn’t work well, you have to reset it and start it. We as organisms need to turn on and off on a regular cycle, otherwise we start to break down. And so, because it’s really old, when you think of a small ameba kind of organism, there’s no inputs of what did I eat today or those kind of things that are gonna influence their sleep. Their environment is the cue for when it’s the right time to go to sleep. So your temperature, light, sound, even smell, all influence that. And even when you get into feel and weighted blankets, those influences of what do you feel like in your environment are extremely powerful, because they talk to your unconscious brain, that gets past all the stuff we think and don’t think about sleep, and it hijacks your brain and says, it’s time to go to sleep. So when you have PTSD or mental health issues and your brain up here is not getting you into deep sleep because you’re so busy in that other state and your brain waves literally will not slow down or your heart rate or your blood pressure won’t go down or your resting heart rate won’t go down, the one way to tell you that is using environmental triggers. And back to that spectrum, depending on what those environmental triggers are, usually you can get to a recipe or ritual that will work best for falling asleep, staying asleep and waking rested, using all of those various levers of mindset, behaviors, and environment.

Kashif Khan

So first of all, you just answered the age old question of do fish sleep? Because I’ve heard that debate over and over. So yes they do, first of all, second, yeah, it’s clear that, and that points me towards something I wanna talk to you about, you talked about the weighted blanket and you talked about, feel, sensorial type thing. Why did you focus on temperature? I mean, you said you know.

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, it just was almost pure accident, somewhat. Todd’s uncle, my co-founder and husband, invented the water bed. And if you’ve ever slept on a water bed without a heater and froze your tail off, it’s a great way to manage temperature. When we came up with this product, starting about 2005 to 2007, this was when micro climate control in seats was coming out. So driver and passenger could have different temperatures, Select Comfort, and Tempur-Pedic, were talking about temperature and having, Tempur-Pedic had that commercial, if you remember, putting a wine glass on the corner of the bed and people would jump around and have the ability to have different things happen in the bed at the same time. And that really evolved into, well, I want my own remote on my side of the bed to have my own temperature. 

Todd is a very hot sleeper, like dripping sweat hot. And so it would make my side of the bed hot, so I’d insulate him with pillows and we had this, we called it the pillow berm that went up so that his heat would stay on his side. So I wouldn’t get too hot. And so it wasn’t a great sleep experience. Like there’s numerous studies, it doesn’t matter who you marry, it almost always ends up with different temperatures. 

So if you’re in bed with someone, you’re gonna be at a different temperature, like 98% of the time, like very few people are gonna both love the same temperature in bed at night. So having two sides of the bed at different temperatures, it actually has nothing to do with science. Which again, I wasn’t even using it right. I like to be warm to fall asleep, and then once I would fall asleep, I would wake up hot and sweaty and not be able to get back to sleep. It was because I had had it at warm. The feeling I wanted to have on that nesting and falling asleep was important for my psychological brain, but terrible for my unconscious brain and delivering great sleep. So even though we invented it, I was doing it wrong for a long time.

Kashif Khan

You know, you just reminded me that I actually know a couple, a prominent Canadian couple, that actually got divorced because of the sleep temperature, the complete opposite spectrum. And there’s years and years of it like this is not gonna work.

Tara Youngblood

Lots of people are sleeping in separate rooms now for that reason, I know a lot of people have, once the woman reaches menopause or if there’s underlying conditions, whatever that is, that puts it in extreme. They’re like, we’re gonna sleep in separate rooms ’cause we can’t get it right. And the problem about that isn’t, and if there’s a reason and it works great, ’cause again, I don’t really care how you sleep, we can get whoever it is to sleep. But when you sleep together, it actually does, from a psychological perspective, you’ll actually have better outcomes for your sense of wellbeing, your happiness scores, making sure you have connection time with whoever your partner is, is really important. So when you start sleeping in separate bedrooms, it’s really easy to fall into different patterns and you kind of lose the cuddle time. And we need that as humans, we need that oxytocin, we need that cuddle time, part of our DNA is a requirement for that.

Kashif Khan

For sure. I remember hearing you say once, so the very basics of health, let’s call it, general conventional wisdom, you gotta start exercising, you gotta start eating right. Let’s get certain biomarkers down. I once heard you say that before even diet and exercise, you have to start with sleep. So what is the logic there, that’s the exact opposite of whatever, I wouldn’t say the opposite, but is in contradiction with what a lot of clinicians say, like it’s diet and exercise first, then work on everything else.

Tara Youngblood

Well, I will say most of us have pulled an all nighter and ended up at like Waffle House or Tim Horton’s or looking for all the worst fatty nasty carbohydrates. And that’s my biggest sort of anecdotal argument. But there is lots of evidence, the number of calories and what that calorie makeup, it depends on the study is what it delivers, but all of them deliver, if you don’t sleep, you eat like crap and you eat a lot more. And that’s from a diet perspective. You definitely wanna be in a good mindset, it requires willpower, it requires thoughtfulness and good decision making skills, which beyond just the diet perspective… They’ve followed financial traders, we’ve got information from our baseball players on their cognitive ability and decision making skills. If you’re tired, back to the being drunk, being drunk, you’re more likely to eat bar food than you are healthy snack. You don’t go out to a bar and have carrots. 

You go out to a bar and eat French fries and junk and chips and stuff ’cause you’re out and you’re drunk. So that’s the fix for both diet and fitness because you have to show up to achieve it. And if you need to show up for something, sleep is absolutely your way to have superpowers and you show up and you’re ready to go, your mindset’s ready and you can deliver on whatever you’ve just promised yourself with your diet or fitness. And if you can’t deliver on the promise, it’s a waste of money, it’s a waste of time, and you get depressed ’cause like I tried it and it didn’t work. How many diets are because of the food you eat versus I was really tired and I was trying to create a new habit. Arguably, a lot of the psychological part that goes into creating new habits for diet and fitness is not centered right to begin with. But then you add tired to it and you’re not gonna be successful.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, and you’re not gonna recover, you’re not gonna see the benefit of the work you’re doing, you go to the gym, you don’t sleep, when do you rebuild? And you don’t have energy to go the next day, mitochondria suffering. So it’s all this foundational, let’s build on the right foundation, right?

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, injuries increase significantly. They’ve got it for high school athletes, professional athletes, it doesn’t matter who you are, weekend warrior. If you’re tired, you’re more likely to have an accident, everyone’s felt, again, anecdotally felt that clumsiness you feel when you didn’t have a full night’s sleep or you’re feeling tired, you stub your toe, you do that, all of that’s increased. So definitely working out hard on your body when it’s already tired, isn’t gonna deliver a good result, it often delivers injury, which then once you’re on the injury bench, you’re out, you’ve lost track of your fitness goals.

Kashif Khan

For sure. I heard you mention coaching, which is not something that I’d ever correlated in my mind to sleep. So that’s something that you’re doing. What does that look like? Or like how do you even start when it comes to coaching someone’s sleep?

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, actually, it’s been a really fun evolution. We’ve worked with professional teams of all different kinds for a long time. And one of the things they struggle with and one of their biggest complaints is they get on the road and they have some sort of performance or game and they’re like, well, my excuse was I didn’t sleep well, I’m on the road, I’m in a hotel. Hotels, arguably, and you’re in one, so you probably know are some of the worst places for sleep on the planet, they’re too hot, they have lights creeping in, they’re noisy, they’re not a great place to sleep. And so for athletes, it’s not a good on the road experience. And when you’re paid to perform, that’s not a good win. A lot of the teams had been bringing in sort of academics, and back to that sleep hygiene. 

Well, if you’re a 20 something year old athlete and you have a schedule where you have jet leg, you’re flying across the country, you’ve got a crazy schedule, you’ve got workouts and games and you still like to go out and party and have fun ’cause you’re making good money and you wanna do that. The last thing you wanna hear is, well, if you don’t go to bed at 10 and wake up at six and do the following things in the right order, you won’t achieve sleep. In fact, one of the quotes I heard recently that was kind of sad is that sleep is like a bus. If you miss your bus, you may have to wait for the next bus, and you’re kind of out of luck. I wouldn’t wait for the next bus if I had to get somewhere. So if I need to get sleep, I’m not waiting for another bus to come along, i’m gonna make something happen, I’ll get on a scooter, I’ll walk, I’ll do whatever I need to do. And so that’s our approach to sleep is no matter where you are or what’s going on or what’s your schedule, there is a way to get you to sleep. 

There is a ritual that will end up in sleep and creating sleep easy and consistently is really what we do for our athletes. So we’ll actually tell them, depending on when and where they’re flying, if they should nap on the plane or not nap on the plane, what are some things they can do in their off time? So their workouts they don’t get to decide, but how we match what other activities go with that, how do we manage temperature and other influences during the day, when they come off a game, what is the ritual to make sure they have the right hydration and they’re in the right mindset and they start to settle down. What are all the things they need to do in their hotel room? We have kits for them that give them all the tools they need to sleep wherever and whenever they need to.

Kashif Khan

So I’m obviously not important to have a kit shipped to me for my hotel suite today.

Tara Youngblood

You can have one, I’m just saying that the beefiest, most like if you picture your, if you’re a sports follower, you picture your favorite athlete, they love lavender spray. So we can’t like, in the kit, lavender spray is by far back to your senses, and your scent, lavender spray is by far the biggest hit.

Kashif Khan

So what else would you recommend? I’m here tonight, i’m gonna go into a room that sucks, that’s too cold and too hot and too noisy, what should I do to get good sleep tonight?

Tara Youngblood

So in our kit we do include little clips, ’cause again, I don’t understand how expensive hotel rooms cannot get their blinds to close properly, but it feels like nine outta 10 times, there’s that little crack that will hit you right in the eye. And you’re like, how did they design that? Where’s the designer that’s sitting there like can the crack hit them in the eye perfectly at 5:00 AM.

Kashif Khan

Designed to get you to check out on time, that’s the whole point.

Tara Youngblood

I think there’s something. And then we also have little stickers to put over ’cause I hate the alarm clocks that they put in, that are always flashing and weird things, and ear plugs and we have blue light blocking glasses because a lot of our athletes like to game late. So we’re trying to manage blue light after their game to get them to settle down. But you know, there’s simple tricks also of like tonight use a cold washcloth. If you wanna fully do a cold shower, it’s up to you, but even just a cold washcloth on your forehead, on the back of your neck, really try to cool your head. Your grandma had it right when she said, well keep a cool head and it’ll serve you right. Cooling your head will also help you unwind in a strange place and create a better sense of yourself. 

If you can, pile towels on top of you and take a minute to almost like a weighted blanket, to feel relaxed, do whatever rituals. And when I travel, I now have a soundtrack that I listen to because my brain is trained, just like athletes listen to an up song, listen to a down song. We do it with our kids, we play lullabies, but cuing your brain of when you hear this, when you smell this, when you turn out the lights, when you decompress, you’re gonna deliver sleep, putting all those levers together can deliver sleep. And if your sleeping consistently well and your circadian rhythm isn’t off, so we work with them at home to make sure their circadian rhythm is functioning properly. But once you have that, your brain really just wants to go to sleep. So if you give it all the right cues, it generally wants to deliver, it wants to turn off too.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, I think, when I’m listening to you, I’m hearing like all these tiny sort of steps and habits that you keep building and stacking on top of each other, and once you become cognizant of sleep. So the challenge is to first even understand that it’s a thing that you need to focus on. And as soon as you do that, you’ll start to notice. And I went through this myself where you just think bad sleep is a thing. Just certain days, you don’t sleep as well. Then you start to think about, well, this is the day where I was on my laptop until midnight or this was the day that I was so stressed out that I got knocked out early or this was the day that I ate, something, the wrong thing, whatever that may be, too late, that metabolically set me off. 

And that’s when you unwind these habits and you plug one of them back in, you instantly feel horrible, right? That delta value between great sleep and you can pull these levers and and you start to realize that’s what all it was, all these bad habits and bad habits and bad habits piled up on top of each other. Yeah, of course I can’t sleep. So I would also say that the solution isn’t always flipping a switch and it just works. These are habits, they’re deeply rooted, scrolling on TikTok until you’re knocked out at three in the morning is a habit, right?

Tara Youngblood

It is a habit, yeah.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, so it’s working on them one at a time, slowly unpacking them, then getting rid of them. So I understand with an athlete, they’re highly motivated and they’re in a very different mindset where they’re wanting to do more. How do you even get someone to understand that this is a problem they need to work on? How do you get them to even believe, some people wouldn’t believe you when you tell them that get off the TikTok, the blue light is affecting you.

Tara Youngblood

You know, I think it’s all about what motivates us. And you know, that gets into all sorts of different nuances. One of the things I talk about with sleep and I mentioned it, it’s in every disease of the elderly, lack of sleep has a role. But when we talk about investments and we all have seen Charles Schwab or whatever, commercial for retirement. If you save, you can be grandparents pushing your kids on the swing and have financial freedom and live this amazing life as a retired person. But at the same time, if you save all that money and you don’t take care of yourself and you end up in a nursing home, that’s not a great experience, ’cause you don’t recognize, maybe you don’t recognize those kids that you’re pushing on the swing and the happy commercial and the happy path. 

But if we think about retirement in terms of, yes, you still need to be that financially responsible, I’m not out there saying don’t save, but we also need to save in terms of banking health, banking wellness, how do we ensure healthspan instead of just lifespan. Living a long time, if it’s not a beautiful outcome of like happy life, being mobile, being fit both mentally and physically, isn’t a great outcome. I wanna play with my grandkids. I don’t wanna not know them in a nursing home. sleep is a way to insulate. Back to the stress and lack of sleep over time, doesn’t deliver amazing experience. Unfortunately it delivers all diseases of the elderly. So how do we insulate ourselves? It’s investing now. And for those athletes, a big part of the conversation is, and LeBron James actually sums it up better than anybody else, and he sleeps like a ridiculous amount, but he does because like I make a million dollars a year for every year I stay in my sport, I make an extra million dollars. 

If my career is two years versus eight years, that’s a sizeable difference. And if I invest in taking care of myself, instead of partying, I will have more time in my sport, which I love, I’ll have better life, I’ll have a longer career. And for so many people in professional sports, their career is tied to a big outcome from income wise. So taking one year off, two years off, of the end of that is pretty significant. And for the rest of us, taking one year or two years off of the ability to play versus sit and be stagnant, I’d rather have more time to play in my life.

Kashif Khan

Do you feel like, because I know this journey is sort of not since day one, it’s the last kind of decade-ish for you. Do you feel younger now than you did before this all started?

Tara Youngblood

Well, for me, I really, that peak stress that I talked about, I ended up with Hashimoto’s. I was really falling apart. Like I didn’t feel well, not very healthy at all, you know? And I think it’s kind of like smoking and quitting smoking, you know, for people that quit smoking, yes, they can get back to being healthy again, there’s a benefit to changing your lifestyle at any point, is it probably better to invest when you’re 20 and make sure you’re healthy all along. But if you want to sleep and you’re 60, there’s still a way to do it. And one of the things we work on hard is to make sure you can get the same sleep at 60 as you can at 20, it just may take a little longer to dig out and create more sleep resilience, ’cause you’re not in a habit. You’re gonna have to reset those habits that maybe have been ingrained for the last 30 years. But if you can reset your habits, you can feel better relatively quickly. Within two weeks of great sleep, you’re gonna notice a sizable difference in who you are, what you’re wanting to do, you wanna cuddle more, have better relationships, you wanna play, you’re back to you don’t wanna play if you’re in survival mode, you do wanna play when you’re rested.

Kashif Khan

I certainly felt that like it’s, and now that you’re in that zone, when you come out of it, you feel, you remember what it used to be like, I don’t wanna go back there, right? So you definitely feel it. You mentioned napping and this is something that I’ve personally been curious about for some time. You know, in our business, we deal with a lot of NHL players, we’re in Toronto, which is kind of the Mecca for NHL training. And so we deal with a lot of the trainers for the players. And one of the things I often found is that they had a scheduled nap, which was typically sometime in the afternoon, which seemed like it was built around recovery from their workout. I know that myself personally, I could nap every day at around four o’clock if I was given the chance, I don’t, but I very easily could. So a couple things are, first of all, is that needed, like why is that happening? And second, the nap is like this short power nap as it’s often called. But we talk about sleep in these cycles that are like an hour and a half or three hours long. So how are you getting a benefit from this quick hit when it’s a different and why do we need it or do we need it?

Tara Youngblood

So it really depends on the person, and there is sort of a genetic predisposition. So morning people will be less able to nap than someone that’s more on the spectrum of a night person. And part of that has to do with just how your circadian rhythm works and what’s happening in your body and trained to your body clock or what’s going on. Naps can be really, really powerful, and to your point, a power nap can really work for people. I think what happens, and there’s been some studies even just about how older people kind of fall into this light sleep that isn’t helpful and it can disrupt deep sleep. And napping can be disruptive if it isn’t short and with purpose. But to that said, if you’re a healthcare worker and you need an app, then you just need to do it with deliberate of balance. 

So ideally in a 24 hour cycle, we want about two hours of deep sleep and two hours of REM. And so when you take a power nap, you’re actually getting more REM sleep and you’re balancing that. But then you need to make sure that you’re getting really great deep sleep on the other end at night. And that’s definitely something we work with with our athletes as well. But what is really destructive is the people that kind of fall into these almost micro naps, where they’re kind of half falling asleep. Maybe you’re on a couch on a Saturday and you fall in and out of sleep watching TV, that’s extremely destructive. 

Napping is not really all created the same. There’s originally, in Dickens, you’ll hear it in references, even Spain today has sort of a nap around that four o’clock time when they come home from work. And then oftentimes they’ll have dinner at 9:30 at night. So right around that Mediterranean time, probably ’cause of heat day and how it evolved. They have very different sort of sleeping patterns and that’s just fine. But if you’re from that area, you may be very predisposed to that four o’clock nap. Other people, wherever that genetic profile is, may be more ingrained to it right after lunchtime. And that’s when a lot of us get a afternoon snooze. But there’s a predisposition to our genetic clock that’s saying if you needed to nap now would be a good time. And it really does and train back to our genetics of where we came from and what we got used to, how we evolved to sleep. And a lot of it goes back to pre-industrial age when we were farmers and hunters and gatherers, and how do we manage our lives then, is a lot about what’s driving behind our sleep, that we’ve kind of lost track of.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, it’s interesting when you talk about it genetically, ’cause we do see, if you look at things culturally, if something goes on for thousands of years, you can imagine what that does to your body’s dependency on that thing. And you look at the cultural gaps and differences, like for example, in The Middle East, they actually, it’s not even just a nap they literally sleep twice, like there’s…

Tara Youngblood

Two sleeps, first and second sleep.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, first, and there’s like three/four hours per time, and it’s just split in half. And it has a lot to do with, like you said, temperature and heat and the shops close during the day from noon till four or five o’clock because it’s just too hot. And then there’s these night markets because that’s when everyone wants to go outside. So they’re not sleeping until 2:00 AM because they’re out shopping. And they need to be up for work and then they’re sleeping again in the afternoon. So, culturally, but they thrive, right.

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, and perfect, which is again, I hate when people say, well, it has to be eight hours. Nothing has to be, is that in our society, is that one of the ways that some people can find it? Absolutely. And it’s been an easy way for researchers to measure sleeping or not sleeping. But all over the planet, humans sleep very differently and achieve sleep. It is about two hours of deep sleep and two hours of REM. The quality metrics of getting good sleep, however you get it, in whatever forms you get, is just fine. And I think finding that out, being a scientist in your own self of what feels good for you. So if you are predisposed to wanna nap at four o’clock, I’d listen to it. Learning to listen to our bodies as our own human self scientist is really important. And we don’t do that enough either.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, I think people understand this when it comes to something like calories, for example, like what did I do in the day? What did I use and what what’s my total caloric intake, people are using apps and things to track all that. But they’re not understanding when it comes to sleep, what the need is of the sleep. They know a number of hours, but they don’t know, like you just said, so perfectly, you need two hours of REM, two hours of deep, maybe it takes you four hours to get that, maybe it takes you eight hours to get that right. So if you understand the outcome, what is desired and why you’re doing this, then again yeah, split it in half, split it in two thirds or whatever you wanna do. And that’s really cool. ‘Cause I now feel less guilty about wanting to crash on the couch at four o’clock every day.

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, and you know, that’s a big part of the psychological sort of what you have to fix in sleep, but we have so many guilt things about sleep, it’s just ridiculous. Back to as an entrepreneur, like if I’m sleeping too much and I’m too well rested, does it mean I’m lazy and I’m not doing my job? There’s so many things that are attached to this sleep thing. It’s really a big part of what we have to break down first is taking care of yourself and self care has become a thing, but it really is true. If you take care of yourself, generally, you’ll be better at taking care of those around you and your business or whatever you’re trying to accomplish. Self-care is obviously the first step and sleep is just a way to make that easier all around.

Kashif Khan

Another question that we’ve had from several people in our own business, in the clinical setting, is that they’ve heard that sleep affects libido in a big way. Have you seen that that’s the case?

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, actually this is the part that I was just actually giving a talk at a military base earlier this week. And so one of the things that happens, our hormones in general get really thrown off when we don’t sleep. Because the mechanisms that manage hormones are all in that same location that sleep’s managed. And so what happens is if you don’t get sleep, your hormones get wonky. For young men, that’s a loss of testosterone. And what happens with that, when we see it in military is there’s a lot of consequences that go with that reduction in testosterone, that often comes from lack of sleep. Their light is all messed up, there’s ways in which you can fix that. But it’s becoming, whenever you have a population that is chronically sleep deprived, their hormones aren’t gonna work, the female version of that is cycles are off, they’re not functioning properly. And it’s really a health crisis in our military. I do believe it’s less talked about, but even in our healthcare workers, anyone that’s working shift work, their whole mechanisms that the chemicals that run their body aren’t aren’t flowing right.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense ’cause your hormones are produced in your sleep. Without sleeping, you’re not getting to work on producing them. So of course, especially for men. So when I say men, that swing, that shift is a lot bigger because you produce your hormones daily. For women, there’s a monthly circadian cycle, so different days will have a different outcome in terms of good or bad sleep. But for men it’s literally day to day, you can feel like a different person day to day because it’s like that last part of the sleep is when you produce all your testosterone. And you produce a little bit more in the evening. But if you’re missing that first, like 80%, you’re done for the day.

Tara Youngblood

Yes, and it just won’t happen. And so if you’re in a chronic state of that, as you can imagine, over time, that creates a lot of problems, but truly study after study is showing that in the military in particular, right now, there’s some studies outside of the military as well. But it’s a documented unfortunate fact.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, I’m not sure if I can put you on the spot about this or not, but I will anyways, which is, so I use the OOLER, which is one of your products, right? And now there’s a new sort of advanced version that you put out. It’s a new product, right. But I’ve heard you’re working on some really cool stuff that goes beyond just temperature, in terms of tracking, in terms of, you know, even beyond tracking, I’ve heard, you’re integrating with some other partners and doing some really cool things. So are we allowed to talk about that stuff?

Tara Youngblood

I think so. The tracker will come out in September. So what we’ve done differently with our sleep tracker, and if you track your sleep, one of the things to know about everyone, and I love Aura and Whoop, we work with all sorts of different types of sleep trackers. But there’s sleep states, that deep sleep and REM sleep that I was talking about are actually not their most accurate measurements. For something called the sleep tracker, it’s kind of a misnomer. They are most accurate at HRV, resting heart rate, those kind of metrics. When it comes to actual sleep states, and in particular deep sleep, they’re not very accurate. They’re probably between 40 and 60%, depending on the user, on their accuracy for sleep states, which again, if I wanna adjust your sleep in real time at night, turns out is not ideal. You combine that with the fact that it’s a battery, so they can’t do the calculations for sleep, which are arguably really big calculations, there’s a lot of data that goes into measuring sleep, it can’t measure it and calculate it in real time. 

So it’s measuring, it’s collecting all the data, and then if you use a tracker, you’ll see in the morning, you’ll pull it up and it’ll take a minute. Or it goes across the screen or whatever, it’s flipping or doing, it’s doing the calculation of a look back of what your night looked like. It’s calculating your sleep in the morning, not while you’re sleeping. And so to do that, you actually have to have a plugged in version, which we do. Ours goes in the bed so that basically we can do the calculations in real time. And what that means is while you’re asleep, we’re gonna adjust your temperature based on whatever sleep state you’re in, when paired with the Dock Pro. So the magic of that, and this is a patented machine learning algorithm, it’s really phenomenal. And we’re actually going through an AWS machine learning, they’ve come in to like evaluate, ’cause they are gonna write a blog about it ’cause it’s really cool. I don’t know, it’s kind of cool to be called out by those guys. 

Yeah, so really what that does is it means that right now with your OOLER, it’s like a smart thermostat. You set it like Nest. But if your house was you, would your house know what temperature it’s supposed to be at? You have to tell it what to do to set that program. Not a problem ’cause we do coach you through that in the app. But the ideal state is you show up in bed, back to my passion is about sleep should be delivered. There’s enough other things going on in your life, that if you can just show up and get great sleep, that’s pretty amazing. And so the goal is you can show up in bed with the Dock Pro and Insight combined, and it knows what sleep state you’re in, so if you’re getting into deep sleep. And it really does look like, sort of as your brainwaves slow down and your heart rate slows down, into deep sleep, we are basically gonna emphasize that, slow your heart rate a little bit more, slow your brainwaves a little bit more, And we’re gonna extend the time that you’re in deep sleep. 

So if you can achieve two hours, great, but if we can emphasize that, make it bigger and better and longer and deeper, then that’s a win, and you didn’t have to do anything for it, you just had to go to bed. Same for REM sleep, we’ll do the opposite of being able to adjust the temperature, talk to your unconscious brain using those environmental cues in order to get great sleep. Back to what I said originally, temperature is one way to do that. The future state is obviously more modalities, pairing with that sleep tracker, to be able to create what we call the maestro effect of a conductor in an orchestra, basically managing your sleep for you while you fall asleep. But that is the vision of climb to bed and get amazing sleep.

Kashif Khan

That sounds so cool. I literally am so disappointed in where I am right now because I wanna go back to my OOLER at home. It’s almost exciting every night to prepare, ’cause I literally, the quality of sleep, I’m having these vivid intense dreams that I didn’t used to have. And I’m waking up completely refreshed and it’s just so obvious the outcome has changed, right? Like what’s going on there. So first of all, thank you for what you’ve provided the world and the impact you’re having. I’m sure everyone’s curious. How do they actually find you if they want to dive into this themselves?

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, so chilisleep.com, you’ll find all the products there. We also have lots of blogs. So if you’re curious about anything I’ve talked about, if you search our blogs, almost all the topics I’ve talked about, I think, are all covered in the blogs. And so you should be able to get information if you need it, or products, if you want to explore that. But again, even into Canada, we have sort of that trial period. And I do encourage people to try it out, it doesn’t hurt anything to try, temperature for sleep, it’s really powerful. I’m from Canada as well. And so we get those like, well what about a fan? Can’t I just open a window? Is that the same? And it’s kind of, I sort of tie it to, yes, except for would you drive your Ferrari without a radiator and temperature management system? You probably would not, or you wouldn’t drive it for very long or your Ferrari engine would say, heck no, I’m not gonna do that. So you are a Ferrari engine and that temperature management at night really makes that engine sing, and your ambient temperature can help with that. But if you think about your mattress, it’s insulating you and all of those little bubbles that make pressure feel amazing and your mattress feel amazing, they’re absorbing heat and reflecting it back. They’re taking your temperature of 37 degrees and they’re amplifying it in this little oven that you’re baking yourself in with your covers on top. And that’s not really entrained to the ambient temperature. It’s really your core body temperature and your core body temperature has to drop those two degrees at night in order to facilitate deep sleep. 

So once you’re in your little cocoon, you are not, the window open is only gonna help a little bit. Whatever heat can escape from your head is what’s gonna be influenced. That’s why people stick their leg out or flip their blankets off to cool off, your body’s trying to get to that ambient temperature, but air’s never gonna get you there like water and it’s not gonna get your Ferrari tuned up like it needs to for the next morning.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then you remind me of my cocoon and the ability to then have the weight of the blankets that I couldn’t before ’cause they would overheat me, right? So now I can have, sort of it’s coming from both ends, and being fought from two fronts, and all of a sudden you get this ideal perfect sleep environment. And the quality is unspoken of, it’s something that I hadn’t experienced for 40 years of life. And in the last two, I’ve been sleeping incredible. It’s been amazing. So Tara, I want to thank you, ’cause this was incredible. Who thought that a topic like sleep, I feel like we can go another hour, and we just scratched the surface. 

I would encourage people to go to the site, I’ve been using it for a while, it’s completely changed how I feel. I would also urge people to go listen to your TED Talk and learn a little bit more what you’re doing and read some of the blogs. The great work you do is you’re educating far beyond your business and what you’re selling, you’re spreading the message, teaching, and there’s so much people need to know that they don’t even know they need to know and they can learn it from you and thank you.

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, yeah, no, I do believe that is the most important step. Most people don’t know why their sleep is broken. And back to the questions you presented of falling asleep, staying asleep and waking rested. There are lots of solutions and lots of levers, temperature is one, and it’s extremely powerful, but there are lots of ways to get good sleep. But the most important message as you mentioned, is sleep is critical and don’t sell yourself short. You absolutely are that Ferrari engine and you need great sleep and you need to be taken care of and serviced, and sleep is a way to do that.

Kashif Khan

Amazing, thank you Tara, it was a pleasure, thanks for joining us.

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, enjoy Austin.

Kashif Khan

All right.