The Top Cool Tool for Getting Your Best Sleep Ever

Dr. Sharon Stills

Hello, hello. Welcome back to Mastering the MenoPause Transition Summit. I’m your host, Dr. Sharon Stills. And wake up, we’ve got an important, important talk for you today all about sleep, but you gotta be awake to hear it, but I am sleep obsessed and I am so honored that ChiliSleep has sponsored our summit because I wanted sponsors who really are about things that I feel are important for all of you listening, mastering your hormonal journey, and sleep is at the top of the list. There’s no doubt in my mind that without good sleep, you just can’t heal or be happy or be productive or anything. And so this conversation is gonna rock. And I have Tara Youngblood with me today who’s the founder and CEO of Sleepme Inc, which is ChiliSleep, a company that creates award-winning technologies and apps that are changing the way the world sleeps. Their Chili Cool Mesh signature product has been used by presidents, celebrities, and CEOs. Tara is a leading sleep authority. She’s given a TEDx talk on the recipe for effective sleep and has spoken at conferences and media outlet. She’s been on Dr. Oz and she’s a scientist, and she’s also studied traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda and neuroscience. So like we are in for a treat, ladies. Welcome, Tara. I’m just so excited you’re here.

Tara Youngblood

I am so excited to be here. It’s a great topic for your summit.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Hmm, it is, it is. And so I’d love just to hear, do you have a story? Like how did you get involved with being the queen of sleep?

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, so it’s interesting. My husband and I have come up with dozens and dozens of different products. His uncle actually invented the waterbed.

Dr. Sharon Stills

No way.

Tara Youngblood

Ago now. So this is a good group to mention that too. We all remember waterbeds, but-

Dr. Sharon Stills

Yes.

Tara Youngblood

So we’ve brought different products to market, but in 2007, just before, when we were coming up with this product, microclimate control and seats was coming out and drivers and passengers were getting different temperatures. And Todd and I were like, “No, I want this in our bed.” The heck with the, in a car. Like we are very different temperatures. At that point, I really wanted to warm up. I was cold all the time and he was super hot all the time and we wanted separate remotes for the TV and the bed as well. So that’s what we did. We kind of made it so two different people can have two different temperatures, and it unlocked a whole lot of curiosity in me as a scientist about how sleep works. Because once you figure out temperature for sleep, it turns out you unlock all sorts of other things. And we can get into the details of that, but it’s been a fascinating journey.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Wow, I love people like you who are like, “I want this.” And then they go out and create it. That’s amazing. I think about things I want all the time, but then I don’t really know how to go out and create them. So that’s very inspiring. So sleep. I mean, I know that a lot of the women watching are not getting the sleep that they deserve or that they desire. Women have problems falling asleep, staying asleep, so getting good quality sleep. So let’s just talk about-

Tara Youngblood

Dive in.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Dive in.

Tara Youngblood

Dive in.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Tell us what we need to know.

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, so sleep is really this really interesting thing. If you go down to the most simplest organisms, they sleep as well. There’s an on/off interval for the most simplest things. And what that means is when you think about it, if you didn’t have a brain to think about going to sleep, your brain would have to register when to sleep and when to not. So sleep is very entrained to the environment. You think light, sound, temperature. All of those are things that trigger and induce us to sleep and help us get to sleep. When you think about not sleeping and your mind spinning, you’re like, “Well, that’s gonna conflict with that.” But actually, the biggest factor is your environment. And so it’s really interesting that temperature for us is what we’ve sort of drilled into. But all of those will have really big influences. The problem about temperature is that as we age, it gets wonkier and wonkier the more the hormones go up and down and females in particular, even when we have cycles, the menstrual cycles, we’re different temperatures throughout the cycle. 

And certainly, throughout our lives, we’re gonna have different temperature profiles as well. Not just about menopause and hot flashes, but our thermostat, as our body thermostat gets a little bit wonky and a little bit less accurate as we age, so it makes it harder to regulate sleep. If you’re thinking that that change of temperature or that thermostat’s gonna tell you when to go to sleep, well, if it’s broken and it’s not working right, it’s really hard to tell your body that it’s, “Hey, it’s time to go to sleep.” The other factor is our lives today are all one constant temperature. We get great climate control out of our air conditioning, but it’s the same temperature in our car, in our house. It doesn’t cool down at night ’cause it’s basically the same temperature and we’re not creating a change of temperature or a warm up temperature in the morning that’s gonna help us fall asleep ’cause our bodies are trying to drop two degrees core body temperature in the middle of the night. 

That is a lot. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re running a fever and you’re feeling kind of not great, two degrees is actually a fair amount and we are supposed to do that every night. And if we can’t do that, we don’t get great sleep, we don’t get great deep sleep, we have a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep and certainly waking rested. So temperature is just one of those things that if you can actually take that and use that to facilitate sleep, you can actually sort of bypass some of those things that make it hard for us to fall asleep. So it’s a fabulous, and we actually, I can’t tell you all the details ’cause it comes out literally in August. So we’re very close to being able to announce it. But in the journal, Menopause, there will be a study that we partnered with Wake Forest University for menopausal women. And the power of sleep really is what comes out here. But when people slept with temperature regulations, so they didn’t have as many hot flashes during the night, they actually had less hot flashes and less symptoms all over the place when they got great sleep. So I know you started with like, what’s the power of sleep, but the symptoms that happen when we sleep well, we just get less. And I think beyond the fact that temperature regulation helps and helps with hot flashes, if you take nothing else away, if I can get great sleep, I am going to feel better overall and those symptoms that we are all fighting against, they get better.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Hmm, I so first of all, this is airing in September. So go check out that study ’cause it’s now out there.

Tara Youngblood

Yeah.

Dr. Sharon Stills

And that’s fantastic. And I agree a hundred percent with that. When patients come see me and they have a laundry list of symptoms, in their initial intake, I am always diving deep into how are you sleeping, when are you sleeping, et cetera. And if they’re not getting good sleep, it’s one of the first things I go after because we do so much healing and detoxing and repairing and regenerating and parasympathetic nervous system activation and melatonin and growth hormone and lymphatics and all these great things when we sleep. And so for me, as my job to help you heal, it’s a lot easier if you’re sleeping. It’s kind of like, it’s just like what you said. I’m like, “Let’s get you sleeping.” And then let’s go back to that laundry list of symptoms and see how many of them have gone away. And I find it very interesting, sad state of society, but we tend to not value our sleep. We tend to rob from it in every which way to get more things done. And I am always like, sleep is sacred. Life can revolve around your sleep. So I’m curious, ’cause you’re talking about temperature, and so we always talk about for sleep, having a very dark room and spraying your lavender, but it sounds like what you’re saying is temperature is really the number one thing and that should be the start of the conversation.

Tara Youngblood

It really should, and it goes back to, in 2003, Clifford Saper out of Harvard actually discovered that our neurons are triggered by a change of temperature. So when those are triggered, it releases melatonin and actually starts the sleep process. Other hunter gatherer studies that came out of UCLA in subsequent years actually showed that hunter gatherers didn’t go to sleep the moment it got dark, that dimming of the light actually helps. So we don’t want blue light, we don’t want lights that are on at midnight. But what happened is when it got cooler is what’s triggering us to go to sleep. So you can still function with light and you’ll see societies all over the world that have nap structure. Siesta is a word for a reason. You can see references in Dickens of first sleep and second sleep. A lot of times, even in Spain, they still live like that where they go home from work, they’ll take a short nap, they have a late light dinner around nine or 10 o’clock, and then they’ll socialize, and then go to sleep. 

So this idea of eight hours actually is entrained to like industrial life, factories. Going to work, they wanted you to show up and go to work and this was your eight hours, get to sleep, get it done, and then turn around and go back to work. But sleep can be very flexible. But sometimes, when you’re trying to figure it out, just entraining the temperature, just getting it cooler at night will really help tell your body. Now, if you have one of our products, that does help you get cool, but a cool shower, trying to reduce that sort of core body temper ature just a little bit will help you trigger that. So we work with athletes that travel all the time. They don’t always have our product with them. And thinking about what could I do to cool off before I go to bed, really does help get you in the right state. So whether you fully cool off, the extreme is on Terry Wahls with MS. She has previously talked about before she started using our product, but she would do 20 minutes in an ice bath. And if you do that, it is a full proof way to get you the sleep. About 40 minutes after that ice bath, you will be knocked out like an elephant tranquilizer. It’s not for everyone and pretty extreme, but it does go to show that if you do use temperature, no matter what, we can knock you out. It’s just how much you wanna go through to get there.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Well, actually, in our bonus section, we have a great talk where I interviewed Dr. Thomas Seager of Morozko Forge about ice baths. And I’m such a fan. I’m putting one in my backyard. And so I love that. It’s also powerful for sleep. So make sure you check out the bonus talk because it is such good medicine. So, but going back to sleep and temperature, so is it enough to just turn the air down?

Tara Youngblood

So this is the problem with turning the air down. It can, it depends on where you are and how much heat you’re trying to give off. So we are 98 degrees Fahrenheit, and then you climb into your bed, which has foam. That foam also absorbs your heat and it’ll reflect it back to you. Then if you have covers on top of it and what kind of covers you have and sort of what’s your metabolism, all those are factors into how much heat you put off. And if you basically put the cover over, you’ve insulated yourself from that outside room temperature. So you’re stuck with your head being the only thing that has a relationship with the outside ambient temperature. That’s why we stick our legs out and we try to manage that. The covering up, like that weighted feel is actually so good for us. And we can get into weighted blankets and why that works. But the problem is when we have the weight on, then we’re too hot and we’re insulated from the environment. The other problem with air conditioning and even fans, you know, you’re blowing a lot of air. 

It’s not always really good for your sinuses to dry it out. And honestly, in this environment, certain areas of the country in particular, getting really cool, like 60, 65 degrees at night can be really tricky. And that’s where the difference of, yes, if you’re air conditioning or you’re lucky you live in Maine and it’s cool and you can open your windows, you know, do all of those kind of things, those are all ways to do it. But when you’re talking about your core body temperature dropping two degrees by the middle of the night, that’s a fair amount of distance to get from out here in the air, all the way into like that heart, lungs, core part of your body dropping two degrees. And so by the time it translates from that ambient temperature for most people, it’s not gonna be enough to really facilitate great sleep, especially if you combine that with hot flashes and hormones. Hormones love to heat us up. It’s like, again, love/hate with hormones. I know you’re all about that, but it is. You even see like throughout menstrual cycles.

So it’s not just menopausal women, but women in general throughout pregnancy cycles, all of that, we will all have different temperatures even throughout the month. So females are really tricky that way. It makes it fun and interesting to manage our temperature. But that is all part of that equation. So just lowering the AC, it’s not to say it can work, but if you’re struggling to fall asleep, stay asleep, or wake rested, unfortunately, that probably means your air conditioning isn’t cutting it for you.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Hmm, very interesting. Very interesting ’cause, yes, I lower my AC, but then I get under the blank. So it’s like-

Tara Youngblood

Exactly. And then you’re paying for your whole house to cool down, which, again, is kind of a bittersweet challenge. That’s where, again, thinking about what are you gonna do to cool your body? And that’s where those ice baths. If you’re installing one, consider doing that before you go to bed. Now, it will kind of fit because it oxygenates you like right out of the ice bath. You’re not gonna go to sleep within that first minutes, but usually, within 45 minutes of that ice bath, you’ll feel tired. You’ll just be ready to go, especially if it’s in that evening time when you would normally go to bed. It’s gonna trigger your body-

Dr. Sharon Stills

Interesting ’cause I was thinking I was gonna do it as part of like my morning routine. So I’m gonna do it it as my get ready-

Tara Youngblood

So one thing about doing with your morning routine is warm up first. And the reason you need to warm up first is actually back to what is happening on our planet. When we go to wake up, the planet’s warming up. So we’re actually, our body is in order to turn off sleep and start the sleep drive for the next night really wants to warm up to wake up. That’s where a warm shower first thing, and then head into your cold bath or a cold shower or plunge or whatever you’re doing, is way more powerful ’cause you actually get, just like that release of melatonin from the cool, you’re gonna actually get a release of cortisol in the morning from the warm. That’s why working out in the morning is so helpful. It really gets us started and it turns off that sleep mechanism ’cause it is like an on/off switch. And if it stays half on, it doesn’t totally flip off, which makes it a lot harder for people to fall asleep as well ’cause their body’s like, “I don’t know, did we turn that off? When does it turn back on?” So it doesn’t have a good start and good stop that makes it also harder. It’s a very hard mechanism. Almost think about filling up a balloon every day and it has to deflate every night, we wanna be able to fill and deflate that fully. Not just have it be in limbo.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Wow, fascinating. Okay, so what about, should we sleep? You said you’re gonna talk about weighted blankets, but also, should we be sleeping naked? Is there a benefit to sleeping naked?

Tara Youngblood

You know, that’s really a personal choice. I think it’s about what you sleep in and how that relationship is to the environment. You know, I think it’s important to feel safe and comfortable. And if having pajamas on feels safe and comfortable, then you should absolutely do that. There’s some people that get a benefit. I do think it’s sort of, if you’re feeling grounded in your environment and you want to do that, but I still gonna wanna cover up. You’re still gonna wanna probably have that release of serotonin that comes with that sort of nesting feel. But it’s really a personal preference. Sleep is a lot about how we grew up as kids. And when we think about like what’s the ideal sleep scenario, most of us go back to some entrained memory of childhood. And if you start there and then progress to what you feel like you wanna get to, most people will find a middle ground of what they really liked as a kid and what still feels good as an adult.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Interesting, I never really think about what I liked as a kid sleeping, but talk about the weighted blankets ’cause I know, I’m a fan. I like a, and I live in Arizona. But even in a, I like a big heavy blanket. There’s just something about a nice heavy blanket that helps me sleep better.

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, it is phenomenal. So weighted blankets were actually invented to help autistic children deal with anxiety. And it’s crazy to think that just putting some weight on you will actually release serotonin, which is like one of those good, happy hormones if you wanna call it that way. It’s kind of the antithesis of anxiety. So when you think about, again, stopping your spinning mind, releasing stress, weighted blankets are a no-drug, super easy way, like recommended from kids all the time, grandkids, climb up. You know, when you’re reading stories, cuddle them under weighted blankets. Everybody loves weighted blankets in the evening. It’s universal just about, but they do get hot. So we do have a version of one that’s cooling. If you’re addicted to weighted blankets, it does have the cooling built into it. And then if you want a pad underneath and a weighted blanket on top, you can even make yourself a sandwich if you’re super geeky on how you wanna manage your temperature. But it is a phenomenal, anytime you can do drug-free, it’s probably the physicist to me. I have a little bit of a love/hate with chemistry. And so anytime you can use physics to do that, there’s less interactions in your body that are gonna be in conflict. You can just get that serotonin, and it’s just a weighted blanket.

Dr. Sharon Stills

So I didn’t know that, so weighted blankets release serotonin. And that’s the, so funny, my granddaughter is always like, “Blanky, bubby, blanky.” She likes I wrap her up, I call her the baby burrito, and I wrap her in the blanky, and she just loves it.

Tara Youngblood

It does, it goes back to that feeling, again, the feeling as an infant of being wrapped in a burrito, we actually, we think we grow up, but we don’t grow up that much. And we really, really love that feeling. So when you see a baby calm down, because we’ve wrapped them really tightly, we’re just big babies that we’d like to wrap that around. And you may find even over time, like I’ve added more weight to my weighted blanket over time, but it is just the best. Again, drug-free drugs are awesome.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Are the best. Yeah, I know ’cause I hate when I’m traveling and you go somewhere and the blanket’s like this thin and I’m like, “No!”

Tara Youngblood

I’ve taken our insert and I’ve cut it in half and actually travel with a little mini weighted blanket that I could at least put on part of myself. And that is my, like one of my hacks for traveling. It smells like lavender. So I feel like there’s consistency there. And then I cover up with that and that’s, TSA doesn’t love it so much. They’re like, “What have you got in there?” It’s the weighted blanket. It’s okay, just open it up. It’s the weighted blanket. Nothing scary, just weighted blanket. But it is a really good hack.

Dr. Sharon Stills

That’s awesome. So let’s talk about actual temperature. If someone’s gonna be putting down their thermometer for the air, what should it be on, and tell us about your products and what they do.

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, so temperature is still sort of, it is hard to tell everybody one temperature. There’s billions and billions of us. And even if you sort of segment down to menopausal women are gonna likely want it cooler and they may have wanted it warmer when they were younger and you may switch those profiles as you age. So by the time you put gender and age and then all of those different pieces together, it’s hard to say, “Well, set it at this one temperature,” which is kind of makes it tricky. But that’s where there’s a wide range of 55 up to 115. So you can figure that out. And so even when you’re setting your house temperature, manage it according to your budget ’cause I do get letters of, emails of people saying, “Well, I can’t set my air conditioning that low,” and I get it. That’s where it’s like, cold showers or even using our product, that’s not cheap. But when you compare it to the air conditioning bill right now, that’s where there’s a lot of value. Even in UK, with the heat wave they just went through, a lot of our customers are benefiting from that. There’s no even AC there. So think about setting it cool. And when you think about cool, this does kind of get into the physics of it, but we’re basically like car engines, right? 

So there’s a radiator in your car, whether you are car junkie or not, you still know that it can’t just function with air blowing over it. There’s no way that heated engine will survive if you just blow on it. You’re gonna have to cool it somehow. And so that’s basically what our pad does is it’s a heat exchanger. And so in the pad, just like any other mattress pad, if you have a mattress pad on your bed, it sits right below the sheets. It’s just water that flows through your bed. So I don’t want any electricity in your bed. And so all that does is it flows through, basically in a pattern underneath you. And what that does is that water is constantly maintained to whatever temperature you set at, which is not that different than your air conditioning in your house. When you set it to 62, it’s gonna stay at 62. 

You set it to 89, it would stay at 89. And any, wherever you set that temperature, that’s how it’s going to stay there. We do have a programmable version. So our OOLER chili pad has more like nest. So if you’re feeling super sophisticated and you wanna program that, that’s how the OOLER works and the Dock Pro just has more cooling capacity. So we call it your freeze your ass off version, and it is because we have a bunch of NFL linemen that are 350 pounds, high metabolism, they put off a ton of heat. So it’s a super ramped up version, kind of like a big room air conditioner versus a little room air conditioner.

Dr. Sharon Stills

So it’s just a pad of water. So there’s no EMFs.

Tara Youngblood

No EMFs. The control unit does, but we have extended the sort of the tubing for it so you can put it on the other side of your bed and the zone of which that EMF is is muted. And basically, it won’t go past that range of a couple feet past your control unit.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Cool. And then, so are you saying like you put it down to 55 degrees?

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, so depending on the unit, so when I’m on a Dock Pro, which is our super ramped up one, it is more like 68 ’cause it’s way more effective at that cooling. There’s more water and it works through. On the OOLER, it’s all the way cranked down.

Dr. Sharon Stills

So now you’re lying on this thing and are you freezing or how?

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, I think it really, it’s hard to describe in the sense of, if you think about what does it feel like when you climb into the sheets and they’re cool and crisp and it feels like really, like it feels good that way. You know, you can set it at whatever temperature you want. So it is kind of a little bit up to you. Most people will get to cold over time because the colder you are, the more deep sleep that’s going to facilitate. And again, if you’re not familiar, there’s light sleep, REM sleep, deep sleep, technically lighten deep or both non-REM sleep. But deep sleep is really where we heal. And you mentioned some of those different functionalities of basically while we’re sleeping in deep sleep, that’s growth hormone, that’s healing. Our spinal fluid actually comes up over our brain, washes out those towel proteins that you get and build up and cause Alzheimer’s and cognitive loss. You know, so the things that happen during the night, we file memories, all those kind of things. So that happens during deep sleep, and deep sleep in particular is usually the first half of the night. And it really does like it cooler. So if you think about we go through different cycles, but throughout the night, but the more cooling you can get, the more deep sleep you can generally get. Usually up to that two to three hours worth of deep sleep every night with cooling.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I was just gonna ask, I’m kind of trying to open up my Oura Ring ’cause it tells you. So is there, should you get a certain percentage of how much deep sleep should you get?

Tara Youngblood

So it really depends. You know, as we age, deep sleep can nearly disappear. So for an average person without any temperature management, you may only get seven minutes by the time you’re 80 or 85. If you’re a 20-year-old, it’s about that two hours of deep sleep and two hours of REM and good balance. But for a lot of people, deep sleep can be sort of hard to get. That’s where sort of cheating and getting it managed with temperature can really unlock that. So no matter how old you are, in early prototypes, I used it on my father, which is a good thing, I guess, but he was able to even at like 70, 75, still get two hours of deep sleep, which no one else around him would have been able to get. That’s pretty unusual, but it can really create a healthy sleep pattern and it resets your circadian rhythm to a healthy pattern. So even when you travel, you’ll get some residual effect of just great consist sleep.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Does it help with jet lag?

Tara Youngblood

Yes, so we deal with that all the time with our athletes and it actually helps with shift workers, jet lag. Again, the highest order of priority, if you wanna talk to your unconscious brain or your involuntary part of your body, you’re gonna use a lot of environmental triggers to do that. And temperature is really powerful with that. So during COVID, shortly after COVID started, we did a one for one campaign with healthcare workers. In all honesty, it broke our typeform that we thought we’d get a few people that were interested in signing up to get a free one. We got over a hundred thousand requests very quickly. So it was like, “Oh crap, good and bad.” So we got lots of healthcare workers sleeping on our product. And in the end, it’s really amazing what you can do. So shift workers, kind of like jet lag where you’re circadian rhythm is off, your clock doesn’t know where to start. 

This is a way of telling your body, “Yes, go to sleep now.” And so they will use it even if they need to go to sleep in the morning or in weird times or things like that. So if you’re jet lag, you come back, and you basically are resetting that circadian rhythm by telling your body to do that. Some people will use melatonin and it can work okay. But again, it’s another chemical. This doesn’t have any reactions. You’re just cooling yourself down. But again, if you’re struggling with jet lag, think of temperature, think of cool showers in the evening, warm showers in the morning, getting out and getting sunlight, those are all triggers to tell your body, “This is the clock now, this is it. Go back to the clock.”

Dr. Sharon Stills

Exactly, I’m always like, as soon as you travel, get your feet on the ground and start earthing and looking at the sun. And I looked in my Oura Ring. So I got a crown, optimal sleep last night. I got one-

Tara Youngblood

Awesome.

Dr. Sharon Stills

But when I look at it, my deep sleep was only 47 minutes.

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, the problem about Oura Rings and Whoop, and a lot of them don’t. So here’s the thing about sleep trackers, which is crazy. Most of their accuracy is in their HRV and resting heart rate, not on sleep state. So their algorithms actually don’t reward you. I just had this conversation with someone. Most of it is rewarding you for that eight hours of sleep. And the problem with that is, we’ve already talked about those eight hours, but it’s not really talking about quality. So it’s kind of like if you eat a thousand calories, yes, you can go to McDonald’s and get a thousand calories. No problem. Is it good calories or is it just stuff that’s gonna fill you up and like not be great for you? If instead those thousand calories are in vegetables and healthy foods, that’s a pretty different thing. And you really need to think of sleep just like any other wellness of diet and fitness. If you’re going to measure fitness on good quality workout or good quality exercise versus just some exercise, it doesn’t count the same as just like diet. We wanna make sure that we’re counting, not time in bed, but quality. And most sleep trackers, ’cause they can’t measure great sleep, don’t measure sleep quality. They measure quantity.

Dr. Sharon Stills

So when it’s breaking down my REM sleep, my deep sleep, you’re saying it might not be that accurate.

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, they generally are about 40 to 60% accuracy over time. Highly accurate on HRV. We do a lot of stuff with Oura. I wear an Oura Ring. We have our own sleep tracker version, but it is, when you think about what’s actually happening in your body, your brainwaves are slowing. That’s really the definition of deep sleep is slow wave sleep, and it’s really about the speed and frequency of your brainwaves. And so they’re not actually grasping that. They’re making guesses based on movement and cardiogram and resting heart rate that you are actually in deep sleep, but they’re having to estimate and fill in a fair amount of gaps there. It’s a look back in the morning. So what they do is they grab all the data all night and if you’ve got an Oura Ring or even a Whoop, you’ll see it spin in the morning, it’s collecting your data. It’s calculating all of your sleep stuff and it’s looking at all of those blips and all that data. And it’s making an estimation of when you were in deep sleep and when you were in REM sleep based on HRV and resting heart rate.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Okay, I was always wondering like how does it actually know? So that makes a lot of sense. And what about as we’re in the bedroom, mattresses, and do you have mattress advice? Because I know some mattresses can be so toxic and we spend hopefully a third of our lives sleeping. So I think this is an important topic.

Tara Youngblood

It really is. You know, I think, when you think about sleep, honestly, caveman had it almost better. Very simple manmade materials. When we think of the off gassing that comes out of a lot of these foams, it can go on for a long time. And even if you can’t smell it, you’re still getting those chemicals off gassing out of your mattresses. So any of your PVC foams, a lot of those, you need to be really careful and make sure if they’re manmade materials, what is actually happening in them. And if possible, kind of, a lot of times it can be a little more expensive, but investing in a bed, it’s a piece of furniture you’re gonna sleep on for eight to 10 years and really thinking about what are the ways in which it can be simple. Again, back to diet. Often, the most simple foods, not the processed foods are the ones that are gonna be best for you. And when you think about whatever you do for sleep, the less process, the better quality that’s generally gonna serve you better ’cause you do, you spend a third of your life engaging in close contact in that environment. So if you’re not thinking about what you’re putting there, you should think about it as strenuously as you would think about what you’re putting in your mouth.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Mm-hmm. And same goes for your pajamas and your pillows and your pillow cases and your blankets and sheets and all of that. It’s really important. It’s a worthwhile investment to spend the extra money and as you can afford to and get the organic and drives me crazy when they have those flame retardant.

Tara Youngblood

Oh-

Dr. Sharon Stills

Putting all the infants in. I’m like, “No!”

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, I will say most flame retardants, and we did have with our original pad, we had to wash it out. Most of them, you can call up, whoever’s making them and ask how many washes it’ll take, but they will wash out. So if you, again, don’t have a choice on it. Most of them will wash out with washing. And so instead, spend the money to wash it out. Maybe it’s usually about 10 washes. Between seven to 10 washes, you’ll get most of it out.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Interesting, and is that using organic laundry soap?

Tara Youngblood

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yep, whatever soap it is. Part of it is just the beating through it. It just gets out of the fibers as it goes through the washing process. So, and if you’re someone that can hang it out on the line, that will help even more ’cause the UV and the natural sunlight and air blowing through it will help. But yeah, if you can wash it and just keep washing it, and then you’ll have most of it washed out if you’re kind of stuck or that’s just what you have.

Dr. Sharon Stills

That’s great to know, I did not know that. So what’s your sleep? I was gonna say like, “What are your top tips for sleep?” But I’m like, “Well, why don’t you just tell us what you do?”

Tara Youngblood

Yeah. I mean the crazy part is I have had a really horrible journey with sleep for most of my life. I have not been a great sleeper. I ended up being a reader as sort of a result. I would try to read to fall asleep and figure that out. We did lose our youngest son at one point and the grief from that, I pretty much didn’t sleep. Near death not sleeping for like a year or so. And so I have great empathy that it is really hard to sleep. So when someone says, “Yes, I now have a recipe that works.” I did not have anything that worked for a really long time. And so it is really important to just like you think about, again, your diet or what you do every day, how intentional you are with who you are and what you do, it’s really important. And I think the biggest enemy of sleep actually is stress. It kind of goes unmanaged a lot of the time, and we build up stress throughout the day. So you mentioned sort of that fight or flight or being more peaceful. The more peaceful we can be for sleep, the better it is for us. But most of us don’t manage our stress throughout the day. And probably ’cause I have four boys. We think about stress as a happy monster, that cortisol with the warm shower in the morning. It’s a very friendly monster, not a problem. 

You can hang out with him all day, but the problem is if that monster you get cut off or you have an argument or you feel stressed throughout the day, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and it becomes harder to get rid of. Now, if we take time to breathe, if we take time to walk outside, if we take time to ground ourselves throughout the day, then that monster is still a manageable kind of thing throughout the day. So one of the most important things you can do for your sleep is not just show up in your bed at night, whatever time that is, and say I’m exhausted and I’ve not have invested anything in it. Like even if it’s as simple as turn off sleep when you wake up, take deep breaths, get outside and relax, be intentional about controlling that stress, that in itself will deliver a better sleep and a better human, I think, overall. And you know, going from that managing stress to expressing gratitude, I do think the power of, again, that mindset, I talk about three pillars of sleep. One is mindset, one is environment, which we just talked about, and the last is those behaviors. 

So as much as it’s nice to have a glass of wine before you go to bed and in this environment, so many people have had a glass of wine or more before they go to bed and they’re using alcohol to fall asleep is terrible, terrible for your sleep. So really try to cut off any big meals and alcohol two to three hours before you go to bed, which I know is a buzzkill, but that really does help you fall asleep and stay asleep ’cause the metabolism effect of those behaviors are terrible. So if you can be grateful, manage your temperature, and manage what goes in behavior wise to that sleep, that usually delivers for me an amazing sleep. And I do have, we talked about those cool showers and other hacks with weighted blankets, but in general, that’s the recipe.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Can you talk about why alcohol is so bad for your sleep?

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, we have such a weird relationship with alcohol in the sense that it, we use it to chill out and that chilling out from a mental state actually feels like, “Well, that should help us sleep.” And for some people, we’ll pass out or whatever that is from alcohol. The problem is the metabolism of metabolizing and working through that alcohol once you fall asleep will actually make you hotter. And when we talk about, again, there’s circadian rhythm, your clock is trying to get you two degrees cooler and you’re busy heating it up, you’re basically creating a scenario where you’re gonna heat up and wake up in the middle of the night. You’ll go to use the bathroom, which may or may not be resolved, the fact that you’ve had to metabolize that alcohol as well. And it means that more times you can get interrupted in the middle of the night, the less quality sleep. So even if you look at those eight hours, but you woke up 50 times during the middle of the night of those eight hours, that’s not good sleep. You know, those little arousals that happen in the middle of the night actually hurt our sleep as well. So the best thing is to get asleep and stay asleep, and then wake up rested.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Hmm, yeah. And I’m not a huge drinker, but I notice if I, and part of why I’m not a huge drinker is because if I have a drink, I notice I fall asleep, and then I wake up in the middle of the night.

Tara Youngblood

Yeah.

Dr. Sharon Stills

And I’m like, “Well, that’s not worth it ’cause sleep is sacred. I’m not getting anything to interfere with my sleep.” And definitely, I agree. I tell patients three hours before bedtime, you should, like that’s when the refrigerator gets locked, the kitchen lights go off, and feeding time is over. And that just helps with sleep as well. So I love your little three pillar. Is there anything else about sleep you’d like the listeners to know? I feel like we’ve covered a lot.

Tara Youngblood

I think it’s important people to know, again, being someone that felt like sleep wasn’t possible, and I have conversations, “Well, I haven’t slept in 10 years and have kind of given up on sleep.” And so they’ve put it in this category of I no longer respect it, I don’t care. And if you can fall back in love with staying in bed and fall back in love with this idea of sleep and picture yourself nestling in it under that weighted blanket, getting great sleep, there’s a methodology called CBTI, which is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. It’s just managing your thoughts, behaviors, and actions, but it actually has a huge success rate. So when you think about hating sleep, that actually has an enormous impact on your ability to get sleep. And I know if you are not sleeping well, it’s easy to hate it and put it off and not treat it well. But the moment you start respecting yourself and respecting your sleep, your sleep will come back to you. It will be part of the path, but you have to learn to love it.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Hmm, that’s such an important piece that you don’t really hear often. And that’s so true. Our intention and our energy around things is so important. And so it is time to learn, to love your sleep again, to get ChiliSleep, to get weighted sleep, to get deep sleep. This has just been fantastic. And I am so grateful to connect with you through this summit and for you to be helping us by sponsoring, to put on the summit and bring all this amazing information to the ladies and listeners. This lady knows her sleep. So where can we find more about ChiliPad and all the amazing work you’re doing?

Tara Youngblood

Yeah, so we are launching a new site called sleep.me. It’s part of our transition to be everything about sleep. And there, you’ll find blogs and content. We have some really phenomenal, even just breathing things. If you’re looking for trying out a breathing thing and reducing that stress throughout the day, it’s worth trying even once. All of that is there and you can follow my blogs and look up. Most of the information I talked about has more details and then they’ll show the different studies that it’s attached to. Pretty big believer in sort of annotating that data. So if you wanna geek out, feel free to head and dive in.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Hmm, I’ll see you all over at sleep.me. I love it, I love it. I’m so excited to continue learning more from you and have your products and just really emphasize getting even better sleep ’cause I feel like personally, I’m a good sleeper. I love my sleep. I pay attention to my sleep. I make sure I get my sleep. It’s important to me. And I know it’s part of how I have always felt good and managed my health. So I’m excited to learn more from you and your amazing product. So thank you so much for being here. Everyone now needs to really take a moment and really take stock. Is this applicable to you? Have you not been getting the sleep you need? We just gave you some really good ideas and tools to really help you get that sleep and not to overlook this, that this is such a foundation of health that you will never attain the health you desire or deserve if you don’t have your sleeping under control. So sweet dreams, everyone, and we’ll see you soon.

Tara Youngblood

Great, thanks for having me.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Oh, my pleasure.